When we were chatting about how she might get into more writing work (and she’s largely talking non-fiction work, but don’t worry, I’m getting to the fiction writing part) I promised her I would look through my regular writing emails and RSS feed and send her some links that might be helpful. Then I decided they might be helpful to others too, so if you’re reading this, just starting out with writing and want to know my favourite places on the web for information and inspiration, then here they are!

Hope Clark’s Funds for Writers
I’ve blogged about Hope before … in fact I’ve just looked it up and it was almost four years ago! Well, what I said then still stands and Hope’s Funds for Writers newsletters are the only ones I always read without deleting. She sums up the writing life and the various dilemmas writers face so accurately that I always feel like I’m not alone. Obviously she’s successful at what she does, yet seems so absolutely normal – and readers know all about her chickens and her garden – which gives you hope (oops, no pun intended) that you, too, can make a living out of writing. Her newsletters have some great leads on writing opportunities but these days I don’t look at them much – it’s the editorial that makes me read every one that lands in my in-box.

Paula B’s The Writing Show
Another inspiring resource for writers is Paula’s Writing Show podcasts and website. Turns out I have blogged about her podcasts before, too! Fiction and non-fiction writers alike can learn a lot from Paula herself as well as from the various guests she interviews for the podcasts and there is now a busy Writing Show forum that I’d love to get more involved in (I think I posted once when it started up but, you know, arrival of small boy and all …).

Christina Katz and the Prosperous Writer
Christina has a whole lot of info, courses, resources, you name it on her site, but it’s her Prosperous Writer newsletters which I’ve found most helpful and inspiring recently. I also follow her goings-on on Facebook and it’s another case of seeing a real live writer leading a normal (busy) life, which really helps too!

Angela Hoy’s Writers Weekly
This newsletter has been popping into my inbox for years too, and I regularly enter their 24 hour short story contest. (Still waiting to win something though – I must be unlucky because they even have heaps of “door prizes” and I’ve never been a winner!!). And while I don’t find it quite as inspirational as the others, there is a whole heap of useful practical information and writing job leads to follow.

So, I hope these help out my friend as well as some random strangers out there who come across this post. As for the more accomplished writers among my readers, I’d love to hear which writing websites or newsletters you can’t live without – do let me know in the comments.

I’ve read the tip many times that all writers should read widely through different genres, not just sticking to their personal favourites. I have to admit, this is advice I usually ignore, because I figure there are only so many reading hours in my life, and I don’t want to waste them reading stuff that’s not really down my alley.

Of course, I was wrong. Thankfully, I’ve been pushed out of my literary fiction corner for a few moments recently and have seen the benefits of (at least occasionally) stepping out of my favourite genre corner.

What I’ve learnt from science fiction

Of all the genres that I was never likely to read, science fiction is probably at the top of the list. Okay, second, after horror (and I still don’t think you’ll see me in the horror section of a bookshop or library for a long time). Yet I was persuaded that there is sci-fi that is still “great writing”, that sometimes it’s just all about the characters and therefore not too different to what I usually read. It was worth a try.

So far I’ve read (and to my surprise, enjoyed) Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game and Jack Vance’s Marune: Alastor 993. As promised, they were beautifully written and had great storylines, two of my usual criteria for whether or not I enjoy a book. And the stuff I’d feared – endless descriptions of spaceship constructions or anything slightly Star-Wars-esque that I wanted to avoid – was barely there at all. (That’s excluding, of course, my problem with the footnotes in Marune – although I am almost convinced that this is acceptable in scifi).

The result of reading these scifi books (and I’m now onto another - Ender’s Shadow) is that my writing brain has been opened up a whole lot – would you believe, I’ve even had story ideas that have a scifi twist? I don’t think I’m about to become a scifi author (far from it) but a short story or two is not out of the question. In general, the idea of opening up your thinking to beyond the reality you know and accept is a great lesson for me.

