Fruitflesh from the Heart

Gayle Brandeis, published author and winner of the Bellwether Prize, suggests an interesting writing exercise in her book, Fruitflesh. She encourages writers to explore emotions and sensations by writing about fruit. Every topic can be covered in such intimate exercises; clothes, crowds, eyesight, listening, dancing, singing, or the slow, natural growth of a seed, from sapling to bud to fruit.

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

Anaïs Nin

Every writer reaches a time when they must leap away from comfortable well-known space. This fearless upward leap may polish the creative gift and bring us closer to the raw talent that inhabits our hearts.

Try writing about fruit, expressing from the heart, and see what appears on the page…

There are times when I want to be stained,

marked all over with berry wine, baptized,

mouth, fingers, chin and neck, between my toes…

heady with ripe flower

bouquets dizzy with bees, their bodies

painted, perfumed by purple sun syrup,

their breath elderberry delicious.

Pattiann Rogers

The deep intimacy of such exercises will strengthen your writing. Only then can you share the depths of the soul with both courage and truth.

EBook Publishing Today by Jerry Simmons

Imagine for a moment you bought a new car for your family and wanted to take it out for a spin. As you head down the street of your neighborhood you notice the roads to the main city streets are blocked and you have no way of getting to the grocery or pharmacy, your access is blocked. Then you discover that your particular model of car has been restricted to the local streets of your neighborhood and nothing further. This is the same problem authors have when they publish and lack access to the market. You are destined to driving the back streets. 

Certainly you can walk to the grocery or drug store, which will take longer and you may encounter bad weather. Walking long distances can also create other problems but eventually you may get to where you want to go. Certainly the lack of transportation is a problem if you hope of moving beyond your local neighborhood and venturing out to another city or state. The time and effort required to get to your final destination may be beyond your capability. You have a perfectly good car in the garage but have limited access to the services you need for your family.

Distribution or access to the market for published content is key to having any opportunity at selling significant quantities of your work. Publishers that utilize the print-on-demand model may provide you with a car, but it will be restricted to back roads. The major booksellers will never allow your POD book in their stores. This is limited access to the market and a major problem that most self-published authors face in today’s marketplace. The same scenario holds true for eBooks. A simple PDF file is great for downloading to another computer but in the real market for eBooks, again, you are limiting yourself to the back roads. 

If your published work is not allowed direct access to booksellers via direct sales to book buyers working for those booksellers, your chances of becoming a successful author is handicapped. Distribution comes in two forms: access and availability. Here is a description of each. 

(1)Access to the market is described as a sales group or distribution company selling your title to book buyers of established and recognized booksellers for the purpose of ordering quantities for their stores or catalogs. These titles are often stocked for quick and easy fulfillment and placement onto store shelves and online catalogs.  

(2)Availability means your book title is being entered into a database with the millions of other book titles making it available for sale should a consumer walk into a bookseller and special order. This is the type of distribution used by the print-on-demand companies which in essence is not distribution or access to the market. 

The same process is at work for digital content in the form of eBooks and Audiobooks via MP3 files. The biggest difference is that print book distributors are heavily influenced, subsidized and dependent on the major print book publishers. In the digital field that is not the case, at least not yet, digital distributors have no dependence on the biggest publishers. This makes distribution of digital content much more accessible for the independent author. 

Regardless of whether you decide to publish in print or eBook format, without access to booksellers you cannot sell significant quantities of your work. Whether the seller is a brick and mortar store or an online retailer, library or school, if you do not have the ability to expand your readership through access to those that actively market and sell product then your audience may forever remain small. 

My recommendation for authors is they consider all formats for their published work: trade print, eBook and Audiobook. At this time the market for the eBook has tremendous opportunities for the independent author over either of the remaining two formats. 

