Momentum of the Muse

I found this little writing exercise. It’s a quick one – 60 seconds, a one word prompt, and your words get e-mailed to you.

The one thing I would have changed about it is the e-mail aspect. I would rather be able to grab my words, copy and paste right there.

Welcome to post #3 in the Effective and Efficient Posting Series: Link Love.

Link love is a great way to tip readers onto helpful, informative, useful or simply hilarious information elsewhere. It is also a good posting strategy for when you’re lazy/efficient/effective/riding on someone else’s work/dedication/coat tails. So what if you don’t want to put in the leg work to achieve results that keep people coming back for more? Someone else does! Make them feel appreciated by pointing people their way.

Now, I’m going to send out some link love to Millionaire Mommy Next Door. I don’t know what my deal with Mommy blogs is; I’m in my 20’s and haven’t trusted children since my brief stint as a waitress at Red Robins, and a four year term coaching 5 to 11 year olds in ice hockey. Millionaire Mommy Next Door is more about Millionaire than Mommy, and lately I have been reading really insightful posts over there. The post I am referring to specifically today is How to Find Your Zingers. It’s a writing exercise which involves making lists of 100. I like making lists, and if you do too, I encourage you to make lists of 1000, or even 10 000.

Hmmm. If I’m so lazy, why and how can I make lists of 1000?

Well, maybe you should just listen to Jen Smith and try the exercise as she describes it.

Be sure to check out the rest of the series:

• Post #1: Quote Compilations Will Save You Time (And Effort Too!)
• Post #2: Using Holidays to Maximum Advantage

I picked up Fondling Your Muse by John Warner in my search for writing exercises.

While I didn’t find much helpful in that regard, it was funny. I haven’t been able to put it down, stealing paragraphs between dinner and dessert. So, I figured I would share some of his tips on editing, since recently my NaNoWriMo train got halted for a flurry of editing that should have been left for December.

The wastepaper basket is the writer’s best friend.

-Isaac Bashevis Singer

If you’re going to hem a pair of pants, check in with the guy who invented the sewing machine. If you’ve got a novel to edit, you should be listening to me. Besides, as you should know by now, the writer’s real best friend is this book.

So, what about editing and revising?

Do you want my advice?

My advice is not to bother. If your book is promising enough, the large publishing conglomerate will have someone revise it for you. If you’re famous, they’ll even write the entire manuscript in the first place. The truth is that most published books aren’t edited in any serious way, a fact that can be confirmed with just a cursory look at the titles found in any store. People aren’t looking for books for perfection, and most published works are riddled with inaccuracies.

For example, in Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs, his classic anti-hero, Hannibal Lecter, says “A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.” Excuse me, but does Harris expect us to believe that Hannibal Lecter would choose the wrong wine to serve with human liver? Even small children know that a more appropriate wine with census-taker liver would be an Australian Shiraz of the Barossa Valley.

Or how about To Kill a Mockingbird, which isn’t even about a mockingbird at all, but the rape trial of a black man? That glaring error hasn’t kept the title from being one of the bestselling and most beloved books of all time.

…

Good enough is good enough, and as long as words are generally in the right order, you’ll be fine. Don’t get bogged down in the endless cycle of revision, just let it go and move on to the most important part of the whole process: selling your manuscript for as large a sum as humanly possible.

If you want a writing advice book that doesn’t help you at all, except to cheer you up about all the writing advice books that told you what you already knew but were avoiding while looking for a get-rich-quicker scheme, then this is the one.