This Is The Writing Advice That Changed My Life -- And The Way That I Write -- Forever Here I am discussing writing advice with one of my favorite new XO contributors, Nia Renee Hill. After having the same conversation with several different writers -- including the beautiful and talented Nia Renee Hill (pictured) for her most recent pieces, I decided to write this up. At the very end is the writing advice that helped me understand why I used to have so much trouble overthinking and trying to fit everything into one piece -- and that provided a solution that helped me improve my writing dramatically. As I've written about before, doing morning pages has helped improve my writing (and my life) by leaps and bounds. The advice below is specifically for the more personal memoir style writing we do at xoJane, but it might hit home for others who do various styles. I hope you share your own writing inspiration in the comments! Here's mine. 1. I find that my writing is a lot better when I'm actually having fun, and I'm really enjoying the process. Remember: You are God here. 2. 3.
5 Things Really Smart People Do By Kevin Daum, visit Inc. Most people don't really think much about how they learn. Generally you assume learning comes naturally. You listen to someone speak either in conversation or in a lecture and you simply absorb what they are saying, right? Not really. In fact, I find as I get older that real learning takes more work. But the need for learning never ends, so your desire to do so should always outweigh your desire to be right. 1. 2. If you can't quiet the inner voice, then at least use it to your advantage. RELATED: 8 Habits of Remarkably Successful People 3. Some people are naturally curious and others are not. 4. No concept or theory comes out of thin air. RELATED: How to Be Happier at Work 5. Often people shut out learning due to the person delivering the material. RELATED: 7 Traits of Extraordinary Bosses Also on HuffPost:
Procrastination Is Not Laziness I was going to tackle my procrastination problem last weekend but I never got around to it. By Sunday at 5:48 p.m. I realized I had blown it again. Throughout the week I feel like I barely have enough time to cook, eat, tidy up, write an article and do the odd errand. But the weekends go by and I never catch up. Sometimes I do sit down early in the day and pound something out, but then I give myself a well-deserved break and that’s usually the end of any productivity. I avoid taking on the real important stuff. The important stuff doesn’t get done, at least not before my procrastinatory tendencies have created an obvious, impending consequence of not doing it, like incurring a fine, really letting someone down, or getting fired. So much of what I want to do isn’t terribly difficult and wouldn’t take a lot of time to get done. Reaching critical levels To some of you this is already sounding familiar. For what I’m capable of, I have been a resoundingly unproductive person. All I want
What’s Your Problem? And Why? A recurring theme in Raptitude is that why is a more useful question than what. Why is the mother of all whats, and tells a much more meaningful story. A 600-foot triangular stack of stones sitting in the Egyptian desert for five thousand years is notable, but it’s the mystery of why someone was compelled to build such a thing that makes it so intriguing. If we only look at events and things, and judge them as if they were isolated entities, we can’t possibly understand them. Everything is both a cause and an effect, so there is no way of knowing what something is if you never look at why it is. So if that isolated entity is something in your life that you want to change, such as a personal weakness or a lingering dilemma, your efforts to solve it may seem to be in vain. Contemporary self-improvement material seems to be concerned simply with what you should do: To be more productive, start doing this. To lose weight, eat this and don’t eat that. So I focused on what to do about that.
Do We Dare Write for Readers? - The Chronicle Review By William Germano Holly Gressley for The Chronicle Review Go ahead. Keep working on your book. But before you finish, I hope you'll consider a modest proposal. Your book will never be entirely yours—it can't be. Today our paradigms for scholarly writing may never have seemed less paradigmatic, our disciplinary affirmations never less comforting. It's unnecessary to rehearse the well-known conditions of scholarly production, circa 2013. And yet there's a paradox here. Publishers must listen more today—and communicate more. "Look inside" was once the carnival barker's pitch outside the sideshow's tent. The "Look inside" feature of listings like those on Amazon is one proof that we have fully and completely entered the Age of the Reader. You might think that having all that power makes things easy for our reader. New reading conditions make old questions even more important: Whatever we write is for readers, or it's nothing at all. That's how we've done things these past 30 years.
