Learn. Write. Live.
What do you need to Just Start Writing? Do you need to Write a Book in a Month? Are you ready to Enter the Writing Business?
The box set Inspiration 4 Writers contains these guides for writers. Available now.
Online Distributors Everywhere, in ebook form. https://books2read.com/u/bOJKL9
Paperback and Ebook from Amazon:
Are stories swirling around? Are ideas to share whirling in your mind? Are you on a carousel, all colors and mirrors with unicorns and griffins and dragons to ride?
That carousel of ideas tempts you to step on and enjoy the ride—yet you hesitate to pass the gate and climb up and select a ride. It’s too wondrous, too dreamlike for any reality.
Just Start Writing is designed to convince you to buy that ticket, walk through the gate, spy out the animal you want to ride, and climb on. The carousel is real, not a wonderful dream.
“Wait,” you may say. “I’ve tried before. I’ve read writing guidebooks until my eyes glaze over. I joined a writing group. I scan Pinterest and read the links. Writing just—it looks overwhelming. It can’t be that easy.”
Just pour those swirling ideas onto the page.
And you want this dream, don’t you? Hasn’t the dream of writing persisted? Don’t you keep jotting ideas down? Aren’t you investigating and exploring because you can’t release the dream?
That was me. I’ve wanted to be a published writer since the Dark Ages. A few years ago I became serious about my dream. I set a deadline to publish my first book in 2015—and I succeeded! Since then, I haven’t looked back. As M.A. Lee and my other two pseudonyms, I’ve published 30 titles, mostly fiction.
Now people ask, “How did you start writing?” and “How do you come up with all of those stories?”
Writers ask, “How do I start writing? and “Where do you get your ideas?”
See the difference in those questions? Most people don’t care about the process. Writers want the process so they can apply it to their own carousels of struggles.
That’s our first admission, you and me: Writing can be a struggle. It’s easy, but it’s also a dizzy whirl.
If these questions are yours—How do I start writing? and Where do you get your ideas?—then Just Start Writing is for you.
Celebrate the Annivesary of Discovering Characters!
One of the hardest things to do in writing is to create characters that readers will care about, that will make them have to read on. ~ Noah Luke
Discovering Characters is like investigating a house we want to buy.
No, I’m serious. Characters have an exterior façade that we comment upon as we drive past. Through the windows we catch glimpses of interior lives.
Even in cookie-cutter boxy cliques, characters have individual characteristics, 
just as the suburbia ranch houses have their garden plantings and the urban row houses have their painted doorways. These small touches create individual homes in neighborhoods.
Some characters enjoy the bright city lights. Some are loners, nestled against a national forest. Characters, houses—each have individual personalities. Some are blingie, with the latest décor while others enjoy the comfort of yoga pants and old sneakers.
As writers, we capture these individual characters and save them from the cookie-cutter boxy stereotypes. We delve into interior rooms for glimpses of formative baggage. Finding their backstory is a search through attics and cellars, storage closets and garages. Characters hide their pain and fears, painting them over and adding distracting artwork.
Our job as writers is to find every detail of our characters then use snippets so our readers will see our characters as they drive through our books. We hint at the foundations while opening doors to their plans and purposes.
Discovering Characters is designed to help writers find the exteriors and interiors, public and private. We’ll dig around the foundations and climb to the roof. We’ll explore the open rooms and the storage closets. We’ll peek into rooms inhabited by such characters as diverse as Elizabeth and Darcy, the Iron Man, Aragorn and Frodo, Travis McGee, Medea, Macbeth, and Nanny McPhee.
Five areas comprise this guidebook. Just as characters—and houses—are individual, this info is individual. You won’t need every bit. Dip in and out, skim around. When you reach locked rooms, come back and explore to discover the keys to your characters.
Discovering Characters, with 44,000-plus words, is the second book in the Discovering set, part of the Think like a Pro Writer series for writers new to the game as well as those wanting to up their game.
Click this link to take advantage of special summer savings.
Writer M.A. Lee has been indie-publishing fiction and non-fiction since 2015. She has over 50 books published under her pseudonyms. Visit www.writersinkbooks.com to discover more information.
Having an Epiphany about your writing?
Wanting guidance of all sorts?
