Tag Archives: are you a writer

Do You Blindside Yourself With Your Writing? If Not, Why Not?

Posted by Madd_Fictional on

“Surprise yourself.  If you can bring the story—or let it bring you—to a place that amazes you, then you can surprise your reader.” — Chuck Palahniuk

Has your writing ever blindsided you? Have your characters ever caught you off guard by saying or doing something clever or revealing a bit of information that you yourself didn’t know? When re-reading a piece that you set aside to cool, have you ever wondered where the ideas, voices, and speculative elements came from and if you have any more of that inside you?

The answer is: Of course, there’s more.

Writing is a journey of discovery, and one of the great pleasures of storytelling is that you discover the amazing things that dwell in your brain, things about yourself and your thought processes that you might not otherwise uncover. And besides self-expression, isn’t that the major point of writing?

So, how do you blindside yourself with your talent? You simply let go.

Get out of your own head and write on instinct. Park the perfectionist on the soft shoulder and write your ever-loving heart out. This is part and parcel of learning to be kind to yourself as you write. Your genius can’t flow steadily with someone backseat editing the entire trip. You can always swing back around and pick up the bugger when you’re ready to begin the rewrite.

And don’t begin your story fretting about how it will end. Your story is smarter than you give it credit for. When it’s done, you’ll see the pop-up timer.

It’s essential to keep in mind whenever you pick up a pen or touch fingertips to keyboard that you’re doing it from a position on the shoulders of the literary giants who came before you, the ones who surprised you with their words, so every time you write, you should follow their lead and surprise yourself.

Until next time, sally forth and be surprising yourselfingly writeful.

PS. If you have roughly an hour to kill—I know, it’s the internet and you’ve got memes to see and threads to troll—you could do a lot worse than lending an ear to Ray Bradbury’s 2001 “Telling the Truth” keynote address of The Sixth Annual Writer’s Symposium by the Sea.

Not only does he counsel aspiring writers to spend their time writing lots of short stories—even if they’re mostly bad, there’s gotta be a couple of good ones in the bunch—but he also suggests to write with joy and for fun, and to let yourself be surprised by your writing and by life.

Do You Blindside Yourself With Your Writing? If Not, Why Not?

Posted by Madd_Fictional on

“Surprise yourself.  If you can bring the story – or let it bring you – to a place that amazes you, then you can surprise your reader.” —– Chuck Palahniuk

Has your writing ever blindsided you? Have your characters ever caught you off guard by saying or doing something clever or revealing a bit of information that you yourself didn’t know? When re-reading a piece that you set aside to cool, have you ever wondered where the ideas, voices, and speculative elements came from and if you have any more of that inside you?

The answer is: Of course there’s more.

Writing is a journey of discovery, and one of the great pleasures of storytelling is that you discover the amazing things that dwell in your brain, things about yourself and your thought processes that you might not otherwise uncover. And besides self-expression, isn’t that the major point of writing?

So, how do you blindside yourself with your talent? You simply let go.

Get out of your own head and write on instinct. Park the perfectionist on the soft shoulder and write your ever-loving heart out. This is part and parcel of learning to be kind to yourself as you write. Your genius can’t flow steadily with someone backseat editing the entire trip. You can always swing back around and pick up the bugger when you’re ready to begin the rewrite.

And don’t begin your story fretting about how it’ll end. Your story is smarter than you give it credit for. When it’s done, you’ll see the pop-up timer.

It’s important to keep in mind whenever you pick up a pen or touch fingertips to keyboard that you’re doing it from a position on the shoulders of the literary giants who came before you, the ones who surprised you with their words, so every time you write, you should follow their lead and surprise yourself.

Sally Forth and be surprising yourself writeful.

— Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

PS. If you have roughly an hour to kill—-I know, it’s the internet and you’ve got memes to see and threads to troll—-you could do a lot worse than lending an ear to Ray Bradbury’s 2001 “Telling the Truth” keynote address of The Sixth Annual Writer’s Symposium by the Sea.

Not only does he counsel aspiring writers to spend their time writing lots of short stories—-even if they’re mostly bad, there’s gotta be a couple of good ones in the bunch—-but he also suggests to write with joy and for fun, and to let yourself be surprised by your writing and by life.

10 Reasons You Might Be A Writer (with apologies to Mssr. Foxworthy)

Posted by Madd_Fictional on

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“As a writer, I need an enormous amount of time alone. Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials. It’s a matter of doing everything you can to avoid writing, until it is about four in the morning and you reach the point where you have to write. Having anybody watching that or attempting to share it with me would be grisly.” ― Paul Rudnick

You very well might be a writer if…

  1. You find yourself constantly editing, be it in your car, cruising down the street when rolling past a misspelled sign, or stumbling upon grammatical no-no’s on the interwebz, and you fix these errors constantly in your mind—and not always quietly.
  2. You collect things—social interactions, dialogue, life events, and basically anything you spy with thy little eye—and you file them away neatly in a folder, either physical or mental, for later use.
  3. You take a mental step back from your life experiences, examining them with a Holmesian eye and puzzle out how to properly describe the events in words for maximum clarity and impact.
  4. Your imagination is like the Energizer Bunny (is that critter still around? Never get old, seriously) and it can’t stop, won’t stop providing your brain with entertainment and fresh ideas so there’s never a mental dull moment.
  5. After reading a good book, you’re struck with the sudden desire to write. It happens.
  6. You often hear voices in your head… belonging to the characters in your latest story. They just won’t shut up, carrying on conversations with one another, whether you’re ready to capture it on paper or not.
  7. You get sideswiped by a truckload of guilt when procrastination becomes your master and you haven’t written anything for a while, and your inner nag kicks into overtime, pressuring you to get back to business!
  8. You laugh at grammar jokes. Don’t be ashamed, they’re funny.
  9. Everything inspires you. Books, song lyrics, movies, tv programs, street ads… they all fill your head with new ideas.
  10. And chiefly, you very well might be a writer if you simply keep writing, regardless of being published, or lack of praise or a support network. Even if you do not net one thin dime, you write anyway, because what sense would this world make if you didn’t write about it?