I know I set four goals last week.  I haven’t been procrastinating.  The past couple of days have been filled with personal and professional demands.  I have been working on my second goal — the writing timeline, but have yet to commit it to the web.  And my fourth goal — not to make excuses any more starts here. 

So for today’s post, I thought I would share some of my favorite books on writing.  Here is the shortlist. 

1. Writing the Breakout Novel + Workbook by Donald Maas.  By far, this is one of my favorite books.  It is comprehensive by a man who has read thousands of manuscripts over the years.  He is a critic, a literary agent, a teacher.  His teachings are interactive and has a nice even hand with all the literary elements.  Retail cost: $36.98 for the two book set.

2.  Another very good writer and teacher of how to write a novel is Noah Lukeman.  Although I have only read articles he has written and bits and pieces of his books, I find his writing style very engaging and his knowledge on how to craft a story insightful.  Here are three of his books:

The Plot Thickens: Ways to Bring Fiction to Life - 2002 - 252 pages
The First Five Pages: A Writer’S Guide To Staying Out of the Rejection Pile - 2000 - 208 pages
The Art of Punctuation - 2006 - 200 pages

3.  How to Tell A Story:  The Secrets of Writing Captivating Tales by Peter Rubie and Gary Provost had to be one of my all time favorite how to books.  I think you too will find it helpful in crafting your story line. Retail cost was about $18.

4.  Writing the Blockbuster Novel by Albert Zuckerman connects the dots for you.  It breaks down why novels such as Gone with the Wind, The Godfather, and The Thornbirds achieved popularity.  It also has a chapter on how to get your books on the Bestseller’s Lists.

5.  The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron is inspirational in that it helps one get focused on writing by discovering and working with your own personality.  It is a must read, no matter what your occupation.   It will open up your creative self and work with your self doubts.  Retail cost: $16

There is one more book on the list that I perused at Barnes and Noble this past weekend.  Book in a Month by Victoria Lynn Schmidt is very well organized, user friendly and perfect to carry with you while you are between tasks.  I am tempted to buy it because it could very well be the umpf to get my would-be novel onto paper.  I know what I should be doing, but is another prompt going to help me get there?  Good question. 

Let me know what books you found useful.  If you have read any of the books in this post, I would like to hear your thoughts.

When you think that almost everyone you know can write, you would think that it would be easy to find someone who shares similar writing goals.  For me, this hasn’t been easy.  I have found people with whom I’ve had exchanges over the years, but either the person has loses interest, gets discouraged, or our evaluative skills differ too widely, and we naturally drift apart. 

So, after awhile I decided to go it alone.  Months and months passed without a  body of work.  There have been lots of notes and first tries.  And from my posts you can tell that after months of dabbling, the end product were a lot of isolated paragraphs on various sizes of paper. 

Yes, I know, I could be more disciplined. So in light of my shortcomings, I am remedying it by setting some personal goals. 

My first goal was to find another writer who wants to write a novel or has written a novel.  I want to meet with that person at least once a month.  Goal: to share information, to make editing suggestions and for me, most importantly, make me accountable to my time schedule.  I decided I would meet with only one writer.  Call me selfish, but I am tired of critiquing endless pages of dribble.  While I like poetry, I don’t feel qualified to comment on it much beyond the cursory connections of symbolism and great word choice.

My second goal is to write, and I emphasize WRITE, a reasonable time table.  I spend so much time catering to family goals in addition to a full time job that my writing goals never bubble to the top of the To-Do list.  This needs modification, if I’m ever going to get beyond the initial attempts.  (I plan to add my time table to my blog to add more incentive to reach these goals.)

My third goal is to write a couple fiction pages a day in addition to this blog.  However, much to my surprise, this blog consumes more time than I ever thought it would.  So some days, when I am engaged in my fiction, this blog will no doubt be affected somehow.  I will have to figure out how I am going to make this work.   

My fourth goal is not to whine and make excuses for not adhering to my schedule. 

Okay, there are probably a half a dozen more goals I would like to share, but I think if the list is too long, it will be overwhelming and I will have difficulty staying on track. 

Goal one is in the works.  Next Saturday I plan to meet a long time local journalist.  Nan has written a novel.  It is still a bit rough she informs me and has been lying in her desk drawer for months.  This union has possibilities.  I don’t know Nan very well.  I don’t know how interested she is in sustaining our relationship.  Unlike the other writing workshops I have been in, I want this one to work.  I want this one to yield results.  I want someone to hold me accountable when I start to make those excuses.

Tomorrow I plan to tackle my second goal, so watch for my page entitled: Cori’s Writing Time Table.  If you would like to share your time table, email me cori@corichu.com.

When someone gives me websites to visit, I tend to cringe because either the list is way too long and well, it seems more like a chore on my to-do list.  One suggestion I can handle, if I remember.   But much more than that, I get distracted.  However, here are five great sources for getting ideas on how to turn your writing into a business.

