You and Your Imagination!

"You and Your Imagination!" These were familiar words when I was growing up, and they weren't meant as a complement.

Yet a good imagination is vital for a writer.

Recently someone said to me, "I wish I could write like you, but I don't have any imagination." 

I looked at her for a moment, then asked, "When you cross the road, do you remember to look both ways?"

She looked baffled. "Of course. Why?"

I could see she just didn't get it. But you see, if she didn't have any imagination, she surely wouldn't check the road for other cars. Why would she? She looks out for the traffic because she imagines what would happen if she didn't.

I did a search of a number of online dictionaries for a definition of the word, "imagination" so I could quote it for you and found something interesting. They all used the identical wording.

1. the formation of a mental image of something that is not perceived as real and is not present to the senses

 2. the ability to form mental images of things or events

 3. the ability to deal resourcefully with unusual problems

The same words were used each time. This tells me two things:

1.  It is probably a good definition.

2.  The writers of the dictionaries are somewhat lacking in imagination.

Going back to my original illustration .  . . The lady concerned could imagine how a car might hit her if she stepped into the traffic. If I had spent longer with her and asked her more questions, I'm sure she could have described the sound of the brakes as the driver tried to stop the car before it hit her. She would tell me about the thud as the car slammed into her. She could have pictured the crowd gathering, heard the sound of the ambulance and felt the terror that came as she realised she had no identity with her.

That's imagination, friend. You see, hear and experience images that are not real. You form mental images of events that aren't really happening. You deal resourcefully with unusual problems. After all, you're not limited by your physical abilities! 

Interestingly, if you spend time imagining a scenario, it will start to feel real. So much so that it can increase your heartbeat or bring tears to your eyes. Try this right now. 

Read this through, then stop reading, and follow my suggestion. Imagine your favourite chocolate bar--or fruit if you're not able to eat chocolate. See yourself handling the object. Bring it to your nose and smell it.

Don't rush.

Mmmm. The smell of dark creamy chocolate. Nothing like it. Or the rich tingling fragrance of a ripe orange.

See yourself peeling off the paper or skin. Break off a piece. Slip it into your mouth and suck gently. . . okay. Stop reading, and spend a minute or two doing this exercise. 

Are you back? Did you try it? Now tell me honestly. Don't you long for some chocolate? Or an orange? Or whatever you imagined? Does your mouth perhaps have extra saliva from the anticipation? Are you heading for the store or the fridge as soon as you've finished reading?

Your writing will come alive when you use your imagination. Don't just write from your head—write from the heart. Put yourself in the scene you're describing and let yourself go. In no time, you'll find yourself experiencing the emotions of your characters, and you'll have a new ability to write what you're seeing . . . in your imagination. 

If your story is slowing down, throw a problem or a crisis at your characters, then put yourself in their skins. Now allow your imagination to react, not as you think they should, but as if you were them. As you capture your feelings on paper or screen, you will find you can't get the words down quickly enough. 

Are you struggling to describe a scene accurately? Stop writing. Close your eyes and create the picture in your mind. Place the people where you have them in your story. Now start the action--and see what your characters show you. Allow yourself to go with the flow. Then write it down.

Are you writing non-fiction? The same technique helps. Close your eyes for a moment and conjure up the scene or situation in your mind before you put your message into words.

Are you writing about bereavement? Let your imagination show you a situation where you were involved with the loss of a loved one. How did you feel? What do you have to share with your reader?

Writing without the use of your imagination is going to be stilted and sterile. Your characters will seem to be cut from cardboard, and your advice will lack empathy.

One more thing before you go. What are you having for supper tonight? Can you imagine it? What does it look like? How does it smell? Most important, can you taste it? Is it chewy? Tough? Juicy? Now tell us what you just had to eat.

SHIRLEY CORDER lives near the coast in South Africa with her husband Rob. She is author of Strength Renewed: Meditations for your Journey through Breast Cancer, available now for pre-order at  Amazon.com or at Barnes & Noble (B&N.com), and contributing author to nine other books. You can contact Shirley through her writing website, her Rise and Soar site for encouraging those on the cancer journey, or follow her on Twitter or Facebook. 

