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Showing posts with the label motivation

Screenwriting (and other) wisdom

I've been meaning to post something on here about how amazing the MFA workshop was in LA, but in addition to feeling like I hadn't yet found the right words, time is also something that's been a bit lacking lately. Therefore, I've decided to post my favorite quotes from the lectures. Some of the best scenes are silent. - Jane Anderson  Conflict is not inherently dramatic – a tennis match is a conflict. You have to care for there to be drama. – Paul Gulino Writing is telling lies that speak the truth. – Deborah Starr Seibel If the story doesn’t end when a character gets what they want/need, then the story wasn’t ever about them. – Jon Vandergriff Get yourself in the room – invite yourself to the meeting. - Laura Brennan (good advice for life in general!) Happy to help, not eager to please. - Alex Fernandez We need to push ourselves to show our vulnerability to the point of writing something that makes us want to puke. - Meg Lefauve.

Work From Home While You Roam - Review

WORK FROM HOME WHILE YOU ROAM: The Ultimate Guide to Jobs That Can Be Done From Anywhere by Robin Barrett My rating: 4 of 5 stars Excellent resource! I found out about this book by stumbling onto Robin Barrett’s YouTube channel. I saw a video in which she listed some interesting work from home options and decided the book was worth a try. It most definitely was. Despite doing my homework in looking for a new income stream there were still resources listed here that I didn’t already know about - and the explanations of the application processes and the payment methods saved me a lot of time in narrowing down the list to things I will actually pursue. There is a lot of repetition in the book - as there are sites which fall under more than one of the categories into which the book is organized. I read the entire book, but I would recommend that if other readers know which category they are most interested in, they just skip straight to that chapter to avoid the cross posting (for lack

The Truth About Writing Advice

Photo by Nick Morrison on Unsplash   I saw a tweet the other day that said: Ask 10 writers how to write, and you’ll get 13 different answers. As much as that did produce a chuckle from me, it’s also the truth. In fact, that might be an understatement. The amount of writing produced about writing is almost insane. Write every day, inspiration is for amateurs. Have a set word-count goal. Treat it like a 9–5 job. Churn out content like a machine. You can’t edit a blank page. Plot every syllable. Go with the flow, follow your muse. Pantsing is just as valid as plotting. It’s OK to write one great novel and then retire. Take 15 years to write a pamphlet, slow and steady wins the race. You do you. Be a reclusive artiste . Get out there in the real world. Write what you know. Don’t write about your real life, be creative. This famous writer wrote first thing in the morning on a laptop, with a huge amount of caffeine at hand. That famous writer wrote in the middle of the night by cand

Book Review - Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered by Austin Kleon

Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered by Austin Kleon My rating: 5 of 5 stars It's taken me almost a month to write this review. And I feel like I'm still trying to wrap my head around this book - in a good way, not a bad one. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I am attempting to implement and follow the advice within it. But, I keep bumping up against this internal wall I have about sharing things in progress. For reasons that would probably require a psychologist to decipher I have an aversion to showing/discussing anything from a work in progress to my plans for next month (or even tomorrow). I'd rather just do it and then share the result; having hidden all the messy meandering between the beginning and the end. However, I'm sure that the admonitions in Show Your Work are right and true and good, not only because they feel that way, but also because I know I enjoy finding out about the people and the process behind the writers I like. I e

Up-cycling Reality for the Sake of Mental Health

Lately, very lately, I have taken to creating blackout poems. I was first introduced to this concept in a university Creative Writing course I took a few years back. Then I was reminded of it by reading Austin Kleon's Steal Like an Artist (which, for all I know, is where my instructor encountered it in the first place ... who knows, stranger things have happened). For years I've been writing a poem a day based on five to six random words. I'm such a weirdo I find this sort of thing fun. But, in doing the blackout poetry I am discovering something else - a way to process the news (aka reality) which borders on the therapeutic. I normally get something out of writing a poem - obviously - if that weren't the case I wouldn't do it. But what I normally get is something akin to a purge. Taking a news article and covering things up in order to uncover a way to make it about something else, is completely different somehow. Rather than purging something, it's more like

Writing Can be Like Herding Cats

I've heard other writers talk about projects that refused to go in the direction they intended/wanted, and obviously I've had ideas morph from one thing to something slightly different. However, I never really thought I'd become a victim of this particular phenomenon since I'm a dyed-in-the-wool "pantser." I have never outlined anything I've written except when forced to do so in school (and even then I always wrote the paper and then back engineered the outline). I suspect it is a combination of however my brain is wired, and the fact that, to me, outlining spoils the fun. Why would I want to bother to write something when I already know what happens? Don't get me wrong, I have written things with a vague idea of what happens, or else there was some sort of guiding principle keeping the thing on the rails. An example would be a short story cycle in which each section occurred on a day of the week and each had an overriding theme (love, loss, betrayal,

Regroup: The Word for 2020

My word for this year should probably be obvious: Regroup. I have clearly dropped the ball of late. This site alone is proof of it. I thought I had a brilliant solution for keeping the posting here active by including any writing/reading/movie/story related assignment-produced content. Then I couldn't even keep up with that! But despite the lateness of this post, I intend to make 2020 the year I get busy on here again.

My Word for 2018

I don't know what rock I've been living under, but this concept of having a guiding word for the year is brand new to me. I only know about it because of a vlogger I watch regularly: She's in Her Apron . But the idea is SO up my alley. I've never been a resolution-maker, but a word? I love words, obviously. I live for them, by them, and though them. To use one to define all my many intentions and goals for the year is one of those ideas where I'm mystified that I never thought of it! My word for 2018 is: RELEASE

What I Learned from NaNoWriMo 2017

I had signed up for NaNoWriMo eons ago, and by eons I mean over a decade. And yet, despite the initial, and recurrent, desire to take part, I never did. First and foremost, it's taken me years to come to terms with the idea of sharing the odd goings on which call my head their home. Secondly, there has always seemed to be some perfectly convenient excuse, as there always is, for why it's not convenient to do it now . But despite the eternal headaches of holidays, schoolwork - and this year, actual final exams - coinciding with NaNoWriMo, I decided to shut up and just try it this year. Something about feeling that I had such lovely, and valid,  excuses built in for any possible failures, made it seem somehow less frightening to think of doing so. So what if I only hit 20,000 words, I thought, that's way more than I had, and I can always blame it on school. In the interest of honesty, I must admit, I started with about 4,000 words I'd previously written. But since I am a