Doing double duty with Cee’s Flower of the Day. I’m not sure what this is. Creosote?
Feb28
Monthly Archives: February 2018
Feb27
How to Maintain Your Motivation
When I resigned from my teaching job three and a half years ago, I resolved to do things around the house that I hadn’t had time for while I was working, like tackling our “garage of doom.” Our house, built in 1979, was showing its age, and our garage door looked shabby and decayed. I told my husband the garage had to be cleared out before we could order a new door.
Now, we’ve lived in our house 29 years. When we moved in, we had four kids, the oldest of whom was nine. My husband started his new job the next day, while I cared for the kids and started unpacking. We immediately became pregnant with child number five, which zapped my energy. The fact that we live in the Arizona desert—where six months of the year it’s too hot to work in the garage, and one month it’s too cold– didn’t help. Boxes moved from our old home in New Jersey waited in the garage for unpacking, to no avail. They were soon joined by other stuff we couldn’t find room for. Eventually, the entire garage flowed waist-high with stuff. The job of cleaning it out seemed insurmountable.
The first two years of removing hundreds of bags of garbage, recycling, and donatables didn’t even visibly reduce the mountains of debris in the garage. But we kept plugging away, and just before Christmas 2017, we pronounced the excavation done. You can read about our Garage of Delight here.
It’s hard to keep going when the job is so big you can’t see yourself making any progress. You have to visualize what you are working toward and then remind yourself that every focused effort you make is getting you closer to your goal, whether you can see it or not.
The same thing is true when you’re working on a large creative project, like a novel rewrite. It’s a daunting process. It helps to identify exactly what it is you’re working on—a story that will hold great meaning for your readers. Sometimes, if you can make your endeavors about others and not about yourself, it can take some of the pressure off you.
Six Ways to Keep Your Momentum Going:
- See the big picture, the forest rather than the millions of trees. What are you working toward?
- Divide the work into achievable step-by-step tasks. Which items within your reach are absolute junk that you can throw in the trash now? How can you show your main character’s frustration without saying, he was frustrated?
- Work on the project every day, even if it’s only for fifteen minutes. Surprisingly, you can accomplish a lot with snippets of time over an extended period.
- Instead of beating yourself up over the length of time your project is taking, concentrate on the people who will benefit from the fruit of your labor. I imagined our cars in the garage for the very first time, and my husband and I not having to raise a heavy wooden garage door. For the novel, think of your readers and the new worlds they’ll experience via your words.
- Strive for excellence, rather than perfection. We still have too much stuff in the garage, but it’s acceptable for our needs. Only God is perfect. Kick-*ss is good enough for humans.
- Reward yourself. For the garage project, our reward was a new garage door complete with automatic lifter. For the novel rewrite, maybe treat yourself to a professional headshot.
What helps you keep motivated? Share in the comments below.
Feb26
Monday Morning Wisdom #143
Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul alike. ~ John Muir
Feb25
Congregation
My response to the Daily Post prompt: congregate.
Congregation
To congregate in the narthex.
Pick up a bulletin.To enter the sanctuary.
Sit in the last pew, next to the center aisle.To praise God
With psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs.To hear the Good News:
Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.To commune with the believers—
Bread and wine, body and blood.To go in peace
To love and serve the Lord.Amen.
Feb25
From the Creator’s Heart #139
in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight (Proverbs 3:6 NIV).
Feb24
Phoenix Symphony Conductor, Tito Muñoz
Tito Muñoz was born in Queens, New York, and took up violin while a student in New York City public schools. He attended the LaGuardia High School of the Performing Arts, the Juilliard School’s Music Advancement Program, and the Manhattan School of Music Pre-College Division. He furthered his violin training at Queens College (CUNY), then attended the American Academy of Conducting at Aspen. He served as Assistant Conductor with the Cleveland Orchestra.
In 2014, Muñoz became the new conductor of the Phoenix Symphony Orchestra, and one of my favorite conductors ever. He has a clarity of intention that is a beauty to behold. I say he conducts like a choral conductor, and I mean that in the best possible way. As a vocal person, I’ve often been confounded by the gestures made by orchestral conductors, but I see the clear communication Muñoz conveys to his musicians. Watch the video below to see what I mean:
I am also amazed how often he conducts from memory. He has a large repertoire of pieces that he knows intimately.
One of his priorities is to attract a new, younger audience to symphonic music. For that reason, every season he premieres several new compositions in addition to standard, well-known and popular works.
Tonight, my friend Barb and I are attending a Phoenix Symphony concert. Schumann and Brahms are on the program. I can’t wait!
I recommend you attend a Muñoz concert if you ever get a chance.
Feb23
#DC352 Heart Within a Heart
My offering for this week’s Diva Challenge: the prompt is to tangle nested hearts. I also wanted to explore the possibility of a heart-shaped mandala. What I learned: the severe corners and points of a heart can cause crazy distortion. Patterns used: Nipa (variation), Flux, Dutch hourglass, Quipple.
Feb23
Creative Juice #82
Good stuff to read this weekend. Inspire yourself!
- Prize-winning small architecture.
- Floating embroidery. I have to try this!
