How Nemo can help.

Favorite posts of the week:

What "Finding Nemo" Can Teach Us About Story Action by Kristen Lamb

How To Avoid the Trap of Creating Unlikeable Characters by Jody Hedlund

Good Stuff On Plot by Natalie Whipple with Dan Wells

World Building:  Don't Do It!  by CJ Lyons

3 Reasons Action is Important, 3 Reasons It's Not by A. Victoria Nixon (editor)

Writer Wednesday gives permission.

I don't claim credit for this, but it's too awesome not to share:

• Give Yourself Permission.
• Permission to call yourself a writer.
• Permission to collect sparks of inspiration from even the unlikeliest of encounters.
• Permission to wander your way into telling stories completely unlike those you perhaps thought you would writer.
• Permission to start writing something new--totally, gloriously new--even if the thought terrifies you.  Especially if the thought terrifies you.
• Permission to admit that a story you've been trying to write isn't working, or isn't actually something that you love writing anymore, and to liberate yourself from it.  And then, to start something new.  (See above!)
• Permission to stray from your outline.
• Permission to keep writing, even if it feels like you may never "get there".
• Permission to steal the parts of as story that ARE working out of a story that mostly isn't, and to use those parts to make something fresh.
• Permission to change your manuscript from first-person to third (and possibly back again).  Or to change tenses, or settings, or main characters, or any other part of your story, once you see a way to make it better.
• Permission to let a character become someone totally different than you originally expected him/her to be.
• Permission to kill a character.  (And to cry a little when you do so.)
• Permission to hire a babysitter, or to blow off some homework, or to order dinner in, or whatever it takes, to give yourself a little more space in your life for writing.
• Permission to write a scene or story that might make certain people who love you shocked and surprised.
• Permission to submit something.
• Permission to fail, maybe more than once.  (Because you can't fail unless you've tried.)
• Permission to feel things deeply as a writer--disappointment, grief, doubt, jealousy.  But then to balance those negative emotions with more positive ones:  ambition, determination, persistence, hope.
• Permission to be where you are in your path as a writer.  Right now.  Even if you think you should be farther along.
• Permission to write in the oddest of places--on the back of kleenex boxes and receipts; at ballet lessons or soccer practice or with a car full of groceries going warm; on napkins in restaurants; in the bathroom of a friend or relative's house when you've gone to visit--in order to capture an idea, or images, or words that flash into your mind, already strung perfectly together.
• Permission to ignore all the conflicting pieces of advice, and simply to write the story within you that wants to be told.
• Permission to step away from measuring yourself against other writers.
• Permission to be inspired by EVERYTHING.
• Permission to be uninspired...but to try to write through it anyway
• Permission to mess up.  Possibly many times.  Every day.
• Permission to do what you need to protect yourself as a writer--to turn off the internet, or to stop reading blogs for awhile, or to avoid Twitter--and enable yourself to do that thing which writers must do--TO WRITE.
• Permission to think of your characters as real people (and to perhaps actually like them better than some real-life people you know).
• Permission to delete,
• Permission to write things that perhaps no one but you will ever see.
• Permission to write things that perhaps many people will see.
• Permission to...Write On!

I don't remember where I came across this, so if anyone knows where it originated from, drop me a line!

A new weekly feature!

As I mentioned in my last post, there are some fantastic writer blogs out there.  I'm a bit of a research junkie so I can spend hours reading through them all and I'm sure I'm only scratching the surface. I realize that not everyone has the desire or time to spend hours every week reading through writer blogs so I came up with Writer Round-Up.

Every Friday I'm going to post the links to my absolute favorite writing posts (or articles) for that week.  If you have a favorite writer/editor/agent/whatever blog/website that you'd like to share, please do!  I'm sure I'm missing out on some doozies.

So, without further ado, here are my favorites for the week:

Little Darlings & Why They Must Die...for Real by Kristen Lamb (Get used to seeing her posts on Writer Round-Up!)

Anatomy of Conflict by Kristen Lamb (see?)

What Ju-Jitsu Can Teach Us About Writing by Kristen Lamb  (This one would be helpful to read on a regular basis.)

Interiority vs. Telling by Mary Kole

Why It's Good For Writers to Love Then Hate Their Books by Jody Hedlund


Feel free to share any awesome posts or articles on writing that you come across!

