Quick Take:

 Design scenes that contain emotional triggers.

In Case You Missed It

From Bob Mayer, one of the hardest working writers I know.  He's also smart, generous, and changes with the times.

53 Books Later: 10 Things I Learned As A Writer  is here.

{he also has some give-aways going on}

About Bob Mayer :West Point Graduate, former Green Beret and NY Times bestselling author Bob Mayer has had over 50 books published. He has sold over five million books, and is in demand as a team-building, life-changing, and leadership speaker and consultant for his Who Dares Wins concept. He's been on bestseller lists in thriller, science fiction, suspense, action, war, historical fiction and is the only male author on the Romance Writers of America Honor Roll. Born in the Bronx, Bob attended West Point and earned a BA in psychology with honors and then served as an Infantry platoon leader, a battalion scout platoon leader, and a brigade recon platoon leader in the 1st Cavalry Division. He joined Special Forces and commanded a Green Beret A Team. He served as the operations officer for 2nd Battalion, 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne) and with Special Operations Command (Special Projects) in Hawaii. Later he taught at the Special Forces Qualification Course at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg, the course which trains new Green Berets. He lived in Korea where he earned a Black Belt in Martial Arts. He's earned a Masters Degree in Education.

‘Tell me a story’ is an appeal from our most primeval selves. You can aspire to explore the human heart, to analyze cultural conditions, to propose social reforms and to discuss philosophical ideas, but if your want to fascinate, to hold on to your readers, also tell them a good story. ~ Jerome Stern

R.I.P. Elmore Leonard

Thanks for the thrills, the laughs, the chances you took with stories, the great characters you left behind.
Thanks for redefining the modern thriller and reshaping fictional dialogue. 

You can find more on Leonard here.  As the Times article mentions, his death was announced on his web site. He was working on his 46th book.

In case you have not run across his Ten Rules for Writing,  here they are.
Keep writing, keep dreaming, build a legacy

"Just this. Just this, this room where we are. Pay attention to that. Pay attention to who's there. Pay attention to what isn't known there. Pay attention to what is known there. Pay attention to what everyone is thinking or feeling; what you're doing there. Pay attention. Pay attention."
 - W. S. Merwin

You’ll need coffee shops and sunsets and road trips. Airplanes and passports and new songs and old songs, but people more than anything else. You will need other people and you will need to be that other person to someone else, a living breathing screaming invitation to believe better things. Jamie Tworkowski

John Steinbeck's 6 Tips on Writing

Culled from his altogether excellent interview it the Fall 1975 issue of The Paris Review.

1. Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.
2. Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.
3. Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn't exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person—a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.
4. If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think you want it—bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole you can come back to it and then you may find that the reason it gave trouble is because it didn't belong there.
5. Beware of a scene that becomes too dear to you, dearer than the rest. It will usually be found that it is out of drawing.
6. If you are using dialogue—say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech.

John Steinbeck on writing

 "If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another. The formula seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to convey something he feels important to the reader. If the writer has that urge, he may sometimes, but by no means always, find the way to do it. You must perceive the excellence that makes a good story good or the errors that makes a bad story. For a bad story is only an ineffective story.”

“Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from - it’s where you take them to.”

― Jim Jarmusch

Quick Take

To keep a story simmering, remember this: All types of conflict in a story must be some sort of test. Force a character to make tough choices that he or she would rather ignore. Make the choices and problems linked to his or her emotional core.

In Case You Missed it: Favourite First Lines

These beauties come from writers on the 2013 Man Booker prize longlist.