The 8 Ps of being a writer

Patience: This may be the hardest one. Patience is required to survive as a writer. There may be times when you consider giving up, if you really want to be a writer, do not. Figure out what you can do during the lean thought periods. If you give up when the going gets tough, do not even think about being a writer, you will not make it. It takes a tough skin to be a writer, you toughen up, or quit, it is up to you. How much do you want to be a writer?

Performance: Performance is giving the publisher or literary agent what they want, when they want it, and how they want it. If publishers or agents want a hard copy, a PDF, Word, RTF, on CD, or some format, you as the writer will have to supply it. If they want a hard copy, that copy should be on time, clean of any errors, and print ready. If the manuscript is due on the 14th of the month, then have it ready to go by the seventh of the month at the latest. This way, you have time to look it over and make any corrections you may have to make. Never turn in sub-par work.

Perseverance: You may find that a particular job requires more work or time than you thought. If you signed a contract, finish the job by doing whatever you need to, to complete it on time. Just because something is difficult, you cannot give up. You said you would do a job, finish, or do not take it in the first place. Furthermore, you may find lean thought periods when first starting out. If you want to be a writer, find something to keep you going during these lean periods. If you are not willing to work through the lean periods, perhaps you should give up now.

Personal Contact: Never leave your publisher hanging in the wind. Give then status reports, so they know how the project is coming along. What do you have completed? What amount of research have you completed? How much do need to complete the project? Keep in touch. Publishers or literary agents want to know how projects are coming along and if they will be completed on time.  This is your job, to keep the publisher abreast of your progress. If you do not think this is part of writing, think again. Personal contact with the publisher is just as important, if not more, than the writing itself. Keep your publisher informed of you’re promoting your book, and your manuscript's progress.

Polish: Polish your copy to make it the best you can. Polish, edit or whatever you choose to call it, is as necessary as writing the manuscript in the first place. You need to check for typos, subject verb agreement, grammar, sentence structure, punctuation, or anything else needed. An author does this for their story, the writing must be correct on all levels to create the best book possible for the reader.

Practice: You cannot just sit on your butt, and do nothing while you wait for your next inspiration. Read what others write, write, and improve your writing by taking a course at the local college, or adult school. Take online writing courses, anything that you write will make you a better writer. If you want to be a writer, you must constantly strive to improve your writing to make it the best you can for your next project. You have all heard the cliché, “Practice makes perfect”, it is true for writers that want to write good copy.

Presentation: Presentation is a multifaceted concept. Presentation is not only the copy you write for publication. Presentation is also the way you present yourself, as a professional, and as a business. If for some reason, you must meet face-to-face with your publisher or literary agent, dress accordingly.

When using a voicemail, make sure that your recording that people hear says professional. Do not have your kids record it. Make sure it sounds professional. Presentation also means the way you sign any e-mails. Consider an e-mail account for business only. There are many free e-mail accounts. It is best to have a web site and use that e-mail for your business contacts. If you cannot afford a web site, or do not know how to build one, a separate e-mail for business only is required. It is much easier to keep things separated.

Professionalism: The first thing about being a professional writer is, never miss a deadline. If something does come up and you're in the hospital, let the someone know as soon as possible. Never wait for the deadline, nothing will destroy a reputation, and scream amateur faster than missing a deadline and not letting the publisher know if there is a problem. Also, be sure to calculate the time required to finish a project. This may be hard at first, but it will become easier over time. The bottom line is, how much time do you have have available to devote to the project along with a day job, family obligations, and anything else that might come up in your life. This is what a professional considers. In addition, a professional contract should state in clear language, the payment method, and signed by both parties, so that each has a clear sense of what each party is responsible for, and when you as the writer will complete the job.

These eight Ps are the basics of being a writer. The eight Ps are what each writer must consider as part of the title, “Writer/Author”. How a writer chooses to implement them is up to them. This list is for thought only. Do you have to implement them? If you want to publish more than once, without a doubt, they are necessary.

Think about jobs you have had. How you purport yourself is as important as the job itself. Even as an automobile mechanic, you cannot be sloppy, if you are, or your work area is, you will not be acting like a professional writer. You must know where everything is and have it within reach.

