Jan Marquart's Blog, page 8

The One Thing You Should Not Do When You Can't Write

You sit down at your computer, it awaits your voice, the blank page stares back seducing you to mar it with your ingenuity, the clock ticks,but -- nothing. You tell yourself that the best thing to do is sit and wait for the idea to be sparked by inspiration. You know you have it in you,but -- nothing. The morning ends and you are a mess. What are you doing wrong? All that time seemingly wasted.

Every writer faces that moment when the mind won't cooperate with the desire. The thing not to do is sit and stress on what is not happening. Instead honor that the mind needs space. I suggest you get up, walk, sweep, cook, talk to a friend, anything that will relax your mind and lighten the stress.

If I am insistent upon writing because that is the time I designated to the task, I like to allow my mind to tell me what it wants to. I might write about the weather, my best friend, what I had for dinner last night. Usually after writing and warming up for about 20 minutes my mind redirects itself to the story I want to write. The minds needs to breathe just like the rest of us.

It's that easy yet I keep hearing from writers how getting the ideas to flow is so difficult. Never fight your mind, especially your creative muse. Find what works for you. When the ideas aren't flowing, what works to get them flowing? Practice and know what is happening inside your mind. Pay attention. It will help your writing in the long run anyway.

Until next time,
keep the pen moving

Warm ups!

I've been speaking with writers lately who have brought up the topic of writers block. Now, for any of you who know me or have read my book The Mindful Writer, you know I do not believe in such a misdiagnosis. When we hit one impasse with our stories or writing careers, the nature of our mind is redirecting us and usually for a very good reason. Sometimes we simply have too much going on in life. Sometimes our muse needs more time to germinate before growing her ideas. That is not a block in writing any more than not knowing what you want for dinner is dinner block or not knowing which detergent to buy is detergent block. Why should our psychology to write be any different than our psychological process in anything else we do or experience?

If you don't know what you want for dinner what do you do? Do you browse through cookbooks for ideas, do you check take out menus so you don't have to cook at all? Writing is no different.

If you are stuck in what a character should do in your story or what you should write about at all, get your mind and enthusiasm warmed up the same way you do with anything else in your life. Read something from one of your favorite authors -- just to get the juices flowing again. Look around you and write about an object on your shelf or what the weather is like -- writing requires warm ups just like jogging for a marathon or reading articles on communication so you have left arguments with your mother.

Now, here's the rub for most writers--they are indefatigably hard on themselves. After all, isn't that what gets books completed, to stand firm and endure the arduous process in the first place? It breaks my heart when I hear writers claim that they can't write but then list incredible demands the rest of their life is making on them so why can't they finish their chapters or think about a more dramatic plot. Is this what you call writers block because quite frankly I've been writing for over 22 years and I've never experienced it, to much people's chagrin. Becoming stuck in thought doesn't mean you can't write; it just means you have to adjust the kind of writing you do and implement a warm up. Sometimes just sweeping my floor is a great warm up. Through the monotonous motion of the broom my mind lets go and ideas begin to flow.

I have been writing books since 1989. Often I have two or three books being written at the same time. But about six months ago I moved to a new town, started looking for work, had to find the grocery store, gas station and people to talk to, and my time and energy was being spent on the daily makings of a life. However, having learned that I have to write everyday or I become agitated, I knew I had to do something. Are you in a similar situation?

What to do? Try this: take up your pen and just write phrases that reflect your life at the moment. If you have been pondering on a certain character for a story, write words and phrases for that character. If you have a certain confusion about a plot for your newest novel, write words and phrases for where you want it to go or how you want it to feel to a reader. Instead of putting the pressure on yourself to write sentences and paragraphs, write warm ups so that when the time is right, you'll be ready.

My point? Writer's block is not a real thing. Once you learn your own psychology and how to be resilient, patient and understanding with yourself who is not just a writer but a human being in a busy life, the pressure on your pen and mind to produce will be re-directed and you'll feel satisfied that you didn't neglect your need to work on a written piece.