- This is an art supply review, but I love the Zentangle projects pictured!
- The classical sculpture that influenced Michelangelo.
- We all know his iconic The Scream, but did you know Edvard Munch was a prolific painter? I’ve never seen these before.
- Samples of children’s book illustrators’ work.
- I’ve read 18 of these 41 books. I started Atonement, but just couldn’t get into it. Some of these books made me cry, some didn’t. I loved some, others, meh. A bunch of these are on my TBR list.
- Chilean street art.
- Temporary sculptures.
- Amazing art quilts.
- The art of the bobblehead.
- Adding your own spin to someone else’s idea is not plagiarism.
Feb23
In the Meme Time: Quality
Feb22
Guest Post: The First 10 Scenes You Need to Plot for Your Novel by C.S. Lakin
A big ARHtistic License thank you to C.S. Lakin for this article about story structure. Lakin is a prolific writer and professional editor and critiquer. She writes about the craft of writing on her website, Live Write Thrive, where this article originated.
Now that we’ve spent weeks looking at most of the key scenes you need in your novel and that will form the foundation for your entire story, we’re ready to look at the “10” in my 10-20-30 Scene Builder concept. These are the first ten scenes you will do well to lock in first.
Of course, if you haven’t taken the time to develop a strong concept with a kicker, the protagonist and his goal, the conflict with high stakes, and the themes with heart, you should hold off until you do so.
You can take my free online video course to understand fully what those four essential corner pillars of novel structure are. Just enroll at cslakin.teachable.com and then click on the free course. I want you to nail this! Also think about studying my 12 Key Pillars of Novel Construction and use the workbook to flesh this all out. Then you’ll be ready to dive into laying out all these scenes.
Last week I gave the example of filling a jar with rocks. These first ten scenes are your rocks. You put them in first, then you add the pebbles (the next twenty scenes) to fill in the spaces. From there you’ll move into sand, then water—all those other scenes that will round out your story within the strong framework you’ve fashioned.
Want to write a perfect scene every time? Download this PDF worksheet with 8 simple steps to success! Click here to get your free worksheet!
So, here are the ten scenes you’ll want to get working on:
#1 – Setup. Introduce protagonist in her world. Establish her core need. Set the stage, begin building the world, bring key characters on stage.
#2 – Turning Point #1 (10%): inciting incident.
#3 – Pinch Point #1 (33% roughly): Give a glimpse of the opposition’s power, need, and goal as well as the stakes.
#4 – Twist #1: Something new happens: a new ally, a friend becomes a foe. New info reveals a serious complication to reaching the goal. Protagonist must adjust to change with this setback.
#5 – The midpoint (50%): No turning back. Important event that propels the story forward and solidifies the protagonist’s determination to reach her goal. “I’ll never go hungry again!”
#6 – Pinch Point #2 (62% roughly): The opposition comes full force. Time to buckle down and fight through it.
#7 – Twist 2: An unexpected surprise giving (false?) hope. The goal now looks within reach. A mentor gives encouragement, a secret weapon, an important clue.
#8 – Turning Point #4 (75%): Major setback. All is lost and hopeless. Time for final push.
#9 – Turning Point #5 (76-99%): The climax in which the goal is either reached or not; the two MDQs are answered. (Be sure to read my posts on MDQs if you haven’t nailed that concept).
#10 – The aftermath (90-99%): The wrap-up at the end. Denoument, resolution, tie it all in a pretty knot.
Twists and Turns
I haven’t gone into twists yet, and we’ll talk about them further. Twists make good stories terrific. They are surprises, reversals. Just when you think . . . then the unexpected comes out of nowhere (or maybe it’s expected, but here it comes anyway).
You can have lots of variations on your twists. The movie Outbreak comes to my mind with twist #2. Dustin Hoffman’s character finally finds the monkey carrying the disease. He flies to the family’s home and the monkey is caught. They now have great hope to get a cure made before everyone in the quarantined town (and possibly the world) dies.
BUT he learns upon returning that the president has authorized full cleansing, and the bomb is en route to annihilate the town. Hope is raised but then so are the stakes, and that barrels the story toward turning point #4—that major setback.
There’s nothing more fun than raising someone’s hopes to the heights, then dashing them. No, I’m not mental. This is good storytelling! Raise your character’s hopes at a moment when he really needs hope. Then smash it into pieces and send him reeling. That’s the build to the climax.
Yay! More Charts!
And since I love creating charts and handouts, as you’ve probably noticed, I’ve put these first ten scenes in a list in two formats for you: An Excel chart(which will come in handy when you go on to paste your scene summaries into the final thirty-scene chart) and a PDF, for those of you who can’t access Excel (or don’t want to use it).
Print out your chart (maybe multiple copies so you can play with ideas) and get working on your ten scenes.
I’ll talk more next week about these twists. And then we’ll move on to the next twenty scenes: the pebbles that go into the spaces in the jar between your ten rocks! There are countless ways to approach the next ten scenes, and over the next weeks we’ll play with some ideas.
Share some thoughts in the comments. Do you have all these ten scenes figured out? What are some great twists you can think of from a movie or book?
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