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My No-BS Guide to Confidence

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f I had to pinpoint one trait that all successful freelancers have in common, can you guess what it’d be?

It’s not intelligence… Or experience… Or a high degree of skill… Or even education.

The one trait I’m talking about is: Confidence.

It’s incredibly simple: If you think you can’t do something — you can’t.

Without confidence, you may be able to make some headway, but it’s like paddling upstream…  At best you end up working too hard to achieve too little — and at worst you end up exhausting yourself and going backwards.

Ultimately, no amount of effort or skill can fully compensate for not believing in yourself. Your subconscious mind — the director of the “movie” you call life — will find ways to help you sabotage yourself and turn those deeply held negative beliefs into reality.

This is what Carl Jung meant when he said, “Until you take what’s in your subconscious, and make it conscious, it will rule your life, and you will call it ‘fate.’”

As someone who’s been on both sides of the fence — having gone from having very little confidence, to understanding how to feel confident in many situations (even if that confidence sometimes seems “unwarranted”) — I’m in a unique position to give you a good insider’s perspective that might help you turn things around.

1. You don’t need to reprogram yourself

A lot of people put time and energy into trying to “reprogram” their brain to be more confident.

But you don’t need to do that.

You just need to deprogram it.

You came into this world pre-equipped with an enormous amount of confidence. You don’t need to add any — you just need to remove the mental junk that’s currently blocking it.

This is great news! Instead of rewriting the code in your brain, you just need to delete some, which is infinitely easier.

Think of when you first learned to walk…

You had no “proof” you’d be successful.

In fact most of the evidence pointed in the opposite direction of success — you’d spent weeks or months crawling on your hands and knees, even falling right on your ass.

Did you beat yourself up about it?

Did you hire a coach? Do affirmations?

Did you think about quitting because it wouldn’t work?

Obviously you didn’t do any of those things. You kept on smiling and having a good time because you knew it was going to work.

As you got older, the people around you helped condition you to be less and less confident over time through criticism, presenting their opinions as “facts” you needed to abide by, and even pushing their preferences onto you as the “right” way to be, do, or live.

In spite of everything that’s gotten in the way before now, it’s still relatively easy to get your inborn confidence back any time you want to. You can probably even do it fairly quickly if you’re focused about it.

You just need to erase, and from now on tune out, the critical noise that started blocking it in the first place.

2. Choose to be responsible for your own confidence

Let’s start off with a simple decision you can choose right now, this minute.

It’s just a choice — I’m not asking you to suddenly be confident, or even to picture yourself as confident — only to decide that you are going to take responsibility for your own confidence.

Allowing your confidence to be dictated by other people’s behavior towards you, or by the circumstances and events that happen around you, ultimately leads to misery (usually sooner than later).

That’s because you have no control over those things — you’re reduced to being a helpless passenger along for the ride (which usually doesn’t go where you want it to).

If you want strong, lasting confidence, you need to decide that it will come from you, and only you.

That way, it’s no longer at the mercy of what’s going on around you. You are always in control of your own fate.

It doesn’t matter if you don’t know what to do to get your confidence up and running again just yet. All you need to do right now is take responsibility for it. By doing so, you’re giving yourself a solid foundation to build on.

3. Realize confidence (or lack of it) comes from your thoughts

People sometimes say to me, “But Danny, how can I be confident when my boss is a jerk? Or when my spouse yells at me right before a big presentation? What then?”

If you look for reasons to not be confident, you will always find them.

But the opposite is also true: If you seek out evidence of your own awesomeness and personal power — regardless of what others are doing — then that is what you’ll find.

For example, imagine if, after being yelled at by your spouse right before a big presentation, you decided that their lashing out was just a result of them having a stressful week at work and a few sleepless nights.

In other words, it had nothing whatsoever to do with you.

Notice how nothing has changed, other than your own thoughts.

Yet if you consistently practice reframing techniques in the way I just showed you, over time you’ll notice that instead of taking other people’s behavior personally and letting it decimate your confidence, you become impervious to it and let it all roll right off your back.

If this seems like some sort of mind trick, or intellectual dishonesty, consider this: I promise you that there is nothing more dishonest — and no bigger piece of mental trickery — than letting someone else’s mistreatment of you make you feel bad about yourself.

