10 Questions that Create Success

This list of questions to  create success popped into my inbox this morning, and good blogger that I am, I immediately appropriated the content. GeoffreyJames@sales_source.com is the plagarizee, and I thank him for this thought provoking reminder of what should be of primary concern to all of us. Ask yourselves these questions at the end of every day, and at the end of your very last day you will have few regrets.


1. Have I made certain that those I love feel loved?
2. Have I done something today that improved the world?
3. Have I conditioned my body to be more strong flexible and resilient?
4. Have I reviewed and honed my plans for the future?
5. Have I acted in private with the same integrity I exhibit in public?
6. Have I avoided unkind words and deeds?
7. Have I accomplished something worthwhile?
8. Have I helped someone less fortunate?
9. Have I collected some wonderful memories?
10. Have I felt grateful for the incredible gift of being alive?

Sharon

Some Tools for Writers

A writer needs all the help she can get, so here's a few suggestions from my own tool box.



1. Scrivener is software I use to manage my writing projects. It's a UK   product and was developed for the MAC. They recently added PC's to their   universe. You can purchase for either computer type at http://literatureandlatte.com. They   have a 30 day free trial. It helps to tame the beast when trying to revise. I won't go into details, go check it out.

2. The Internet Writing Workshop www.internetwritingworkshop.org is   a listserve managed by some people at Penn State. It is one of Writer's Digest   101 Best Web Sites for writers. I don't know if there is any association   with the school, but I have made many good writing contacts through this site.   You can submit an entire ms one chapter at a time. Some of the critters   are published authors.

3. You Write On www.youwriteon.com is based in   the UK. You can submit the first 7 K words of your ms. For every critique you   give, you will receive a critique in return. Assignments are done randomly.   When you are critiqued, your ms is graded in 8 categories from Characters,   Pace, Story, Language, Voice, Dialogue to Theme and Setting. After your ms receives 8 critiques (I don't know why everything is in eights) it is ranked   with all the other ms on the site (hundreds & hundreds). Every month the   top rated submissions receive a critique from an editor at Orion or   Random House. You can read all the critiques by these professional editors and   learn quite a bit.

Sharon

I Was Married in Donna Summers House

I’ve been married three times. In my first two marriages, I think I was too restless to stay put for long. Husbands one and two all had good qualities, and I am friendly with both to this day, but marriage to husband number three endured the longest, and since I learned some useful skills in my practice marriages, I don’t plan on trying for a forth. 

I met my current husband, Bob, when I answered an ad in a magazine. This was before the more sophisticated match making techniques of the cyber era.  The ad read something like “Retired, good looking gentleman looking for companionable relationship…”  I was a senior officer on Wall Street and I wasn’t dating at the time. Middle aged, married enough times and raising a teenaged daughter in a one hundred year old house in Brooklyn, I was more concerned about protecting my California-bred daughter from wannabe mobsters and stripping paint from woodwork than I was in dating.

My secretary wouldn’t let me rest on my past marriage laurels, “Everyone should have a guy,” was a popular refrain in the office. Even the mailroom guy started to ask me if I was dating, and did I want to meet his cousin who owned a deli.

“Here, I even circled some interesting ads,” my secretary said, and laid a copy of New York Magazine on my desk.

“Trudy, they’re all serial rapists and con men,” I said.

“My cousin met her husband through an ad.” She sounded exasperated and I was tempted to throw her out of my office before the conversation escalated. Trudy is a Long Islander, giving her a sense of entitlement that people from the five boroughs of the city usually don’t have. She tended to expect to get her way most of the time. Whenever I stymied her, she was known to stamp her feet like a child. I put up with her because she was good at her job, and she took good care of me. But I wasn’t about to allow her to orchestrate my love life.

“I’m too busy.”

“Just pick one, I’ll write the letter, I’ll take your picture, and we’ll see what happens.”

“No.”

“I’ll even field the calls.”

“Good, you can go on the dates too.

A few days later, Trudy smiled broadly when I walked into the office. “What are you so happy about?” I asked her.

“I made a lunch date for you.”

“Why does that make you happy? You make lunch dates for me all the time. Who is it?”

“His name is Bob,” she answered.

“Who’s he with?” Usually she wasn’t so coy. Business lunches were nearly a daily occurrence, and part of the reason I had put on weight since moving to New York.

“He’s with himself,” and she hooted with laughter.

“Trudy, have you been drinking?” I looked at her coffee mug, and it looked like the usual sludge from the office kitchen.

“You are going on a date.” 

I could feel my face getting hot. I must have looked angry too, because Trudy’s eyes opened wider and she wheeled her chair back from her desk and held up her hands. “Don’t get mad.”

“Too late.”

“Just listen, he sounds so nice on the phone. He’s retired and he says he’s good looking.”

“He says?”

“Well that’s what the ad says. He’s coming down here today.” The last sentence was barely audible.

“Call him and cancel.”

“Oh no, he would be so disappointed. He wants to hear about your woodwork and your horses and Cindy.”