And what I’ve learnt from historical sagas

At my local library, they have an entire section for family sagas – stories that follow families down through generation after generation – another kind of novel that I’ve definitely never been interested in. I guess that another book I’ve just read, Judy Nunn’s Beneath the Southern Cross, falls into this category, and again, I enjoyed it despite myself.

The reason I read it is weird in itself. My mother recommended it to me, and the bit that grabbed me was the family in question is the Kendle/Kendall family. Since I’m a Kendle, I was naturally interested in a (fictional) story of a Kendall family, and particularly the Kendle half who changed their name to disassociate from the other side of the family after a falling out. (I wonder if that part is true?)

In any case, although I’m still sure this is not really my kind of genre, I enjoyed the book and in particular, was impressed with some of the “show, don’t tell” examples I found in it. Every 100 or so pages, the story jumped a generation or two, and Nunn used small, seemingly incidental situations or details to clue the reader in to who the new characters were and how they were related to the previous generation’s characters. It must have been tempting – and I would have been quite forgiving about it – to just summarise the new generation, but she didn’t. And I was impressed.

What’s your “love to hate” genre?

What genre do you never read? Let us know in the comments and hopefully someone else will suggest a good book for you to try if you want to expand your genre experience a bit. I really recommend it!

Thanks to niallkennedy for image via CC

Unless you’re reading Becoming A Fiction Writer through an RSS feeder, you’ll have noticed that there have been a few changes. Yes, I bravely upgraded to a new WordPress theme because I’m trying to make this site a bit more user-friendly – during the transition phase, it might be a little bit less user-friendly, but please hang in there. It’s all for the best, of course.

If you have any feedback on the new design (so far) or you find anything broken, do let me know. My skills in this area are just on the limit of do-it-myself versus find-someone-else, but I’m stubborn enough to try everything on my own. Thanks for being patient with me!

Random Thing #1: Don’t Take Me to the Cinema

I regularly fall asleep in movies. In fact, I try to schedule all movie-watching to include regular breaks, or at the very least, an interval about an hour in. It rarely matters what the circumstances of my movie-watching are, the nap is a fairly consistent thing. At school, I sometimes show my students a movie in the afternoon, and I have to make sure I sit up the back of the classroom so that when I feel myself nodding off, I can stand up and walk around for a bit. In a cinema, I ration out snacks so that I’ll have some to keep myself busy when I’m getting sleepy.

And it should be said, this sleep problem seems unrelated to the quality of the movie. Obviously in a bad movie I’m more likely to nod off because I won’t even try to stay awake, but even in great movies I have serious problems. What does this mean for my writing? It means it’s a very good thing I’m a novel writer and not a screenplay writer. I don’t know much about what happens at the three-quarter point of a movie script. A novel? No problem. I could read for hours without getting sleepy.

Random Thing #2: LOLcats Have Me ROFLing

The blog I click on first in my reader is always, always, always the Lolcat’s I Can Has Cheezburger site. It’s got terrible weird slang English and sometimes corny jokes but I simply adore it. I’m a big cat lover and the Lolcat phenomenon totally impresses me. There isn’t enough praise I can give it. If you’ve been hiding under a rock and don’t know it, click on over, but beware: if you’re not a fan of cats and can’t be patient with the odd slang, you probably won’t get what I mean. And I can live with that.

I’ve been wondering what this means for my writing, and I’ve come up with a theory. Just before I read any blog posts about writing (because writing blogs are my second choice), I look at the Lolcat pictures, laugh at the captions, and get put into a great mood. So perhaps Lolcats are helping put me in the best frame of mind before I start reading about writing. Thanks cats!

Random Thing #3: Guten Morgen, I Mean, Good Morning

At home, I usually speak German. When I lived in Germany, I spoke English at home, but now that my German husband and I are living in Australia, German is definitely the dominate language. I’m keeping it that way so that our future children will be German speakers – I figure they’ll be growing up in Australia with English all around them but if home is a German zone (or mostly), then they won’t miss out. I hate the thought of them missing out on growing up bilingual.