Robert Medak

Freelance Writer, Blogger, Edit, Reviewer 

RJ_Medak

Robert Medak on Authors Den

 

Making Those Tough Choices to Boost Your Writing Career

We make choices everyday. And choosing to make tough choices about our writing life can be more painful, influence our health, and tear at our hearts similar to making tough food choices and giving up those snacks we love. Bad food choices, bad health. Bad writing choices can lead to being overwhelmed, discouraged, unproductive, and hopeless as we compare how others are more successful than ourselves. When that happens, it is time for a change.

Bad writing choices may be an over-statment of the word "bad", but sometimes a writer must take a look at the actions being taken to promote a writing career versus the busy activities that maybe associated with a writing career, and I am at just that place.... I need more actions to move my writing forward and less activities that take up my time but don't advance my personal goals. Where do you stand with actions vs. activities?

It is important to analyze where you want the rest of the year to end up as far as those writing goals that were set in January. For me, I had to bow out of a writing group that I love ( tears at the heartstrings) but that was not really helping me to write. I have bowed out of two other monthly writing groups as well that required a monthly fee and were full of good advice but did not help me to write more.(It is similar to decreasing the chocolate and adding the fruit for a more healthy diet. A kind of discipline that will bring health back to your body and more pages to your next book. ) I need to socialize less, promote the businesses of others a little less, and write my own products more. It is not selfish, it is business. Without more pages of work, I would have nothing to promote.

Don't get me wrong, promoting others and networking is essential to a writing career and to getting your name out there and noticed especially on the sites of other successful authors. And I love promoting great new authors, good books, and established authors releasing new work.  But if networking and promoting others is taking up all the time of a writer and the writer no longer has new products or material to send out to publishers, what good does it do to have your name splashed on those sites? "Author such and such..... oh yea, what does she write?  Oh that's right, she stalks other author sites but doesn't write, has no expertise, and sure doesn't have a platform....." You get the idea.

At the risk of becoming more unknown than I am already, I have taken an action step. Less socializing and more writing. A unique idea? Maybe. A good choice for me? That remains to be seen and will be re-evaluated in September and again in December before I make my 2013 goals. But this much I know. It isn't healthy for me if I am not writing and I am just thinking about writing. It also doesn't pay the bills.

How healthy is your writing life? If it is not in tip top shape with submissions polished and ready or a steady paycheck coming in from previous work  then maybe it is time to make some tough choices to boost the writing career of your dreams.


Terri Forehand writes from her rural home in Indiana. She writes for several online blogs for actual money and continues to work on several projects including picture books for children. Visit her website at http://www.terriforehand.webnode.com for more information. She blogs for  children's writers at http://terri-forehand.blogspot.com

Blog Posting, Keywords, Anchor Text, Tags, and Website Statistics Part1

Every marketer knows the importance of article marketing – it’s an effective visibility tool and increases the user’s expert status. For individual websites, this is in the form of blog posting.

But, you can write an article that’s properly formatted, has a great title and amazing information and if you don’t use keywords, include tags, SHARE and Promote that article, you won’t get optimized traffic to your site. This can’t be stressed enough.

I did an analysis of two of my sites. Both are focused on writing and marketing. My individual site, Karen Cioffi Writing and Marketing (KCWM) usually has three posts per week. The Writers on the Move (WOTM) site usually has one article per day.

Take note though that when getting website statistics, numbers will vary significantly depending on the source of the information. Blogger’s Stats tool was used for this analysis.

According to the Blogger Stats, which site do you think gets more traffic?

Since the marketing philosophy is’ content is king,’ you’d think the WOTM site would get tons more traffic, because it provides quality information on a daily basis.

Well, if that’s the site you chose, you’d be wrong. The KCWM site gets more traffic than WOTM does.

Another interesting tidbit is that the majority of traffic from both sites comes from:

Google searches
Yahoo searches and yahoo mail
StumbleUpon
Facebook
Twitter

Google is by far the leader of the traffic sources with Twitter holding up the rear.

