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“Il faut cultiver notre jardin,” —Voltaire
For those of us who don’t do fancy French, this means:
“We must cultivate our garden,” says Pangloss at the end of Voltaire’s Candide.
No sentiment could be truer for women who write. Stop focusing on the whole wide world. Instead, maintain a space that is your own and encourages the fruits of your labors to blossom.
But the process of growing our garden requires the right tools. Reading this blog and learning how to revise your own stories could help you cultivate your garden, obtain peace of mind, and establish your writing legacy. Happy reading and writing!
Looking for a specific writing topic? Search the entire blog below.
Show Me Your Process
Identifying your own process is a major undertaking.
Some writers act like theirs was etched into stone by the gods and is so sacred nobody gets to see it. Others pretend like it doesn’t exist at all. Like writing just happens in furious bursts of unexplainable creativity.
That’s crap! Process can be creative and practical. But it must be developed.
And if a writer isn’t talking about their process, it’s because it scares them.
What is Writing, Anyhoo?
Oral storytelling, theatre, handwritten manuscripts, school lectures, business presentations, stand-up comedy, news reports, archives of microfilm and microfiche, videos, podcasts, physical books, ebooks, blog posts, TV shows, movies, Zoom presentations, social media posts, love letters.
What do all these things have in common?
You guessed it—words.
Capture Movie Moments in Your Holiday Writing
Reflecting on your life in a journal may help you produce lots of content. But what happens when you have to sift through all that material to get to the good stuff and tell a story?
Journaling won’t get you to the heart of an experience. Not like shaping a story can.
Yep, I advocate for shaping a story rather than free writing. But how do you kickstart that story into motion? You don’t need a long ramble of exposition to figure out where to begin. A gut reaction will get you going and keep you away from passive voice.
Grammar Police, You’re Under Arrest!
It drives me bonkers to see grumbly grammarians nitpicking everyone’s typos and simple mistakes. Absolutely, there are agreed upon rules for the written word. These rules can help us better read what a writer is trying to communicate. But that’s just it. Writing is a form of communication. Not a place to bully writers.