Inspiration: A Limerick

I’m afraid I stayed up for half the night

Waiting for inspiration to bite

Racking my brain

And going insane

But – suddenly! – I knew what to write!

--Alyssa, West writing tutor

The Thesis

Creating a thesis can be hard,

it can seem like the work of bard,

but if your points you do sum,

it can be quite fun,

and your essay will sound avant-garde.

A Product of Inspriation

The product of inspiration
Adorned by much perspiration
It glistens and glows
So everyone knows
Sweat's role in the operation

Grammar Girl’s Quick & Dirty Tips To Overcome Writer’s Block

Grammar Girl’s Quick & Dirty Tips

To Overcome Writer’s Block

1. Lower your standards at the beginning of the process.  Raise them later.

This advice, which some people apply to dating, was issued most famously by poet William Stafford.  He argued that high standards create a threshold that inhibits writers from getting started.  The key is to lower your standards at the beginning of the process.  Get that fantasy of winning prizes or of capturing hearts out of your head. 

2. Imagine the story before writing a draft.

Writing begins long before your hands get moving.  The more head work you do before drafting, the easier the hand work will be.  Such mental preparation is a form of rehearsal, the kind we do to prepare for asking someone on a date or a boss for a raise.

3. Rehearse the beginning by speaking it to another person.

You can draft a story with your voice before you write it down with your hands.  All you need is a friend willing to listen and maybe ask a few questions.  Even an attentive dog will do, preferably a Jack Russell terrier named Rex.  Let the story emerge from your mouth, to your ears, then to your hands.

4. Don’t write the story yet. Write a memo to yourself about the story.

When you write to yourself, you lower your standards in a simple and productive way.  Once your hands get moving on an informal draft, words begin to flow.  The trick is to fool yourself into thinking that your story is something else:  a memo, a journal entry, a letter, a note to a friend, a grocery list, anything that blows up the logjam.

5.  Write as fast as you can for ten minutes – without stopping.

Writers wait too long to start writing.  They find a dozen substitutes for writing, including eating, drinking, walking, shopping, checking e-mail messages, and wasting time on Facebook.  Even research can become an excuse.  Try writing early – and fast.  Your early writing – call it a “zero draft” – will teach you what you know and what you still need to learn.

6.  Tell the critical voice in your head to “shut up!”

You need a strong critical voice during revision when you standards will be at their highest.  Listen to that negative nag too early in the process and it becomes what psychologists call “the watcher at the gate,” the negative force that wards off all creative impulses.  Keep the voice in the green room until you call it on stage for revision.

7. If you are blocked in your usual writing place, try a new place.

Every writer needs about a half-dozen reliable places to work.  Here are mine, in order of comfort and productivity:  desk at work, desk at home, recliner in “man cave,” in airport waiting areas, on planes, and at my mother-in-law’s kitchen table.  Habitual behavior usually helps writers, but when you’re stuck, don’t just sit there, change your location.

8. Write on a legal pad.

Even preliminary drafts can have that finished look on a computer screen, which is always dangerous.  That clean look may artificially exalt your standards too early in the process.  Enter the yellow legal pad.  Nothing hand-written on yellow paper looks finished.  You will be amazed at how much less anxious you become by occasionally going old school and using old tools:  paper and pencil.

9. Get someone to ask you questions about your story.

When I try to help writers get unstuck, I often rely on simple, open-ended questions:

o    How’s it going?  How can I help you?

o    What are you thinking?

o    What’s your story about?

o    What happened?  Who did what?

o    What do you want your readers to learn?

o    What most surprised you about this?

o    What was the most interesting you learned?  The most significant?

10.  Forget the beginning for now.  Write the ending first. 

When you approach a roadblock, don’t be afraid to take a detour.  If you are stuck writing your lead sentences, try drafting a passage that might end up in the middle.  Or imagine where the work might end.  The novelist Katherine Anne Porter once said that she couldn’t begin a story unless she knew the ending.  “I know what my goal is,” she said. “And how I get there is God’s grace.”

This excerpt was written by Roy Peter Clark and comes from his latest book Help! For Writers:  210 Solutions to the Problems Every Writer Faces.  Help! is the third in a writing trilogy published by Little, Brown.  The first two, Writing Tools and The Glamour of Grammar, are available in paperback editions.  Roy teaches writing at the Poynter Institute, a school for journalists in St. Petersburg, Florida

NaNoWriMo Haikus

What cohesiveness?

A two page paragraph.

A rushing river.

Five hundred words over.

Reduction, subtraction, yes?

A gust of red leaf.

“This makes no sense”

“Sorry, I was up ‘til 2”

Harvest moon above.

Verbs. Nouns. Adjectives?

Verbificating nouns

Like a heap of stones.

The tap of the keys

Racing to the end, without

Looking back again.

Inspiration lacks

When understanding fails and

The whole ship sinks blank.

Fun Facts about Writing & Letters

Fun Facts about Writing & Letters:

1.   The record for the longest letter was established in 1952, during the Korean War. A lady in Brooklyn, New York, wrote to her boyfriend, a private in the U.S. Army, serving in Korea. Instead of using regular writing paper, this ingenious lady used the narrow tape that is found on adding machines, 3,200 feet of it! The letter took her one month to write.

2.   A hand-written note from a sitting president is worth at least $7,000.

3.   A typical pencil can draw a line 35 miles long or write about 45,000 words.

4.   Numerous scripts existed before the actual alphabet existed; Hieroglyphics, Archaic Scripts, Aramaic square,

5.   11% of the people in the world are left-handed

6.   The longest one syllable word is screeched

7.   The Hawaiian alphabet has only 12 letters

8.   No word in the English language rhymes with month

9.   Margaret Mitchell wrote Gone with the Wind between 1926 and 1929. In her early drafts, the main character was named "Pansy O'Hara" and the O'Hara plantation we know as Tara was called "Fountenoy Hall."

10. What word can you take the first letter of, put it as the last letter, and make it the past tense of the original word? Answer: Eat (ate)

NaNoWriMo - Rules, Schmules

I found this article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/20/ten-rules-for-writing-fiction-part-one on the world wide web, and I bookmarked it the instant I saw it. 

With NaNoWriMo starting today, I imagine many great writers out there are already experiencing the anxiety of trying to put sense to the stories in their head. This ten rules (plus a few added 30 from other sources) will hopefully help you all not only during this busy month, but throughout your writing career. I, for one, take this one by heart, given by Esther Freud:  Never forget, even your own rules are there to be broken. 

Image taken from Deviant Art. 2012. Web. 1 Nov. 2012.