Trust

You sit to write. The voice on your right shoulder says: tell the story when you were six and got that birthday present, you know, the one you loved so much and how it determined the course of your life. But the voice on your left shoulder says: that's a stupid thing to write. Who wants to hear about that old backpack anyway? Who wants to hear that you loved carrying it so much you asked your father to take you camping all over the country and that it eventually turned into your own travel business. Who cares about your stupid story? And so you have it. The writer's dilemma,two voices battling it out over worthiness.

When we meditate, we practice being. When we write, we do the same thing. The biggest enemy for a writer is lack of trust, period.

Writers have been diagnosing this as writers block but I am here to tell you there is no such thing as writers block. I'm here to redirect your attention to this matter to a new culprit: your relationship with yourself. But there is a cure for this problem and that is to get to know the way your mind works. Watch what happens to the voices on your shoulders when you do anything you really want to do. What do they say and how do the sabotage you from living out your expressions? What else does your mind do when you want to express yourself? Make a note of it and see if that isn't what happens every time you pick up your pen.

Don't be a victim to your own mind. Do not let your childhood conditioning make you a victim. Pick up your pen and write. Your story might just be the one to change a child's life.

And if you have other moments that keep you from writing, for instance, you get antsy or can't find a topic to use for a warm up, consider my book The Mindful Writer, Still the Mind, Free the Pen www.createspace.com/3546101 now an ebook on amazon.

Everyone has to start somewhere, but there is no start unless you have begun.

Voices from the Land

Hi Everyone,

Due to popular request, for a limited time only, Voices from the Land ebook on Amazon will be reduced from $9.99 to $5.99.

Buy your ebook now. Enjoy!

A Book in Thirty Days

Do you know what NaNoWriMo.org is? You're going to love this and I can't wait for November to come and not just because it is my birthday month. NaNoWriMo.org is a website that you sign on to and then write 50,000 words in the month of November. That means you write over 1,000 words a day. I've spoken to writers who have done this and they have produced a book out of it. So I want to pass this on to you. I just signed up and when November 1 comes around you start writing. NaNoWriMo.org will give you instructions to scramble your manuscript so no one steals the contents. All they want to do is count the number of words you wrote. This is new to me so I don't know more than that. Anyway -- check it out.

Write to Heal

Your body hurts. You take pills but the problem doesn't go away. You are distressed. Therapy doesn't help and the therapist doesn't understand. We have all been there at one time or other in our lives. What to do?

Here's a quote by Dr. James Pennebaker about my book Write to Heal.

Over the last 25 years, more than 200 studies have been conducted on the power of writing. The general conclusion is that writing about emotional upheavals can often improve people's mental and physical health. In Jan Marquart's book, Write to Heal, the reader gets a deeply personal sense of the power of writing. More importantly, the author lays out practical ways to deal with issues that bother you. This is a fine book by any account.

Okay, that being said, you write and you write and nothing releases inside you to start the healing process. What has gone wrong?

Writing to get well is a process of digging deep into our subconscious. Many writers who want to write to heal keep the writing superficial. Let me give you an example. When I was on my own with acute environmental sensitivites I focused on re-defining the condition with alternate words and phrases. After writing the the word 'toxic' on the list, something clicked inside and so I focused on that word. I made further lists of people and situations in my life that felt toxic. Then after each entry I wrote out fully the experience of it in my life until I could write no more. I wrote until I was spent on all impressions that came up with every item on the list. Then when I was finished with the process I wrote out an affirmation that combined all the written entries into one meaningful sentence and pasted it on my bathroom mirror to repeat over and over during the day. I stated the affirmation while sweeping my floor or driving down the road. Then I made sure to change everything toxic in my life to non-toxic. I wore organic, ate organic, bought everything organic. I kept writing about feelings and thoughts that popped up that were negative or that made me feel badly. It was a six year purge. Each day I went a little deeper and a little deeper. Illness is a condition embedded in everything about us: thoughts, behaviors, language, body expressions.

Slowly I began to heal. I had been so ill I couldn't get near scotch tape because I could smell the petrochemicals in it and if a TV had been on for 20 minutes I could smell the plastics and chemicals in that too. My life was a living hell.