Back to Basics: 10 Things Every Writer Should Do in Their Novel Photo: brendanovak.com The following is a guest post from bestselling author Brenda Novak. In writing about the keys to penning a hit novel, Novak reveals a valuable point: It often boils down to nailing the core storytelling basics. 10 Keys to Writing a Bestselling Novel: 1. Start your story in the right place—when something exciting happens, when something unusual comes to pass, when a worthy challenge has been presented to your protagonist. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. —New York Times & USA Today Bestselling Author Brenda Novak is the author of more than 45 books. *And speaking of that: WD is participating in this year’s auction! You’ve Got a Book in You by Elizabeth Sims Are you writing a book or novel for the first time? You might also like:
Throwback Thursday: Back-to-School Beatitudes–10 Academic Survival Tips « The Crunk Feminist Collective 30 Aug Update, August 2012 Original Post Graduate school was nothing short of an emotional and physical rollercoaster. Be confident in your abilities.If you feel like a fraud, you very likely are suffering from impostor syndrome, a chronic feeling of intellectual or personal inadequacy born of grandiose expectations about what it means to be competent. A little musical inspiration for the journey... Alright, fam. Like this: Like Loading... Learn 46 Languages Online for Free: Spanish, English & More How to learn languages for free? This collection features lessons in 48 languages, including Spanish, French, English, Mandarin, Italian, Russian and more. Download audio lessons to your computer or mp3 player and you’re good to go. Amharic Foreign Service Institute Basic Amharic — Audio — TextbookLessons with dialogues, drills, exercises, and narratives will teach you the basics of this language spoken in Ethiopia. Ancient Greek Ancient Greek Introduction — Web SiteThe UT-Austin Linguistics Research Center provides an overview of Ancient Greek and 10 lessons based on famous Greek texts. Arabic Bookmark our free Arabic lessons section. American Sign Language Introductory American Sign Language Course — YouTubeBy the end of this course you should have a basic bank of ASL words that you are able to use to form simple sentences. Bambara Bambara in Mali — Web SiteLessons from the Peace Corps. Bulgarian Cambodian Catalan Chinese Czech Danish Lao
Transcendental Woman by Christopher Benfey Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life: The Public Years by Charles Capper Oxford University Press, 649 pp., $45.00 Margaret Fuller: Wandering Pilgrim by Meg McGavran Murray University of Georgia Press, 515 pp., $44.95 Fuller in Her Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of Her Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates edited by Joel Myerson University of Iowa Press, 217 pp., $27.95 (paper) With impediments in her way—she did not attend college, she wasn’t rich or conventionally beautiful, she was prone to physical and psychological ailments—Fuller continually sought a wider scope for her ambitious undertakings, as if, as her intimate friend Emerson remarked, “this athletic soul craved a larger atmosphere than it found.” During her sometimes improbable and ultimately tragic life—a life that George Eliot might have imagined—Margaret Fuller became, as her biographer Charles Capper points out, the first of many things:
Literary Resources -- 20th-Century British (Lynch) This page is part of the Literary Resources collection maintained by Jack Lynch of Rutgers – Newark. Comments and suggestions are welcome. Twentieth-Century Literature Calls for Papers From Penn's list. Voice of the Shuttle — Modern British The best set of links. Literary Women of the Left Bank (Paula DiTallo) On-line magazine on early Modernism, especially women in Paris, 1900-1940, but with broader coverage than the title suggests. Modern Fiction Studies (Purdue) Information on the journal. Postmodernism is/in Fiction (Pomona) Original essays and links on Acker, Auster, DeLillo, Garcia Marquez, Gibson, Hagedom, Morrison, Powers, Pynchon, Reed, and Rushdie. The Space Between Information on the "society for the study of literature and culture between the wars." The Spirit Of Bohemia (Bohemia Books) A collection of original essays and links on 19th- and early 20th-c. The Great War Lost Poets of the Great War (Harry Rusche, Emory) Poetry of the First World War Trenches on the Web (Mike Iavarone) Authors