Natasha Deen's Blog, page 98

Thursday Time: Try a Little Tenderness

Otis Redding said it best, "[sometimes] you gotta try a little tenderness."

Writing is a lonely task and it's a hard road. It's a journey full of dips and valleys, slews and pot holes. And if you focus on those things, it's easy to get discouraged and to give up.

Of the 100 people who start a novel, only 15 will finish theirs. Of that 15, only 3 will get a contract.

This is a job for sissies. It's a job for the strong and the resourceful.

Part of being resourceful is knowing when you have to be ...

Doing the Math

M & Ms currently has a promotion: Collect 8 pouch tops and get 2 movie tickets for Cineplex.

I'm not the best at math, but this is how I see it:

A bag costs around $5-7 (with GST).

Collecting eight means it's 5 X 8 = $40.

The price for general admission to the theatre is $6.50.

Two tickets = $13.00.

So, M & M's wants me to spend $40 to get $13…I think I'm better off just buying the tickets…(of course, I suppose it makes sense if you're going to buy 8 bags anyway, to send in the pouch...

Wednesday Woe: The Responsibility of Artists?

Listen, I know at my ripe age of 387, I'm not so hip or down with teenage angst. Heck, I'm not even part of the target age group for college/university students.  But it still bothers me when I see writers taking the easy road, being literary cowards when it comes to writing for these groups of women.

Enter the heroine and hero who sleep together—mind you, they've been jostling with this relationship for years.  Come here.  Go away. She told him she didn't love him. Then she told him she...

Technique Tuesday: Nominalizations

Nominalizations are a type of passive writing.  They're empty nouns.  How do you know you're nominalizing?

There's no subject in your sentence: The positioning of the statue was good. (The question of course, is who or what positioned the statue?). It's accompanied by the words like a, an, the, his, her, these, several, of, utilization, sadness, taking. The taking of flight 456 was horrible.

It's not that you can't use nominalizations, but make sure you're using them correctly. If...

Monday Mechanics: Commonly Misused Words

Whoops, sorry guys. Forgot today was Monday—kept thinking it was Sunday (long weekends really screw with my internal calendar).

Today, courtesy of http://www.noslang.com/spelling.php, are a list of misused words:

Accept, Except - Accept means to receive, while except means to exclude.

Adverse, Averse - Adverse means difficult, Averse means having a strong feeling against (like an aversion)

Affect, Effect - An Effect is a result, Affect usually means to alter.

Alright - This just isn't a...

Friday Freebies: The Complexity of Kindness

Last night, I sat by the side of the road, watching my friend hold the hand of a drunk, suicidal guy, and I held my cell in my hand, listening to the 911 dispatch and waiting for the ambulance.

And all I could think of was, "When he was five, he didn't plan on growing up to be a drunk." He didn't graduate high school and say to himself, "Yeah, when I'm fifty-five, I want to collapse on the side of the road and have strangers coming to my aide."

Is it kindness or enabling to phone for...

Thursday Time: Keeping Writing Momentum

Loads of people (85%) won't finish the book they start writing.  I feel their pain.  I had a couple of manuscripts biding their time until I found a method that helped me:

Write your first draft to your computer or your book—Don't Tell Anyone about your story. No one.  It'll drive you crazy, but keep your mouth shut until the first draft's completed.

Not talking about my work until I finished, meant I had to finish, and that gave me the energy to keep writing and finish the manuscript.

Darwin Award for Cheaters

Okay, I'm not predisposed to cheating on my spouse (yeah, I'm looking at you Arnold, Tiger, David…), but I gotta say, if I was going to do something as idiotic as that, I sure as sugar would put more thought into the logistics.  Things like:

Thou shalt not fish in thine own pool—so, guys, don't screw with the nanny, the housekeeper, the aide… Thou shalt use protection—because it protects your wife (and considering what a schmuck you're being, she deserves all the protection she can...

Tuesday Technique

We hear all the time, show don't tell, but in reality, sometimes we need to tell.  IF we're being all poetic, artistic, and vibrant about everything, I think we wear-out the reader.

So, when do we show, and when do we tell?

Show: Emotional moments, plot turning moments, climaxes, moments of intense discovery.

Tell: Trivial details, transitional moments, stuff that doesn't really matter, stuff that does matter (but you don't want the reader to realize it just yet).

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