killjoypristine

Lucky you! By chance, I pulled two blog spots this week!

Photo credit: PeteJackson

Yesterday I talked about paring down your words to the bone – which is a message, when boiled down, is simply put as- “get to the point.”

Sometimes it’s tough to do that. It can be difficult to know what’s important to you and what’s important to your story.

Like many other writers, I received a boatload of writing books this holiday season (what do you get a writer? A book on writing of course!) I’m in the midst of reading Structuring Your Novel – Essential Keys for Writing an Outstanding Story, by K.M. Weiland and I came across this bit of brilliance:

“A professor of mine once posed it to me this way, thumping the podium for emphasis: “It’s not “World War II began”! It’s “Hitler. Invaded. Poland.””

Character. Action. Setting. That’s what’s important to…

I had a conversation at a party a few years ago with a woman who wanted to be a writer.

Working on that pose.
Photo credit: Beverly Goodwin

“I’m really good,” she told me. “My adviser said that my thesis was one of the best she had ever read.”

“Well that’s a good start,” I replied. “Do you have a blog or a website?”

“Nope.”

“Do you belong to any writers’ groups?”

“No, I don’t have to, I’m already a writer.”

“Have you had anything published?”

“No, but I know I would be a really good writer if I was given an article to write.”

At this point my eyes started to glaze over. I tried one more time.

“Well, if you’ve written something and you’d like me to take a look at it I will.”

She huffed a tiny and polite breath, gave me an off look, and then…

I wish I could recall which of the masters painted this piece. If anyone knows, please let me know in the comments.

Are you fascinated by other people’s writing habits and routines? I am. There’s a great series on Copyblogger called The Writer Files that profiles the writing lives of different business writers and authors. I hardly ever miss an installment.

I’m a sucker for the allure of the writerly way.

Though I love knowing who uses Scrivener vs. who uses a yellow legal pad and a blue felt-tip pen, I think as writers we have a penchant for getting overly caught up in the romance of the craft. We are, most of us, confessed addicts when it comes to new notebooks and writing utensils. We each of us crave a room of our own and aren’t shy about drooling (metaphorically or literally) over another writer’s creative space. We believe…

The Peter Parker/Spider-Man myth—like most in the ever-reshaping and rebooting world of comic book superheroes—has spun a slightly inaccurate but powerful catch-phrase around Peter’s Uncle Ben: “With great power comes great responsibility.”

The original wording—“AND A LEAN, SILENT FIGURE SLOWLY FADES INTO THE GATHERING DARKNESS, AWARE AT LAST THAT IN THIS WORLD, WITH GREAT POWER THERE MUST ALSO COME —  GREAT RESPONSIBILITY!”—was not spoken by Uncle Ben, in fact, but by the narrative’s omniscient narrator penned by Stan Lee:

August 1962, Vol. 1, #15 Amazing Fantasy, Marvel Comics

And for Peter Parker, this truism, however phrased, reveals his ongoing battle with the responsibility inherent in his acquiring super powers, complicated by that occurring without his choice. The world of Peter Parker/Spider-Man has been manipulated in the Marvel Universe (even literally) as an internal battle between that responsibility and Parker’s own personal desires (personified often as love interests such as Gwen…