The market for publishing is changing rapidly and in order for authors to maximize their opportunities and in turn their potential, they must stay informed. The difficulty with the print market has been obvious for many years yet we all tend to think of print when discussing publishing. The business of printing books and shipping to booksellers is anachronistic and outdated way of thinking. As the market for print continues to decline the barriers to entry continue to grow. Not the case with eBooks. 

The digital marketplace is new, vibrant and growing rapidly. With over 760,000 new print titles being published each year compared to 50,000 eBook titles the competition is less and access to the market is open and available. The window of opportunity for any new market is small and the time for eBook publishing is today.

Make a Living as a Writer

Making a living as a writer is more accessible now than ever. By dint of education and effort, you, too, can become a copywriter, a journalist, or an author. Here are a few tips to make the journey toward writing as a profession more swift and fulfilling.

1. Educate yourself in niche markets where good writing is in demand. Healthcare, sports, financial, computer tech and politics come to mind. But, there are many other topics for which you can become an expert that will make you money. Just be sure that they are not inundated with competitors that underbid your paycheck.
2. Get to know your editors. Some editors want to assign a topic and walk away. The better you perform on your own the more willing they are to hire you, again. But, certain editors adore writing by committee. Avoid them like the plague. You will be forced to revise until your fingers bleed and your keyboard breaks…not a wealth building strategy for any writer.
3. Build an authorial fingerprint. Set up a simple but compelling website and/or get articles in local publications. The more samples you have to show prospects the greater your chances of getting hired. Nothing convinces a possible client of your talent than seeing past work in print.
4. Use humility as your starting point. It’s much easier to work into high paying jobs if you already have a reputation as an easy-to-work-with writer that is both bright and open to suggestions. Accepting a lower paying gig often leads to higher paying jobs through editorial referrals. As your reputation grows, so will your earnings.
5. Remember that you are selling an article, not your knowledge. Although editors often buy “all rights,” they can’t buy information gleaned from days of research. Research once then concept a dozen times. This will bring you a plethora of work assignments engendered from one research investment.

There are many other writing tips that can help you excel on the Internet. Get aggressive. Read up on what works and what doesn’t. Your writing opportunities will increase and your professional credits will thrive, right along with your bank account!

