Inspiration Monday XI

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I think you guys are the nicest people on the planet. And also some of the most talented. Thanks for being so understanding about everything, thanks for being encouraging both to me and to each other, and thanks most of all for writing! I think words are more powerful than any of us realize.

Rashmi told me how to get the poll up – so if you haven’t already made your opinion known in yesterday’s comments, click through to my home page and click on the poll on the right sidebar.

And click on some of these names! All of them are well worth the read (or the listen!)

Kay

Fredi and two and three

Jinx

Drew

Carl

Billie Jo

Marantha

Hugmore

Patti

Scribbla

Char

Mike and two and three

Mark

Barb

Also, Drew, the Rewriters’ resident composer, actually produced an actual song based on lyrics he wrote for InMon VII – actually a real song! Go check it out.

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The Rules

There are none. Read the prompts, get inspired, write something. No word count minimum or maximum. You don’t have to include the exact prompt in your piece, and you can interpret the prompt(s) any way you like.

OR

No really; I need rules!

Okay; write 200-500 words on the prompt of your choice. You may either use the prompt as the title of your piece or work it into the body of your piece. You must complete it before6 pm CSTon the Monday following this post.

The Prompts:

The curse of immortality
War was the least of our problems
Sun sets, curtain rises
Declared independence. Nobody listened.
One man’s trash

 

If you want to share your Inspiration Monday piece, post it on your blog and link back to today’s post; I’ll include a link to your piece in the next Inspiration Monday post. No blog? Email your piece to me at stephanie (at) balcomagency (dot) com.

Happy writing!

Change coming to Inspiration Monday

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Dear, dear, dear Rewriters,


First of all, don’t panic. It’s only a small change, and I think it’ll hurt me more than it hurts you. In fact, I’ve been arguing with myself over it for the past two weeks.

Time constraints dictate that, for future Inspiration Mondays, I can only promise to read the first ten unique submissions (“unique” meaning from different people). This doesn’t mean I won’t read your submission if it happens to be number eleven. It just means I might not read it. I will also continue to link to ALL submissions (so keep linking back!).

This is in no way a guilt trip or a veiled request for less participation. The whole point of InMon is to write more! I hope that more people will continue to be regularly involved, and if any of you even thinks of apologizing for participating “too much,” I will hire a private investigator to find out where you live so I can go smack you upside the head.

Really, this was bound to happen sooner or later. If I want this thing to grow, I can’t limit it to what just one person can keep up with. But even now, as my cursor hovers over the “Publish” button, I am hesitating. I don’t want you to think I don’t care, or that reading your work is even a chore – it’s not! This is like giving up chocolate or something. All week long, I was reading submissions, thinking – what if she writes something this fantastic next week and I don’t even read it? What if he tops himself again next week and I miss it? Plus, you’ve all been so kind and supportive. So even though this is torturing me, I wanted to be up front with you guys about the what, the why and whatever else.
First Tuesday posts, now InMon reading, are you slowly inching away?
No! I’m simply instituting practical guidelines for myself so I can keep this good thing going. There’s so much I want to do with this blog! But I only started blogging seriously last February, so I’m still gauging how much I can handle.
Will there be any other changes to InMon in the future?
If the submissions keep building, I may have to limit links. For instance, if we get up to 40 or 50 per week, I may only link to the first 25. But for now, I’ll continue linking to all submissions.
The only other changes I can foresee might be how I select the 10 to read or the 25 to link – I may start choosing randomly, or focusing on new faces. Also, there may be some “break” weeks for holidays like Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the Super Secret Project.

 
What is the Super Secret Project???
I can’t tell you yet! But I’m about 25% of the way into preparations.

And another thing…
I don’t want you to look at me as some kind of faceless, inaccessible “expert.” First, I’m not really an expert. I’m still learning, too. Second, this is a community; we should help each other. So talk to me! Ask me questions! If I can possibly help, I will.

A question to leave you with:

What do you guys think about maybe, possibly, sometime in the future self-publishing a collection of the “best of InMon” in a book? All the Rewriters would pick the best of their submissions, and we’d put them all together in a book through Lulu.com or something like that. Nothing fancy—it would only be marketed to our small community—but I think it would be cool. I’ve created a poll (click through if you are reading through email/RSS), and feel free to elaborate on your thoughts in the comments.

EDIT: Okay, I can’t figure out how to get the poll up. Just let me know what you think in the comments.

5 ways my mom made me a writer

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Although my mom isn’t a writer, I owe a lot to her for making me one. She did this in five big ways:

She read to us

My mom reads like a fiend and she read to us all the time when we were little. Narnia, The Hobbit, The Just So Stories, A Wrinkle In Time, From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, and countless others. She taught us to love stories – I can still remember how excited I was when I got into first grade and found out I was going to learn to read for myself.

She took us to the library

Every two weeks in the summer, she’d drive us to the library – not the tiny one up the street, but the big one that was a little farther off. I’d make a b-line for the YA section and grab anything that looked interesting, and take home a whole stack of books I could only hope would last me two weeks.

