Free novel idea: Three-Quarter Classified

Let me lend you a novel idea. | A Novel Idea (Photo credit: Jennifer Pickens)

I don’t know about you, but I get far more novel ideas than I could ever hope to write in one lifetime. I get so many story ideas, sometimes I just let them fly by and disappear into the never-written without ever bothering to stop and write them down. This morning, while reading a blog post on generating story ideas, I couldn’t help wondering if someone out there might one day be interested in taking one of my extra ideas and running with it.

Right now, I have four different novels in progress that I am determined to complete before starting any new projects. My notebook of new ideas is filling up as fast as my novel notebooks are. I couldn’t possibly write all of these novels, even if I lived three extra-long lifetimes. So, why not share some of my extra story ideas?

How long does it take to become a writing master?

How many words do you think you need to write to become a writing master? | Painting The Writing Master by Thomas Eakins (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A Facebook friend recently shared a link to an article titled, Here’s A Shocking Truth If You Think You’ve Wasted Your Life. According to this article, it takes a person about seven years to master a particular task. This prompted me to consider how long I have been writing and how close I should expect myself to be to mastering it.

After giving it some thought, it occurred to me that I am probably exactly where I should be in regards to my writing career. Although I have been writing in some capacity for most of my life, it is only in the past five years that I have put my full effort into it. Prior to that, I had taken a ten-year break while I was married because my ex didn’t want me to write at all.

Keeping tabs on my online activity

This picture has nothing to do with tabs. Zemanta suggested it. I thought it was pretty. There you go. | Coloreando en Amistad (Photo credit: PatWH)

Author Charlotte Rains Dixon recently ran a blog post in which she listed all of the tabs she had open on her internet browser. I thought it was interesting to see what all she has open for research and such, so I thought I would do a “my tabs” post of my own. So, these are the tabs I have open in my browser at this time:

• Gmail: self-explanatory, I think.
• The My Tabs blog post that inspired this post.
• Facebook: Always open. How about you?
• YakTale: A writing acquaintance mentioned it yesterday, and I’m deciding if I want to submit some of my short stories to the site since no literary journal will ever publish any of my short stories. Or would it be better to publish them myself, as eBooks?

Writing is…

Collaborative writing exercises—such as the clustering shown here—can be used for development of ideas. Colored tabs of paper—attached to the large page—are used in a collaborative voting exercise to gain consensus. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Writing a book is like putting together a blank puzzle, one on which you must paint each little bit of the picture as you are putting the pieces together. How is that not art?

What is writing to you?

Adventures in eavesdropping: Take One

Coffee house conversations can be very interesting, but difficult to record. | Conversations at Vermillion (Photo credit: JeanineAnderson)

I’m working on a novel-writing assignment that is turning out to be far more difficult than I had ever imagined it would be. The assignment is to go to a public place, listen in on a random conversation, and write the conversation down word-for-word, being careful to capture the inflection in the speakers’ voices and imbue the dialog with the mood of the “scene” without the use of description. I thought writing the dialogue would be the hard part, but it turns out that eavesdropping on random conversations is extremely hard when you set out to do it on purpose for a school assignment.

After class Wednesday morning, I decided to stop by a small coffee shop near the school where I teach. I had never been in this particular coffee shop before and did not realize it was a Christian book store/coffee shop until I was halfway in the door.

How to write the most boring scene in your novel

Can’t force yourself to get excited about writing your next scene? Start by writing down the reasons why the scene is too boring to write. | Writing (Photo credit: jjpacres)

Last night, I sat down to write chapter 10 of my novel, and I just couldn’t get into it. I knew what the chapter was supposed to be about, but I simply could not get excited about it. Then I remembered author Rachel Aaron’s advice  on getting excited about what you’re writing.

“If I had scenes that were boring enough that I didn’t want to write them, then there was no way in hell anyone would want to read them.” ~Rachel Aaron

So, I sat down with my notebook and began to scribble my thoughts about why I thought the scene I was about to attack was too tedious to write.

Free-writing is hard.

My keyboard foils my free-writing every time. | English: Screenshot from Linux software KTouch. An image of the Home Row keys for touch typing. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’m in a whining mood today, and can I just say this one thing? Free-writing is hard.

It’s not what I thought it was. I have two free-writing activities that I need to do for class this week, and the first one did not go well at all.

A good chunk of my free-write turned into me whining about how free-writing is so hard to do. But I’m supposed to write what comes to mind without thinking about it, right? And when I was doing this free-write, my thoughts about how hard free-writing is just kept taking over. So, now I’m going to whine about it in this here blog post for a few minutes and get it out of my system before I attempt to tackle the other one.

Can you write a Story A Day in the month of May?

writefirstwritefast (Photo credit: jwordsmith)

Each week, I ask my Written Communication students to spend about 15 minutes freewriting on a specific topic. At the beginning of the semester, I asked them to each submit several freewrite ideas for us to use throughout the semester. Once in a while, I will sit down and do the activity with them. When I do, I always end up with an interesting piece of writing I likely would not have otherwise written.

I find freewriting and the use of writing prompts to be extremely useful. So, I was just sitting here thinking that it might be fun to do a similar writing prompt on my blog once a week. And, since Wednesday and Writing both start with W, I thought, why not Wednesday Writing Prompts?