Analyse Your Audience by David Farland, Part II

Characters
Well, given this list of most popular books of all time, take a look at the characters. What is the age and sex of each protagonist? Ninety percent of these novels seem to be aimed primarily at men. Why is that? Don’t women read? Of course not. (I’ll have a long section on why this historical bias exists later.)
Does the book have more than one major protagonist (usually defined by viewpoint character)?
Does the age of the protagonist change throughout the book? For example, in Harry Potter we first meet young Harry shortly after birth, but most of the book takes place later in life.
Beyond age and sex, you might study the characters closely. What is their social status? What about their physical appearances? What kinds of personality traits do they have in common?
Conflicts
After you study the characters, move on to conflicts. I like to take each major character in turn and study each of his or her conflicts. I label them as primary, secondary, tertiary, and so on.
So the next question is a bit tougher. How important to the reader will that conflict be? For example, when A Tale of Two Cities was written, the entire world was still reeling from the after-effects of the French Revolution. British nobility – indeed leaders around the entire world – were afraid of losing their heads, so they began to vie to for the title of "most virtuous leader alive today." Nobles began giving money to charity and making sure the press was present to see them do it, and so on. The reform movement swept across the oceans to America, where in the 1830s - 1850s tens of thousands of Christian Communes rose up. (I'll bet that you thought communes were a modern thing, something that happened just during the 1970s, but they go back thousands of years, and I wouldn't be surprised to see them rise up again in the coming year or two.) So the global reform movement swept throughout Europe and Russia, and thus we can see that for a reader in the mid-1800s, this kind of novel struck the reader deeply. In short, it carried information vital to the reader's survival.
We can see that trend throughout the list. Is Lord of the Rings really just escapism? I don't think so. As a teenager I clearly believed that the ring of power was a metaphor for the nuclear bomb. Tolkien denies it, but the bulk of the novel was written in the post-war era after WWII. If nothing else, I found myself identifying strongly with the inconsequential hobbits who were trying to rid the world of an item that could destroy the planet.
How important is it to you to know how the mob works today? When The Godfather came out, most people were totally ignorant at how powerful organized crime was. Today we're better educated, but I think that most people would be shocked at just how corrupt politics has become.
So study the conflicts.
One screenwriting doctor claims that in every great story, there is a question about the character's identity at its heart. Who am I? Who do others think that I am? This might seem like a tertiary conflict in many of these stories, but I think you'll find that it is a common thread.
In short, pay attention to even the smallest conflicts in the tale.
Very often, a powerful novel doesn't just challenge the protagonist's identity, it challenges the reader's identity, too.
Emotional Beats
In order to sell to any audience, you need to understand what drives that audience. A child may be looking for stories of wonder, tales that have comforting endings. A teen will be more likely to be looking for romance. An older male might be interested in figuring out how to best take care of his family, and so tales that have a strong tie to obtaining wealth become attractive, while older women in particular are interested in stories about belonging.
I worked with a green-lighting company in Hollywood that used to study how the emotional beats generated in an advertising campaign would translate into filled seats at the box office. Depending upon the age and sex of the viewer, we could tell what they wanted to see.
So we broke those emotional beats down into certain categories: mystery, drama, romance, adventure, wonder, horror, humor, and lust.
Using this system, we could look at a commercial and say: okay, your primary audience is teen girls. We know that 92% of that audience will be driven to the theater to view a movie that has romance in it, while 89% are looking for comedy. If the movie hits those emotions, then it will have a large potential audience. On the other hand, what if it hits the wrong emotional markers for the audience? Teenage girls don't generally look for drama; they get enough of it in their lives. Nor do they respond well to pornography. So what if you give them a movie that deals with things that the audience doesn't like? Well, you will probably drive viewers away. Instead of appealing to 90% of your audience, if you make a pornographic movie for girls you'll be advertising to less than five percent of them. So your sales will drop dramatically.
Themes
Emotional markers are big in Hollywood, but the list of markers isn't as helpful as it could be. There are commonalities in stories that go beyond the emotional tags, and I'm going to label them as "themes."
I've noticed that tales about character growth tend to be more satisfying than those that are not. So I add that into my mix of things to look for.
Similarly, many readers respond well to novels about friendship – gaining and keeping friends. If you look at the "top television shows of all time" you'll see that many of them – shows like "Cheers," "M.A.S.H.," "Seinfeld," "I Love Lucy," "Happy Days," and so on all revolved around a small cluster of friends and cohorts.
As I mentioned above, as a man I've noticed that tales about "making it rich" are attractive to me. Interestingly, before I got married I was far more interested in romance – how to find and wed the right girl. Now my fantasies tend to revolve around "How am I going to support my family – not just for the rest of my life, but even after I die?"
So look at the bestselling novels of all time. How many of them deal with themes appropriate to their audience?
Miscellaneous
Look at the books above and ask yourself what length has to do with becoming a bestseller. I suspect that when Lord of the Rings came out, it was perhaps the longest fantasy novel ever published. But most of the books on the list above are big, honking novels of a quarter of a million words or more. Most of them are among the longest books of their kind.
Why is that? Orson Scott Card has pointed out that when you write a novel of transport – one that takes the reader into another time, place, or culture – it naturally takes longer to tell the story.
But I think that there is more to it. I think that a longer novel invites greater depth. It allows the author to put more characters into deeper conflict, bringing in wider themes, weaving a tapestry that becomes more engrossing to the readers than a shorter work can produce.
Beyond novel length, look at things like: length of chapter and length of scene.
You could easily go into the mechanics of a bestseller. How much dialogue does the author use compared to, say, narration?
Is the book written in first person, second, third? How deeply does the author penetrate into the character's viewpoint?
You might even get down to smaller elements. In bestselling novels, there is a tendency for authors to dwell upon things such as: what it's like to eat at a restaurant that only the very wealthy can afford. You might study things such as: how does the author handle a dining scene?
Summary
I'd like you to become a student of what sells, and I think that the only way to do it is to do as I have suggested here: create a list of the bestsellers in your genre and medium then begin to study the commonalities.
As you do this, you'll gain a tremendous advantage over not just the new authors that you meet but even some authors who are widely published. I know dozens of authors who've never given an hour's thought to audience analysis – even authors who have written 30 novels or more.
Some authors have an inner sense of style that allows them to naturally drift toward writing for a wide audience. But most of us have to work a little harder to get a grip on such things.