4. Give yourself more credit

There’s a reason I’m always telling people “my story” — that I have no college degree, held menial dead-end jobs until I was 34, and so on: If I could be a total screw up for decades and still turn it all around, why not YOU?

But even though I tell these stories all the time, people still email me in disbelief, arguing that I must have had experience, must be exceptionally organized, must have been born with a high IQ, etc — even though none of those things are true.

This is a weird thing that humans do. We project advantages and amazing qualities onto people we see as “experts,” even when we have no idea if those observations are real or imagined. Psychologists even have a name for this behavior: the halo effect.

The truth is, even the smartest people know surprisingly little.

For example, I once watched two Harvard law professors arguing about whether something was illegal.

Just think about that! Two of the smartest legal minds in the world — from the same Ivy League school, no less — holding literally opposite views on whether something is legal or against the law.

Do you realize what that means? It means that the world’s dumbest person can choose either side of that debate, and still have the exact same chance of being right as both of the two legal geniuses who are arguing about it!

The line between average and great is much, much thinner than you think. It’s mostly just a choice you make.

5. Be nice to yourself

Imagine having one or more employees working under you… Would you expect them to do amazing work if you were verbally beating them up all the time?

Not only would they be miserable, and produce poor work — they’d probably walk out on you.

Yet we beat ourselves up all the time … and then we wonder why we’re not getting to where we want to be in our careers, our fitness, our relationships, or our finances.

The key to stopping this self-defeating behavior is to realize that doing it doesn’t just feel bad… it’s also standing in your way of making progress.

It might seem like you can beat yourself into being better, but I’ve never found that to work, especially in the long term.

You can absolutely succeed regardless of what others do to you, but you cannot succeed without YOU in your own corner. If you want to be confident and successful, constant self-criticism is a behavior you cannot afford to keep.

6. Starve what you want to die

Sometimes a negative thought pattern has picked up so much momentum over time that it’s hard to stop.

It’s a lot like putting the brakes on a train that’s been moving full-steam ahead for a while — it takes some time and effort to bring it to a full halt.

Similarly, if you’ve been beating yourself up about something for months or years, it’s hard to change your thoughts about it on a dime.

If you find yourself in that kind of situation, you can at least distract yourself from the negative mental loop

In other words, while you may not be able to change the negative thought into a positive one right away, you can at least “starve” it by not giving it as much attention.

You can do that by adjusting your thoughts about it a little at a time, or even distracting yourself from it completely.

For example, if you’ve been struggling to lose weight, you can adjust your mental story from “I’ll never lose weight” to “Maybe I’ve just been too down on myself — I think I can make this work if I start small and build up my confidence. This week I’ll take the stairs instead of the elevator…”

There’s also nothing wrong with avoiding the mirror or the scale for a while, if those things only seem to lead to negative thoughts that keep you programmed for failure.

Over time, that negative thought pattern will become weaker and weaker, and you’ll be able to notice a negative thought and change it to a positive one with very little effort. And if you keep practicing that habit, you can even eliminate the negativity completely.

7. Don’t listen to “realists”

People love to try to convince you you can’t do something because it’s not “realistic.”

But have you ever thought about what reality actually is?

The word “reality” is just a way of describing what has been true up until this point.

It says little — or nothing — about the future.

By definition, growing and improving means that you’re doing something you’ve either never done before, or that no one else has ever done before.

If everyone listened to the “realists” about what’s possible, everything would always stay the same.

We probably wouldn’t even be here since the world as we know it likely would not have developed. Nothing good in this world was created by a “realist.”

Steve Jobs explained this very well in a short video that completely changed my life when I watched it for the first time about 7 years ago — I suggest you check it out too:

8. What you say is as important as — and maybe more important than — what you do

This is controversial, but in my experience it’s absolutely true.

In the Netflix special Miracle, Derren Brown coaches a woman through her first time eating glass.

His advice to her would shock most people: He spent a few seconds on the technical instructions of how to chew up the glass — and the rest of the time focusing on positive self-talk.

This scene illustrates a fascinating phenomenon: When you say something to yourself (whether out loud, or even in your thoughts), your subconscious mind can take it as a sort of “command.”

If the glass-eater had “prepared” by telling herself it would hurt, do you know what would have happened? It would have hurt.