Writer Wednesday has a bone to pick with Show vs. Tell.

About a year ago I had a serious chat with myself.  If I wanted to get published I'd have to actually, well, write.  As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm pretty good at doing anything other than writing.

Rearranging the arts and crafts closet?  Sure.
Organizing the bookmarks on my laptop?  Check.
Fatal Attractions marathon?  Why not? (The chimpanzee episode freaked me out so much I think I have a mild chimp phobia now.)

If I wanted to get published I'd also have to study up on the craft. Over the years I've read a lot of books on writing poetry and screenplays, but I'd never read a single one on novel writing.

I'd also never read any writer blogs, but it didn't take long to find some amazing ones.  (See Kristen Lamb's blog for evidence.)

Show vs. tell is a writer rule that I come across often on blogs.  Maybe more than any other rule, but it could just seem that way because I have a bit of a bone to pick with showing versus telling.

Here's a confession.  I enjoy exposition.  I love backstory.  I love internal dialogue.  All that plot-dragging stuff.  But that's not why I have an issue with showing versus telling.  Well, maybe a little.

The main problem I have with it is that some people tend to take it too far.  I've seen fellow writers suggest changing every single spot in a WIP where there is telling instead of showing.  Say what?  Wouldn't literary fiction completely disappear if a writer couldn't ever tell? If I took all the telling out of the 130 pages of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay that I've read so far I'd be left with about 6.  All right, maybe a few more than that, but seriously...

I realize that show vs. tell exists for a good reason and some writers just don't know how to show, but I think there is a danger of sucking the life out of a story if a writer fixates too much on showing.

Maybe that's just me though.

I was starting to wonder if that was the case until I read this AWESOME post on Jody Hedlund's blog.

It's not just me!  I'm not a new writer--I've been writing since I was a small child--but I am new at this writer blog-following, craft-studying fiction business so I second guess myself often.  I haven't yet learned when to trust my instincts and when to follow "the rules".

I'm not saying that I plan to ignore Show or that Tell and I are going to run off and get hitched, but it's nice to know that I'm not entirely alone in my thinking.

Writer Wednesday returns from Salt Lake City.

The writers conference was mentally exhausting, yet exhilarating.

I worried that I'd come home discouraged after being around so many motivated writers.  Many of whom could write circles around me as far as volume goes.  I'm a slower writer.

I worried that I knew less about the craft of writing than I thought I did.  I vacillate sharply between overconfidence and paralyzing self-doubt, without much time spent in between.  Us artiste types are nothing if not dramatic.

I was amazed at the prolificacy of many of the attendees, ranging from newbie writers to nationally published authors, but I didn't feel overwhelmed.  In fact, I felt validated.  I'm not completely out of my depth after all, even amongst real writers.

Obviously this now means I've swung back to overconfident, but that's bound to be better than paralyzing self-doubt, no?  At least I get something done with overconfidence.  I can work with overconfidence.  A blank document page?  Not so much.

I thoroughly enjoyed most of my classes.  Here's what I ended up taking (it was really hard to decide!):

Slow it Down...I mean, Speed it Up!  How to Pace Your Novel
Eight Sure-Fire Ways to Show, Not Tell
The Most Informative Class on Description EVER!
Noah's Story Arc:  How to Use Conflict to Create a Watertight Plot
Habits of Successful Writers
The Hero/Family Relationship in Middle Grace and YA
The Truth in the Fiction
Writing Action
Using Resonance to Attract Readers
Point of View:  One of the Most Important Tools a Writer Has

Larry Brooks was our keynote speaker and there was a Q&A session with a panel of national agents and an editor.  I loved one of the agents so much that I plan on cyberstalking her (in a legal, professional manner, of course) when I'm ready to submit a manuscript.

The Q&A

In the coming days and weeks I'm sure I'll have more to share about the conference (my ADD brain is still struggling to process everything), but I think the main thing I took away from those two days was the renewed desire to take writing seriously.

Writer Wednesday blog love.

I don't have time to write a proper post today since I'm leaving early tomorrow morning for the writers conference in Salt Lake City (Woohoo!) and I've been running around all day today getting ready, so I thought I'd show some fellow blogger love.

One of my favorite blog posts on writing ever is here.  I love it so much I printed it out and taped it to my wall!  It's very short, but it speaks to me.

Sometimes it yells.