It's Mind

How to Write with Conviction I wrote my first persuasive essay while staring at a cartoon hamburger. While gesturing to the individual ingredients that made up a neon hamburger on the overhead projector, my elementary school teacher explained the “Hamburger Method” of writing a persuasive essay. The Hamburger Method starts with the top bun: the introductory paragraph and main point. Three paragraphs represented by the lettuce, the cheese, and the meat follow the first bun. These three paragraphs each cover a supporting argument to enhance the main point...

continuation of part I... When working on my creative projects, I again use Word if I’m not writing by hand. I really like writing out first drafts of poems by hand. Then I type them up in a Word doc so I can more easily play with line breaks. Then I print out the draft and do edits by hand again. I also prefer to revise and edit my prose by hand. It forces me to slow down and closely consider the changes I’m making. But I do it all in pencil so I can easily make changes to my changes. I spend a...

How a mom of two finds time to write both day and night. Who are you? Dianne Turgeon Richardson. I am a full-time technical/proposal writer for a government services contractor in the Orlando, FL area, and I occasionally take on freelance writing and editing work. In my spare time, I write creatively: poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction/personal essay. What do you write? I started writing when I was seven with my own version of a Babysitters’ Club novel. Today, we’d call it fan fiction, but at the time, I really just thought, “This doesn’t look so hard...

Let me offer you some free advice… Hamilton is an international sensation. Fusing hip-hop and musical theater, Lin-Manuel Miranda created an impressive telling of Alexander Hamilton’s life story. As writers, there’s a lot we can learn from the show, its creation, and its namesake. As Aaron Burr says in Aaron Burr, Sir, let me offer you some free advice: 1. Inspiration Can Strike Anywhere I’m past patiently waiting. I’m passionately smashing every expectation. Every action’s an act of creation! I’m laughing in the face of casualties and sorrow...

If you’ve been writing for a while, you have some old ideas for novels or short stories kicking around. Here’s what to do with them. A while back, the New York Times published an article that talked about if you have a book in you. A small publisher in Michigan conducted a survey of 1,006 Americans and 81% of that group said yes. If I had taken the survey, I’d easily be able to say yes, since I do have some rather old and unimpressive manuscripts under my belt already. Regardless, since you’re reading this, I bet you’d say yes to that survey as well...

This article was completely crowdsourced. I’ve been in a slump lately. Ideas are flowing, that’s not the problem. I have zero desire to sit down and actually write the things. I call this strange feeling The Funk. Feeling stuck, I reached out to a number of writers’ whose work I greatly admire and asked them a simple question: How do I get out of The Funk? These are their gracious answers (published in no particular order with the writer’s permission): Chaz Hutton: Compartmentalize. Sit yourself down for 15 mins at a time...

It’s about more than storyboards. Pre-Production: Treatment A treatment is a detailed summary of the planned story. While scripts are almost entirely dialog, treatments contain little to no dialog and focus on describing major scenes. The treatment describes the setting of the film, the characters, the events, and the conflict. Think of a treatment as a rough draft, most of which will not make it into the final product but allows the writer to explore their vision. Some treatments are a few pages and some are much longer...

Fun fact, this is one of the most Googled questions including the word writing. It’s not the most commonly searched question about writing, but it’s been search enough times for it to rank in the top 500 search terms including the word writing. So, let’s dive in. Is writing more of a physical or mental process? Is it strictly one but not the other? Personally, I don’t think so. Whether you use a computer or good old pen and paper, writing has its elements of being both a physical and mental process...

If you’ve hit a brick wall with your novel, you’ve got to mindfully push yourself to think about new ideas In the beginning, you’re overflowing with ideas. You’re excited, you’re eager to write, and you’re developing your plot and characters famously. Then you keep pushing. You keep working along, eager to finish your novel. Yet at some point, the idea river turns to a trickle and you end up slogging through certain parts of your novel, desperate to connect the dots one way or another. I’m guilty of writing my books out of order...

Changing your soundtrack will help you get back on track. Let’s go from trying everything from foreign music to nature. If you’re stuck and unable to write, you’ve got to switch things up to get your mind moving again. It’s tricky, certainly, but we’re writers and thus we must write. It’s as simple as that. Whether you typically listen to music when you write or not, try a few of these different approaches. Switching up your routine is exactly what you need to get writing again. For the last week, writing has been the most painful labor for me...