“Did you tell him my life story? Did you tell him I’m getting fat and I’ve been married twice? What have you been up to ‘Miss Can’t Mind Her Own Business’?”

“I had to make the letter interesting so people would answer. I didn’t make dates with the other men, just Bob.”

“The other men?” She opened her mouth and I held up my hands. “No, don’t tell me, I don’t want to hear.”

The rest of the morning I was busy at my desk until Trudy stuck her head into my office around noon. “He’s here,” she said.

“Who?”

“Bob.”

“I told you to cancel.”

“He’s too nice; he’s down in the lobby.”

“You know you’ve gone too far this time,” I said.

“You’ll thank me.”

When I went down to the lobby, there was only one man standing in front of the security desk. He was wearing a car coat with wooden toggle buttons that looked like something someone would wear on the range in Montana. He peered at me for a minute and then walked up to me. Mr. Toggle Coat was Bob. I’ve tried to remember if I was gracious when we met, but I suspect I was still fuming at Trudy and may have taken it out on my future husband. At least for the first few minutes. Then, his courtly good manners and gentle humor took me by surprise, and I had a good time at lunch. So much so, I agreed to meet him for dinner in  few days later.

Trudy had a smug look on her face when I returned to the office, but I wasn’t about to give her the satisfaction of telling her I enjoyed myself just as she promised. My only remark as I passed her desk, “Don’t do that again.”

“You can’t fool me, I know you had a good time.”

I stopped and looked at her. “And how do you know that?”

“I followed you and watched you and Bob through the mirror at the bar.”

“You did what?”

“You know, in case he was a serial rapist or a con man.” I heard her sniggering behind me all the way into my office.

Oh, and the wedding at Donna Summers house?  I’ll tell you about it next time.

Sharon Spencer Schlesinger: NaNoWriMo

Sharon Spencer Schlesinger: NaNoWriMo: What am I doing blogging when this is National Novel Writing Month? For the uninitiated, NaNoWriMo is almost self-descriptive. A whole bunch...

NaNoWriMo

What am I doing blogging when this is National Novel Writing Month? For the uninitiated, NaNoWriMo is almost self-descriptive. A whole bunch of writers, new and experienced, attempt to complete the first draft of a novel in November. I think if you finish on time, and upload 50K words, you get a tee shirt.

Obviously everyone isn't going through writer hell just for a tee shirt. It's just a great way to power through a story. Because it's fast tracked, your subconscious is given free reign and your inner editor doesn't have time to build massive walls out of writer's blocks.

In this, my maiden voyage, I'm fortunate to have a co-pilot (we'll refer to her as G) to act as some wind beneath my wings. Plenty of nights I have stayed past quitting time at my computer simply because I didn't want to  try and sleep with G in the lead, word count wise. Today is the 11th day of NaNoWriMo and I'm pleased to report I've banked 21K toward a novel entitled Far Enough. It started out as a character driven story of a young alcoholic girl who hits an elderly man with her jeep and runs away.

Now, the characters have hijacked the story line and introduced a mystery element. But I'm still going to stick with my projected ending no matter what they say.

Sharon

Beat Sheet or Scene List

No matter what you call it, beat sheet or scene list, it's  a wonderful tool to structure a manuscript. I've read three books on writing in the last two weeks. All three suggest the writer create a list of scenes or 'beats' for everything that drives the story forward. I finished a 68 scene list for my woman's fiction, Layla Bunch. It's very visual and colorful and it fits on one page (the print is a size 8 font, and it's just large enough to read without a magnifying glass). The colors come in because I made each plot line in the book a different color.There's room for time/date, the mood of the scene, and a separate color column designating acts 1,2, or 3.

You might think it's confining and cramps creative flow, but it does the opposite. I can see the scenes in my mind, and if I need to switch them around, it's an easy cut and paste of a single line. The book is so clear in my mind, I know that the draft I am writing will be much the better for this bit of planning. It won't prevent me from going off on a left field creative jaunt, but I'll be able to assess the damage/value of that deviation pretty handily.

Don't be afraid to mess around a bit with your creative paradigm. Every writer must find that creative sweet spot somewhere between total creative anarchy and anal obsessive planning.

If you write, how do you manage the process?

Sharon

A Writer's Room

The room I write in is a spare bedroom converted to a 'writer's room'. If I'm an example of any other writers, it is a constant battle to keep this space orderly. It's true much is stored on computer files, but there are printouts of chapters or entire manuscripts, journals filled with observations, yellow pads of notes, index cards of scenes, books on craft, magazines on craft, rejection slips, etc. I spend most of my waking hours in this room. It is the place I go to upon awakening, the place I leave from to go to bed. If it were not orderly, I would be frustrated, because the creative process is disorderly enough.

Anyone who has ever written a novel knows that it is a multi-headed hydra that must be wrestled to the ground over and over again. It slips from your grasp and if you don't live in an orderly world and can call on the aids you have developed to maintain that order, it will be hard to pin the hydra and announce some sort of victory.

Sharon