So, the question to ask is WHY does the KCWM site get more traffic?

The answer has to be keywords, anchor text, tags, and promotion. Let’s take a look at each factor.

Keywords

If you notice above, the leader of the traffic sources is Google searches, which is driven by keywords.

Every post on my site is keyword focused. What this means is that I do a keyword search before posting the article. I start with a focused word, say “blog posts.” If the article focus words don’t pull their search weight, I change them to more effective keywords.

And, as it has been stated before in other articles, your keywords should be in your title,  subtitle (if you have one), and within the content of your article. Be sure to add the keyword in the first paragraph and last paragraph, and here and there throughout. Just be careful not to overdo it.


Come back on June July 1st for Part 2 of Blog Posting, Keywords, Anchor Text, Tags, and Website Statistics. It talks about Anchor Text, Tags, and Promotion.

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More on Marketing

Article Content Formatted and Search Engine Ready
Creating Content: 10 Online Repurposing Formats

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CHECK OUT Design Your Own eBook Cover in 10 Easy Steps Using Microsoft Office 2010

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Mono Vision

After years of wearing glasses and contacts, this past week I made the decision to have Lasik surgery for my eyes. At my age, which I don't really keep track of, my eyes now have the challenge of seeing both distance and close up. Such a struggle. Years ago, with contacts, I was introduced to what is called Mono vision. Mono vision is where one eye is adjusted to see distance and the other to see up close. 

For some people this can create challenges, for me it is heaven. So when the time came for my Lasik procedure, it was exactly what I wanted. 

In writing too, I have the same desire. That of seeing up close and distant at the same time. Up close means writing from the beginning taking all the room necessary to give the nuances and details time to develop. Yet, for me, I must also have the vision of the end. Not all the details of what will happen, but a final scene. A picture in my head that I write toward. 

One of my favorite quotes is: "If you don't know where you are going, any road will take you there." -Lewis Carroll. 

Many times when I finally get to the end of a piece, when I am on that road, so to speak, I change course at the last minute. That is also fine, because I know I'm still in the right vicinity. 

Whether writing non fiction or an article, knowing where you are headed will help you to draw your readers to the right conclusions. And try writing a novel with just that one end scene in mind. See if knowing where you're headed will also help you find direction. 

See you all on the road.

______________________________

D. Jean Quarles is a writer of Women's Fiction and Young Adult Science Fiction. Her latest book, Flight from the Water Planet, Book 1 of The Exodus Series was written with her coauthor, Austine Etcheverry.

D. Jean loves to tell stories of personal growth – where success has nothing to do with money or fame, but of living life to the fullest. She is also the author of the novels: Rocky's Mountains, Fire in the Hole and, Perception. The Mermaid, an award winning short story was published in the anthology, Tales from a Sweltering City.  

She is a wife, mother, grandmother and business coach. In her free time . . . ha! ha! ha! Anyway, you can find more about D. Jean Quarles, her writing and her books at her website at www.djeanquarles.com

Her novels are available in electronic format here, or print format here. You can also follower her at www.djeanquarles.blogspot.com or on Facebook

Office Organization Tips: How to Get and Stay Organized for Your Freelance Writing Career

HOW TO GET AND STAY ORGANIZED FOR

YOUR FREELANCE WRITING CAREER

by Donna M. McDine

 You’re in the process of taking a writer’s course and the abundance of information thrown your way is filed neatly in your brain. You wish you could say the same for your work space. While all your notes, research, writer’s books, etc., are valuable for your writing career it’s a miracle you can even find your desk under the sea of paper.  It’s imperative that you have the best filing system for your needs! 

1.                  Analyze and Purchase Supplies: First make a visit to your local office supply store and purchase hanging folders, manila folders and folder labels. If you don’t have a file cabinet now would be a good time to purchase one. You could purchase the good old standard metal filing cabinet or a file cabinet on wheels. The file cabinet on wheels would come in handy if you are limited on space and need to remove it from your work area when entertaining.