For writers seriously thinking about turning their writing into a business, I suggest a couple of things.  You should first check out your local small business development office to see what programs, grants, and free education classes are available.  Often times the small business development counselor can help you craft a business plan or give you ideas for marketing as well.

There are two general websites that cover the topic start up businesses thoroughly.  It might be well worth a peek.  www.entrepreneur.com and www.inc.com.  Use these sites as a reference or as a jumping off point for further research. 

Sometimes SCORE might be able to shed light on how to develop your business.  It used to be SCORE counselors were primarily composed of retired small business men, volunteering to give sage counsel to new businesses.  Now current business owners are participating as counselors.  While this doesn’t change the program, it adds a different dimension to the advice.  Current business owners may be more in tune to the trends, the current local economic conditions, and may be able to connect you with other networking contacts.  The downside is because they are running a business, they may not have as much time available.  SCORE retirees can also provide a long view of the whole business cycle.  They may be more experienced in the various business models and can provide a longer historical context.   In any case, having a “mentor” works well and keeps one on track.

One other great source is other writers who have made it their business.  It is great to ask questions about how people achieved what they did.  What was their best advice?  What were the defining moments for their business choices?  And if you are worried that other writers are too busy…well, maybe…but there are many out there that will feel flattered that you thought of them as successful.

None of the sources I listed are not knowledge specific about the writing industry.  The information is broad and can be applied to starting any business. 

ADVICE:  Figure out some kind of filing system that you will be able to keep track of your brilliant ideas, because if you are like me, they seem to disappear quite easily. 

If you have any other suggestions, please feel free to comment. 

Yesterday I visited a psychic for fun.  I do that every so often.  I had never been to this particular person before and am always amazed at the range of intuition.  As I have mentioned in my blog, I have a problem with staying focused on writing projects.  I thought that maybe I had a problem with fear of the blank page, fear of success, fear of criticism, or fear of finding out the very thing I thought I had a talent for was wrong. 

Yesterday’s reading was not so much a look into the future, but a recap of what is here and now.  The psychic accurately described of me and my family in the present without much information from me.

What was most revealing was my inability to settle down and write took a new light.  The psychic said I have the interest, the talent, and the opportunity.  Apparently, what I heard was that my passion is anemic.  I am not passionless, but I do present to the world a more controlled feeling about me. The good thing was knowing I wasn’t suffering from all those common fears of writing.  My issue is unique.  I have passion for writing, but apparently, not enough. 

So the big question is HOW do I fix that  — Lack of Passion.  Maybe I shouldn’t refer to is as a lack of passion but more like a controlled passion.  How do I ratchet that desire up?  Let’s hold this thought while I back track to get to the meat of this blog —the four P’s for Success. 

In the 1980’s an article by Bill Cosby appeared in the Washington Post magazine about the four P’s for success  — passion, persistence, patience, and practice.   (see the word passion mentioned…)

If you are short of any one of these four P’s, you are not going to reach your potential, Cosby implies.  Cosby may be right.  When I think about successful writers —Tom Clancy, Nora Roberts, and Ken Follett.  Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and the list goes on and on.  They all possess the four P’s.

Bill Cosby pointed out that talent wasn’t necessary for success, but it sure makes the road to success a whole lot easier.  You have to admit that we have all read books that we couldn’t get passed the first page, much less 200 more pages of the same writing.  You wonder: “How did this person ever get published?  You think you could write a novel better than what you just read.  And maybe you can. 

Well, let’s look at that not-so-talented person in light of the 4 P’s and how this person  (Ms. Write) achieved her goal. 

PASSION: Ms. Write probably read a novel and said those very words “I can write a novel as good or better than the one I just read.”  Her characters start sharing their lives with her and she becomes engrossed in the conflicted emotional lives of her new friends.  She has no end, but trusts that she will know when she gets there, when the denouement plays out, when all the characters have resolved their conflicts for good or for bad.  Her passion swells directly proportional to her emotional investment on each page.

Passion for Ms. Write means sacrifice.  She has to finish the scene, the chapter, the story.  Despite her long hours at work, being a mother to her children, her husband, a myriad of other equally demanding events that pepper the day, she has to write.  She is compelled to sit at the computer between 11 and 2 in the morning. 

Suggestions to increase passion:

1. Get a mentor or join a writing workshop.
2. Start journaling - Write about your desires and hopes.  See if that amps up the motivation. 
3. Create a time line for a project.  Post the time line so that it is visible every time you sit at your computer.
4. Find someone who shares your passion for writing so that you can keep your writing in the forefront.
5. Start listing the items you have to do for the day and be sure that writing is on the list, but receives priority attention.  This means it is one of the top three activities you hope to accomplish for the day.  If your writing appears at the bottom of the list, you are more than likely never going to get to it, or maybe if you do, time, tiredness or something else will short out your efforts to complete your daily goal.

