Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer

by Roy Peter Clark

Listen to poet William Stafford: I believe that the so-called “writing block” is a product of some kind of disproportion between your standards and your performance. . . . One should lower his standards until there is no felt threshold to go over in writing. It’s easy to write. You just shouldn’t have standards that inhibit you from writing. (from Writing the Australian Crawl)

Are people's high expectations prohibiting them from writing?

Web log

Omg please call it a blog

It would not be hard to make a case that the standards of most bloggers are too low, that these digital innovators would make themselves more readable and persuasive by raising their standards—but only at the end of the process.

Interesting he doesn't slam blogging for being unprofessional, but sees blogging as the start of being professional.

The key is to write rather than wait.

Watch your language. Purge your vocabulary (and your thoughts) of negative words and self-talk like procrastination and writer’s block and delay and “this sucks.” Turn your little quirks into something productive. Call it rehearsal or preparation or planning.

I like this positive thinking of purging negative phrases like writers block.

Keep a daybook. Story ideas, key phrases, a startling insight, these can be fleeting. A handy companion, like a notebook, laptop, or daybook, helps you preserve the stimuli and ingredients for new writing.

My day book is Evernote

That’s how smart writers continue to learn, by reading work they admire again and again “to see how it works.”

• Sample—for free—a wide selection of current magazines and journals in bookstores that serve coffee.

Lol he suggests free coffee as a part of reading :-}

Write in the margins.

Amen!

Talk back to the author.

Yes! The author needs to engage with the reader just as the reader needs to engage with the author.

Mark interesting ...

Ask questions of ...

Engage with the text.

Scholars argue that reading is a triangular transaction—a ménage à trois—among author, text, and reader. The author may create the text, argues Louise Rosenblatt, but the reader turns it into a story. So the reader is a writer after all. Voilà!

The same goes with visual art. The viewer creates the meaning. I'd love for the Art Institute to put a comments box beneath each artwork. Comment cards would be in an abundance in the museum. Visitors would walk around with a stack of notecards inspiring people to not just consume the art, but to critically and creatively thnk about the artwork. The notecards in the visitors hand is a ----key, a prod, a device, a mind connector, a instigator, an enabler---- for such thoughts. Interpretations, meanings, new uses, creative works will be deposited for every artwork. No longer are these stale pieces on a wall. These artworks a now keys, starlings points, to unlock a wealth of knowledge and creativity. These cards would be collected and published in print publications, online websites, and even displayed under the artwork or in an area nearby the gallery. Perhaps each artwork could have an e-ink display as part of the caption where a user may flip through the library of thoughts created for each artwork.

coffee

Coffee!

Find an author to admire.

I need to start admiring the craft of authors' writing, not just their ideas.

I identify with this method: save string, gather piles of research, be attentive to when it’s time to write, write earlier than you think you can, let those early drafts drive you to additional research and organization.

Gathering research in paper files and making notes could also be done cilia blogging. The plastic crate with the subject written in a tag would be the same as a topic-focused blog (note not just blog post, but blog website).

This process may appear too long and unproductive, with too much saving, storing, and thinking. The trick for me is to grow several crops at the same time. Fertilize one crop, even as you harvest another. In my office I have several boxes with labels on them:

Peeps think I'm crazy for having multiple blogs, but it's like having multiple research boxes.

Right now, buried in routine, you feel you lack the time and energy to undertake enterprising work. Maybe you have a day job but want to research a novel. Perhaps you feel worn out writing many short items every day for a company newsletter. Where will you find the energy to write in depth? If you rebel against the clutter of paper piled in a box, start an electronic file or a paper file in a manila folder. As you perform your routine work, talk about your special interest. Gather opinions and anecdotes from across the landscape. Scribble them down, one by one, fragment by fragment, until one day you look up and see a monument of persistence, ready to be mounted in the town square.

Collecting your research live on a blog allows others to give feedback by commenting and sharing.

Most doctoral students who finish all their class work, and pass all examinations, and complete research for a dissertation never get a Ph.D. Why? Because they lack the simple discipline required to finish the writing. If they sat each morning for an hour to write a single page—250 words—they could finish a thesis in less than a year.

It takes that much writing to get a PhD?

in the wake of the terrible events of September 11, 2001. In the days following the attacks, people on the street and television interviewers would ask me, “Where was God? How could God let this happen?” I found myself responding, “God’s promise was never that life would be fair. God’s promise was that, when we had to confront the unfairness of life, we would not have to do it alone for He would be with us.”

1. Admit it. You want to write something bigger than you’ve ever written before, but you can’t get your arms around the project. The length or breadth of it intimidates you. Cut up the monster. In a daybook or journal, break it up into its smallest parts: chapters, sections, episodes, vignettes. Without referring to any notes or research materials, write one of these small units. See what happens.

I should have done this when I wanted to write a book about croquet back in the early 00's.

I abhor the image of the writer as a solitary figure.

This requires not just the Golden Rule—treat others the way you want to be treated—but what my old colleague Bill Boyd calls the Platinum Rule: Treat others the way they want to be treated. How does the copyeditor want to be treated? What does the photographer need to do her best work? And what gives the designer satisfaction? The only way to know for sure is to ask.

2. Develop a schedule of conversations with each person on your list. Apply the Platinum Rule. Ask them what they need to do their best work.

Brenda Ueland fights the battle against internal and external criticism with the passion of a warrior princess and the zeal of a suffragette. She titles one chapter, “Why women who do too much housework should neglect it for their writing.” In another chapter, she argues, “Everybody is talented, original and has something important to

say.” She notes that “all people who try to write . . . become anxious, timid, contracted, become perfectionists, so terribly afraid that they may put something down that is not as good as Shakespeare.” That is one loud critical voice, one bug-eyed watcher. And so no wonder you don’t write and put it off month after month, decade after decade. For when you write, if it is to be any good at all, you must feel free,—free and not anxious. The only good teachers for you are those friends who love you, who think you are interesting, or very important, or wonderfully funny; whose attitude is:

“Tell me more. Tell me all you can. I want to understand more about everything you feel and know and all the changes inside and out of you. Let more come out.”

Here’s the alternative: never defend your work; instead, explain what you were trying to accomplish. So: “Jack, I can see that all that peeping in my lead didn’t work for you. I was just trying to find a way for readers to be able to see the impact of this policy. I didn’t want to let the police action get lost in a lot of bureaucratic language.” Such a response is more likely to turn a debate (which the writer will lose) into a conversation (in which the critic might convert from adversary to ally).

This sounds like a defense, not a conversation, the author is still defending his work.