Live your Writing Dreams

I grew up in a family of practical pragmatic people. If they couldn’t see it, smell it, feel it, taste it or hear it, it didn’t exist. Imagination was useful only as a hobby. Whatever you received came only by working hard with your two hands. No Fairy Godmothers welcome!

Now, there’s nothing wrong with this philosophy. It works for many people and is a good way to live, especially when taking care of a family and dealing with practical things, like bills. But, it doesn’t grant much room for the development of poets or writers or dreamers.

And, they need to live, too.

I learned through hard experience that those with creative minds die when exposed only to harsh pragmatic reality. If a rose were planted in a desert next to a cactus, the cactus would thrive because its needs were being met, while the rose would die because its needs were not being met.

My point? Feed your inner artist by living your writing dreams.

This doesn’t mean you should throw away your car keys, pull on a backpack and head away from civilization, with only a journal and a pen. It means you should think about your writing goals and imagine yourself living them, now. What would it be like to sit at an author’s signing table and sign hard copies of your latest published novel? How would it feel to be called up to receive a writing award in front of your peers? Could ideas and words flow through you and onto the page, with ease and grace?

Opening your mind to these ideas is a great way to open your heart to living a more creative life. Put aside your pragmatic doubts. Live your writing dreams mentally and, eventually, you will live them in the clear light of day. 

Analyze your Audience, Part I - by David Farland

From David Farland’s wonderful Daily Kick in the Pants Newsletter
Analyzing Your Novel's Audience:
 
I’m going to encourage you to learn to do your own audience analysis. Why? Because if you do, you might well begin to see things that others have missed.
Here is a list of the 20 bestselling novels of all time. The information comes from Wikipedia, is dated just a bit, and the list is obviously wrong. It shows Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows high on the list but doesn't show the first book in the series, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone anywhere at all. Since the first books in a series will always outpace the last books in sales (because there is always some falloff), it is obvious that we've got a problem.
Furthermore, sales of the Harry Potter books hit over 400 million for the series as a whole a couple of years ago in July. With seven books in the series, that means we have average sales of near 60 million copies, not the 44 million that was listed as the top sales figure here. In short, all seven books in the series should be on this list, not just the last book, and the numbers should range higher. But I’m not going to correct this list, because the truth is that I want to talk about more than just Harry Potter. Oh, and Twilight should be on here, too.
Title Author
A Tale of Two Cities Charles Dickens
The Lord of the Rings J.R.R. Tolkien
And Then There Were None Agatha Christie
The Hobbit J.R.R. Tolkien
She H. Rider Haggard
The Catcher in the Rye J.D. Salinger
The Alchemist Paulo Coelho
The Da Vinci Code Dan Brown
The Name of the Rose Umberto Eco
Harry Potter / Deathly Hallows J.K. Rowling
Jonathon Livingston Seagull Richard Bach
To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee
Valley of the Dolls Jacqueline Susann
Gone with the Wind Margaret Mitchell
One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel García Márquez
The Godfather Mario Puzo
Jaws Peter Benchley
Shōgun James Clavell
The Pillars of the Earth Ken Follett
Perfume Patrick Süskind
The Horse Whisperer Nicholas Evans
Now, given this list, I look for patterns in order to determine the elements that make a bestseller.
Settings
Let's start with the settings. How many of the books distance the reader from current time and space?
You'll notice that the first book on our list takes place six decades before the readers of the 1860s were around. Most of the readers wouldn't have been alive. It would be like me writing about JFK. Also, the book is set in two countries – England and France. In other words, no matter where you were living, the book offered some escape from the contemporary setting.
As you scroll through the list, you'll notice that about 35% of the novels are set in complete fantasy worlds. Most of the rest had historical ties. In each case where the novel doesn't distance the reader from the modern world, most of the novels take you someplace that you would like to go – a seaside resort, an island retreat, and so on.
So offering your reader escape seems to be something that most bestsellers have in common both in books and in movies. In Writing the Blockbuster Novel, Zuckerman says you should look to set your tale in places where the reader might want to go – exotic destinations like New York, Bombay, and London abound.
But what if you don't want to set your book in one of those places? That's all right, too. You can still entice your reader into your setting. For example, if I were setting a novel in Rigby, Idaho I might consider talking about the things that make Rigby one of the great destinations in the world – clear sunny skies, neighbors with high values, wild elk bedding down on the banks of the Snake River, and so on.
This is a key even in my genre of fantasy. Tolkien sold a lot of books, but one of the real reasons why is that Middle Earth is a great place to be. The Shire with its gentle Hobbits, its bounteous gardens and its innocence is a great place to go if you want to get away from real-world stress.
Beyond just the initial setting though, there are other questions to study. For example, does the setting move about? Or does the novel span dozens or even thousands of years? It's an easy thing for an author to talk about how glacial ice sculpted a present-day valley, or to throw in a story told by a grandmother to help set a scene. All of these techniques can expand the world that you're creating.