I can say, without doubt, that writing was a huge part of saving my life. And it could be a huge part of saving yours too, because every physical illness is a full body experience.

Write to heal can be ordered on my site: www.JanMarquart.com for $8.99. My book The Mindful Writer, Still the Mind, Free the Pen has many healing prompts to write for healing as well. It is sold as an ebook on Amazon. The Mindful Writer can be bought in paperback form: www.createspace.com/3546101

I'd love to dialogue with you about the wellness of writing. It is my passion and I have had twenty years of watching it heal me in the mind/body/spirit trio.

Writing Love Scenes

Readers love getting swept away by love scenes. Romantic novels are selling like hotcakes. I don't know if that's because our personal love stories are failing, since one out of every two marriages ends in divorce, or not. I just don't know. What I do know is that when I counsel couples they seem to want to get back to that magical moment when love first burst open their hearts and swept them up in the magic and power of it all.

Now anyone in a relationship for longer than one month will agree that love has its ups and downs. So when your love life seems to hit a plateau what do you do? For many women, they head to the romantic book aisle to reunite with that feeling of oneness and to reinstate their hope until they can work with their partner to awaken their own experience.

When my agent read Kate's Way she wanted me to add a romantic love scene. I thought she wanted an erotic sex scene. Turns out she did. But I don't write that kind of literature. "It makes money," she said. So be it. But I didn't want to write trash. If I was going to write a love scene I wanted to write about the highest quality of emotions when two people connect in bed or wherever else they decided to lay naked. My agent thought for a moment then stated that I should imagine the way I want to feel in such encounters and write that out. "Use your imagination to its fullest," she said. I suffered over it because being single and thinking about romantic encounters just agitated me. So I watched movies like You Got Mail and read more Elizabeth Berg novels, which wasn't so bad because I love her writing, just to get into that romantic and holiest of mental spaces before I wrote. I watched other movies of the same ilk night after night, sometimes two in one night struggling to get into that space that would let every part of me untetter myself and my pen.

The day I felt ready to write was anxiety-filled. I let my fingers click on the keys with fierce enthusiasm as if I had just met the most fabulous lover and was about to write him a poem from every fiber of my being. When I was through with writing the scene I sent it to my agent, then paced about the kitchen waiting for the phone to ring. I was surprised at how silly I felt. An hour later, when the phone rang, I hesitated before saying hello; I was a wreck. If what I wrote wasn't going to work for the agent I didn't know what I'd do. I'm not even sure how many weeks I spent on the process, too many though, and the thought of having to re-enter that space to work on it some more shook me. "Jan?", she said. "You nailed it."

I'm not writing this to brag. I'm writing this to say that, if I can do it, anyone can. I'm writing this to all the writers out there who want to empower their stories with love and not trashy erotica. I am living proof that you can do it. There is nothing special about my writing skills. I am still learning about how to get my story from my heart to my pen and embolden the reader. But I consider Kate's Way to be a success, and not just because I actually hit the print button and sent it on its merry way to create space for publishing. I consider Kate's Way a success because it stretched my mind to write out my fantasy with dignity.

So if you are struggling with this type of writing there is no need for expensive workshops or classes. Read what other authors wrote. Study their wording and how they got images to take you away to that place that opened your heart and made you ache for love.

And for now, I'm going to believe that writing has the power to manifest...

I'd love to share a discussion about this.

Kate's Way is also an ebook from Amazon for $5.99 just in case you want to read how I pleased my agent. It can also be ordered in book form: www.createspace.com/3498926

Characters

I'm new to novel writing. My previous books have been self-help. I even considered my memoir about a stroke from herbs to be self-help because I wanted to share all I learned. But in the writing of my story and in describing my friends' participation in all that took place, I got a glimpse of how novels are written.

I tucked the idea that someday I would write an actual novel in the back of my mind and when a long stint of unemployment fell upon me, I sat to write a story. Instead of mapping out a plot, I simply put my fingers to the keyboard and typed.

