Will you recognize who it is? Check this out…
https://ac01ancaner5nl8k3hpemgihry.hop.clickbank.net
Let us see who your loved one was.
Have You Seen This?
Tag: #creativity
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CREATING YOUR ANTAGONIST
The Art of Chaos created a wonderfully written post on writing your antagonist. I encourage all new writers to check it out by clicking the link provided.
https://www.scribophile.com/academy/a-character-anatomy-seven-places-where-character-meets-story
Happy Writing!
EXCITING NEWS
Hello my faithful followers and future ones! I want to provide you an update on my future book “Small Town Facade”. If you have not yet had the chance to go into my pages and check it out, now is the TIME! I will be providing you updated chapters and they are doosies!
There is more than just a kidnapping going on in this town my friends! AND…..Someone else will go missing!
Don’t cheat yourself out of a great read, especially on these rainy days, mother nature is providing us to get caught up on our reading.
I look forward to reading your comments and also listening to your input on what you think should happen. THIS IS a first draft.. and you WILL find many mistakes.
As a beginning writer, we all look to our fellow writers for insight and communication, and advice on how to make ourselves better writers.
Support your fellow writers. And look for those NEW chapters later today!
A Monument of Love
Voices of the past would like to share with you one of the world’s greatest love stories.
It a great love begain in 1612, when Mumtaz Mahal, a Muslim Persian princess, married Shah Jehan, also known as Prince Khurram. The Prince would ascend to the throne in 1628 and become the 5th Mughal emporer. You will soon learn why this love story is so important to our past as you continue reading.
The queen’s real name was Arjumand Banu. In keeping with the traditions of the Mughals, important women of the royal family were given another name when they married. Mumtaz was the Princes’ second wife but she was considered his ultimate love match. By all accounts, she and the emporer were soul mates. Mumtaz accompanied him throughout all of his travels and his military expeditions, and she was his most trusted political advisor.
As with any legendary love story, tragedy would lurk in their future. Mumtaz would die giving birth to their 14th child. This had affected the emporer so badly that his black hair turned snow white in just a matter of months. He was overcome with grief, and had vowed to keep his beloved wife’s memory alive forever.
The emporer had decided to build her a monument of eternal love. Mumtaz had endeared herself to the people with her kindness, and the emporer’s subjects were inspired to help build the monument.
BECAUSE OF THE LOVE OF ONE MAN FOR HIS WIFE WE NOW HAVE WHAT IS NOW KNOWN AS THE TAJ MAHL.
Thank you for joining me for an inspiring love story to help you enjoy your Sunday.
Just One Cup
I answered CBKCreative.com post # 283 and I wanted to share it with you.
The prompt was: A mom wakes up and makes a cup of coffee, then spends all day trying to drink it.
I padded along the cold, wooden, floor into the kitchem and put a pod into my Kureg machine. Eyes still blurry, I went into the kids room, and rustled the little one’s awake. Once I was sure, or at least I thought I was, I turned on some cartoons and began to make their breakfast. Forgetting that my coffee had brewed, piping hot, steam traveling up and around the machine, I went once again to gather the little one’s for a hot meal before school.
As they gather at the table, wiping away what is left of the sandman’s mysteries and begin picking at their food, the way little one’s do, the telephone rings. Meanwhile, my coffee becomes mildly warm, the steam dissipating, and has yet to be sweetened with cream and sugar the way that I like it.
I answer the phone and listen to a friend who is in desperate need of a favor, as I begin to pack lunches and shush the little one’s , urging the kids to stop bickering, and please finish up and go get ready for school. I passively agree to my friend’s request in an urgent need to see that the children are moving about. My coffee sitting there, chilling, long forgotten. The caramel color of ideas but a mere dream.
While I’m checking that little teeth have been brushed, and styling little heads, I look into the mirror only to find that I, myself, am still a shamble. I sit the kids on the couch and dare them to move, running to my room to change. I put on a pair of shorts, a T-shirt, and pull my hair back. I brush my teeth and run out of the room grabbing my keys, rushing the kids to the car.
When I look back, making sure I turned off the stove, I see that little cup of heaven still sitting there, and a tear falls down my face as I turn, shutting and locking the door behind me.
THE ART FORM OF SHORT STORIES
Voices of the Present dares to bring you a little something different to the table today. I am working on a short story course and I thought (by chance) some of you may just benefit from the course as well.
“A novel is a daily labor of love over a period of years. A novel is job. But a story can be like a mad, lovely visitor, with whom you spend a rather exciting weekend.”
-Lorrie Moore
In writing a short story, you can be bolder, wilder, than you might dare be with a novel where you’re buckled in for the long hual. The brevity of the form of short stories allows for experimentation. You can write lots of short stories, and try lots of different things.
Some authors are famous mainly for their short stories. They include: Alice Munro, Flannery O’Conner, Charles Baxter, Eudora Welty, Raymond Carver, Mary Robison, John Cheever, and Kelly Link. This is only to name a few.
If you are like me, and are interested in publishing your fiction, short stories may be a good way to start. There are many literary magazines that publish short stories. There is a searchable directory here: https://www.pw.org/literarty_magazines
Publishing our short stories in magazines may allow us to build a trach record as a professional author that can also attract the attention of literary agents.