(Look for Part II Monday)

Love of the Craft

With Valentines Day less than 24-hours away, love of the craft seems an obvious topic. Why do we love writing? Is it the mystique, the clarification, appreciation of the act of penning our inner most thoughts?

Too often we allow the pragmatic side of writing to infuse our minds, forgetting that writing is a delight because it opens us up to childlike truth and wonder. One of the great gifts of learning how to read and write is the act of writing, itself.

On Valentines Day, a day for celebrating love in all its glory, love the craft of writing. Count the many gifts it brings into your life, with deep gratitude. And, let the love of writing inspire an affectionate note, a thoughtful card, an appreciative or supportive word. Never forget to write what you love and love what you write!

"If You Want to Write" by Brenda Euland

Brenda Euland, personal friend of Irving Stone, was a creative writing teacher for over 70 years. She loved the art and craft of writing. But, especially, she loved to guide writers into avenues of honesty, where real feelings rose above superficial phraseology.

“I have read all of Chekhov, now. He is so great, and his letters and his life and what people remember of him are even greater. Yet, it is consoling that if he did not know all about cruelty, gluttony, cowardice, and coldness in himself, he could not have written about them. Great men feel and know everything that mean men feel, even more clearly, but they seem to have made some kind of an ascension, and these evil feelings, though they still understand them sympathetically, no longer exert any power over them.

“Gradually, by writing, you will learn more and more to be free, to say all you think; and at the same time you will learn never to lie to yourself, never to pretend and attitudinize. But only by writing and by long, patient, serious work will you find your true self.

“And, why find it? Because it is, I think, the immortal soul and the life of the Spirit…”

I agree with Brenda Euland. The greatest power on earth is the Spirit. Connecting with yours influences and empowers, especially when you open your heart to embrace it. The light it sheds upon our inner creative worlds is as brilliant as the sunlight that rises and sets on our planet. We have power to know ourselves, truly, completely. Such honesty honors the soul as much as creativity drives it.

Write truly. Write powerfully. Write from the core of your heart with a goal to say what you know needs to be said. Only then will your efforts make life more pure, more strong. Only then shall your talent, regardless of what critics may say, make this world a better place.

