Featured Client: Naomi Ruth Lowinsky
Naomi Ruth Lowinsky Offers Inspiration For Writers
Jess Walter, author of Beautiful Ruins and We Live in Water: How I Write, in the Daily Beast.
For those who can’t click the image, here’s the link to the awesome article!
WriteWorld Note: These tips are quoted from How to Write Like a Cartoonist by Scott Adams for The Wall Street Journal.
by Bridget Zinn
WriteWorld Note:Celebrate Bridget Zinn and Poison with us!
Recently, I got an email from one of my darling cousins about writing. She was asking about getting motivated to write, especially after having taken a break — in her words “get back on the ol’ writing horse” and how to complete projects and make writing a more integral part of her life. This comes up a lot with writer friends, so I thought I’d post my thoughts for you all (if you mainly read my blog to check on my health and are not a writer, I’m doing great, thanks! Feel free to skip this post).
I have to admit that I hardly feel like an expert in many areas of writing (as you can see by my random punctuation) and I’m always learning a lot from other writers and from my agent, but the one element of writing I feel I have managed to whup into shape in the past eight years or so is the Getting a Lot of Writing Done and Finishing Projects aspect of writing. Even and especially when I’m busy with a million other things.
by Bridget Zinn
WriteWorld Note: This article is all about the “Road To Publication” for Bridget Zinn, author of Poison. Celebrate Bridget Zinn and Poison with us!
Setting the scene: I grew up writing and had notebooks stuffed full of novels, poems, and fragments. After graduating from high school, I tried all sorts of other career options. I went to massage school, worked as a jazz dj, earned a bachelor’s degree in theatre and generally looked for interesting things to do (click here to learn more about crazy jobs I tried).
Then I started working in cancer research. It didn’t take me long to realize that this was NOT the job for me. I loved the idea of saving-the-world etc., but it was a less-than-cheerful job (and my office didn’t even have windows!) and not at all the puppies and rainbows sort of thing I like.
This was when I discovered that what I needed to do with my life was to write fiction for young people. I fell really and truly head-over-heels-in-love with writing. It was a great escape from my job and, even when I quit that job and moved on to more satisfying work, it was still absolutely perfect for me. In what other job do you get to spend your days living through crazy high-jinx, falling in love, making cool friends and having damn fine adventures? Writers get to create a world with each novel—a fun, gorgeous, tantalizing world with inhabitants who crack you up.
My writing voice turned out to have a strong teen vibe and that was what I had the most fun working on, so it was clear what I was going to write.
I love books. My late father Donald, who taught Wordsworth and Melville to inner-city kids for decades, used to read Ulysses to me while he carried me on his shoulders. Perhaps it was inevitable that I grew up to be a writer. Now, after years of investigative reporting for Wired and other magazines, I’m finally writing a book of my own.
The subject of my book is autism, the variety of human cognitive styles, and the rise of the neurodiversity movement. The seed of the project was an article I wrote for Wired in 2001 called “The Geek Syndrome” about autism and Asperger syndrome in high-tech communities like Silicon Valley. I’m happy and humbled to say that it was an influential article, and I still get email about it from the families of kids on the spectrum and from autistic people themselves, though it was published more than a decade ago.
The science of developmental disorders has made significant advances in recent years, and some of the social issues that I raised in the piece — such as the contributions that people with atypical cognitive styles have made to the progress of science, technology, and culture — seem more relevant than ever. At the same time, the wave of kids diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorders in the ’90s is now coming of age, and their heroically devoted families are facing fear and uncertainty about the future as crucial government-funded services and support provided to families of special-needs children dry up. Meanwhile, neurodiversity advocates are challenging narrow definitions of “normal” cognition, and autistic people — even those who are unable to employ spoken language — are using assistive technology like the iPad to express themselves. There’s a lot of new ground to cover.
I’ve signed a contract with a wonderful publisher — a Penguin imprint called Avery Books — and a sharp and enthusiastic editor named Rachel Holtzman. One of the most thrilling moments of my life as a writer was walking into Penguin headquarters in Manhattan and seeing classic jackets for Jack Kerouac’s novels like The Dharma Bums framed on the wall. It was reading the exhilarating, compassionate, and perennially fresh poetry and prose of Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and their friends that made me want to grow up to be a writer in the first place.
