Write At Least 1000 Words Every Day For A Week | freelancing blog

Write At Least 1000 Words Every Day For A Week | freelancing blog: "Now why would anyone want to do that: write 1000 words every day for a week?

Well you wouldn’t if you are an established writer; you are already pumping out much more than that on an average day."

The best advice ever if you want to kill writer's block and piss on it's grave. How you get better at something is to do it as regularly as possible. Set word counts for yourself and live up to them. Look writing as what you do, how you do life.

Market: Cincinnatus Press

Cincinnatus Press: "We are looking for excellent writing. Before submitting, ensure your work is error-free and and has been closely proofread. If you have engaged the services of a professional editor, even better. Freelance editors can be contacted through http://www.the-efa.org"

Technorati Tags: writing, Market, writer, write, guidelines, cincinnatus, press, editor, submission, freelance

Children's Literature

As with most things in the publishing industry, I find myself being cynical about children's writing, meaning kids' books. I imagine the idea is to write in a way that will appeal to children. The problem with that is that kids don't buy the books, so I think the real game is to write in way that will appeal to parents who want to read to their children. The kind of thing that will make reading to kids fun, and enjoyable to them. It doesn't matter how banal, derivative or insipid your words are, just that you get the parents enthusiastic about spending time with the whiny little snot-monkeys.

Come up with a heavy, obvious rhythm, find yourself an illustrator, and write a silly story. You're done.

Technorati Tags: writing, children's, stories, fiction, writer

Writing Advice: The Benefits of Writing Longhand

There are benefits to writing your work out with a pen before you commit it to type, namely the reread is unavoidable,and the process of getting out of your imagination is slower and therefore more deliberate. I saw an interview with Herman Wouk once where he said he wrote all of his novels this way. I believe Stephen King also is known for working with a pad and pen before using a keyboard.

Drawbacks:
1. Since it makes the work more deliberate, more physically difficult (writing a 5,000 word piece is physically difficult), there is often, towards the end of the piece, the temptation to rush, to get it done with as quickly as possible. While this is not always a bad thing, you don't want to screw up an ending because your hand hurts either.

2. It takes longer to get something out. If you are a working writer the object is to get the thing out and on an editor's desk as soon as possible. You should be able to get this without hurting the quality of your writing.

3. If your handwriting is like mine you might have trouble reading the stuff you have written, especially if you your hands were hurting when you wrote.

4. It's twice the work. You have to think the stuff up, write it out then you commit it to your word-processor at a later date. It might sound like you would have been doing the same thing anyway, but in practice it feels like much more effort.

5. Twice the paper. If you are one of those people who hangs on to hard copies of everything you write, you will need some extra space for your legal pad pages plus your copy paper.

Dealing with Rejection Slips

It's hard to keep going in the face of rejection, especially when you think it was a good piece and perfect for the market to which you submitted it. You have to remember that literature, and the assessment of it is entirley a matter of taste, meaning that editors are not any more qualified in the judgment of quality than their readers who didn't go to school or major in English Lit. Editors don't know how to pick a winner any more than the average joe in the street who they depend on to keep their presses running. It's all about what you like. Editors are there to check grammar and spelling, and make sure that the work is not exactly like something else they have published before, that's the true editorial function, everything else is caprice. They choose stories on whim, because of the kind of day they are having, on something they read the night before. All you can do is get your work to where you feel satisfied with it, submit it, and then hope for the best.

How to Find Inspiration

A good piece can come to you out of the clear blue, but not necessarily, most times your muse will need a kick to get started, so you need to be able to kick your muse, jumpstart the inspirational process. The best way to get your creative juices flowing is to do something you have never done before or don't usually do. make a prank call from a payphone (yes, there are still some of those around), go to a petting zoo, go to the park, drive to a town where no one knows you on a Sunday morning and masturbate in front of a church as people are getting out. Anything. I find that buildings are especially inspirational for me, so I look up real estate sites.

The fact is that inspiration comes along about as often as something comes along in your life, you might want to try bringing new things into your life more often.

5 Proofreading Tips

1. Let your work Marinate
Do not proofread immediately, let it sit for a couple days and then come back to it. Sometime enthusiasm for something can block the more objective part of the brain and you lose focus on the quality of your work.

2. Read as you write.
Reading a good book as you try to write something can open us up to mistakes we have made and the possibilities of doing something better.

3. Never trust spellcheck.
Some words when misspelled are actually other words, basic stuff, I know, but you would be surprised how many new writers do not know this.
e.g. none=nine and buy=by and lost=list and so on.

4. Do not be afraid of the re-write. Re-writing is practice, you get better at something by doing it repeatedly.

5. Read your work aloud. Hearing something, especially something that sounds like crap is often the way to tell that it, in fact, is crap.