Whenever, and I mean whenever I get an email from someone who has repeatedly failed at freelancing, despite having “tried everything,” I always look for — and virtually always find — sentences like this within their email:

“I’m very frustrated…”

“I’m so overwhelmed…”

“It seems like nothing works for me…”

“I can’t make it work…”

Feeling this way is understandable. And everyone needs to vent sometimes.

But I’m telling you right now that talking this way repeatedly for prolonged periods of time — whether out loud to others or in your own head — is the same as asking for more failure.

I know it doesn’t feel that way, but that’s what’s happening.

You need — need — to find a way to start to turn those thoughts around.

I’m not suggesting you outright lie to yourself, since pure denial can backfire.

For example, waking up one morning and saying to yourself “My confidence is soaring, I’m sure I’ll get a promotion today!” — after years of telling yourself you’re the worst employee at the company — probably won’t work.

Your subconscious mind is a tricky thing, and it can reject ideas that are too far off from what you’ve been telling it for so long.

However, you can start to soften these thoughts, and over time you can replace them completely.

It’s a lot like taking a blow torch to metal: First you have to heat the metal up, then you can bend it, and eventually you can mold it into whatever you want it to be.

I’ll leave you with a few examples of how you might start to soften your thought pattern:

“This has worked for others. Maybe it can work for me too.”

“I can find a way to do it.”

“I’m worthy of success and I deserve good things to happen in my life.”

“I’m sure there’s a better way to do things I haven’t thought of yet. I’ll read some blogs to see what I might be missing.”

“Maybe my negative attitude has been affecting me more than I realize. A good night’s sleep can help me feel more confident in the morning.”

These are just a few examples off the top of my head — you can use whatever thoughts feel good to you.

More importantly, do you feel the relief in those statements?

That relief is your original self-confidence — the same amazing confidence you were born with — starting to reset to its original factory setting.

If you re-create this confident state of mind by making a habit out of being nice to yourself, before you know it you will feel damn near invincible.

By Danny Margulies

Source: freelancetowin.com

Visit us at First Edition Design Publishing

25 Story Starters for Writing Fiction

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Are you a storyteller? Do you want to be a storyteller?

If you’re interested in writing flash fiction, short stories, or novels, then you’re going to need lots of ideas, especially if you want to write professionally.

Some of us have too many ideas; others don’t have enough ideas. Maybe we have a solid idea for a story, but something’s missing. We need to spice it up by adding subplots or characters. Maybe the setting or story world isn’t rich enough. Perhaps your story lacks theme.

Story starters are a great way to get ideas for writing stories, but they can also be used to generate ideas for improving stories that are already in the works.

Story Starters

Today, I’d like to share twenty-five story starters. You can use these story starters to inspire a new story or to breathe new life into a story you’re already working on. Use them to write whatever you want — flash fiction, short stories, or a novel.