Then something amazing happened. I watched the characters unfold. Truly, they took over. I've heard other writers speak to this at the many booksignings I have attended, but to sit in the middle of this experience was absolutely fascinating. Two years later I had two novels completed. What a ride!!

I'd love to hear your stories about how your characters unfolded. Did you start with a name, an attitude, a piece of clothing? Did you have a message you wanted them to present to the reader? Did a character start out as a protagonist but moved into being the antagonist?

Baby on Board

Every summer I hear about parents who leave their babies in the car on hot summer days. Not one of these stories ended well. How does a family recover from such pain and tragedy? I've decided to use my pen to help. I have created Baby on Board stickers. They sell for $4.99 and are placed on windshields to remind parents that their little ones are in the back seat. This kind of writing is not a manuscript, nor a memoir, nor a piece of flash fiction. I do hope it becomes a poem parents chant to themselves before shutting the car door and that they read Baby on Board, Baby on Board, Baby on Board.
To order these stickers email me: jan_marquart@yahoo.com or purchase them on my site: www.JanMarquart.com (this is in process). Let's protect our children. For what good are you using your pen?

Query Letters

Do you know how to write a good query letter? Because many authors do not, and in these difficul times, agents have a difficult enough time selling new writers to publishing companies. A good query could stand between the life or death of your manuscript. If you don't appeal to an agent; you'll have almost no chance to reach a publishing company.

Every writer coverly or overtly wants to have a manuscript chosen by a professional agent. Self-published writers choose to self-publish for many reasons and one of them is that the voice of the written word calls out to be heard just as it called out to be written. Self-published writers load up sites like Goodreads, SheWrites and more to get their creative stories and important memoirs out there. And thank goodness for these wonderful sites or self-published authors would be going door to door or standing in grocery store parking lots to sell their books.

We don't write to stifle ourselves. We want to be heard, talked about, make money and more. If we don't write for the love of writing; we write for some other noble reason. Don't we?

The saying goes: you only have a second to make a first impression so we must make it a solid one. There are no do-overs. That being said. Query letters are crucial to getting the attention of an agent. I've read dozens of query letters and it really isn't a surprise that the manuscripts they represent don't lead to an agent's acceptance. I spoke with a reader from a publishing house the other day. She said she reads hundreds of queries every day and knows quickly whether to continue reading or not. I asked her how many queries enticed her to solicit the manuscript. She stated one, maybe two a day. And there was no guarantee that after reading the first chapter or two of a manuscript that it would be accepted for publication.

What makes a good query letter? Several things:
1. Don't be cute. Agents don't have time for personal stories or teasers.
2. Don't waste a word telling an agent you are just as good as Tolstoy or Proust.
3. Don't run on for pages trying to reel them in with creative writing.

So what do you do?
1. Give a quick introduction to your book. Make it factual. Add a quote to demonstrate your writing skills and choose one that reveals something important about the book.
2. State the population that would be interested in your book. For instance, this book is written for the adult woman.
3. At the end, give your bio. Make it simple. Give a list of publications for which you have written, any published books, and awards you have received.

The Writer's Digest has query letter samples in the beginning of it. Read them. Take the advice given.

I cannot emphasize enough how important a good query letter is. Agents get thousands of queries a month. If you start wasting their time with superfluous information your query will be tossed. It's that simple. My agent for Kate's Way loved the book after she received and liked my query but even then it was difficult to make a good sell. Publishing companies are spending less time interested in new writers because they want writers who already sell thousands of books to ensure that they can make money in these tough economic times. Your manuscript has to be edited to perfection too. Publishing companies don't edit like they used to.

So, if you are not submitting your manuscript because you don't have a clue as to how to get started-do some research, study up on it. Don't let these economic times be totally discouraging. New authors are, in fact, being discovered every day.

The book, If You Meet the Buddha on the Road Kill Him, had something like 125 rejections. JK Rowling had 12 rejections. Both books are still selling well and Meet the Buddha was written in the 70's. Open to learn all you can so your fabulous stories and memoir have a chance.

Keep the pen moving,