Karinwritesdangerously

“Writing is a sweet, wonderful reward.”

“It is not necessary that you leave the house. Remain at your table and listen. Do not even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still and alone. The world will present itself to you for its unmasking, it can do no other, in ecstasy it will writhe at your feet.”
Franz Kafka

The legendary violinist Niccolo Paganini was giving a well-attended performance. Only minutes before he was about to play, he rushed around backstage frantically searching for something. Then he went out and gave a musical rendition that proved to be one of the highlights of his career. After he stepped off the stage, someone asked why he was so agitated right before performing. “I forgot my Stradivarius,” he replied. He was forced to borrow another instrument. “But tonight,” he added, “I learned the most important lesson of my life. Before I thought the music was in my violin. Now I know the music is in me.”

This lovely story comes to us via my friend and mentor Rob Gilbert’s wonderful Success Hotline (973.743.4690) — and it never ceases to inspire me.

“Now I know the music is in me” — what a precious discovery and how true it is for all of us: The music is in me — and the music is in you. While I have no idea what your unique song is as a writer, I do know a few things about the music inside you:

It’s waiting for you: Whatever it is you long to say it is waiting inside you yearning to be said. It may wait so quietly that it can be ignored or overlooked — and even, sadly, remain unsung and unsaid. It may bubble up irrepressibly and mischievously. It may agitate and disturb you, giving you no peace until you respond to its call. But fierce or feather-light, it yearns to be recognized and nourished.

It’s calling you: You can ignore it and distract yourself from it. You can tease it by starting and then stopping projects. You can frustrate it by never pushing through to completion. You can rob it of strength through inaction and indecision. You can find a hundred ways not to answer its call, but it will somehow survive and persist.

It’s depending on you: You are the only one who can sing your particular song — there’s no one else. And so that song depends on you: on your desire, your discipline, your drive. Without you, it will never be sung. With your intention and ingenuity, it’s everything.

It wants to spring forth: Whatever your song, your unique vision or idea to shared, it inclines lifeward — it seeks expression and expansion. Nourish it with tender loving care, with devotion and discipline, and it will reward you by surprising you with unexpected turns of events, encounters, coincidences — little gifts from the universe to support, encourage, and embolden you. Write on!

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Brenda Ueland was an independent, highly successful writer who authored a classic called, If You Want to Write: A Book About Art, Independence and Spirit. What a marvelous, magical title and guide!

Brenda was a true believer in the power of creativity and devoted much of her energy to helping people unleash the creative power within them. To inspire us all today, some quotes from her book: 

“Everybody is original, if he tells the truth, if he speaks from himself. But it must be from his ‘true’ self and not from the self he thinks he ‘should’ be.” 

“I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like a child stringing beads in kindergarten – happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another. ” 

“No writing is a waste of time – no creative work where the feelings, the imagination, the intelligence must work. With every sentence you write, you have learned something. It has done you good.” 

“Work freely and rollickingly as though you were talking to a friend who loves you. Mentally (at least three or four times a day) thumb your nose at all know-it-alls, jeerers, critics, doubters.” 

“Don’t always be appraising yourself, wondering if you are better or worse than other writers. ‘I will not Reason and Compare,’ said Blake; ‘my business is to Create.’ Besides, since you are like no other being ever created since the beginning of Time, you are incomparable.”

“The only way to write well, so that people believe what we say and are interested or touched by it, is to slough off all pretentiousness and attitudinizing.” 

“Creative power flourishes only when I am living in the present.” 

“…writing is not a performance but a generosity.” 

“Work freely and rollickingly” — what better advice is there? Write on!

Please help KWD grow by sharing: https://karinwritesdangerously.com/

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“I think we’ve learned that early reading is more than just a nice thing to do with kids. It really does have a very important role to play in building brain networks that will serve children long-term…”
Dr. John S. Hutton

How important is reading for young kids? The American Academy of Pediatrics has issued a policy statement stating that literacy promotion should start at birth. What a call to action: Pediatricians caring for infants and toddlers should be advising parents about how important it is to read to even the youngest children. Bravo!

As one story on literacy noted, there are “extensive links between growing up with books and reading aloud, and later language development and school success.” What’s more, breakthrough studies have identified the complex interactions that take place when we lift a small child into our lap and open a picture book.

One study looked at brain activity in 3-to 5-year-olds as they listened to simple stories. They found differences in brain activity based on how much the children had been read to at home. Kids who were read to often in homes with books had more activity in a region of the left brain associated with integrating sound and visual stimulation. While this area is known to be very active when older kids read to themselves, it also lights up when younger kids hear stories. 

“When kids are hearing stories, they’re imagining in their mind’s eye,” noted Dr. John Hutton, the study’s lead author. This suggests that kids who are read to have more practice creating visual images will become more adept later at making images and stories out of words. Dr. Hutton speculated that a book may also spur creativity in a way that cartoons and screen-related visuals may not. As he put it, “When we show them a video of a story, do we short circuit that process a little? Are we taking that job away from them? They’re not having to imagine the story; it’s just being fed to them.”