Anyway, the problem with speaking German at home is I quite often find myself tongue-tied in English. Obviously, this is a bit of a problem for someone who works as an English teacher and a writer. My friends are now used to me spitting out odd German words now and again and searching around for the English equivalent, but my students still look at me strangely when I have a mental blank on an English word and just stare at them while I wait for it to come to me. However, you might be glad to know: this doesn’t seem to affect my writing. Perhaps because I rarely write in German, my brain is hardwired for English when my fingers hit the keyboard.

Random Thing #4: Getting Academic

I used to work as a university lecturer, and I haven’t lost that academic thirst for knowledge and, to be honest, qualifications. This year I’ll be studying the two more units I require to complete my Masters of Education and I’m pretty excited about it. Back when I used to work as an academic, I’d started my doctorate (the remnants of which are now turning into this MEd), and I still dream of doing a PhD – but now I dream of doing a PhD in creative writing. Don’t try to tell me that being a Dr will have little or no impact on my writing quality or my success as a writer, it’s just a personal achievement thing. I’d just like to do it. Okay?

Random Thing #5: Crushin’ on Daytime Psychobabble

I’m secretly keen on Dr Phil. This really grates against my intellectual pretensions, but on the days that I work from home I’ll often turn his show on – it’s screened here at midday, right when I usually sit down for lunch. And with the exception of the Oprah-like shows when he gives away gifts or money or some other razzle dazzle stuff, I often find I actually learn something. I mean, it seems like he actually has some psychologically useful things to say. Having said that, I just stayed with some friends who were reading his (unauthorised) biography and he didn’t sound quite like I’d imagined, but still, I actually find myself using some of his strategies to deal with my everyday life. But as I said, it’s a secret. Ssshhhh!

There is an impact of this on my writing. Most of my fiction and ideas for novels are fairly free from explosive action, and are more about getting into the heads of characters. So any psychology I pick up seems to get passed on to my characters. I hope that turns out to be a good thing.

Random Thing #6: Me and My Deformed Thumb

I have a strange lump on the inside joint of my right thumb. When I was growing up, I thought that this was a normal part of the human body, although I never questioned why my left thumb wasn’t the same. In fact, according to my mother, this lump is the result of a milk bottle accident when I was young – back in the days when milk came delivered to the doorstep in glass bottles, I was getting one out of the fridge, dropped it, and a shard of glass got wedged in this part of my thumb. A scar grew over it, I guess, and that’s what the lump is.

Now I can’t claim that this has a big impact on my writing, but it just seemed like a curious random thing to end with. And occasionally, just occasionally, when I type too fast, I hit this lump at just the right (or wrong) angle on the space bar key and it hurts and tingles for ages. Perhaps it’s telling me to slow down and actually think about what I write. Or perhaps, like so many things in life, it’s just random.  Now you know.

Rules of the 6 Random Things meme:

1. LINK TO THE PERSON WHO TAGGED YOU
2. POST THE RULES ON YOUR BLOG
3. WRITE SIX RANDOM THINGS ABOUT YOURSELF
4. TAG SIX PEOPLE AT THE END OF YOUR POST AND LINK TO THEM
5. LET EACH PERSON KNOW THEY ARE TAGGED AND LEAVE A COMMENT ON THEIR BLOG
6. LET THE TAGGER KNOW WHEN YOUR ENTRY IS UP

But I’m going to cheat a bit here and simply challenge all interested readers to do this. If you’re a writer, use it as a writing exercise. And other bloggers, use it on a slow blogging day to get some curious information about you out to your faithful readers. And let me know when you do – I’m the most curious of the lot.

I’m not at all sure that Christmas is a very inspirational time of year for writers – I’m fairly certain it’s not for me. Instead it’s more a hectic time which seems to tumble into my life far before I’m ready and tells me quite bluntly that another year has gone by. Fast.

