Category Archives: Daily Writing Tip

Daily Writing Tip 26 of 100, The Importance Of Percolation

Posted on by Bill Chance

For one hundred days, I’m going to post a writing tip each day. I have a whole bookshelf full of writing books and I want to do some reading and increased studying of this valuable resource. This will help me keep track of anything I’ve learned, and help motivate me to keep going. If anyone has a favorite tip of their own to add, contact me. I’d love to put it up here.

Today’s tip – The Importance Of Percolation

Source – Beyond the Words by Bonni Goldberg

However you do it, the point of percolation is to let the little cells of the idea gather, divide, and multiply in order to sustain life and energy outside of your thoughts, to coalesce into something that isn’t crushed by written words or blown away by your busy mind.

I am old enough to remember clearly, from the time I was a child to about the time I was in college, that everybody drank coffee (unless it was instant) that was made in percolators. In my mind, mornings are punctuated by the strange hiss and gurgle of hot boiling liquid coursing through the inner mysteries of the percolator to throw itself against that clear bubble on top. The contained brown fountain of hot caffeinated liquid, slowly becoming darker as it circulated again and again. It was a combination of mystery and totem – familiar and unknowable.

Of course, today, in the modern world, we know that a percolator is the worst way in the world to make coffee. You are basically boiling and reboiling the distillate – guaranteeing it will be bitter to the point of being undrinkable without generous dollops of sugar and cream. Of course, in those days, coffee was represented by factory roasted and preground Robusta beans from someplace called Maxwell House – so it didn’t even matter how it was prepared, really.

Yeah, now we know better and we argue over the freetrade country of origin, the coarseness of the grind – the advantages of drip, French Press, cold process, or whatever newest gadget has hit the shelves.

I wonder if anyone still uses a percolator?

This is truly the best of all possible worlds.

Daily Writing Tip 25 of 100, Hushing the Mind

Posted on by Bill Chance

For one hundred days, I’m going to post a writing tip each day. I have a whole bookshelf full of writing books and I want to do some reading and increased studying of this valuable resource. This will help me keep track of anything I’ve learned, and help motivate me to keep going. If anyone has a favorite tip of their own to add, contact me. I’d love to put it up here.

Today’s tip – Hushing the Mind

Source – Deep Writing by Eric Maisel

The pieces fall into place in an active, hushed mind. You take a deep breath, stilling the universe. Then you take a voluptuous gulp of the mystery residing in that silence. From that gulp you make a world.

There is that feeling – when an entire reality is flowing out through your fingertips into the keys. They rattle like the chattering of a million squirrels. Or something like that…. That is what you are looking for – if nothing else a relief from the squabbling voices of everyday.

A little relief – and, hopefully, so much more.

Daily Writing Tip 24 of 100, Exquisite Characters

Posted on by Bill Chance

For one hundred days, I’m going to post a writing tip each day. I have a whole bookshelf full of writing books and I want to do some reading and increased studying of this valuable resource. This will help me keep track of anything I’ve learned, and help motivate me to keep going. If anyone has a favorite tip of their own to add, contact me. I’d love to put it up here.

Today’s tip – Exquisite Characters

Source – The Creative Process by Carol Burke and Molly Best Tinsley

The point of all these negatives is this: the heart of a short story, its energy source, is not, or is no longer, the plot. As the editor of one literary quarterly expressed it for would-be contributors, what he responds to in a story above and beyond everything else is “exquisite characterization.” A story is about people before it is about anything else–about human beings, richly rendered in all their quirkiness and typicality, in all their pain and pleasure, weakness and strength, despair and hope.

I had a writing teacher confess that the biggest problem he had was that his characters, “never did what I want them to do.” Isn’t that the ultimate compliment to your own writing – that the characters you have created are so real and interesting that they insist on living out their own lives, no matter what you want them to do. They become real people, not puppets on a string dancing to some literary formula or hackneyed plot device.

Daily Writing Tip 23 of 100, What’s A Story?

Posted on by Bill Chance

For one hundred days, I’m going to post a writing tip each day. I have a whole bookshelf full of writing books and I want to do some reading and increased studying of this valuable resource. This will help me keep track of anything I’ve learned, and help motivate me to keep going. If anyone has a favorite tip of their own to add, contact me. I’d love to put it up here.

Today’s tip – What’s A Story?

