The world is full of people who “want to write a book someday,” but few are those who manage to find the time to do so amid the myriad other commitments in their lives.
A lot of the people who genuinely want to write a book never do so, because they never find a reason to prioritize their writing practice. That was the case with one of my book-coaching clients—until one of his sons died from cancer.
Source: Developing a Writing Practice, Part 3: Important | Jane Friedman
Without a strong passion and/or a pragmatic approach to giving your writing the time it needs, those dreams of poems, novels, and plays will probably never come true. Passion might arise out of a tragedy in your life that subsequently sends you to the keyboard day after day until you’ve said what you want to say about it.
Yet, as the author says, “There’s no need to wait until life reminds you of your mortality. You can make writing a priority right now.” The suggestions in this article just might help you, I think because they don’t smack of discipline, like being forced to do fifty pushups a day or run ten miles, approaches that might create good soldiers by don’t allow much for a fresh breath of creativity as part of your prioritizing time and effort.
Worth a look–and even more, worth a try.
–Malcolm
What I seldom know is which character is doing what. Sometimes characters are referred to by the first name, last name only, or code name. Often, all in the same paragraph, as in “Johnson stopped his car in a no-parking zone and hung his FBI creds around his neck. As Bob edged closer to the barricades he noted a police helo hovering overhead, then, and incoming call, ‘Cyber 1,’ he answered.”
So many things over the course of one’s life often happen due to small and seemingly innocuous decisions. A man drives home from work a different way and gets t-boned in an intersection and ends up in the hospital. How do you predict that? Maybe he marries his nurse and lives happily ever after. Okay, the car wreck was bad but the marriage was good. What if he’d driven home the normal way without a car wreck. Would fate/luck/God made sure he met that nurse some other way?
This morning, I found a couple of store brand packages of toilet paper at the Food Lion. First time I’ve seen any there in almost a month. They also had paper towels and Kleenex. My lucky day.
Looking for something to do this afternoon, my wife and I watched an old virus-out-of-control movie on Netflix this afternoon called “Outbreak.” While I suppose a movie about a pandemic in the making was apt for the interesting times we find ourselves in, we picked it because it was better than the other selections.
I’m also coping by re-reading old books, currently James Patterson’s Instinct about a serial killer who leaves cryptic clues to his next victim by placing a playing card next to each person he murders. The novel came out in 2017 and was co-written by Howard Roughan. It demonstrates the problem with the police using the services of an expert. If the murders keep going on and on an on, the expert really isn’t solving anything. If the murders stop right after the expert solves the whole case on page 20, you don’t have much of a novel.
I listened to Queen Elizabeth II’s brief pandemic speech on TV last night and though it was a reasonable appeal for working together to solve this crisis as Brits have done before. She’s old enough to remember the Blitz, the country’s attempts to find safe places for the children, and the resolve with which everyone mobilized for efforts in battlezones and on the homefront.
Comfort food is a high priority with us right now. I just took a squash casserole out of the oven to be warmed up for several meals. My wife’s been making pies and rice casseroles. We usually pair these with whatever we can find on TV, including “How to Get Away With Murder.” Our joke with that series is that (like “Lost”) we seem to know less and less about what’s going on after watching each episode.
Malcolm's Round Table 