The Discovering series offers help with
>> PLOT
>> CHARACTERS
>> SENTENCE CRAFT
>> BRANDING individual books, series, and your author persona
and
NOVEL WRITING.
Discovering Your Novel is a separate guidebook.
Discovering Your Writing bundles characters, plot, branding, and sentence craft into one 8 x 10 book. BEST DEAL HERE!
Check this out for more information.
View the book trailer here!
The paperback of this writing craft bundle is coming soon!
Ebook is currently available.
On The Write Focus, we’re posting a daily podcast from Write a Book in a Month, by Remi Black.Daily check-ins include the project stage progressing word count as well as speculations on writing in general and the writing business in particular.
Click this link to visit TheWriteFocus blog.
1] Daily Word Count
2] Length to Goal
3] Reason for the Goal
Each episode runs less than 10 minutes. Listen briefly every day or hoard up several episodes for when you fix a quick dinner, drive a short commute, or take a brisk walk.
Lessons for writing happen along the way!
Each episode will conclude with the two quotations from professional writers (Hemingway! Heinlein! Atwood! More!!!) that opened and closed the day’s writing sessions.
Bookmark your favorite to come back daily.
Podbean: The Write Focus (podbean.com)
Apple podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-write-focus/id1546738740%20
Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/4fMwknmfJhkJxQvaaLQ3Gm?si=0GFku2PbShWXiDhRp7JaDQ
YouTube Channel Writers Ink Books – YouTube
Join us!
Amazon links are given because it’s easy, and for no other reason.
Purchase Write a Book in a Month at Amazon here. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0848MWXGD
Also mentioned in the first 10 episodes (March 31 to April 5) ~
Patty Jansen’s Self Publishing Unboxed Amazon.com: Self-publishing Unboxed (The Three–year, No-bestseller Plan For Making a Sustainable Living From Your Fiction Book 1) eBook: Jansen, Patty: Kindle Store
Purchase Think/Pro at Amazon here: https://www.amazon.com/Think-like-Pro-Advent-Writers/dp/1983248266/
The Think/Pro planner for writers can be purchased here: https://www.amazon.com/Think-Pro-Planner-M-Lee/dp/1983248673/
Dwight V. Swain’s Techniques of the Selling Writer https://www.amazon.com/Techniques-Selling-Writer-Dwight-Swain/dp/0806111917/
Anne Morrow Lindbergh Gifts from the Sea https://www.amazon.com/Gift-50th-Anniversary-Anne-Morrow-Lindbergh/dp/0679732411/
Marie Kondo The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up https://www.amazon.com/Life-Changing-Magic-Tidying-Decluttering-Organizing/dp/B00RC3ZGN4/
Our focus : the special writing skills that we can learn and practice then apply
in our next manuscript, using a light paintbrush. Revision with Enhancements makes our writing better.
The Enhancement series divides our practice into concepts and schema or ideas and structure or figurative language and rhetorical devices.
We are available from Apple to YouTube, Spotify and Podbean (my favs), Deezer and Podcaster, the rivals iHeart and Tune-in, and too many more to list.
Here are the 4 easiest:
My favorite podcast is Podbean. https://eden5695.podbean.com/
YouTube direct link to the Enhancements playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXi3M_aM-d7Iyaw3xDbgPAQrc1p8CG_Z7
Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-write-focus/id1546738740%20
Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/4fMwknmfJhkJxQvaaLQ3Gm?si=0GFku2PbShWXiDhRp7JaDQhttps://eden5695.podbean.com/e/270-preptober-part-2-13-steps-for-dancing-part-1/?token=7b928fab89a35c042dcbfcdf2e206e4d
Apostrophes ~ no, not the mark of punctuation. It’s the literary term. Know what it is? How about paradox? Sure on that? Chiasmus: my favorite, people enjoy when they see it, but do you know the term when you want to practice it? Can I stump you with these? Polysyndeton. Epistrophe. These are all Enhancements that can help your writing sing on the page. That’s an implied metaphor, BTW.
Enhancements from anastrophes to zeugmas ~ the series starts with this episode.
Similes: easy enough. Metaphors: also easy. Direct Metaphor: just like a simile. Implied Metaphor: now we’re getting complex. Hyperbole: easy again. Great for insults.
How about metonymy and Synecdoche?
