Things I do not have time for today: LIFE. Hence, another list post. Sorry!
Things you should make time for today (come on, even I did):
- Sherrie Petersen gives a one-minute rundown of the many things she learned at SCBWI-LA from Rachel Vail, who is apparently a genius. Example:
Don’t “Write what you know.” Start with what you know. You are like the hero and you are like the bad guy too. Keep making stuff up until it’s true.
- Speaking of genius, Erin Danehy is beginning a new Writers Workshop Wednesday (ah how we bloggers love our alliteration, no?) and she started with six Tips for the Novice Workshopper. (Really, they are important for any writer to keep in mind.) My favorite:
Some people are born gifted. Plain and simple. But that doesn’t mean you are talentless.
- Glimmer Train featured an article by Olufunke Grace Bankole, who recently won one of their short fiction contests. Her words are sheer brilliance and beauty:
There is a time, a season for each thing: a time to act, and a time to wait. When I forget this, I struggle to make progress with work that requires not force, but patient, gradual persistence. In this waiting season, it is as if nothing at all is happening, and it can feel as if the things that are, discourage us from continuing on. The bane of most writers’ lives, this waiting time asks that we be alone with the very things we are waiting—wading—through: doubt, stagnation, aching self-consciousness. In solitude, we are to hold vigil over our words. We turn them over on all their sides, and then tuck them away; we take them out again, and put them on the page, even when they seem unworthy of it. We trust that in their time, they will tell a whole story, beginning to end. And because it is only a season, the waiting eventually gives way to the birthing of a piece that had been incubating all along, somewhere away from our eyes.
