Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Oooo, An Award!

Thanks to Penelope Paige of Intent Forgotten blog for giving me this blog award.

Here are the rules of the Creative Writer Blogger Award

Nominate SEVEN “Creative Writers”

Post links to the SEVEN blogs you nominate.

Leave a comment on said SEVEN blogs to let them know they’ve been nominated.

So here are my outrageous statements! If you pick which one's the truth, you'll be my seventh nominee! Just post which answer you think it is here!

1. Loves to go snowboarding.  Especially with growing up in Utah.
2. I hate having things out of order.  I guess this means I'm a very meticulous person.

3. Learned a few figure skating tricks during a youth activity with my church at the ice rink when I was 16.
4. I love to knit.  Can't get enough of knitting fun!

5. Played on the boy's varsity soccer team my senior year of high school.
6. Took a tumbling class during one spring season just so I could do tricks off the high dive when I went swimming.

7. Has finally finished writing two full manuscripts of my stories.

Try to figure me out! Just comment on what you think the truth is and I'll make you the seventh nominee if you guess correctly first! I'll edit this post when someone gets the truth right.

Here are my blog award nominees:

1. The Mayor at Mayor of Crazytown
2. Mrs. R at The R House
3. Olivia at Living, Loving, Learning
4. Shiloh at Daydreaming Radishes and Dandelions
5. Clare C. Greenstreet at Life of a Wannabe Writer
6. Emily Cross at The Chronicles of Emily Cross
7. Guess my truth and you'll get this slot!
Watch for next time when I cover "be" #7: Be in Charge of Your Writing.

Ciao!

Monday, February 8, 2010

Back to the "Be's"! 6. Be Convicted In Your Writing

So, I know it's been a while but now I will finish up these "be's" I was talking about a while ago.

The sixth one is Be Convicted in Your Writing.  I find this helpful as to writing because if you're not convicted in it, you won't get very far in the first place.  Although this is a very hard one to handle dealing with how lives these days are moving so quick paced that we can't get everything done that we want to get done and if we aren't getting paid to write--why make more time out of your day to do it right?  Wrong.  Dead wrong.  If you want to get paid to write, such as for magazines, newspapers or getting published, you MUST be convicted in your writing.  Believe in your writing abilities and what you are writing about.

For me, I have a 4 year old who goes to school 4 hours Monday through Friday now.  Well, I've tried to setup a writing regime but get distracted by the games on Facebook or Cafemom.  Even solitaire looks more inviting on my computer than what I should be doing.  This is a bad example of not being convicted in your writing.  I really think that I should put the games away for now and get working if I am to become a published author one day.  I need to be convicted in what I'm working on, learning more of the craft of writing and sharing it as well.  This is why my new writing group is so exciting for me.  I can give my writing to people right then, we can review it, get help that I need (and this isn't all just for me it is for their writing as well) and keep on going.

You know, with the internet these days it is very easy to get distracted doing research for the story as well.  For me, I LOVE to research and create this whole huge back story of all the characters, figuring out how old they all are, who their parents were, how these characters grew up, what time period are they from, etc.  That, I believe is good research for writing a good fiction story (makes it more believable), but also can be so much and so overwhelming that I have become TOO convicted in my story itself.  I can gather so much information that will blow my own mind as I go along that I don't know what to do with it. 

So, you see, there is a way that we, as writers, need to balance the conviction we give our writing.  Yes, take a break from it once in a while.  Yes, do the research.  But don't overwhelm yourself.

The biggest way I have found (and have been trying to do lately as mentioned earlier) is setting up a writing regime while my daughter is at school those 4 hours every day.  I need to take two of those hours and do writing.  Even if I put out nothing on the page and just sit there thinking of where the story should go.  Or just working on the outline itself is good.  I have come to notice that if you have a schedule, you become more convicted in what you are doing.  If at 6 p.m. every night you sit down to scrapbook one page a night, that's 7 pages a week if you really do this every day.  If you sit down for 2 hours, 5 days a week, you can easily get ten pages written each week giving you at least forty pages a month and 480 pages a year.  But yes, life doesn't work out that way.  That is what we, in society, do to ourselves now-a-days.  Everything is rush, rush, rush.  We never take the time to really be involved in what WE want to do for ourselves.  We all need timeout each day to work our craft and keep on learning it.  We need to be convicted in what we do.  We need to love what we are learning and doing.  If we can just even try to schedule in writing for at least 2 hours every day, it will become habit, and habits are hard to break.  And this, is a good habit I fully intend on being convicted in.

Ciao!

Thursday, February 4, 2010

Writing Groups

I was asked a few weeks ago to host a writing group within my church.  Of course, how could I not turn away the fact that I can attend a writing group in my area once a month with people I know can and are my friends.

But that got me to thinking lately about writing groups.  This writing group will be a mix of writing.  Blog writers, fiction writers, poetry writers, etc.  The first meeting is this next Wednesday and of course I'm so excited I'm thinking of making chocolate chip cookies for it but also at the same time, I'm very apprehensive as to what are we going to actually do for the first time around?

I've heard to just trade papers and edit and help each other with what we like about their writing and what we don't like and what they should work on.

I've also heard--oh just go with the flow of how things feel.

No.  I cannot just do either of those things!  I can't!

But I figure I can at least have a writing prompt to vomit the words on the page, possibly do a get to know you feature (but within writing parameters of course), and then a treat and possibly discussing what everyone in the group would like to see from this.  What are their goals for writing?  What are they looking for in the group itself?

I don't know about you, but being an "on the edge of the seat" kind of writer, a writing group isn't something I can just do "on the edge of my seat" kind of thing.  So, if you have suggestions on what I can incorporate for this writing group--it would be most helpful! 

Ciao!