This month’s challenge is to write an intentionally terrible first paragraph.  See how many rules you can break. Write run-on sentences, purple up your prose, dangle your modifiers. Flood your Inner Critic until she gives up trying to stifle your creativity. 

Read more here: break the rules | kimberlycreates

Happy Grammar Day! Looking for ways to celebrate? Check out these ideas from Grammar Girl, or sing along with the Grammar Song. Now, march forth!

This year has been marred by a string of technical difficulties. Have you ever had one of those days, weeks, months, or even years where nothing seems to be going right? Your creative life seems to be ruled by Murphy's Law? You're not alone — and there's a way out.

Read more here:
http://www.kimberlycreative.com/2012/02/27/overcoming-difficulties/

If I did everything right, this post should be showing up on both Blogger and Google+ for those of you who’d like to follow me there.

If you’re on LiveJournal, I mirror this blog there as well.

Originally published at kimberly creative. Please leave any comments there.

You sit down to write. The blank page stares up at you, or your cursor blinks back at you. You’re inspired though. An idea seized you by the shorthairs and you’re determined to write it. Maybe you’re able to scribble away for a while. A half hour. Maybe even an hour. But sooner or later,  it happens. You’ve written yourself into a corner, and you’re not sure how to get out of it.

Does this ever happen to you? If you’re a plotter, maybe not. But if you’re a pantser, like me, it might happen more often than you’d care to admit.

Pantsing vs. Plotting

So why not start plotting then? It will make writing so much easier, right? You’ll have your road map all ready, you’ll know the general direction the story needs to go, all you’ll need to do is fill in the details. Right? So what’s the big deal?

Again, if you’re like me, you’re probably thinking: Boooring. It sucks the excitement right out of writing. The joy of discovery? Gone. And besides: Outlining? Yech. I’d rather stab myself in the eye with a rusty fork. Too rigid. Too structured. My creativity can’t be hemmed in like that.

Enter K.M. Weiland

That is, until I started reading K.M. Weiland’s tweets and posts about outlining. In particular, her post on reverse outlining  got me interested in her book, Outlining Your Novel. When I saw the Kindle version priced at only $2.99, I figured, “What’s a few bucks?” So I bought it. And read from cover to cover in less than a week.

Weiland freely admits that outlining doesn’t work for everybody. And that the trick to the writing process is discovering what works for you. But she makes a solid case for outlining — and she dispels many of the myths and misconceptions pantsers like me may have about outlining.

Roadblock to Outlining

The biggest roadblock to outlining for me has been the rigidity of it. Just the word “outlining” brings to mind nightmares from sixth grade: roman numerals, with nested letters and numbers trailing beneath in precise order. I, II, III, A, B, C, etc. How can you confine your creativity to such an inflexible structure?

According to Weiland, you don’t have to.

Outlines should encourage wild creativity, daring experimentation, and focused inspiration.

- K.M. Weiland

Weiland refers to your outline as a “mistake” draft, like your first draft, the very sort of thing encouraged during NaNoWriMo. A place to make those discoveries and brainstorm your way out of those corners before you write yourself into them.

It may be purely semantic, but I suggest not even thinking of it as “outlining” but as “pre-writing” instead.

Roman Numerals Need Not Apply

The process she describes is nothing like the outlining you learned in grade school. There is very little about it that is rigid and inflexible. In fact, I was shocked to discover that much of what she describes in her book is what I already do. You probably do it, too.

Have you ever gotten stuck and just started writing about being stuck? Maybe it looked something like this:

I don’t know what to write next. What if my MC did this? What if she did that, instead? Could this supporting character be involved? Oh! What if this happened? I know: MC should do this, then the villain will do that!

Congratulations. You’ve just outlined. No roman numerals needed.

Rather than doing this sort of writing as-needed in spurts along the way, Weiland lays out a process for doing all of this brainstorming beforehand. She suggests a structure in which to do the brainstorming, but even that structure is flexible and fluid.

Recommendation

I don’t intend to follow Weiland’s process exactly, and I don’t think she wants you to do that either. Your writing process is uniquely yours, and she seems to understand this. Your process may evolve over time, changing through the years or even changing with every new project you start. The trick, always, is finding what works for you. But her take on outlining has changed my view of it.

