Memoirous

 from 365 Affirmations for the Writer February 16 Writing as a Spiritual Process Writing is a kind of meditation, a spiritual activity by which my soul is nourished. ― Jane Hertenstein   February 17 Writing as a Spiritual Process If writers write not just with paper and ink or a word processor but with their own life’s blood, then I think something like [our own words being just as much to us as from us] is perhaps always the case. A book you write out of the depths of who you are, like a dream you dream out of those same depths, is entirely your own creation. —Frederick Buechner, theologian and novelist, from Telling Secrets   Write a blog post or journal entry as if it were a prayer, tossed out into the universe.   February 18 Taking Risks Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are her...

 from 365 Affirmations for the Writer February 12 Writers/Outsiders I believe that writers, unless they consider themselves terribly exquisite, are at heart people who live by night, a little bit outside society, moving between delinquency and conformity. ― Guillermo Cabrera Infante , Cuban novelist who wrote from exile   February 13 Writers/Outsiders Writers, as they gain success, feel lik e outsiders because writers don’ t come together in real groups. ― Anne Rice , author of Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles   Today it is easier now more than ever to join a critique group. With the advent of the Internet you can now meet other writers from the anonymity of your home computer. Google and make a list of on-line critique groups, read the sites and learn about each one, and find one you might be comfortable with, to show your work.   February 14 The Writer as Witness To write is to invade another’s space, if only to memorialize it. To write is to inv...

 from 365 Affirmations for the Writer February 8 First Drafts Writing a first draft is like groping one’s way into a dark room, or overhearing a faint conversation, or telling a joke whose punchline you’ve forgotten. As someone said, one writes mainly to rewrite, for rewriting and revising are how one’s mind comes to inhabit the material fully. ― Ted Solotaroff , author and literary critic   February 9 First Drafts Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a very dirty peanut across the floor with your nose. ― Joyce Carol Oates   Do not stop. Do not lift your pen from the page, but for the next 15 minutes write. Write about anything. Just something.   February 10 It’s Hard Let’s say it’s a mess. But you have a chance to fix it. You try to be clearer. Or deeper. Or more eloquent. Or more eccentric. You try to be true to a world. You want the book to be more spacious, more authoritative. You want to winch yourself up from yourself. You ...

from  365 Affirmations for the Writer February 1 Characters When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people, not characters. A character is a caricature. — Ernest Hemingway, from Death in the Afternoon   February 2 Characters I have to know my character thoroughly before I start, and know how he’d act in every situation. If I am writing about Mr. Tidwinkle’s golf game, I must also know how he would act when drunk, or at a bachelor dinner, or in the bathtub or in bed — and it must all be very real and ordinary. — J. D. Salinger, to journalist Shirley Ardman in New York ,  1941   Motivation plays a big part in determining character. Right now: list 10 things your character wants. Now list 10 things he/she doesn’t want.   February 3 Characters Some of my favorite shows are ones where the characters are vile and human and flawed. That’s what makes me want to keep watching a show, not writers telling me how to feel ...

from 365 Affirmations for the Writer  January 22 Write Every Day If you want to be a writer, you have to write every day. The consistency, the monotony, the certainty, all vagaries and passions are covered by this daily reoccurrence. ― Walter Mosley, New York Times , “Writers on Writing”   January 23 Write Every Day “I know I have a novel in me,” I often hear people say. “But how can I get it out?”   The answer is, always is, every day. It doesn’t matter what time of day you work, but you have to work every day because creation, like life, is always slipping away from you. You must write every day, but there’s no time limit on how long you have to write. One day you might read over what you’ve done and think about it. You pick up the pencil or turn on the computer, but no new words come. That’s fine. Sometimes you can’t go further. Correct a misspelling, reread a perplexing paragraph, and then let it go. You have re-entered the dream of the work, and t...

 From 365 Affirmations for the Writer January 11 Keeping a Reader’s Attention The first 15 pages are critical—the reader demands a reason to keep reading. ― Jane Hertenstein Review your current writing project. Does it grab your attention from the first sentence or pique your curiosity? Start at the beginning, making the first sentence lead to the next. January 12 Keeping a Reader’s Attention The prime function of the children’s book writer is to write a book that is so absorbing, exciting, funny, fast and beautiful that the child will fall in love with it. And that first love affair between the young child and the young book will lead hopefully to other loves for other books and when that happens the battle is probably won. The child will have found a crock of gold. He will also have gained something that will help to carry him most marvelously through the tangles of his later years. —  Roald Dahl, author of James and the Giant Peach (1961), Charli...

 Between working on a non-fiction proposal, my class at Story Studio, jumpstarting an old critique group, and querying agents, I’ve had little time to dedicate to the blog. So things will be a bit slow this year for Memoirous. Meanwhile, I’ll post excerpts from my book 365 Affirmations for the Writer, available as both a book or eBook through wherever you download. Thanks and fingers crossed for my non-fiction project!   JANUARY       January 1 You Determine Where You’ll Go You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You’re on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the one who’ll decide where to go... ― Dr. Seuss , from Oh, the Places You’ll Go!   January 2 Books Books are the grail for what is deepest, more mysterious and least expressible within ourselves. They are our soul’s skeleton. If we were to forget that, it would prefigure how false and feeling...

Creaking, crackling branches swaying in the wind in 14 degrees weather everything so tight and cold it feels as if I might snap my feet padding along on the sidewalk when I arrive home, I finally breathe and cough an asthmatic gasp as my lungs warm back up I'm beginning 2022 with writing--and a head cold, that NEVER morphed into Covid. Somehow I keep getting lucky. I have signed up for a class at Story Studio Chicago and it starts this week. I'm spending time reading and writing--and, hopefully, acquiring an agent for my various projects. 

First time writing that year. Must train fingers to not substitute a 1 instead of a 2. I started the year off with an acceptance of a small, brief flash. After last year’s novel in a year workshop at Story Studio I thought: Why not? And signed up for Jumpstart Your Novel with Sheree Greer. Sheree looks to be a queer writer hailing from Florida. There are not a lot of similarities between my and Sheree’s writing—mostly I loved the description of the class: In this class, we begin with intellectual and creative inquiry, asking the tough questions of our characters, our stories, and ourselves. This is the kind of work I shy away from on my own. Hopefully, I’ll be pushed to examine myself, my characters, and their motives. https://www.storystudiochicago.org/classes/creative-writing/jumpstart-your-novel-with-sheree-greer/ Through readings and interactive writing exercises, we’ll explore strategies for developing our ideas into stories and our stories into novels. We will discuss how...