I think my favorites are :

We shot dogs."
Redeployment (Phil Klay)
(to be published in the UK early next year)
The thrill and terror of a first line is that it can go absolutely anywhere. It's a doorway. After that the house takes shape. I have seldom been so stunned by an opening line as when I opened an application for the creative writing programme at Hunter College, New York, and read the line: "We shot dogs." What made this all the more intriguing was that the application was from a young former marine, Phil Klay, who had served in Iraq and was now looking to a career in literature. The line is simple of course. Three words. Ten letters. It is shocking and direct and intimate and rhythmically violent. I knew almost instantly this was a writer with a future. "We shot dogs" plunges the reader into a world that is urgent, intimate, informative – and it teaches us to how to read the rest of the collection. Collum McCann

"We wanted more."
We the Animals (Justin Torres)
Just three words, almost as if to say words are expensive, but the line still manages to do so much as Torres captures the urgency that pervades the story of three young brothers and their dysfunctional family. We wanted more; besides introducing us to the boys as a unit, the line a t once speaks to a demand, a need, and a desire, it's punch quickly growing from the use of repetition as we are plunged into the chaos of the brothers' lives. The novel keeps looking back to where we started – the first line, and wanting more. Noviolet Bulowayo

Keep writing, keep dreaming, polish your first lines

"To write well about the elegant world you have to know it and experience it to the depths of your being... what matters is not whether you love it or hate it, but only to be quite clear about your position regarding it."~Italo Calvino

George Saunders Advice to Graduates

Err towards kindness. 
Now that's genuine wisdom.
Find the piece here

Keep writing, keep dreaming, practice kindness.

August

Quick Take: 

In real life many adults talk about growth, change, maturity. The truth is that most growth and change occurs in the first few years of life. Ask any parent as he or she has witnessed a baby transform into a toddler, a child, a teen. Humans are attracted to drama or storytelling because we witness more transformation and resolution than life offers.

From Blood Meridian

"The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tent show whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a muddied field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others."
 - Cormac McCarthy
Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

11 Things it Took me 42 Years to Learn

Advice from Shane Nickerson that applies to writers. Read it here.
I especially like this bit of advice:" Play like you practice.
If you’ve heard it from a coach, you know what it means. It means don’t save yourself for the big game. Don’t imagine a time when everything is real and you’ll finally be able to give it 100%. This is it. It’s real right now: your writing, your acting, your creating, your parenting, your working, your choices in life. There may never be a big game, or at least, not the one you imagine from the comfort of your couch while you’re playing Minecraft instead of rewriting your sketch. Time slips quickly, and the impression you make on people now will have lasting repercussions as your peers rise through the ranks and eventually have the power to hire you, or not. You play like you practice. You'll have no idea how to actually execute when opportunity arrives if you haven't been giving it everything until that day comes."

How to Self Publish a Bestseller: Publishing3.0

Terrific advice. 
Find it here

Writing Opportunity

WILD IN THE WILLAMETTE, a guidebook to natural areas in the mid-Willamette Valley to be published by OSU Press in 2015, is seeking unpaid contributions of outdoor writing. The book aims to be both field guide and literary compendium, meant for everyone wanting to explore wild places within the eight major watersheds of the mid-Willamette Valley -- by foot, by kayak or canoe, and by bicycle.

All royalties will go to Greenbelt Land Trust. Writers will receive credit in the book, a free copy, and the satisfaction of supporting GLT's valuable work of protecting open space in the valley. Submissions will be due by September 15, 2013.

Please see the website at www.wildinthewillamette.org for the book's working table of contents, showing sites and outings to be covered. If you're interested in writing for the book, please send an email to ecoeditor@gmail.com telling why you're interested and what makes you uniquely qualified to write about the site or outing you choose. You'll receive an example of how Freisites and/or outings should be written up, along with writers' guidelines.

Joyce Carol Oates Advice on Writing

Joyce Carol Oates, the Queen of Prolific (I believe it's a kingdom by the sea), is posting writing advice on Twitter. I especially agree with # 1 and # 10. Find it here .

Keep dreaming, keep writing, have heart

Kari Luna's Advice to Writers

Debut Novelist or Garage Rocker? You Decide!