Whether you’re a pantser or a plotter, I highly recommend this book. If you ever find yourself getting stuck as a writer, I’m certain you’ll find something useful in Weiland’s tips. Even if you walk away convinced you’re still a pantser.   I plan to incorporate some of her tips into my process and to experiment with others, but part of me will always be a pantser.

I got well over my three dollars’ worth out of Weiland’s book and I’m convinced that you will find something that works for you in it as well. If you don’t want to risk more than three dollars but you don’t own a Kindle, you can still buy the Kindle version and download a free app from Amazon to read it on.

Originally published at kimberly creative. Please leave any comments there.

January Check-In

How did you do for your January Writing Streak? One of the benefits of tracking your progress is that you can look back and see where you’ve been. Another is that you can adjust your goals as needed.

One of my running friends told me once, “Running is a head game.” I’m beginning to understand it now. It’s about staying motivated. It’s about telling yourself you can do it, because when you start telling yourself that you can’t, that’s when you start to lose the game. I think writing is the same in many ways.

When I began my January Writing Streak, I planned to only count new and revised fiction words. As the month progressed, I decided to give myself permission to include more words in my count. Now, I’m counting my Detox words, my blogging words, edited words, and pre-writing words. These words buoy me, motivate me, keep me from giving up.

Detox: 29,192
Blogging: 6,547
Fiction: 5,787

Counting only fiction words, I’d have 5,787 words this month. But my Detox words clear my brain out and make room for creativity. And my blogging words, while they aren’t fiction, are still an expression of my creativity. Giving myself permission to recognize these words as part of my creativity has freed up that creativity. Instead of berating myself for not writing enough, I can look at this month and feel good about having put 35,939 more words toward my creativity. Combined with my 5,787 fiction words, that’s 41,526 words — nearly a NaNoWriMo-worthy word count!

Your Turn

How did you do for January? Is it time to reevaluate your goals? Do you need to give yourself permission to track words you hadn’t been last month? 

 

Originally published at kimberly creative. Please leave any comments there.

On the first Monday of every month, I’ll be offering a free exercise for fostering your creativity.  These are a sampling of the exercises that I suggest to my Fostering Creativity clients. My clients’ exercises are tailored to their specific needs and challenges, but these free exercises will give you a peek at how my program works. Each month, I’ll select one winner. The winning entry will be highlighted on my blog, you will receive the #JustWrite Fostering Creativity Award to display on your blog or web site, your entry will be showcased at the Winner’s Circle, and you’ll receive a mystery prize as well. Scroll to the end of the post to read about last month’s winner.

For this month’s #JustWrite exercise, we’ll play with words and wonder, opening our senses to the world, so that we can invite our readers into it.

Awakening the Senses

Our world is full of images, but our senses are often dulled to them.

Gabriele Rico, Writing the Natural Way

Very young children are Zen masters. They explore the world with wonder, engaging it with all of their senses, discovering the color, shape, size, texture, sound, smell, even taste of everything they can get their chubby hands on. Just ask any mother of a newly mobile child.

As we grow up, we lose touch with our inner Zen master though. We exchange wonder and discovery for responsibilities and schedules. We begin to sleepwalk through life. We’ve forgotten to see the world, to experience it with all of our senses and all of our being, to be a part of the world rather than apart from it.

Twenty-Five Details

My husband likes to tell a story about an English teacher from his high school days, who would tell his students: “Twenty-five details! Good enough for Ray, good enough for you!” The story goes that Ray Bradbury always made sure he had at least 25 details about any scene he wrote, even if he didn’t use all of them. I’ve yet to be able to confirm this, but it’s a nice story.

Draw [the] world with your words, and you will draw the readers in.

Jane Yolen, Take Joy

Take some time this month to fully engage your senses, to truly see the world, to reawaken your sense of wonder. Dorothea Brande exhorts taking fifteen minutes to “notice and tell yourself about every single thing that your eyes rest on” in Becoming a Writer. In her book, Take Joy, Jane Yolen suggests going out into the world and spending up to an hour sitting still, just watching.

