Waves bob up down
toss turn as wind blows,
set sail swirl spin
a breeze blast of salt air.
Waving bobbing all around,
tossing turning dropping down,
sailing swirling spinning blowing,
from breezes blasting salt air about.
Tag: Write
Elusive Scent by L. M. Montes
A scent so sweet swept o’er to me,
across the tides of breezes be,
I tried to grab and snatch it close,
but through my fingers it left and rose
up to the sky and blow away,
to come again another day.
The What If…
On March 8, 2022 I wrote an article for this blog on starting your story/book/novel. Well, that was a general overview of starting your writing journey. Here in this article I am going to be more specific. There are many ways in which one can start a story. One way I’m going to touch on today is the ‘what if’ statement.
Let’s say you want to write a story but you don’t know where to begin. Start with a ‘what if’ statement. It doesn’t have to be complex; it just needs to catch attention.
Examples:
- What if a girl is at the beach with her friends and finds a locket dated from the early 1900’s, and on the inside is a photo of her great grandmother and another man who is not the girl’s great grandfather.
- What if a young man (in his 20’s) is at work and receives a message that his wife has fallen ill, but the thing is he has no wife.
- What if three male friends are walking in the woods taking a short cut to another friend’s house. On the way only two of them are carrying on a conversation while the third friend stays silent and listening. One of the other two turn to the third to get his opinion on something only to find he’s not there.
- What if a man in his thirties who lives in an apartment steps out and is on his way down the hall to go out to his car but stops short at the open door to his neighbor’s apartment. There’s blood on the threshold and on the arm of the couch just to the left of the open door.
- What if an uninvited stranger walks into your party, singles you out, and tells you, “He’s here.” But you don’t know who ‘he’ is.
Feel free to steal the above ideas. Maybe one of these will help you come up with a ‘what if’ of your own. Have fun with them. The idea is to create a ‘what if’ statement that creates questions. Once you have a ‘what if’ statement you want to use, continue building on it. You’d be surprised how your mind will start spewing out idea after idea that will expand on that one ‘what if’ statement.
Get Back to It
If you’re writing a story, whether it’s a short story or a novel doesn’t matter, try to write everyday or every other day. If you take too much time off from your story, you tend to forget it. Then, when you go back to it, you have to spend much time going back through parts of what you’ve already written to remind yourself where you wanted the story/plot to go.
Sometimes life rears its ugly head and you have no choice but to put your writing down for a while. Instances like this can’t be helped. If this is the case, one thing you can do to keep reminding yourself is to revisit your story if only for a 10 to 15 minutes each day to remind yourself of the story/plot. Writing yourself reminders also helps, so keep journal handy.
I took three days off the last three days and forgot where I was going with what I wrote. I had purposefully stopped my writing session last Friday, July 1st in the middle of a scene that could easily continue on (prevents writer’s block). Today I picked up where I left off and forgot where I was going with the scene. The result? I had to refamiliarize myself with the scene in hopes of remembering. I didn’t remember, but then another idea struck. It all worked out.
It isn’t that you won’t come up with something if you forget. It’s that the time taken to get back into your writing and to get the flow going again can drag on and take up some valuable time.
The Path by L. M. Montes
In morning’s mist I stroll,
along a path that widens,
then narrows to grab hold,
my whole as if I’m hiding,
be strong and be so bold,
in life there is no sliding,
splendor is never seen,
if we cease to try our road,
like an outstretched hand so keen,
we grasp or dump the load,
so take my hand and ever lean,
with help success will bode.
More on Dialogue
- Begin a new paragraph every time a new person speaks. If you don’t do this, the reader gets confused about who is supposed to be speaking. You don’t want that. You want your readers’ minds to be engrossed in the story, not outside the story.
- Remember to use quotation marks whenever someone speaks. Doing this will differentiate between someone speaking out loud and what is going on inside the character’s mind, narration, or description. Here again, you don’t want confused readers.
- Just a reminder here: use dialogue tags (see previous article entitled Dialogue Tags from July 28, 2022 for more details).
The Chapter of Sludge
Ya know, there always seems to be that one chapter or scene that seems forced. Now, we all know creativity can’t be forced. But, sometimes it just is. So how do you get past that? Sometimes you just can’t. You have to wait. That was my day yesterday. I sat down to continue working on chapter 37. At first I couldn’t think of anything. My characters were standing around getting ready to do a fight scene, but they wouldn’t do anything. This writer’s mind was stumped. To rectify this problem I put on some fantasy music hoping this would stir the creative juice pot. It did to some extent, and I completed 600 words. Am I happy with it? Eh. Maybe. Maybe not.
One has to consider what is going on around them that might be a cause for the creativity rut. Part of our house is being renovated, so there are workers here during the week. I am taking care of the business end of this renovation. You know, phone calls, questions, updates, paperwork, etc… I think this has much to do with throwing monkey wrenches into any creative situation.
The show must go on. Keep writing even if it’s a slow and/or disruptive day. The story must get written.
Continuity
Let’s say you are writing a novel or something shorter such as a novella. As you’re writing chapter 20, you forget about some details you wrote in chapter 3 or maybe 4. Because you forgot what was in chapters 3 or 4, the information you write in chapter 20 about the same details may be contradictive. Maybe this is happening in different places throughout your book (these are called plot holes or inconsistencies). There are three ways you can fix this.
- Keep track of the information in each chapter on note cards and keep them handy as you write.
- Don’t worry about fixing them until you finish your first draft, then go back to the beginning and read each chapter, keeping track of the details as you go by writing little notes in the side margins on what information needs to be fixed. Then fix them.
- Have another person in addition to yourself read your first draft to look for these issues.
If you don’t fix plot holes, your readers will end up not being very happy with you. You want to make sure the read for them smooth. You don’t want them to have to stop and wonder.
Feedback
How we/you write is how you write. Not everyone is going to like your style, because, as you know, everyone is different. That’s ok. Write in your style anyway. Someone might even give you a low scoring review because of it. That’s ok, because it invokes curiosity and will entice readers to buy/read your book. That’swhat you want. So, embrace the negative. From it can come the positive.
Your Fans
What keeps you motivated to continue writing? There are many motivators, but what I am focusing on at the moment are your fans. I don’t merely mean readers. I mean true blue, unadulterated fans. Those individuals who love your work. They love it so much they will come back for more. They throw complements at you telling you they LOVE your stories and to PLEASE write more. They chomp at the bit waiting.
What this does is feed your mind and continues to sprinkle a positive light on it. We all love complements, don’t we? So use this to make your writing better. And as you’re writing, you’ll be focused on how can I make this even better?
In a nutshell, your fans keep you on your toes, and they make you a better writer.
WRITE TIME AND AGAIN 