What is writing? Is it lots of words? Is it written in blood? Something that rhymes? Gateway to a movie deal? Anything you can read?
Where does your writing start and how do you get started?
Pen or pencil, quill or chalk, rolling writer, gel pen, BIC or sharp stick. The implement you choose should work best for you.
Your paper can be in a spiral or tablet, ledger, chap book bound with twigs, lined, plain, or parchment. Again, it is what works for you. Some people fold their pages in half to force themselves to be concise.
Laptop, digital tablet or desktop, heck I have even written on my phone when I had a good idea to get down. I love that my bluetooth keyboard works with both iPad and iPhone.
Lot of buzz about formats: digital versus Digital 3.0 (writing by hand or by keyboard) or even by dictation. Most important way to write the method that is most natural to you.
Whatever you create can be turned into digital bits later. Just like an ideal location (cafe, beachfront, forest stream, attic corner) if it encourages your production, then it works. Easy-to-manage formats for writing it down is key to accessing the most you have to give. How you write must never get in the way of what you write.
Some even take one step further and use a old time ink pen with a lovely nib and ink derived from the crushing of rare herbs and fossils. Others will write with crappy pencils, stubs tossed away as trash from some well-heeled accountant or pigtailed schoolgirl. If I say doesn’t matter, it is not me saying the source of implements is of no consequence, no, I’m saying if it makes magic happen then it is the right choice for you.
Don’t ever let the lack of an ideal vantage point in the café, a wobbly chair, a noisy child, a loud cell phone yapper, or lack of your ideal medium ever stop you.
Handwritten, typed, or dictated it is the product of your imagination and craft. If you write by hand, please do type it up as you go. Don’t be like me. I had 36 notebooks to type up. That is a self-made obstacle that almost drove me off the path. I was afraid to get close to actually finishing my book because then I would have to publish it. So I wrote faithfully and never typed it up. Until one day I took time to hug myself and climbed the mountain.
So tell me, what is your writing to you?
Hi Jerry — I’m looking forward to test-driving the new site. So I’ll be brave and leave the first comment on this post.
“What is my writing to me” you ask? It’s the moment. The moment I turn my overworked mind from its presence as a child’s toy top, spinning, circling, canvassing the table, wobbling and hurrying off the edge — into the hand that grabs the top before it reaches the ground.
The clutch. The feel. The power. And I hold on tight because in the space of a breath the busyness of life will tug that top out of my hand and set it spinning once again. But for a moment — a moment — I had my mind to myself.
Hey Melissa- Good to see your words thrown off the spinning top like water off a duck’s back. But the duck twirls at an alarming rate and the fine mist makes the fowl expression hard to see. But without all that it would just be a duck and water.
Type it up. Type it up even if when you are through writing you feel – that was bad. When you read it in a couple weeks, you’ll see something glowing and you’ll fashion it into a satisfying something. Check it out.
I’m test driving and I have a question. This road map with the little boxes that we click on i.e. “normal life” (Ha what is that anyway?) “the call” “resistance”….exactly what are we supposed to do with this? I’m doing a lot of essay/opinion editorial writing which requires a different let’s call it plan of attack. I just need some help getting started here. I’ve got a zillion ideas for a story but no idea how to actually get out of the starting gate. Help!
I get being thrown for a loop by the “normal life” phrase. It is a major reason I created “Your Story’s Journey” so I could shake off my mis-placed concept. If you go to Your Story’s Journey and select Normal Life, or rather hover over it or tap it if you’re on a tablet, you’ll see that another level comes up that has four different selections. Choose any one of those. This takes you to an exercise area where you can go through a series of five-minute exercises that will help you build “normal life” for your story. http://www.writingpractice.com/your-storys-journey/normal-life/
Normal life is what is normal for your character’s scenario. James Bond has a different normal life than Mr. Anderson who has a different normal life than Eldridge Cleaver. Normal life sets the stage for what the audience will accept as normal in both science fiction and science fact. Give the exercises a try and let me know what you think.