I’m not sentimental about old media vs. new media. Nothing will ever replace the sublime feeling of sanctuary created by the printed page, but I treasure the books on my Kindle too, particularly when I’m reading at 30,000 feet. What I love is words — storytelling, the flow of well-wrought sentences, the gradual unfolding of a long and thoughtful tale, the private communion with an author’s mind.
But now comes the hard part. It’s one thing to work up a 4000-word magazine feature and another to sit down and write a 100,000-word book. I’m acutely aware that I’ve been granted a precious opportunity to cast light on forgotten history and provide a platform for voices that are rarely heard. At the same time, I’m scared out of my wits that the two decades of journalism that have led up to this project have not prepared me to write a good book. I wake up at 3am staring into the darkness, wondering if I’ll have the skills, discipline, and inner resources to pull it off.
I’ve chosen to deal with my anxiety by tapping into the wisdom of the hive mind. I recently sent email to the authors in my social network and asked them, “What do you wish you’d known about the process of writing a book that you didn’t know before you did it?”
I’m delighted with the sheer range of practical advice that poured in. The writers in this group are as diverse as the volumes that line the shelves in my home office. There are top science writers and journalists like Carl Zimmer, Jonah Lehrer, Deborah Blum, Paula Span, and David Shenk; prolific blogger Geoff Manaugh of the endlessly fascinating BLDGBLOG, which focuses on architecture and the future of urbanism; award-winning poet and essayist August Kleinzahler; a wise-beyond-his-years entrepreneur named Ben Casnocha; a Zen master named John Tarrant and an author of Buddhist bestsellers, Sylvia Boorstein; two-time Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee David Crosby of the Byrds and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young; and two of the geniuses who helped launch 21st century digital culture and the spunky “maker” movement, Cory Doctorow and Mark Frauenfelder of BoingBoing. A more diverse group of writers, talking about the nuts and bolts of their craft, would be hard to find anywhere on the Web.
A few things became clear as soon as their replies came in. First of all, I’ll have to throttle back my use of Twitter and Facebook to get this writing done (and I may never rev up my idle Quora account after all.) Secondly, scheduling intervals of regular exercise and renewal amid the hours of writing will be essential. And thirdly, I’ll certainly be buying and downloading a software program called Scrivener, which is a powerful word processor specifically designed for writing books and keeping vast amounts of related data in good order.
Reading these tips has made the voice in my head that whispers I can do this a little louder when my eyelids snap open before dawn. I hope the advice here inspires the creation of many great books, not only the one I hope to write. I’m deeply grateful for the time and attention of the master writers assembled here.
Enjoy — and good luck with your own writing!
by Katie Herzog
The author shares the inspiration behind Babes of NPR.
I haven’t been writing lately and there are reasons for this, mostly because writing is a pain in the ass. There are things I dislike more—for instance, public laundromats and the self-flushing toilets at Whole Foods—but writing is there with them on the list of my least favorite activities. And yet, even though I’d happily go months writing nothing longer than a grocery list, when I have to turn to the person beside me in yoga class and introduce myself, I always say that I’m a writer. I do this because I think it makes me sound like I have a rich inner life, when all I really have is a lot of TV to watch and some unfinished essays waiting for someone else to pick them up. The most literary thing about me is that I’m poor.
tetw:
A Tetw reading list
Great writing about reading, speaking, journalism and… writing.
Hi Neil, I’m a huge fan of your work. I was wondering if you could give me some writing advice. I’m stuck about 2/3 of the way through a first draft, and I’ve got plot threads running all over the place. Do you have any suggestions on what I can do to bring them all back to my central plot? Thanks in advance! -April
Make a list of what has to happen to get you to the end of the story. Write down all the dangling plot threads and ways you can resolve each one. Look for ways that you can deal with several plot threads at the same time.
I tend to be less concerned with how things happen than with what has to happen to people, so I list my plot threads by people. I write down things like “Fat Charlie has to SING.”
And then start writing again. Good luck.