She home-schooled us

Most kids spend six hours a day in class and still have homework in the evening. They’re so busy cramming their heads with facts, they don’t have time to experiment with hobbies and figure out what they really want to do. When you’re home-schooled, you have a certain amount of work to do per day or week, and once you’re done with it, you’re free. On a good day, I could get everything done bynoon.

 

She made us amuse ourselves

You’d think with all that free time, we’d get bored. Well, sometimes we did. But every time we complained to Mom about it, she would say “You could always clean out the garage” or something to that effect, which meant we quickly learned not to depend on her for entertainment. Instead, we learned to amuse ourselves – which naturally lead to reading, which itself naturally led to writing (for two out of three of us).

 

She never told us we couldn’t

Although we understood that we had to lead productive lives and make real money, neither she nor my dad ever told us we couldn’t become writers (or a singer, which was what I wanted to be for most of my childhood). However, we also didn’t ask them to spend vast amounts of money to feed our hobbies; we didn’t ask them to buy us fancy computers or send us to expensive writer’s camps. I guess the message behind that is, if your kid really wants to do it, he’ll find a way with or without a big stack of money.

Happy Mother’s Day!

Inspiration Monday X

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Whew! More submissions than ever this week – 28! It also happens to be the tenth InMon, and we are well over 100 submissions total. Seems like we should have some kind of anniversary celebration. Happy InMon to us, happy InMon to us! Click the links, they are genius. Happy InMon to us!

Woah. Unintentional rhyme!

Kay

Carl

Mike and two and three and four

Sonia

Marantha and two and three 

Drew

Janel

Billie Joe

Patti

Char and two

Jinx

Mark

Scribbla

Rebekah

Indigo Spider and two

Fredi and two

Jenna

Debra

BlueSkyPoet

Barb

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The Rules

There are none. Read the prompts, get inspired, write something. No word count minimum or maximum. You don’t have to include the exact prompt in your piece, and you can interpret the prompt(s) any way you like.

OR

No really; I need rules!

Okay; write 200-500 words on the prompt of your choice. You may either use the prompt as the title of your piece or work it into the body of your piece. You must complete it before6 pm CSTon the Monday following this post.

The Prompts:

A man with no fingerprints

The day the earth stood still*

Atlas shrugged*

The other me

Things only children know

 

If you want to share your Inspiration Monday piece, post it on your blog and link back to today’s post; I’ll include a link to your piece in the next Inspiration Monday post. No blog? Email your piece to me at stephanie (at) balcomagency (dot) com.

Happy writing!

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*Obviously, these are titles from famous works. I wasn’t impressed by either film version of The Day the Earth Stood Still, and I’ve never read Atlas Shrugged, but both phrases fascinate me, and I’m eager to see what you guys do with them. Have at it!

The second most important sentence in your book

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Copywriting (my day job) will never be as rewarding as fiction writing, but they share some similarities in craft. For example, the headline.

“Headline” doesn’t just refer to the large type on the front of a newspaper; it can mean the main line of text on any ad, billboard, webpage, or whatever. I probably spend more time writing headlines than anything else, mainly because they’re difficult. I can easily write a paragraph in fifteen minutes, but I might take hours to find the right headline for one ad. Why?

Lacking a striking image, the headline is the most important part of the ad. It must capture the attention of the audience and compel them to read the rest of the ad. It’s not enough to be well-written. Good writing by itself is not compelling. The same applies to the first sentence of your book.*

The first sentence of your book is the make-or-break moment for many readers, when they choose to keep reading, or to put it down forever.

So, a few pointers:

  • If you haven’t spent more time on your first sentence than on any other sentence in your book, you’re doing it wrong.
  • Scenic description, no matter how poetic, isn’t compelling.
  • Fight or chase scenes, no matter how action-packed, aren’t compelling if you don’t know anything about the characters involved.
  • What is compelling? It’s hard to put a finger on it, but it is usually weird, surprising, insightful, contradictory, or witty.

Examples!

In the fading afternoon light, the helicopter skimmed low along the coast, following the line where the dense jungle met the beach.

               –The Lost World, Michael Crichton

She seemed to float above the ghostly evening mist like a menacing beast rising from the primeval ooze.

               –Sahara, Clive Cussler

Eragon knelt in a bed of trampled reed grass and scanned the tracks with a practiced eye.

               –Eragon, Christopher Paolini

There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.

                –Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte

Those all sound quite nice. But compare them to the following:

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

               –Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell

All my life, I’ve wanted to go to Earth.

               –Podkayne of Mars, Robert A. Heinlein

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

               –The Go Between, L.P. Hartley

This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.

               -William Goldman on The Princess Bride, by S. Morgenstern.

There was a boy named Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.

               –The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, C.S. Lewis

Which ones make you want to keep reading? How does your first sentence measure up?

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*I call the first sentence in a book the second most important sentence because in keeping with the philosophy that we owe our readers satisfactory closure, the last sentence of the book is actually the most important. But I digress.