I CAN ONLY ADVISE YOU AS I AM BEING ADVISED IN MY COURSE.
WRITING PROCESS:
As we sit down to write the first draft of our story, it states that it is probably not helpful to think too much about story-writing technique.
The teaches advised not to worry about coming up with a great beginning or writing nice sentences. We will deal with all of that later, during the revision stage.
Our first draft is for generating raw material. To turn off the analytical, judging part of our brains and tap into our imaginations. To try to lose ourselves in the daydream of the story.
I ASK YOU TO JOIN ME AS I WORK THROUGH THE FIRST ASSIGNMENT, AS I HAVE GIVEN IT TO YOU FOR FREE.
ASSIGNMENT:
We are to throw a problem at a character and see what happens.
STEP 1: Choose a name for your character. Then, imagine some more details about this person, such as:
- age
- profession
- physical description
- positive personality traits
- negative personality traits
STEP 2: Come up with three ideas for problems the character might face.
EXAMPLES:
- lost cat
- inappropriate feelings for his mother-in-law
- ghost haunting her attic
STEP 3: Choose one of the problem ideas, and make it as specific as possible. (If your idea is aready specific, you can skip this step)
EXAMPLES:
- If the problem is low self-esteem a more specific version might be: “wants to ask out the barrista at his local coffee house, but can’t believe any woman would ever be interested in him.”
- If the problem is money trouble, a more specific version might be: “lost her job, needs rent money in one week to avoid eviction.”
STEP 4: How might your character react to the problem? Come up with three ideas.
STEP 5: Now, pick one of the ideas from step 4. The character is doing it. Take a few minutes to imagine the scene. Play it like a movie in your head.
STEP 6: Now, you’re going to write one sentence about something in the scene you just imagined. This sentence should either describe a physical action, or else it should be a line of dialogue.
STEP 7: The sentence you wrote for step 6 is going to be the first line of a story. It’s okay if it comes from the middle or the end of a scene! Use it as your starting point, and see what happens.
I ASK YOU TO JOIN ME IN THIS PROCESS AND COME UP WITH IDEAS TOGETHER. WE CAN LEARN THIS PROCESS TOGETHER.
IF YOU ENJOYED THIS POST AND WOULD LIKE TO CONTINUE WORKING THROUGH THESE LESSONS WITH ME LEAVE A COMMENT.
STRUGGLES
Ok guys, I had a week long full of family struggles. I’m sure you all have been through the same. We are a community and we should support one another and not forget to reach out and be there. I found a short story I wanted to share with you.
THE BUTTERFLY
A man found a cocoon of a butterfly.
One day a small opening appeared. He sat and watched the butterfly for several hours as it struggled to force its body through that little hole.
Until it suddenly stoppeeed making progress and looked like it was stuck.
So the man decided to help the butterfly. He took a pair of scissors and snipped off the remaining bit of the cocoon. The butterfly then emerged easily, although it had a swollen body and small, shriveled wings.
The man didn’t think anything of it and say there waiting for the wings to enlarge to support the butterfly. But that didn’t happen. The butterfly spent the rest of its life unable to fly, crawling around with tiny wings and a swollen body.
Despite the kind heart of the man, he didn’t understand that the restricting cocoon and the struggle needed by the butterfly to get itself through the small opening; were God’s way of forcing fluid from the body of the butterfly into its wings to prepare itself for flying once it was out of the cocoon.
MORAL:
Our struggles in life develop our strengths. Without struggles, we never grow and never get stronger.
Creativity
As a creative first time writer I don’t know exactly all the tools that are required to become a better writer or how to become more productive. What I do know is that the first thing that comes to mind is if I set a schedule or pressure myself to become more productive, my creative side decides it would rather be painting or drawing something. The pressure of trying to be more productive, short circuits my writing mojo. It’s better if I don’t throw myself at a project the way wrestlers do when they are battling eachother in the ring. If I do I end up creating page, after page, after page, (you get the drift), of nothing but dissatisfying material that I will probably never even use.
For me, if I’m under a deadline, I work hard to not still be writing two days before that deadline. Speed often generates a lower quality work that will need more rigorous editing, which in turn will eat up the time I thought I had gained.
A quote I recently read:
The hardest time to face is being alone with yourself. It is when you confront a storm of questions in your mind. Remember, it has a power that very few people can handle.
As a creative writer, time to myself generates all kinds of ideas that go into my book idea folder, or a scene that gets jotted down in my notebook I am using for that particular story. It is where some of your most creative inspirations can come from, if you apply the theory to write what you know.
Another quote I read:
If you really want to live up to your potential, you have to stop people pleasing and start setting some goals that scare the daylight out of you.
Writing scares the daylights out me. What if I’m not good enough? What if I do get published and no one reads it? These questions scare me because these questions are what holds me back from doing what I love.
The best advice I can offer anyone in the same boat as myself is, to just write. Let your creativity flow through your fingers and telll the story that you want to read. The more that you are true to yourself, the less you have to worry about whether your story is good enough.
Put yourself out there and let others read what you write and let a writing community give you advice that you can either take or not. You have no idea where, if you are ever stuck, that this community may help you have a break through.
Happy writing today!
Voices of the past, present and future 