Wondersense

Engage all of your senses: sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste. Go beyond the basic senses though; develop your wondersense instead. Aim for that state of Zen mastery and exploration you had as a young child. Delve into the tone of a scene, listen to the shape of words, try to capture the texture of an emotion. Pay attention to the senses you rely too heavily on, and those you dismiss. Bring balance to them as much as possible.  If you really want to get daring, play with synesthesia: mix the senses up. What does purple taste like?

While it would be ideal to go out into the world for this exercise, you could opt instead to take a walkabout into your imagination. You could go to an imaginary place or a remembered one. You could even choose instead to take a scene you’ve already written and inject it with sensory details.

Vivid, exact, concrete, accurate, dense, rich: these adjectives describe a prose that is crowded with sensations, meaning, and implications.

Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering the Craft

Last Month’s Winner

The #JustWrite Fostering Creativity award for last month’s challenge to write an addicting first line goes to Caine Dorr, from Vancouver, WA. His winning entry:

“You know what would help me calm down some? If you go down there and put a bullet between her eyes!”

Caine’s hook starts in the middle of a tense situation. We don’t know what’s going on yet, but the speaker is clearly agitated. “Down there” evokes the image of a heroine trussed up in the cellar, mad scientist’s underground lab, or subterranean cave. And already, the threat of violence!

The winner of the Reader’s Poll was Rena J. Traxel, with this entry:

“Sleeping Beauty doesn’t die!” I slammed the book shut and placed it beside me on the plush window seat that my gramps built for me, last summer, before the accident.

I’d also like to give an Honorable Mention to Jess Isaac Hanna for his entry, which suggested shades of Ray Bradbury with “The fire had no choice but to burn.”

 

Originally published at kimberly creative. Please leave any comments there.

I’ve picked my favorite entry from this month’s #JustWrite Challenge: The Hook — what’s yours? Vote for your favorite hook below. I’ll unveil both my favorite and yours next week when I post the newest #JustWrite Challenge.

Take Our Poll
If you’re reading via RSS or e-mail and can’t see the poll, you can also vote by clicking the link below:

Vote for Your Favorite Hook Here!

Originally published at kimberly creative. Please leave any comments there.

Via SF Signal: Star Wars Uncut – The Crowdsourced Star Wars Filmed in 15-Second Segments By Different People.

This is crazy fantastic to watch. Be warned though, it’s two hours long. I also have to wonder if it’s going to get pulled sooner or later for copyright issues.

Originally published at kimberly creative. Please leave any comments there.

Being an internet junkie and online workshopping addict has its benefits. One of those is getting to know up-and-coming authors before their books ever hit the market. I like to keep up with fellow workshoppers, and often follow them on Facebook or Twitter. I’ve enjoy being able to keep up with them through the years, even when I haven’t been actively workshopping myself.

The Girl of Fire and Thorns

 

Rae Carson is one of those authors. I first read her work at SFF/OWW (an online workshop I highly recommend to writers of science fiction, fantasy, and horror).  So when I heard the news that her book, The Girl of Fire and Thorns (ISBN 978-0062026484, list price $17.99 hardcover, $9.99 Kindle version) had been picked up by Greenwillow Books  (an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., New York, NY), I was thrilled for her. I put it on my reading list and recommended it to my local library as a new purchase.

When her book was shortlisted for the William C. Morris YA Debut Award and nominated for the Cybils Award, I was doubly thrilled for her. But the book stayed on my reading list until early January.

What moved it from my reading list to my Kindle? This post at the Greenwillow Books blog, where she talked about misogyny, and how a woman’s worth is so often tied to her body image:

Thousands, maybe millions of women have their accomplishments waved away or ignored daily, even as their bodies suffer devastating scrutiny—from both men and women.

These experiences were very much on my mind when I sat down to write The Girl of Fire and Thorns. The protagonist, you see, is fat.

Body Image

I haven’t made any secret of this, but I don’t think I’ve ever come right out and said it either: I’m fat. Medically, I’m overweight now, but I’ve also been obese and even morbidly obese. I’ve struggled with eating disorders for years and viewed most of my life through the lens of a ‘fat chick’ even  when I was starving myself to stay thin. I’m okay with my body image these days, but before I even cracked the virtual spine of this book, Elisa resonated with me. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book with a fat protagonist before.

