Achievement Unlocked
Tonight, I drink. Tomorrow, I will blog.
NaNoWriMo 2012 Complete!
01 Dec 2012 4 Comments
in NaNoWriMo Tags: Architecture of the Novel, Awesome, Book Writing, finished, NaNoWriMo
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Inspiration #13
22 Apr 2012 Leave a Comment
in April, Inspiration Tags: Architecture of the Novel, Fiction, Writers Resources, Writing, writing craft, Writing Process
Every Sunday, I choose a passage of wisdom from someone who knows better and much more than I do about writing, life, the universe and/or everything.
Share and enjoy!
“Night and day, while sleeping or half awake, you now let your mind live the rhythms defined by the line on the highway driving west, those mile markers that prove this story is going somewhere. you are getting someplace: This, you think, is becoming interesting.
So it matters little that you can’t spend eight hours a day sitting at your desk—so few people have that kind of time. The story comes alive in your mind, you take it along with you where you go, you practice. It becomes your rod and your staff.
Our aim is simple: We’re trying to keep our stories alive in our minds by listening to them tell themselves every day. You write whenever you can. You write day in, dy out, for weeks, for months, on end. You do it in traffic, while half listening to some not very interesting friend complain about the very same things she’s always complaining about, knowing you’ll hear her when she comes to anything new and interesting.
So you give yourself over to the story. You abandon the grand ideas you have about the shape it ought to take and allow the story to shape itself.”
~ from Architecture of the Novel, by Jane Vandenberg
Inspiration #7
04 Mar 2012 Leave a Comment
in Inspiration, March Tags: Architecture of the Novel, Book Writing, Inspiration, Writer Resources, Writing, Writing Process
Every Sunday, I choose a passage of wisdom from someone who knows better and much more than I do about writing, life, the universe and/or everything.
Share and enjoy!
So many of us feel like we have this huge big story lying only half asleep within us, waiting only for the moment we have the time and silence and space and money and peace of mind that will finally allow us to sit down and listen to what this story has to say. All that we need – we feel – is to become attentive enough to our story for it to begin to tell itself to us. It does seem to exist almost preternaturally, as if ti has come from where it already seems to exist, in hibernation.
The silence we feel we need will happen – we seem to think – in a little while: as soon as we can get out of school or when the kids are older or when we can carve out some vacation time, or when this, that, or the other happens.
We can write our novel, we think, as soon as we retire.
Putting it off keeps us from the dread of that moment when we sit down and stare at the pulsing screen of the laptop or at the proverbial sheet of bright white paper, each shimmering in its emptiness. Here we are, but our story lies elsewhere, off in some darker place, and unclaimed continent, accessible only in out half-remembered dreams.
- Jane Vandenburgh, Architecture of the Novel: A Writer’s Handbook