PERSISTENCE: Despite the unending interruptions, the not-really understanding family, Ms. Write keeps plugging away at her novel.  She sets goals for herself, tiny benchmarks to push her to the finishline.  She doesn’t allow herself to succumb to excuses, even when her novel doesn’t unravel as smoothly as she would like. 

Suggestions to improve your persistence:

1.  Reward yourself.  Be creative.  Shopping is not necessary.
2.  Talk about your writing and how excited you are about it to your family.  If you tell them you need time, they will surely give you space to create.  Just be sure that you don’t alienate them by ignoring their needs and feelings totally.  There will be times where you will have to make sacrifices, such as go to a school play when you would rather be writing a Broadway play. 
3.  When you set your goals, your timeline, make it reasonable.  You don’t want to get discouraged with unrealistic expectations.
4.  Persistence is finding alternative routes around obstacles to reach your goals.  Never quit.

PATIENCE:  Patience is necessary on two levels.  The first is that Ms. Write has to be patient with herself, because she hasn’t written before.  She will have to figure out how stories are told, how to strike a balance when juggling character information.  And secondly, she needs patience when she starts to submit her work.  She can’t give up with the first rejection.  She needs to learn something from each submission.

Suggestions for more patience:

1.  Sometimes taking a quiet moment and meditating on what is being asked of you will make a world of difference.  Learning how to channel the impulse to have things instantaneously will be quelled.
2.  If you make a mistake, or your editor says to redo whole sections or add an entirely new character, treat it as a challenge.
3. When you are frustrated with the way things are going, take an Eastern philosophical approach.  If you don’t like the way the storyline is going, get up from the computer and do something else for an hour.  If you aren’t liking the way your whole writing career is going, meditate and over a few days, what you need to do to fix things may come to light.  There is an old Chinese saying that the more you resist, the hotter the situation becomes, and the system shuts down until it cools down.  You need to address this before the overload, because you will see the answer more clearly then.
4.  Don’t give up at the first challenging sign.  It is worth the effort to see things through.

PRACTICE:  Obviously, the more you write, the easier it will become to write.  More reading and writing is the best way to hone your skills.  Bill Cosby included finding a mentor and/or studying how others who you consider have “MADE IT” did it. 

Suggestions: Practice makes perfect, as the old adage goes.  But actually the more you practice, the more you will find that the writing life becomes yours. 
1.  Set aside time in each day to practice, even a little.  Ideally, it will be the same time every day.
2.  Practice. Practice. Practice.

If you are wondering if the psychic predicted fame and fortune for me, the answer is no.  She wasn’t able to project too far in the future is my guess…but that’s not to say that I will or won’t make it in publishing.  The whole thing comes down to whether you believe this is what you were supposed to do.  If you were meant to be a novelist, you will be.  You have to trust and have faith that will happen if you give the four P’s equal attention.   

So obviously, I have some inner work to do.  I hope you will share my journey with me.  I’d like to hear what other people are grappliing with.  So feel free to comment.

In the last two posts I covered the pros and cons of  writing classes vs writing groups.  The big question:  Is it worth it?

The answer is: Yes.  I’ve had enough positive experiences, including what I learned from the one college professor whose syllabus was basically an analysis of the chapter of his book, to know that writing classes ultimately are a good thing, as long as your expectations and the class goals are in accord. 

A good professor can introduce you to new styles, techniques, voices and ideas.  He or she can motivate you and push you to write what you never thought you could.  A class can offer opinions and viewpoints that you would have never considered.

The only way to improve is to write.  Writing classes can do that.  They can force you to sit down and do the writing, so that you will improve, so that your thoughts will begin to flow.  And there is nothing more motivating than the proverbial deadline.

The bottom line is that you have to assess what do you expect this writing class will do for you.  Will it force you to finish that short story that has been sitting in a bottom drawer?  Will it inspire some new angle for your plotline?  Or will you learn some inside tricks of the trade from other successful writers?

When I was younger, I used to be totally embarrassed by how raw and disjointed my sentences and thoughts were.  How do other writers get these well-crafted prose from the brain to the page?  I came to learn that most people cannot write like Isaac Asimov, dictating six different plots for books to his assistants simultaneously and then only providing light editing before submission.  Many people rewrite their book 15 times to get their piece crafted the way they want.  My point is that the first draft isn’t perfection. 

Keep in mind it is a first draft.  That’s all that it is.  Be realistic.  How many people can write near perfect copy in the beginning.  I suspect most of you are like me.  We struggle to get what we write flawless, but for those who don’t know when to stop…they will be the ones that are always burdened by that starving artist image

Okay, I haven’t written in a couple of days.  I tripped on a metal doorstop and my face hit the open metal door.  Yes, I have been sporting the Angelina Jolie look the past few days. 