“Wait, I know these,” you say. “Let me remember. I haven’t heard them since high school. Metonymy’s when a part of something represents the whole. Oh, that’s synecdoche. I don’t remember metonymy.
Don’t stress. This episode of The Write Focus will help.
Examples from poetry, novels and speeches.
A love of words. A love of what we writers can do with words. We can tell an engrossing story and create characters that we love and that we love to hate. We can make our readers cry and laugh. We can persuade and win points or write an angry tirade for our soapbox of choice. We can play with words, language acrobatics, jumping words through fiery hoops and tumbling and backflips.
And compelling writing at the sentence level starts with comparisons, with figurative language.
Want to improve your sentence craft? This episode can help.
Samples from poetry, novels, and speeches with extended poem excerpts or entireties listed below. (Is that a word?)
What’s an easy and ingenuous way to elevate our writing to the next level? This way works down into the words we place on the page. In character descriptions. Setting development. Plot dynamics. It’s like a secret language that most readers don’t know about even as their subconscious recognizes that secret language. In many respects, this is global, recognized everywhere. If no one spots it—which is always good—this secret gives us writers a satisfactory glow every time we touch it onto the page.
What is this easy and ingenuous way to elevate our writing? Symbols.
Last week was a half-hour episode on Symbolic Numbers. This week we’re all about symbolic colors, and we have our regular length: long enough to fix a quick dinner, drive a short commute, or take a brisk walk.
We explain the 3 primaries red, blue, yellow; the neutrals black, white, grey; the metals silver and gold; and the vivid purple, green, and orange. Can’t leave out brown, the color of old sacrifice.
Join us for ways to enhance your writing by changing a single word.
It’s the Enhancement series, on The Write Focus.
Special Links for this episode
The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost | Poetry Foundation
NC Wyeth 450px-Boyskingarthur-wyeth-excalibur-lady-of-the-lake.jpg (450×574) (summitlighthouse.org)
It’s the 100th episode. Time to Celebrate.
And
Besides symbolic colors and numbers, how else can we add single words and short phrases to enhance our writing? We’re delving into simple touches that we can add to stories and poems and novels AND nonfiction essays and blogs to enrich the text for our readers.
Key words here are simple touches. These carry a tremendous wealth of information.
By having several tools in our writers’ toolbox, we can layer our enhancements in with a light touch. With our previously discussed metaphors and other figures of speech, we dab in a color symbol or three, a number here and there. But we’ve barely explored the writer’s toolbox.
In this episode of The Write Focus, we offer another method to touch a highlight to our writing.
Last episode I had a major oopsie. Almost finished recording three tools (imagery / archetype / allusion) for our Enhancement Writer’s Toolbox, and I realized the recording had approached 40 minutes. Quelle surprise!
Now I stumble over words and pause and take long breaths, but I know—know—that I wouldn’t have enough errors to lose 20 minutes. I can accept reaching 25 minutes. We’ve had a ½ hour episode, part 1 of Symbols (the numbers). But multiple ½ hour and more episodes? No. NO. That defeats The Write Focus’s stated length: time for a quick commute, brisk walk, or fast meal-prep.
The plan to cover imagery, archetype, and allusion in one episode was because all three contain a wealth of information in one word or phrase (a Herculean task).
Therefore, rather than run 40 minutes, I broke that planned episode into two.
Emily Dickinson ~ both versions of “I Never Saw a Moor” https://allpoetry.com/I-Never-Saw-a-Moor
e.e. cummings ~ “i carry your heart” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/49493/i-carry-your-heart-with-mei-carry-it-in
A Relatively Short Episode at 12 minutes
Ever heard a story, and just know, know that something extra is also part of the story? Not hidden bits and pieces but a whole narrative?
A top story is running along, but another story runs underneath the surface, occasionally poking up the periscope for a look around before re-submerging so it can run silent, run deep? (Yep, that’s an allusion to the famous submarine movie.)
That submerged story, it’s an allegory, and the allegory occurs more often than we would imagine.
How do we craft our allegories? This episode can help.
Mystical wanderer. Dark desert highway. A ragged prince who turns into a toad. The beast of fame that cannot be killed.
Recognize these images? Yep, it’s Carole King’s “Tapestry”, a riddling allegory that questions more than it answers, and “Hotel California” by the Eagers, another allegory of Fame and the goddess Fortuna.