What Makes a Million Dollar Best Seller by David Farland

From David's Daily Kick:

Many times when a writer starts to write his or her first book or screenplay, it is because the seed of an idea takes root in his or her head and the author feels that it must come out. This is the author’s primary motivation to write. That's not a bad way to write, but unfortunately in many cases the new author will pen something that feels terribly important and profound to him or her, while the rest of the world might not respond at all. That's because so many new authors write as a type of therapy.

The new author, after two or three sales, will often find him or herself sliding back down on the sales charts, and only then will begin to wonder what it is that the rest of the world would like to see in a story. The answer to that question of course changes from reader to reader. But if you're looking to sell big, you need to do some research into what audiences like.

This is something that writers need to do for almost every story. My research process requires me to look not just at book sales, but also at popular movies and television shows—to try to get a snapshot of our culture as a whole. The reason for this is quite simple. If I write a book, there are a limited number of readers for it. For example, it has been estimated that in my own field, fantasy, there are only about two or three million regular readers out there. I can catch some of those people as they wander past my books, but if I want to go really big—say Harry Potter big—I need to do better than that. I need to create a sensation. I need to get enough publicity on morning television and radio shows so that it drives readers into the bookstore—the way that Rowling, Paolini, Meyer, and Suzanne Collins have recently have done.

In order to appeal to that wider audience, I look at several mediums and try to take some clues from them.

For example, let's take film. In order for a movie to gross $100 million at the box office, it has to draw a viewership of about 16 million people—which is much larger than the number of hardcover sales made by almost any novel. So, what can I learn from movie tastes? A few years ago I read a book on screenwriting. In it, the instructor listed the top 50 bestselling movies of all time and asked that readers look for similarities. When I reached the end of the list, the author announced that there were NO similarities. But I had found three things that they all had in common. The list changes each year, but my points will still hold true. In fact, I’ve even found a few more similarities.

Here is the current list (as of 2/2012):

1 Avatar Fox $2,782.3 $760.5 27.3% $2,021.8 72.7% 2009^

2 Titanic Par. $1,843.2 $600.8 32.6% $1,242.4 67.4% 1997^

3 Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 WB $1,328.1 $381.0 28.7% $947.1 71.3% 2011

4 Transformers: Dark of the Moon P/DW $1,123.7 $352.4 31.4% $771.4 68.6% 2011

5 The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King NL $1,119.9 $377.8 33.7% $742.1 66.3% 2003^

6 Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest BV $1,066.2 $423.3 39.7% $642.9 60.3% 2006

7 Toy Story 3 BV $1,063.2 $415.0 39.0% $648.2 61.0% 2010

8 Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides BV $1,043.9 $241.1 23.1% $802.8 76.9% 2011

9 Alice in Wonderland (2010) BV $1,024.3 $334.2 32.6% $690.1 67.4% 2010

10 The Dark Knight WB $1,001.9 $533.3 53.2% $468.6 46.8% 2008

Last update: Feb 2012 (For the purposes of this blog, the list has been edited to only the top ten. See David Farland’s website and sign-up for the Daily Kick for more information).

So what do these films have in common? Here are a few things:

Movies set in another time and or another place: 98%.

This tells us that movies that take us away from the real world and transport us into an alternate reality are far more popular than those set within a contemporary setting.

Movies with wide audience potential (Male&Female): 100%.

Most of these movies have strong protagonists of both sexes and of various ages. Thus they draw in a much wider audience than, say, a teen chick flick. However, the main story focus is almost always on a relatively young male—anywhere from a child to a man in his early twenties. I hate that statistic, but I can’t ignore it.

Movies with high emotional Richter-scale values: 100%.

The movies here tend to tug on the heart-strings. Very often they achieve this by placing an entire "world" in jeopardy. But sometimes, as in Home Alone or Forrest Gump, the movie focuses on one very likable protagonist—then puts him or her through hell.

Movies with heroic main plot: 98%.

Almost every movie on the list focuses on someone who is trying to save others.

Fantasy or SF: 94%.