WHEN YOU’RE A novelist and your first book comes out, people ask you the same question. They don’t want to know about the characters, or if you’re writing another book. They could care less about a book tour, even if it includes stops in Antarctica. Or Timbuktu.
They want to know how you did it.
How did you write it? Find an agent? How did you revise it, sell it, promote it?
How did that thing in your brain turn into this thing on the shelf?
Fruit pie! I told them. Trampolines. Have you ever tried Barcelona? In roller skates?
But as I began giving actual answers as opposed to snarky ones, I realized that being a debut novelist was exactly like something else I’d already done: playing in a garage band.
The similarities were eerie. And I wasn’t even in well-known garage bands. I was in punk-soul bands who opened for the Delta 72 and The Mooney Suzuki. Exene and the Original Sinners. The Total Sound Group Direct Action Committee and Holly Golightly. Andre Williams. We played music, but we also wanted to make records on labels like Estrus, Goner and In the Red. So how did we do it? The same way writers do it, apparently. Only with a lot less gear.

Find her advice here

Quick Take

If I could offer writers only one piece of advice it would be this: When you're writing a book, let it consume you. Carry it. Stay close to it. Follow your thoughts or threads about your story as if your wandering in a woods with no fear of getting lost.

"You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you're working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success - but only if you persist.” - Isaac Asimov

Does Twitter Make Sense for Most Writers?

Jane Friedman is weighing in again on a topic a lot of writers wonder about. With so many social media platforms how do you choose and how do you choose wisely. She reveals her thoughts and begins a debate about writers, promotion, and Twitter here.

What do you think? 

Proportion

• The fundamental elements of a story’s structure are proportion and order. Managing
  
  proportion is the art of making some things big and other things little: of creating foreground and background; of making readers feel the relative importance of characters, events, ideas. Often this means upsetting normal expectations by finding a superficially trivial detail or moment that, on closer examination, resonates with meaning. Tracy Kidder & Richard Todd

Quick Tip:

Describe what the reader won't assume. 

The farther your story veers from ordinary life, the more description you'll need.

The so-what factor

I know this is a writer buzz kill, but read the latest Brutal Truth: The so-what factor matters. A lot. Find it here.

July

In Case You Missed It: 55% of YA Novels Bought by Adults

This figure doesn't mean that they're buying the books for their kids or grand kids, but for their own reading pleasure. I believe this is one of the big sea changes in reading habits that has happened in the past few decades.  Something to think about. Here's the link to the article in Publisher's Weekly.

Keep writing, keep dreaming,

Heat wave in Portlandia continues. I was up before 6 to beat the unforgiving sun and because my office faces east.

Recommended movie for a heat wave escape: Mud. Coming-of-age story. Loved it.

Here's a thought from BrentCalderwood.com:

Writers Build the Fire.

Editors Clear the Smoke

I don't link

Every day I receive requests from people to connect on Linked-in.
It's a site I signed up for a few years ago, but just never use. I use Facebook most days for connecting with friends and colleagues and sometimes tweet, but am erratic tweeter. It seems to me that it's impossible to use all the social media and contact media that's available. Instead, it makes more sense to choose wisely. It makes sense to say no to what doesn't serve or appeal. Save the time and energy for writing and creating.

Keep writing, keep dreaming, have heart

The Truth about Authors and E-book Sales

Can be found here at Writer Unboxed: A Major Publisher Jumps the Shark.

Thanks again to the brilliant Porter Anderson for addressing this issue."[Publishers'] savings on printing, binding and distribution make up for the lower revenue from lower ebook prices– and increased profitability is coming entirely off the backs of authors." Brian DeFiore

Keep writing, keep dreaming, keep paying attention to your royalties....

How to Promote a YA Novel as told by Kari Luna

If you're new to writing YA and want to promote your novel, take a look at this video.
Directed by David Bessenhoffer and full of awesome. Kari Luna's The Theory of Everything will be published July 11 and this is the perfect way to create buzz.