I bought the book in early January, and finished reading it in three days. Two nights in a row, I stayed up well past my bed time, promising myself over and over, “Just one more chapter.”  It has been years since I have devoured a book like this. Elisa’s story, but more importantly, her character, left me astounded. I started reading this book because Elisa was fat, but I kept reading it because I grew to love her.

Not Just For Teens

Although Rae’s book is marketed as a YA novel, her web site touts her as an author of books for teens, and the protagonist herself is a sixteen-year old girl, do not be mistaken: This is not a just a kids’ book. There are no vapid vampire-wannabes. There is no catty backstabbing. There are no wacky teenage hijinks or sappy melodrama. This is a book about growing up, finding your strength, and coming into your own. In other words, this is a book for anybody who ever has grown up, or ever will grow up.

Elisa is sixteen years old, thrust into an arranged marriage and a politically charged situation, imperiled by her family’s desire to protect her by keeping certain truths from her while she was growing up. In almost every chapter, she faces her fears and discovers new strength within herself — discovers that she is capable of much more than she, or most people around her ever thought possible.

This is the kind of book I want my daughters reading. These are the kinds of messages I want running through my daughter’s brains: Even though you are scared, you are capable; you can face this; you can get through this. 

As an adult, I found the book to be affirming and uplifting. While reading other YA books, I’ve often wanted to reach through the pages, grab the protagonist by the shoulders, and scream, “Get a clue!” Not so with Elisa. I took comfort and joy in every step she took to overcome her struggles.

What Else I Loved

Another aspect of The Girl of Fire and Thorns that I found not just refreshing but absolutely captivating, is the shades of gray throughout the book. There is very little black and white, although many situations are first presented as such. The antagonistic characters have their own stories, and they are facing their own struggles as best they can. In some cases, I found myself outright sympathizing with some of these characters.

There are romantic elements to the story, but I didn’t feel that they overpowered it. As a 40-something mother of two young girls, I can’t stand most romantic storylines or romance novels because I find them unrealistic. They relay messages I don’t want my children to be ingesting about what love is. Love is not the flutter in your belly or the long hot kisses or anything below the neckline. Love is commitment and doing the right thing and putting someone else’s needs before your own. While there are some belly flutters in The Girl of Fire and Thorns, I enjoyed reading as Elisa learned to separate those feelings from reality.

What I Didn’t Love So Much

There were only two things that felt a bit bothersome to me. First, there were two “bad guy” characters who felt more one-dimensional than others to me.  With most of the other characters who first came across as unsympathetic, Rae eventually showed us how they were the heroes of their own stories.That multi-dimensionality was hinted at with one of these two bad guys; it just wasn’t explored as fully as it had been with other characters. Based on Rae’s treatment of other characters though, I expect this to be remedied in future installments of this series.

Second was the way that Elisa lost her weight and how it was tied to revealing her strength. I’ve lost a hundred pounds in my lifetime. It doesn’t come off easily, nor does it come off quickly. While body image is intensely personal, particularly body dysmorphia, Elisa’s weight loss did not feel entirely realistic to me. Although she does begin to find her voice and her power before the weight comes off, that weight loss becomes the symbolic transformation point for her. Although Rae makes the effort to point out that Elisa is not supermodel thin, I worry that the message could still be misconstrued as “If you just lose weight, everything will be okay” or “Thinner is powerful.”

Recommendation

Did these two things detract from my love of this book? Absolutely not. I think the strengths of this story far outweigh these two potential weak points. In fact, several of the characters balance the potential misconception of “Thinner is powerful” by accepting, admiring, and loving Elisa just as she is, before she loses the weight.

As a woman who grew up with weight issues, as a woman who grew up struggling with owning her own strength, and as a mother of two young girls on the verge of figuring out who they are and what their place in the world is, I highly recommend this book.

Elisa is a beautiful example of someone learning to face her fears, trust her instincts, and own her own power. It’s affirming to read for someone who’s been there and a beacon for girls and young women just setting out on their journey to discovering their own identity.

Originally published at kimberly creative. Please leave any comments there.