Source – How To Write A Damn Good Novel by James N Frey

An expanded definition of story now would be: “A story is a narrative of events involving worthy human characters and consequential events.” This definition is good but still not complete. What is missing is that the characters must change as a result of conflict. If a character waltzes through a story unaffected by the events and sufferings he sees and endures, then the narrative of events is not a story at all, but merely an adventure.

A complete definition, then, is: A story is a narrative of consequential events involving worthy human characters who change as a result of those events.

In a writing class I took once we spent a lot of effort debating the question, “Is that a story or not?” At the time I wished that someone would define exactly what a story was. The class consensus seemed to be, “I don’t know what a story is, but I know one when I see it.”

That isn’t good enough. In the years since them I have been searching for a definition. Today’s tip is as good as I have found.

So far.

Daily Writing Tip 22 of 100, What I Know

Posted on by Bill Chance

For one hundred days, I’m going to post a writing tip each day. I have a whole bookshelf full of writing books and I want to do some reading and increased studying of this valuable resource. This will help me keep track of anything I’ve learned, and help motivate me to keep going. If anyone has a favorite tip of their own to add, contact me. I’d love to put it up here.

Today’s tip – What I Know

Source – The War Of Art: Winning the Inner Creative Battle by Steven Pressfield

WHAT I KNOW  
There’s a secret that real writers know that wannabe writers don’t, and the secret is this: It’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write.   What keeps us from sitting down is Resistance.  

THE UNLIVED LIFE  
Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.

What Steven Pressfield calls Resistance goes by many names. I usually refer to it as The Void of Chaos. Whatever you call it, however you know it (and you do know it) it is the enemy. It is the greatest enemy – the perpetually undefeated enemy.

You can’t defeat it, but you can fight it. That’s the best you can do.

I’m sorry.

Daily Writing Tip 21 of 100, Proceed From the Dream Outward

Posted on by Bill Chance

For one hundred days, I’m going to post a writing tip each day. I have a whole bookshelf full of writing books and I want to do some reading and increased studying of this valuable resource. This will help me keep track of anything I’ve learned, and help motivate me to keep going. If anyone has a favorite tip of their own to add, contact me. I’d love to put it up here.

Today’s tip – Proceed From the Dream Outward

Source – The Novel of the Future, by Anaïs Nin

It is interesting to return to the original definition of a word we use too often and too carelessly. The definition of a dream is: ideas and images in the mind not under the command of reason. It is not necessarily an image or an idea that we have during sleep. It is merely an idea or image which escapes the control of reasoning or logical or rational mind. So that dream may include reverie, imagination, daydreaming, the visions and hallucinations under th influence of drugs – any experience which emerges from the realm of the subconscious. These various classifications are merely ways to describe different states or levels of consciousness. The important thing to learn, from art and from literature in particular, is the easy passageway and relationship between them. Neurosis makes a division and sets up defensive boundaries. But the writer can learn to walk easily between one realm and the other without fear, interrelate them, and ultimately fuse them.

….

For this the writer has to learn the passageways. Those passageways are like the locks of canals, feeding each other while controlling levels to prevent flooding. The discipline and form of an artist’s work are set in the same system to prevent flooding. The amateur drowns. The writer has to remain open, fluid, pursue and obey images which his conscious structure tends to break or erase.

This comes back to imagination and courage. Do you have the courage to let your imagination guide your work? Or is the inner editor always there, saying things like, “Nobody is going to understand this,” or “This isn’t what the paying public wants to read right now.” He will be there, saying those things – but you don’t have to listen.

The inner editor might be right… but he is still an asshole – and you shouldn’t listen to assholes.

Daily Writing Tip 20 of 100, Run Fast, Stand Still

Posted on by Bill Chance

For one hundred days, I’m going to post a writing tip each day. I have a whole bookshelf full of writing books and I want to do some reading and increased studying of this valuable resource. This will help me keep track of anything I’ve learned, and help motivate me to keep going. If anyone has a favorite tip of their own to add, contact me. I’d love to put it up here.

Today’s tip – Run Fast, Stand Still

Source – Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury

Run fast, stand still. This, the lesson from lizards. For all writers. Observe almost any survival creature, you see the same. Jump, run, freeze. In the ability to flick like an eyelash, crack like a whip, vanish like steam, here this instant, gone the next-life teems the earth. And when that life is not rushing to escape, it is playing statues to do the same. See the hummingbird, there, not there. As thought arises and blinks of, so this thing of summer vapor; the clearing of a cosmic throat, the fall of a leaf. And where it was-a whisper.