New Year’s resolutions are another topic for another day – but let me tell you, I’m already thinking deeply about them, especially the writing-related resolutions. For now, all I wanted to say was that I hope everyone reading this blog has a fantastic Christmas holiday and gets to rest from all those other distracting parts of life. Perhaps some of you will be lucky enough to have extra writing time. I’m going on holiday instead to Sydney and the Hunter Valley so I hope to return with abundant inspiration.

Merry Christmas!

Inspiration where you don’t expect it

As most of you know, I teach English as a Second Language three days per week, and my students often provide me with inspiration through the discussions we have and even some of the language they use. But this week I had some unexpected inspiration from, of all places, the clothes they wear!

I’ve got a new Korean student in my class, whose name I won’t mention in case he ever stumbles across this blog, although he’ll probably figure out that it’s him anyway … in any case, he has a habit of wearing T-shirts covered in Konglish – Korean-English. That is to say, at a quick glance it seems to be English, but if you read it carefully, you don’t really know what it means. While the students were working on a grammar exercise yesterday I sneakily copied down the writing from his shirt. In fact it was all written in capital letters but I just find that too irritating to read, so here’s the upper and lower case version (spelling errors are as on the shirt, not mine!):

Energy.

Although you compleatly differ from me, you are the same consciousness will be centraized on the skin.

Beca.   Aid.

Young men are watched warmly. It is the grown. Up role which is helped so that they can shine like the sun.

Planet.

Use you see,

Yes, it really ended with a comma, totally leaving me dangling. But instead of laughing too loudly (because then a Japanese or Chinese guy will cackle in return at the bizarre Chinese characters we emblazen on our T-shirts or sometimes worse, tattoo onto our skin!), just read it as a poem. Isn’t it great? I love the young men who will shine like the sun!

It’s somehow heartening to think that you don’t have to use language correctly to allow it to have a positive effect. Perhaps it’s a good reminder that rules are made to be broken; you can start your sentence with “but” or even write just half-sentences and it could still sound beautiful. Well, it cheered me up good and proper and that’s what I needed this week.

PS: If unusually-translated English is your thing, then I totally recommend The Chinglish Files. The site is run with respect, explaining why the Chinese would have chosen particular English translations and offering improvements. Culturally-sensitive fun, so to speak!

So on the premise that having inspiration and ideas hit is totally important, I have to tell you about the results of a study I bookmarked a while back. It was one of those weird hotel chain surveys (done by various chains, on a bizarre range of topics, just to get the name of their chain in front of more people – but I’m not going to give them the satisfaction today, sorry).

The survey talked about how and when people get creative and inspired, and the most interesting (but probably useless) result was this: 10.04pm is the most likely time for a brainwave.

Obviously, I’m not average, because I know that after ten o’clock in the evening, my brain is already asleep, if not my body, too. Perhaps I’m doing something wrong?

I’m not too worried. I usually have no shortage of ideas and I know my inspiration comes from many places, at many times. Other parts of the survey rang truer for me, such as getting great ideas in the shower, and the scary statistic that 58% of people forget their best ideas because they don’t write them down immediately. Luckily I’m pretty devoted to getting my ideas down on paper as soon as I can and tend to chant weird mnemonics in the bathroom if I’ve come up with more than one idea I want to remember, since a paper and pencil don’t work out so well when you’re under the shower.

But back to the 10.04pm thing. I guess if I had to make a time, I’d have to name my most creative times as being between 6.30am and 7am (on days when I get up to go to work), and on the weekends, around 7.30am to 8am when I’m half-dozing, half awake in bed and my brain gets flooded with ideas.

So now I’m intrigued. When are your most creative times? Are you a morning person like me or one of those weird night owls who’ll right a classic book sometime after midnight? Let me know your creative times in the comments.