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Friday, 1 January, 2010
- Rant 'o The Week: planning
- School News
- Featured Courses
- Essay: Verifying sources
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RANT 'O THE WEEK:
Plan Your Writing. Write Your Plan
by WritersCollege.com Director Stephen Morrill
This time each year I trek to the office supply superstore and remember the ghost of office supply stores past. Tampa is a medium-sized town and yet I can recall how, up to 1984 when I quit my downtown job and took up writing magazine articles from my spare bedroom, the only office supply store downtown was a small shop with outrageously overpriced and restricted supplies. In this era of big-box office supply stores, open nights and weekends and stocked with a cornecopia of goodies, it's easy to forget what a recent innovation they are, and what a gift they are to small business people everywhere. And we writers are small business people, or aspire to be.
As always, this time of year, I bought a year planner for the coming year. Mostly, I buy the Day-Runner brand, full-size daily sheets and the entire year's worth. I don't buy the expensive "executive" binders they offer; the sheets work fine in a cheap three-ring binder.
Now comes the fun part. The planning.
"Nonsense," I hear you say. "I just write when the Muse strikes. I don't need to plan." Well, I suppose that's true if your plan—if we can call it that—is to never really finish the work, if you do only one writing thing at a time and have the rest of your life to almost get there. And for some people, this is fine and more power to them.
Me, I have people to do and places to see and I need help. I need cheap psychological tricks. I know, for instance, that I wish to write at least several books this year, in addition to much other stuff. Books are the worst for me. I can bang out a magazine article in a few days or a few weeks to a month and not do all that much planning for it because the deadline is upon me the moment I get the assignment. But a book? First of all the deadline is months away, maybe a year away. Second, the work required is too horrible to even wrap my mind around. Third, if it's a novel and I have to write the whole thing up front and then find an agent, the world is blissfully ignorant of me and nobody is on my case to get the manuscript in on time. Nobody but me. And fifth—and I know you can relate to this—every time i set aside time to write, something else comes up, something that, while perhaps not of terribly great importance, is still something that must be handled at once and the book deadline is, well, months off, and what's another day more or less?
So, I need two things to make this work. I need a regular schedule that says writing is just as important as anything else in my life and, for this hour, or two, or four, the most important thing to do at this time. And I need some help not having my knees shake and my eyes glaze over as I contemplate the mountain of work before me. I need a schedule.
As important, I need a schedule that breaks down the job into bite-sized chomps that I can handle without choking. I need a schedule that says that if I buckle down on a regular basis, I'll achieve my daily goals, my weekly and monthly goals, my quarterly goals, et cetera. And, yes, I also need a schedule that says it's OK to go off the rails occasionally, just so I get back to work as soon as possible and make up for lost time and meet those deadlines. I am not going to always keep to the schedule. Life gets in the way sometimes. But I try never to move the deadline. Instead, I build in slack time.
My pronouns: thus far I use "I" but it could be "you" as well. You have your own goals and needs and life to live. I can give only the most generic advice. But that is to try to have a schedule for your writing and try to stick to it as much as possible. If you have family, try to impress your schedule upon them too. Point is to remember that you want to be a writer. You want to produce some form of writing. You have decided that this is an important facet of your personality and of your life goals. A schedule, complete with fixed deadlines, will aid you in enforcing and reinforcing all this.
SCHOOL
NEWS: Some of the things I am planning (that cursed "P" word again!) are:
Most exciting to you, perhaps, I am considering setting up a message board system. This would let me pontificate about writing, our teachers could chime in too, and you could post as well. It would be a place to ask questions and get answers, share experiences, brag about your accomplishments. We have tried this several times before, once with Yahoo (tyhe most aptly-named web site, I think), and once with an in-house system that was more professional. I may try the latter again. But I could use some feedback. Would you use it?
Completely redo the school web site. I do this every few years mostly because I get bored looking at it but also to modify some technical specs.
Start a school FaceBook page, maybe a blog (but what would I say there I can't say here?) and rethink the whole social-media thing as it relates to the school.
Create a links page. People have asked me, for years, to link to them and let them link to the school. I have heretofor resisted. That will change.
FEATURED
COURSES: (Also see our homepage for daily featured courses)
Article Writing and Selling 101 with Usha Sliva
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to see your article and name appear in Cosmopolitan or Flair; Entrepreneur or Newsweek? The pride and joy is indescribable. And the pay, not bad! Learn how to become an accomplished article writer and pitch your work to magazines of your choice. It’s all in the writing, selling and presentation and this course will teach you step by step, how handle each one of them.
By the end of the course, you should be able to identify the different kinds of article writing styles that exist, learn methods accomplished writers use to gain inspiration and ideas, learn to write a query letter that brings in results, learn how to select appropriate magazines for your queries and the ways in which you can find and select them, learn how to handle rejection and learn how to write and sell the perfect article, each and every time.
Body-Build Your Story with Patrika Vaughn
Does your story bulge in the wrong places, lie flaccid when it should exude strength? Build vibrant stories, articles and books by learning the jobs of every beginning, middle and end; which point of view will work best; how to set the scene and create the action, and turning points that will keep readers interested.
Nonfiction Book Proposals with Gloria Kempton
The best kept secret to marketing nonfiction books is that you don’t have to write the entire book. In this course, you will learn about all of the elements that need to be included in a book proposal and how to put them together for maximum effect on the agent and/or editor, setting you on the path to signing a contract with a publisher.
Book Reviews That Rock: Finding Books to Review and Places to Sell Them with Sandra Louden
In the unlikeliest of settings (on vacation by the ocean of The Outer Banks), Sandra Miller-Louden was approached by a book editor of a major newspaper to write book reviews. Instead of opportunity knocking, it literally surfed its way in—and Sandra decided to ride the wave. Book reviewing is a genre rarely explored, yet book reviews are everywhere! When you read a book, you always have an opinion about it, don’t you? Well, why not turn that opinion into cash by writing book reviews? How do you get books to review and where are the best places to peddle your freelance reviews after you’ve written them? Sandra Miller-Louden is introducing her latest course—Book Reviews That Rock. This 4-week course will give you the tools to pursue book reviewing. Included in the course is Sandra’s signature “Balanced and Power Assignments” ™—all designed to get you writing, keep you writing and sustain that creative flow!
Creating Characters with Jana Shellman
Learn to make your characters live and breathe. Get inside their head...know how they relate to one another. Write such full characters that their arms and legs stick out when you try to close the book!!! Learn their purpose in your plot.
ESSAY: Verifying Sources
by Stephen Morrill
Since this appears to be the only place where Tiger Woods' name has not (yet) appeared, let's fix that.
Oh, I don't care about Woods and his peccadillos. In fact I thought a peccadillo was either some little musical instrument about the size of a Slim Jim, or an obnoxious western-state pig whose only claim to fame was that it could (or would) climb up a cactus.
Well, in the midst of all that Woodsian blather, one golfing magazine sent a reporter (or so he claimed to be) to some event. this person wrote that he had talked to two golfers and they had expressed themselves—in rather colorful language—about Tiger Woods. He wrote this all down and included it in the article. |
 wild peccaries
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But there was a slight problem. the two golfers in question both said they had never seen this guy and had never spoken to him and would never have said any such things about Woods....
Click here to read the full essay.
WEB LINKS:
Hilarious parody of the AP Stylebook (even funnier if, like me, you have a bookshelf full of stylebooks which don't agree.
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