Since I write fantasy I'd like to point out that fantasy movies have been topping the bestseller lists for decades. It's time that the studios take notice!

Alternate World: 80%.

Most of these movies that have done well have been set in an alternate world, not in our world.

So, as a writer, what can you learn from these points? Well, if you're trying to write a bestseller, this information might be something of a treasure map, pointing you in some likely directions. A real analysis of bestsellers will need to take us much deeper—into not just noticing what works, but understanding why it works, and how the studios “make it work.”

Go to Dave Wolverton's homepage and sign-up for his Daily Kick, written under his pseudonym David Farland.

Great First Lines

Nothing hooks a reader like a great first line. Here are a few examples of first lines that made books must-reads.

• My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973. Lovely Bones/Alice Sebold

• “Let her hang until she’s dead!” “Take her out and hang her now! I’ll do it myself!” Bam! Bam! Bam! Judge Otis L. Warren wielded his gavel with such fury I thought he might smash a hole in the top of his bench. Trial/James Patterson

• One cannot raise walls against what has been forgotten. The citadel of the Ishuäl succumbed during the height of the Apocalypse. But, no army of inhuman Sranc had scaled its ramparts. No furnace-hearted dragon had pulled down its mighty gates…no one, not even the No-God, could besiege a secret. The Darkness that Comes Before/R. Scott Bakker

• On the night that I was born, my paternal grandfather, Josef Tock, made ten predictions that shaped my life. Then he died in the very minute that my mother gave birth to me. Life Expectancy/Dean Koontz

• Mr. Dunworthy opened the door to the laboratory and his spectacles promptly steamed up. “Am I too late?” he said, yanking them off and squinting at Mary. “Shut the door,” she said. “I can’t hear you over the sound of those ghastly carols.” The Doomsday Book/Connie Willis

It’s easy to see, when reading great first lines, why a reader becomes hooked. After your manuscript is concepted and written, polish your first line. Like a handshake, it will invite the reader into your world and send them to the cash register, novel in hand.

Overcoming Writers Block

When words won’t come, when your muse feels as dried and dead as old pencil lead, there’s one sure way to reconnect with your creative side. Close your eyes and recall your favorite childhood activity. I had many. From watching the Alpenrose Dairy fireworks to making mud dams to weaving buttercup chains to sneaking through the fence to play golf on the local course, I lost myself in the moment, as a child.

If you’re a parent, sit for five minutes watching your children play. If you’re not a parent, spend a moment or two at a park. Kids don’t pretend anything. They live in a world so real that our adult vision fades to pale shadows by comparison.  

Brenda Euland said, “…working is not grinding but a wonderful thing to do; that creative power is in all of you, if you give it just a little time…if you do not keep it out by hurrying and feeling guilty in those times when you should be lazy and happy.”

When your inner child becomes dormant, when the pen, pencil or keyboard grows mute, step back into a sweet childhood memory. Easily, gracefully, your inner poet will resurrect, eloquent and alive with a creativity that springs from the marrow of your bones and touches each reader with invisible fire. 

Writing your way to Health and Fitness

Several years ago, the American Medical Association published a study that confirmed a connection between the healing of certain common illnesses and the written word. When patients wrote about painful life stories, it opened their hearts to replace that inner pain with peace.

This caused illnesses like asthma and arthritis to heal, measurably, often within two weeks. How can this affect you and your writing?

A healthy body replaces unhealthy cells with healthy cells, on a regular basis. A healthy mind replaces unhealthy thoughts with healthy thoughts, on a regular basis.

The more often we write about what matters to us, without reference to the opinions of others or the judgment of the world, the more clearly we feel our core values, and this is very healing.

Take a moment, today, and write about something that caused you discomfort, not to relive it, but to understand it. This kind of charitable clarity not only defines your boundaries but strengthens your self-knowledge.

You have so much to share. Start by sharing your writing with yourself, and an awesome wholeness may follow!