In another set of findings, researchers discovered that the vocabulary in kids’ picture books is often richer than the speech they’re hearing on a daily basis. So kids who are read to hear more words and a greater variety of words, and have the chance to exercise their brains by forming images from those words. 

Aren’t books wonderful? They’re brain boosters, comforters, cuddle-in-a-lap snacks for the mind and heart. Reading rouses kids’ imaginations! What video or iPad offers all this? Write on!

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God Says Yes To Me

Kaylin Haught

I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic
and she said yes
I asked her if it was okay to be short
and she said sure it is
I asked her if I could wear nail polish
or not wear nail polish
and she said honey
she calls me that sometimes
she said you can do just exactly
what you want to
Thanks God I said
And is it even okay if I don’t paragraph
my letters
Sweetcakes God said
who knows where she picked that up
what I’m telling you is
Yes Yes Yes

This delightful poem is a gift to us from fellow author, editor and poetry lover, Toby Stein.

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Sometimes. we just want to cut loose and work on something different. Shifting genre gears can be a great way to do this. But getting up to speed in a field with different conventions can be tricky.

This calls to mind a chat I once had with a fellow writer. He and a friend planned to work on a screenplay together. Since they loved thrillers that was the genre they were exploring.

Right away the Hitchcock classic North by Northwest popped into my head. Cary Grant plays an everyman character embroiled in a nefarious plot. Along the way, he falls in love with Eva Marie Saint. The story builds to an action-packed ending on Mount Rushmore.

Anyway, I suggested the two budding screenwriters take a look at North by Northwest (rated among the top 100 films by the American Film Institute), and a few other classic films and really spend time analyzing just how they work. This was one of the great tips my wonderful playwrighting coach once suggested.

Actually, he advised us to take one play we really loved and live with it for a time, reading and rereading it, getting to know it inside and out — so that we would really understand what made it tick.

What a great piece of advice!

It’s the “hedgehog” strategy — as in “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Diving deep into a classic in a genre and spending time with it can be a very efficient, productive way to probe the underlying principles that drive it. It can also give you fresh appreciation for how an elegant and engaging story is constructed. 

There are so many fruitful questions you can ask as you analyze a novel or play or film script you admire: How and when does it draw you in? What qualities does the main character reveal in the opening of the story? How does the writer release plot clues in a way that keeps you engaged and sustains momentum? Why is the ending satisfying — and is it surprising or does it seem inevitable?

Taking a deep dive into a work you love can be so much fun! Write on!

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“Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
Albert Einstein

We’ve all had those moments when we feel like our muse is on vacation and our creative juices just aren’t flowing. What to do, what to do? As my friend and mentor Rob Gilbert often says on his Success Hotline (973.743.4690), “you’re not lacking creativity, you’re blocking it. » A few creativity-boosting strategies to help jump-start your writing:

Make unlikely connections: A hallmark of creativity is the ability to make surprising links between ideas and things. Consider wonderful similes or metaphors that helped you see with a fresh eye and mind. Or the different ways kids use a cardboard box — as a spaceship, a lemonade stand, a log cabin, a clubhouse. One simple way to challenge yourself to creatively connect the dots is to pick three words randomly from a newspaper or a dictionary and spend 15 minutes writing a story about them. You’ll be amazed at what you come up with. 

Come up with a new angle: If you’re writing a novel, for example, you might rewrite a scene from your antagonist’s point of view instead of your hero or heroines. Or you might play devil’s advocate and try to talk one of you characters out of taking an action and see how he or she responds. You might also find inspiration by having an inanimate object or a creature without a voice share its view of what’s unfolding.

Switch gears: Sometimes all we need to get our creative juices flowing is a mental coffee break — a pause that refreshes. Since we work with words all day, grabbing some crayons or colored pencils and drawing free hand or in one of those new adult coloring books can be relaxing and reenergizing. If you’re a logical left-brainer, try daydreaming and see where it takes you; if you’re a right-brain intuitive, solving a complex puzzle can help your creative juices start flowing.

Creativity is a bottomless well, just waiting to be tapped: The more we draw from it, the more there is to draw from. Are there any creativity boosting techniques you’ve found especially helpful during a dry patch? Feel free to share them as we all write on.

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“There are no dull subjects. There are only dull writers.”
H.L. Mencken

“My task, which I am trying to achieve, is, by the power of the
written word to make you hear, to make you feel — it is before all,
to make you see. That — and no more, and it is everything.”
Joseph Conrad

Enticing readers to enter the world you create through your words can be challenging. One of the best tools you have at your command is color — the vividness or variety of your language. Anecdotes, similes, and metaphors — these can all add richness and texture to your writing.

As Jack Hart notes in A Writer’s Coach, readers want to be rewarded for the time and effort they devote to an author’s work. One way to reward them, says Hart, is to seed your story with “nuggets that give pleasure. Think of them as the chips in a chocolate-chip cookie.”

