While it is a lot of fun, there’s no doubt that writing is a lot of hard work too. Fortunately the two are not exclusive and we as writers do get the satisfaction of writing. This could translate to getting for you: money, fame, recognition or self-fulfillment, depending upon why you are writing in the first place. Like any other skill, your writing gets sharpened with practice and incorporating improvements in your style.
Category: On Writing: Resources for Writers
Sharing insights, suggestions, tips and almost anything which will help you, and me, become better writers.
If you want to see your novel published, the querying process is one of the first challenges that you need to deal with effectively. I don’t have the numbers, and the estimates I have read vary so much that it’s difficult to pin the number of queries literary agents receive every day. I do know for sure they add up to a huge number. Irrespective of this number, the fact remains that the query determines whether your book project will proceed to the next stop or not. Here are a few posts from experts to supplement what I had written some days ago in a post: “On Querying”. Continue reading “More on Querying”
As we begin a new year, I would like to wish you and yours a very happy, successful and bright New Year. May 2014 bring immense joy to you. Usually joy comes through hard work and persistence! To help you move towards achieving your goals as a writer in 2014, here are a few links I found particularly useful: Continue reading “Resources for Writers”
This must be one of the shortest posts here but has to be one of the best! Thanks to a tweet from Maria Popova, the amazing creator of Brain Pickings, I saw this awesome collection of quotes on writing in Readlists. Continue reading “Timeless Advice on Writing”
Before I became a writer, I was a reader and a voracious one at that. It meant grabbing any book that caught your fancy and reading it primarily for your enjoyment. It didn’t matter one bit whether or not I knew which genre it belonged to. As a kid, I loved thrillers, mystery novels, crime stories and stories about the wars. This kind of grew on me over the years. It was probably inevitable that when I became a writer, I would try to write stories of the kind I loved to read. Continue reading “So, What Exactly Do You Write?”
It has virtually become mandatory for an author these days to have a website. Some of them are extremely well done while many others indicate that this is something the author is struggling and coming to grips with, something he/she doesn’t know too much about. Simon Appleby, director of digital agency Bookswarm lists his “Ten Author Websites That Really Do The Business” in this article in The Writing Platform. Continue reading “How Good Is Your Author’s Website?”
As mentioned earlier, I am in the process of querying for my third thriller, “Let The Dead Stay Dead.” As always it has been a hugely educative experience. I had the opportunity to see many interesting websites and blogs of literary agents and was totally lost in the wealth of knowledge and perspectives found there. This is by no means a comprehensive list. I am only mentioning top of the mind a few points that have stayed with me. Continue reading “On Querying”
Manreet Sodhi Someshwar’s latest novel, ” The Hunt for Kohinoor” (Westland, 2013) is slated to be released in mid-December 2013. As is common these days, you can pre-order this at Flipkart. This, if I am not mistaken, is a sequel to her earlier book, “The Taj Conspiracy” which was very interesting. I loved her first book, “The Long Walk Home,” which was set in the Punjab at the time of the Partition. My best wishes go out to Manreet. May ” The Hunt For Kohinoor” be a super hit!
Many people have the urge to write and write well. However, not everyone makes the grade. In this context, I liked this blog post by Maria Popova in Brainpickings called, “9 Books on Reading and Writing.” With gems from authors like Ernest Hemingway and Stephen King, this post points you to books that can transform your writing.
A few extracts:
- Anne Lamott in ” Bird By Bird, A Few Instructions on Writing and Life,”
“Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It’s like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can’t stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.”
- Stephen King in his classic, “On Writing:A Memoir of the Craft”
“Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.”
- Ernest Hemingway in ” Ernest Hemingway On Writing”
” The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof shit detector. This is the writer’s radar and all great writers have had it.”
This morning I wrote a blog post on my recent effort in the National Novel Writing Month aka NaNoWriMo. I mentioned how thrilled I was to complete it successfully for the fifth successive year.
In this post I wish to dwell on the after effects:)
- What you seee before you id the editied version. (sic) Nothing proves a point more than a demonstration. What I meant to key in was, “What you see before you is the edited version.” Yes, banging away thousands of words per day with a tight deadline does that to you, at least it does that to me. Many typographical errors erupt like a particularly severe attack of acne as your mind works faster than your fingers can fly. Your mind has moved on to the next sentence while your fingers can barely keep up. Therefore you have, as per my theory, so many typos. It takes a while for you to slow down. A while before you get back the accuracy of your keying in which has become a casualty in your recently acquired quest for speed.
- There’s also a void in your life. Seriously. For one whole month NaNoWriMo took over your schedules and grabbed the highest priority. Several other assignments remained incomplete, others fell by the wayside while you focused on attaining your goal to write 50,000 words during the month of November. Now you need to pick up the projects you looked away from, those that emerge as being high priority now that the frenetic activity of NaNoWriMo is over. Believe me, you do feel kind of lost for the first few days. But do write a bit every day. That’s the discipline that NaNoWriMo teaches you, which can stay with you for the rest of your life.
- You haven’t written those 50,000 + words just for the heck of it. You will do your best, I am sure, to complete the novel in all respects. It means a huge amount of work now that you have laid the foundation for your novel. The editing, the fine tuning, the building up of your NaNo Novel starts now. But wait. I would recommend you take a break. Set it aside for a month or so, then come back to it afresh. You will see it differently. You will pick up from where you left off.
In my experience, after NaNoWriMo it takes anywhere between one to two years to get your novel published. So when people say, ” You completed NaNoWriMo successfully? Oh, wow! When and where do we turn up for the book launch?” You need to take a deep breath and say NaNoWriMo was just the start. You have heaps to do before that novel sees the light of day as a published book.
My best wishes to you for your effort to get that NaNo novel published.
Yay ! I have done it. I successfully completed NaNoWriMo for the 5th successive year a few days ago. This explains why I have not been as regular as usual in posting to my blogs. I try to be regular in blogging and as part of my writing discipline. I aim to write a blog post once a week for each of my three active blogs, “People at Work & Play,” my writing blog, “Writing To Be Read,” and this my webiste/blog. Continue reading “Fifth Successive NaNoWriMo Completed”
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