“Hotel California” has a classical music connection to Carl Orff’s “O, Fortuna.” Now that’s a surprise.
These chart-topping songs are the focus for Allegories, part 2. Come along as we explore the songs and their allegories and discover how to craft an allegory in our own writing.
Carole King – Tapestry Lyrics | AZLyrics.com
Carole King performing “Tapestry” with images https://youtu.be/LUWIwhhxyDM
Eagles – Hotel California Lyrics | AZLyrics.com
Eagles’ live performance https://youtu.be/l4Cb9Hj1WZM
Lyrics to O Fortuna | Latin and English (had2know.org)
Andre Rieu conducting a performance of “O Fortuna” André Rieu – O Fortuna (Carmina Burana – Carl Orff) – Bing video
“Always in motion is the future.”
Do you recognize that quotation? You may be able to because the words are out of natural order.
It’s Yoda!
No, we’re not going to talk about Yoda and the Star Wars franchise or laser swords.
Our focus for this episode is Words Out of Natural Order. That happens more often than we writers realize.
Inversion, switching up the natural order of words, is more than Yoda and a Zen-like character device that became a gimmick.
It’s recognizable, though, isn’t it?
How can we use Inversion to create our own writing—without becoming a gimmick? This episode of The Write Focus can help.
For CHIASTIC STRUCTURE, which is too involved to hear (You have to SEE it), visit this link and look for the Chiastic Structure of the Iliad books.
“Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow / Creeps in this petty pace from day to day.”
Why are we quoting the famous Macbeth speech by Shakespeare? It has two separate types of repetition. The 1st type is simple repetition with two instances. The 2nd type is a repetition of opening sounds.
In this episode we’re also going to talk about a third clever type of repetition.
Three types of repetition. Did you know repeating words is a proliferate writing technique? Like Guppies, words clone each other. Join our presentation of three simple ways to capture reader interest and curiosity.
Joni Mitchell – Both Sides Now Lyrics | AZLyrics.com
Judy Collins sings BSN with Arthur Fiedler’s Boston Pops as accompaniment
Repetition. We focused on simple repetition in the previous episode, from the riding, riding, riding of “The Highwayman” up to the old inn door to the clever use of incremental repetition, with “I’ve looked at cloud … and love … and life” in Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now”, and to alliteration of “streaming rain, blinding sleet, stoned by hail, freezes the frost and fall the snow” from an Old English poem.
This time we look at the intricate types of repetition, to and fro, fast and slow, front and back, complicated but powerful. It’s Repetition, part 2.
Opposites / Dichotomies are the foundation for all ideas. The positive / negative synergy develops concepts for finance and commerce, business and manufacturing, science and tech, fiction and nonfiction, art static and art dramatic.
The world also has its triads and quarternaries ~ past / present / future and earth / air / water / fire.
We have many more dichotomies than triads and quarternaries and even symbiotic dualities (yin / yang). When the opposition is presented “for effect”, then we have an Enhancement.
“I always lie.” There’s a conundrum for you. If we tell people that we’re lying—are we lying or telling the truth? Yes? No? Difficult to tell, isn’t it?
The opposites in this week’s episode offers 3 types that can quickly entangle us. If you’ve ever been mixed up about paradox, irony, or satire, this episode can help.
LINK to “Counting Stars” lyrics
We’re going from A to Z this week, as we discuss Sequences, the last of the Enhancement series.
Climbing higher and higher = foothills, ridges, mountains.
Getting worse and worse = aged, ancient, decrepit.
Listen up to discover ways to sequence, progress / regress, ascend / descend, and create clever jumps in meaning.
Discovering Sentence Craft by M.A. Lee
2 Online Compendium References for Rhetorical and Figurative Devices:
Productivity from WMG Publishing and Dean Wesley Smith
Many writers — veterans included — think Indie Publishing is hard because of Formatting the Manuscript.
I tell you now, Formatting is EASY compared to writing character dynamics and events that surprise the reader.
If you’ve ever wondered about formatting, MS basics and keyboard shortcuts, the essential documents of Front and Back Matter, and the essential Masterbook, time to stop wondering and start doing.
You can do it. I did it. Let’s celebrate Indie Publishing together.
It’s the last Foundations week for Discovering Your Novel, the summer series for The Write Focus.