Color offers a reader the joy of discovery; an unexpected comparison, an unusual modifier, or a detail that reveals much more than meets the eye — these are all pleasure-giving nuggets that can engage and entrance readers and keep them moving along with you through your story. 

Raymond Chandler, who created the classic detective Philip Marlowe used to write on half sheets of paper; his self-imposed goal was to create “a little bit of magic” on each half sheet. That’s a form of color.

Jack Hart devotes a whole chapter to adding color to writing. Here are a few tips you may find helpful:

• Pick three details: Capture your characters by describing three details that define who they are in revealing and insightful ways. 

• Sharpen your similes: Coming up with arresting, unusual comparisons adds flavor and spice to your writing. Hemingway and Fitzgerald honed their descriptive skills by picking out random objects and then creating comparisons for them. 

• Use color carefully: “Metaphors, similes, and other figurative devices work best when you measure them out carefully,” observes Hart. Using too many can dilute their impact; too few can make your writing seem lackluster. So sprinkle them artfully throughout your prose to add spice and snap. And write on!

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« Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost. »
Henry James, from his essay The Art of Fiction.

Habit blinds us all: We fall into familiar byways without even noticing that it happens and begin to look at the world with a kind of sameness that can make both our days and our writing seem lackluster. 

How can we bring childlike wonder back into our days and words?

How can we refresh our writing so it sings and dances?

In Becoming a Writer, a classic work on the creative process, Dorothea Brande tackles this problem head on in a chapter called “Learning to See again.” In it, she suggests that one of the keys to fresher writing is to be in the moment when we are out in the world — to turn our “attention outward,” instead of constantly immersing ourselves in our problems or obsessive planning to the point where we miss what’s unfolding around us — the life happening right in front of us. 

How do we become someone “on whom nothing is lost”? Here’s what Dorothea suggests: “By way of getting to that desirable state, set yourself a short period each day when you will, by taking thought, recapture a childlike ‘innocence of eye.’” Here’s how:

For half an hour every day, transport yourself back to the “state of wide-eyed interest that was yours when you were five.”

Even though you may feel strange at first doing something so deliberately that was once as easy and natural as breathing, if you stay with it, you’ll find that you can slip into that state of total curiosity where everything is being seen as if for the first time, fresh and sparkling. When you do, you’ll find that “you are able to gather stores of new material” that you can mine in your writing.

Don’t rush to use whatever these half-hour “fresh seeing” mental excursions bring you. If you do, you’re likely to find that they turn flat and factual — like a journalist’s notes. Instead, give them time to work themselves into your writing. As Dorothea says, “wait for the unconscious mind to work its miracles of assimilation and accretion on them.”

I love this notion of “fresh seeing” — of recapturing that sense of childlike wonder that made the world so exciting when we were kids. If we can bring some of that newness and fresh-born excitement to our writing, our words will begin to sing and dance. I’m going to give this a go. How about you? Write on!

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“Open your mind to new experiences, particularly to the
study of other people. Nothing that happens to a writer,
however happy, however tragic, is ever wasted.”

P. D. James

P. D. James is known as the “Queen of Crime,” yet she’s widely admired for blurring the line between the crime novel and literary fiction. She launched her career as a novelist by writing from 6 AM to 8 AM before going to her civil service job. She was forty-two when her first novel was published. An online site gathered together some pungent and inspiring PD James quotes on writing that I wanted to share with you:

“Learn to write by doing it. Read widely and wisely.
Increase your word power. Find your own individual
voice through practicing constantly. Go through the
world with your eyes and ears open and learn to
express that experience in words.”

“It shows considerable wisdom to know what you
want in life and then to direct all your energies
towards getting it.”

“Crime fiction confirms our belief, despite some
evidence to the contrary, that we live in a rational,
comprehensible, and moral universe.”

“Increase your word power. Words are the raw
material of our craft. The greater your vocabulary,
the more effective your writing. We who write in
English are fortunate to have the richest and most
versatile language in the world. Respect it.”

“Write what you need to write, not what is currently
popular or what you think will sell.”

“Read widely and discriminately. Bad writing is
contagious.”

“It is undoubtedly a lonely career, but I suspect
the people who find it terribly lonely are not
writers. I think if you are a writer you realise
how valuable the time is when you are
absolutely alone with your characters in
complete peace.”

Wise words from a woman who surely wrote dangerously. Inspired and energized, let’s write on!

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Bing Chang, a cherished KWD reader, shared this lovely reflection on on character in a comment and I wanted to share it with you:

« We often speak of “character” or “human nature” as though they were well-defined concepts. Yet perhaps what we observe is only the visible expression of a much deeper reality. If humanity bears the image of God, then the ultimate depth of human nature is as inexhaustible as the One whose image we bear. We recognize courage, compassion, creativity, love, and sacrifice as expressions of that nature, but they are only glimpses of something we cannot fully define. We know the leaves of the tree, but not the full mystery of its roots. Character is not the essence of humanity; it is the visible shoreline of an ocean whose depths ultimately reach into the mystery of God. »

—Bing Chang