In the chart below I summarized the differences between a writing class vs. a writing group  If you question whether to go to a writing class or group, and you have never been to one, you should at least check it out.  You will know within the first two meetings of either group whether your attendance will help you further your goals.  Remember your travel time, your time in the class or group, and the time you work on assignments or other projects is time spent away from your writing.  Is this worth it when you should be, could be spending time with your favorite character that needs to solve some conundrum?  When a writing class or group is good, you know it.  You know that it is the stepping stone you need to shorten your learning curve.

Nervous and excited about joining a writing group or class? You should be. Unlike math or the hard sciences, where there is only the right and the wrong answer, writing is personal. Science and math rests on reason and facts. When we write, we pour some parts of ourselves in the experience. Our deepest thoughts spill out in words, open for all to view….and criticize. We leave our soft underbellies exposed.

I have been a member of a number of writing groups and attended several writing classes over the years. Why we subject ourselves to criticism is obvious. We want to do write better. But deep down when we present our work, the project that we have been writing for several weeks, months, and maybe years, what we are looking for confirmation that our writing is good, that we really do have talent.

Feedback, especially constructive feedback, is both beneficial and stifling to the creative process. Critiquing brings a new vantage point, new ideas, and can sustain motivation. If the criticism is harsh and insensitive, it can be extremely devastating to a new writer. It can squelch the writer’s chance of developing his or her writing, because we carry the wound for the rest of our lives. Time dulls the sting of the insult, but we are acutely aware of the unkind feedback and sometimes one can detect it in behavior. When things hapen of the is a subjective process and one has to understand from whom the criticism comes. What is the person’s agenda or experience? Are the comments have a ring of truth to them? Are the comments accompanied by actual suggestions to remedy the problem? Or does the person doing the critique in the process of satisfying some complex ego flaw?

But just maybe the critic is giving an honest opinion. This is what we all strive for when we sign on to these classes.

Here are some things to keep in mind if you have never been to a writing group or writing class:

• First, if you are the sensitive type…easily wounded if you do not get a standing ovation, then you are probably not ready for your work to be reviewed by a group. For the most part, every member of the group thinks they are helping you become a better writer. The truth is that only you can help you become a better writer. Be open to criticism.
• Do not take it personally — unless someone says you have an ugly dog.
• Do not try to explain your point of view unless it is requested. This position makes you defensive and you start to not listen carefully to what the person is trying to tell you, even though the criticism may be awkwardly expressed. When you have to explain what your story is about or what it means, then you obviously haven’t written the passage well enough. Your words should be self explanatory.
• Even if your work ranks up there with Mario Puzo, you need to realize that your plot, your writing style, or whatever is not going to appeal to everyone. You don’t need to please everyone.
• Take the suggestions and use what makes sense. Thank them for their feedback and don’t let them see you sticking your tongue out at them.

A bad class or group is a total time waster. Yes, not all writing groups or classes are created equal. A writing group that has members with strong egos can crush your creative spirit. Strong, ambitious and vociferous writers often force their opinons, because being heard is like stroking their own self worth. Just remember advice can be taken or rejected.

A good group is homogenous. This means that everyone at the meeting shares the same interest. If the group is songwriting, then everyone should be into the creating music or writing lyrics. If the group is about poetry, then you would not find a lyricist in the group unless the lyricist also wrote poems. There is too much ground to cover when your group has varied agendas. No one wants to talk about someone else’s genre and neither will you particularly be interested in listening reading it.

I welcome you to share your thoughts on this topic. In the next post I will compare the writing class vs. the writer’s group, line by line. Stay tuned.

If you haven’t yet blocked out what you do during the day, especially a week, you are in for a real eye opener. You think you know where your time goes, but in reality, you only have some vague notion how you spend your time.

Below I have blocked out my next week. I used shades of green for personal tasks, shades of blue for work related time spent, purple for writing or reading activities, and pink for family time. What jumps out at me is that sometimes the time allotted is not so rigid, so some activities spill over into the next hour and maybe the next one after that, depending on what kind of project it is.

The second thing that jumps out at me is that the white areas are left for more writing activities. However, look at where my writing activities fall…very late at night, which most times doesn’t work well, because I end up nodding off. Someone once told me that what we spend our time doing most is what we want to be doing most. I don’t think this is an absolute statement, but it holds some merit. What do you find yourself doing most? Is this what you want to be doing? Is this something you feel you have to do to have a steady income or keep peace in the family? Or is it obligatory?

The question is “Where to find more quality writing time?” Do I have to wait until I retire? I am still pondering the answer. If you have found a solution, I would love to hear from you.

You too can try this exercise to see how your time is spent. I have posted a page so you can use this same technique.