What can we writers learn from lizards, lift from birds? In quickness is truth. The faster you blurt, the more swiftly you write, the more honest you are. In hesitation is thought. In delay comes the effort for a style, instead of leaping upon truth which is the only style worth deadfalling or tiger-trapping.

I love the feeling when the words are coming fast – when I can barely type fast enough to keep up with the torrent. It feels like drinking from a fire hose. Then there is the stop, when the ideas fall away, when the fears rear their ugly heads.

That… I don’t like so much.

Daily Writing Tip 19 of 100, Writing About Emotion

Posted on by Bill Chance

For one hundred days, I’m going to post a writing tip each day. I have a whole bookshelf full of writing books and I want to do some reading and increased studying of this valuable resource. This will help me keep track of anything I’ve learned, and help motivate me to keep going. If anyone has a favorite tip of their own to add, contact me. I’d love to put it up here.

Today’s tip – Writing About Emotion

Source – Creating Character Emotions by Ann Hood

When we copy a writerly voice, we put up a barrier between us and the emotions of our characters. As a result, the readers get filtered versions of emotion instead of real interpretations and an honest and an honest rendering of them.

…

So my first piece of advice is to write like yourself. until you do that, you will not be able to invoke emotion – and therefore character – effectively.

We have all read stilted prose that seems to be a feeble attempt to copy the latest blockbuster. When asked, the author will answer, “Well that’s what all the editors are looking for. That’s what’s selling nowadays.”

Pretty lame excuse – it’s supposed to be your own blood you are spilling across the page.

Daily Writing Tip 18 of 100, Where Do You Get Your Ideas

Posted on by Bill Chance

For one hundred days, I’m going to post a writing tip each day. I have a whole bookshelf full of writing books and I want to do some reading and increased studying of this valuable resource. This will help me keep track of anything I’ve learned, and help motivate me to keep going. If anyone has a favorite tip of their own to add, contact me. I’d love to put it up here.

Today’s tip – Where Do You Get Your Ideas

Source – Telling Lies For Fun & Profit by Lawrence Block

Bits of fact can fit together. Almost all of the successful fiction writers I know share a tendency to retain odd scraps of data to no apparent purpose. Sometimes these orts prove useful, sometimes they do not. I know, for example, that in 1938 the state of Wyoming produced one-third of a pound of dry edible beans for every man, woman and child in the nation. I should be roundly surprised if I should ever build a story around this nugget of information.

He’s right – nobody gives a damn about how many beans came from Wyoming in 1938. However, I do know, from experience, that at one time, in Olney, Texas (quite a while ago, however time doesn’t really move in Olney, Texas… does it) there was a Dairy Queen. A hundred tiny hand-lettered signs hung from the ceiling in the Dairy Queen, each saying, “Thursday Night Is BEAN NIGHT – all the beans you can eat for 99 cents!”

I’ve always wanted to use that in a story. The probable title – Stay Out Of Olney On A Friday Morning.

BTW – An Orts is a small bit of uneaten food after a meal.

Daily Writing Tip 17 of 100, Touching Fire

Posted on by Bill Chance

For one hundred days, I’m going to post a writing tip each day. I have a whole bookshelf full of writing books and I want to do some reading and increased studying of this valuable resource. This will help me keep track of anything I’ve learned, and help motivate me to keep going. If anyone has a favorite tip of their own to add, contact me. I’d love to put it up here.

Today’s tip – Touching Fire

Source – The Forest for the Trees An Editor’s Advice to Writers by Betsy Lerner

Being a writer or wanting to write is to live in a perpetual state of anxiety, where the chances of failing far outweigh the rate of success.It’s a constant free fall, especially between projects, for the celebrated and the unknown alike. “Everything is will and the great obstacle is fear,” said Gordon Lish in an interview about writing. “It comes down in every instance to this dualism between what one wants and what one may be afraid to have.”

I always enjoy the spots where writers, especially successful ones, complain about how hard it is. Or actors… or musicians… anybody, really. You see, I’m a chemist and I have spent decades working for the man in the cold, dark, heart of the corporate machine.

Yeah, go ahead and bitch. You have no idea.