2.                  Identify Categories: Upon your return tackle the job of sorting your mounds (hope it’s not too deep) of paper into categories. File names:

ü  Agent Info

ü  Character Development

ü  Critique Groups Dialogue

ü  Editing

ü  Commas & Punctuation

ü  Grammar

ü  Point of View; Plotting & Outlining Your MS

ü  Scene & Story Structure, Sensory Details. 

The list is endless. Your filing system will grow over time. While reading articles on writing that you find helpful clip and file the article immediately. This makes for easy referral later.

3.                  Create Your Files: Place all your pertinent papers in the appropriate file. Each manila folder should be inserted into an individual hanging file in alphabetical order for easy retrieval and filing.

4.                  Desktop File: Jan Jasper, author of Take Back Your Time: How to Regain Control of Work, Information, and Technology (St. Martin’s Press) states: “Action files must always be within easy reach – ideally in a small desktop file holder that holds the file folders upright so the tabs are clearly visible. For added peace of mind, make a note in your calendar or scheduling software to remind you of important dates. This combats the “out-of-sight, out of mind” worry and lets you clear your desk without fearing you’ll forget something important”*

[*Conquer Desktop Clutter with Action Files © Jan Jasper; 2001-2007

About the Author: Jan Jasper has been training busy people to work smarter, not harder since 1988. She helps clients streamline work procedures, manage information overload, and use technology efficiently. Her specialty is helping people who've already worked with professional organizers and coaches and are still not able to get it all done. Jan is the author of Take Back Your Time: How to Regain Control of Work, Information, & Technology (St. Martin's Press). She recently completed a North American media tour as the national efficiency spokesperson for IKON Office Solutions, Inc. She has appeared on radio and TV all over North America and is quoted regularly in print. Jan is an adjunct professor at New York University.]

Suggested important files to maintain to keep in your line of sight on your desktop are:

ü  Writing – Follow-up

ü  Writing – Reading

ü  Writing – Research

ü  Writing – To Do

ü  Writing – Work-in Progress

Each file then contains an inventory sheet of what tasks need to be accomplished.  You know your files and needs best, please feel free to revamp the categories to suit your needs.

5.                  Follow-through: Lastly, it is important that you maintain your new filing system daily or at least weekly. This way you will not get piled under the dreaded mounds of paper.

By following these five tips on an ongoing basis your tidal wave of papers will surely cease to exist.

Bio: Donna McDine is an award-winning children's author. Her stories, articles, and book reviews have been published in over 100 print and online publications. Her interest in American History resulted in writing and publishing The Golden Pathway. Donna has four more books under contract with Guardian Angel Publishing, Hockey Agony, Powder Monkey, A Sandy Grave, and Dee and Deb, Off They Go. She writes, moms and is the Editor-in-Chief for Guardian Angel Kids and owner of Author PR Services www.authorprservices.com from her home in the historical hamlet Tappan, NY. McDine is a member of the SCBWI. Visit www.donnamcdine.com.

What's Your Best Advice?

I am at heart a devotional writer. It's been my "calling" for quite a while. But when I'm not writing you will most likely find me with my nose in a piece of fiction. I love to read. My husband has been telling me for years I should write fiction since I read so much of it. I just never felt the nudge toward doing that. Well, that is until three weeks ago.

This one character from the Bible kept cropping up all over the place. I started to think about her story. What were the parts and pieces of it? What if it was a modern day story? How would it play out? Who would be involved in the story? The questions kept coming. I couldn't get away from them, so I started jotting them down and eventually started answering some of them. For a brief moment, I thought about trying my hand at actually writing the story. But I squashed that idea because "I don't write fiction". That worked until the character woke me up from a dream, giving me the same phrase over and over. I realized it was the answer to one of my questions and possibly the opening line of the book. I used to think authors who said their characters talked to them were crazy or kidding. Not anymore!

So, I've decided to take the plunge and write the book. I'm not new to writing, but I am new to fiction. And even though I've been reading it for years, I still feel ill-equipped to write it well. What is one piece of advice you would give to me or any writer venturing into this arena for the first time. I've got my pen ready to take notes. 

About the Author:

Marietta "Mari" Taylor is the the author of Surviving Unemployment Devotions To Go. Find out more about Mari at her blog or her website, www.mariettataylor.net.