Read more: "The Theory of Everything" is a new novel from eclectic literary superstar Kari Luna (whose talents also include world traveling and the professional-grade consumption of apricots). In it, a teenage girl named Sophie Sophia finds herself falling down an intellectual rabbit-hole—except that instead of rabbits, the rabbit-hole is full of pandas—as she tries to retrace the steps of her father, a brilliant physics professor who had a habit of seeing unusual things before he disappeared. Curious? Us, too! But the book doesn't hit shelves until July 11, so for now, let's all peek at the interest-piquing book trailer and place bets on the probability of finding the perfect panda suit to wear for the big debut. (Trailer music provided by Marmoset; Forgetting Goodbye by Medium Size Kids.)

Creative People Say No

Creative People Say No

If you don't have enough time for writing, or just feel pressed by too many demands, you need to read this.

"Time is the raw material of creation. Wipe away the magic and myth of creating and all that remains is work: the work of becoming expert through study and practice, the work of finding solutions to problems and problems with those solutions, the work of trial and error, the work of thinking and perfecting, the work of creating. Creating consumes. It is all day, every day. It knows neither weekends nor vacations. It is not when we feel like it. It is habit, compulsion, obsession, vocation. The common thread that links creators is how they spend their time. No matter what you read, no matter what they claim, nearly all creators spend nearly all their time on the work of creation. There are few overnight successes and many up-all-night successes.

Saying “no” has more creative power than ideas, insights and talent combined. No guards time, the thread from which we weave our creations. The math of time is simple: you have less than you think and need more than you know. We are not taught to say “no.” We are taught not to say “no.” “No” is rude. “No” is a rebuff, a rebuttal, a minor act of verbal violence. “No” is for drugs and strangers with candy."

Keep writing, keep dreaming, say no

How Do Traditionally Published Authors Complete the Sentence "Self-Publishing is?"...

Their answers might surprise you. Find the article here.
Written by guest blogger Paul Goat Allen {I'm dying to ask him about 'Goat' aren't you?} it begins:

"I thought it would be interesting to ask a bunch of established authors — writers who have found some semblance of commercial and/or critical success through traditional publishing — to finish this simple open-ended statement “Self publishing is…” to see if there were any prevailing responses or attitudes.
Would these writers respond with disdain, ridicule, or pity, or would there be some level of acceptance?
Although the responses were varied, collectively they offered profound insight and enlightenment into the future of self publishing."

If you're a late-blooming writer you're racing time. Read the piece here.

Last call to register for Summer in Words 2013

You've got until June 15th to register for Summer in Words. 

For more info go here.

The Humble Hyphen

  English is a dynamic, ever-changing language. As the language changes, sometimes punctuation changes too. Which brings me to the lowly hyphen. Some of the words that were once hyphenated are now unadorned. Or would should we say undivided? Here's a neat guide for hyphens that will be a great help. 

Keep writing, keep dreaming, have heart

In Case You Missed It: Does Great Literature Make  Us Better?

Another piece in The New York Times Opinionator series asks a provocative  question:
It's part of series running in the Times written by contemporary philosophers. It begins:

"You agree with me, I expect, that exposure to challenging works of literary fiction is good for us. That’s one reason we deplore the dumbing-down of the school curriculum and the rise of the Internet and its hyperlink culture. Perhaps we don’t all read very much that we would count as great literature, but we’re apt to feel guilty about not doing so, seeing it as one of the ways we fall short of excellence. Wouldn’t reading about Anna Karenina, the good folk of Middlemarch and Marcel and his friends expand our imaginations and refine our moral and social sensibilities?"

I veer on the side that literature makes us better. What about you?
Keep writing, keep dreaming, have heart

In Case You Missed It: People Read With Their Ears

William Zinsser who wrote the classic On Writing Well is now 90 and blind. But he still coaches writers and still carries, the passion, the flame for the written world. In case you missed this story, A Writing Coach Becomes a Listener, in The New York Times find it here.  On Writing Well  was based on a writing class he taught at Yale University taught me about delicacy, the importance of every word in every sentence.It was a life-changing book. 

“Clutter is the disease of American writing,” he declared in one passage that tends to haunt anyone daring to write about Mr. Zinsser. “We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.”

June