  1. We all know about conspiracy theorists. They believe the moon landing was a farce. Come up with a new conspiracy that theorists rally around. The public thinks they’re crazy, but are they?
  2. The world is run by politicians, but sometimes, ordinary people get caught up in political drama and intrigue. What happens when a bike messenger, a restaurant server, and a daycare teacher get unwillingly drawn into the affairs of state?
  3. Technology has developed at a splitting speed over the past century. Before we know it, every house will be equipped with a robot and a virtual reality system. But what happens when a couple of kids venture into the wrong area of the virtual reality and get stuck there?
  4. Witnesses to crimes can find themselves in grave danger, which is why there are protection programs for such persons. But what if the witness decided to join forces with the prime suspect? What does the witness get in exchange for false testimony that acquits a terrible criminal?
  5. Take a look at the world we live in. In some places, life is pretty good. But in other places, life is difficult for most people, especially where there’s a lot of inequality, poverty, and oppression. What if an oppressive culture used war or the media to spread itself around the globe? What would that look like, and would we ever overcome it?
  6. After a family moves into a new house, one of the kids looks for a hiding place to stash some secret belongings and discovers a panel at the back of a closet. Assuming it leads to the attic, the kid removes the panel only to find a window that looks into a world populated with magic and monsters.
  7. Two politicians are in a heated race to win a critical election (governor, president, etc.) and through negative campaigning have become arch enemies. But their kids go to the same college and have fallen in love. What happens when the relationship is revealed in the media?
  8. All the evidence in a brutal, premeditated murder points to one primary suspect, including footage from security cameras. The problem is that there’s no motive, and the alleged killer insists on his or her innocence. Who committed this heinous crime?
  9. While working on a more fuel-efficient space shuttle that will transport tourists to and from the moon, one engineer stumbles into a way to make faster-than-light (FTL) engines a reality.
  10. A stranger comes to a small town that hasn’t seen a new resident since the town’s youngest child was born sixteen years ago. The stranger rarely leaves his or her formerly abandoned home except to buy groceries and strange supplies from the local home improvement store, and the townspeople think something’s not right.
  11. Step back in time hundreds — or perhaps thousands — of years. The leader of a small tribe is butting heads with the tribe’s healer. Meanwhile, a powerful neighboring tribe is infiltrating their territory.
  12. Inspired by Jurassic Park, a biological engineer is committed to recreating dinosaurs. While researching ancient dinosaurs, the scientist stumbles into evidence that fire-breathing dragons once soared over the land and decides to recreate those instead.
  13. While representing an accused killer, the attorney falls in love with the client, partially because he or she believes the accused is innocent.
  14. Teenagers love to rebel and experiment. But what happens when one teenager’s antics end up on video and go viral? Bullying and humiliation ensue.
  15. After working hard for decades, the main character has finally managed to retire and purchase a condo on a small, tropical island, where he or she intends to write a novel. But strange things start happening — things go missing, there are creepy noises, and our character feels like he or she is constantly being watched.
  16. For centuries, humans have wondered if we are alone in the universe. The answer finally comes when aliens arrive. But it’s a time when tensions are high between the nations of Earth. Will humanity unite, or will some nations form an alliance with the aliens?
  17. A young couple believes their fairy tale has finally come true and they will live happily ever after. They are recently married, have good jobs, just bought a home, and there’s a baby on the way. But the fairy tale seems to unravel as secrets and lies begin to surface.
  18. When a foreign operative embedded in the CIA disappears with loads of government secrets, all hell breaks loose. But is this operative truly a foreign spy, or is it a citizen intent on blowing the cover off of government corruption?
  19. A mid-sized tourist plane crashes on a remote deserted island, killing all but a handful of survivors. Rescue is on the way until a devastating storm arises, barring access to the island. Now these urbanites must learn to live off the land and with each other.
  20. After serving a ten-year sentence for a heinous crime she didn’t commit, a former college student gets a new identity and becomes a private investigator intent on exonerating herself.
  21. A group of teenagers spends a summer day on a scavenger hunt in the woods just outside of town. When they reconvene to name the winner of the hunt, one of them doesn’t show up and cannot be found.
  22. When a kid finds out both parents are out of work and the family might have to move in with the grandparents, he or she decides to solve the problem by starting the modern version of a lemonade stand — an online enterprise.
  23. One couple’s nasty divorce leaves their two young children in the custody of their grandparents. Will the couple put aside their differences to get their children back?
  24. Dreams come true when a foster child is finally adopted. But the child’s new family is filled with secrets, and he or she begins to suspect that it wasn’t a chance adoption after all.
  25. The main character receives a strange inheritance from an unknown deceased relative: a key ring with no keys on it. Unusual events occur whenever the key ring is present.

Have you ever used story starters or writing prompts? Where do you find inspiration for writing fiction? Share your thoughts and experiences by leaving a comment, and keep writing.

By Melissa Donovan

Source: writingforward.com

Visit us at First Edition Design Publishing

Curiosity and Creativity for Writers

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Today’s post is an excerpt from my book, Ready, Set, Write: A Guide to Creative Writing, which takes you on a tour through the world of creative writing while offering writing ideas and inspiration. This is from chapter thirty-one, “Curiosity and Creativity.” Let’s find out how fostering curiosity can increase your creativity. Enjoy!

Curiosity and Creativity

Even though inspiration abounds all around us, we writers sometimes get stumped. We search for essay topics, plot ideas, and interesting language for our poems. Unfortunately, our searches don’t always yield desirable results.

But by fostering curiosity, we can ensure a constant stream of creativity. Some of the best writing ideas come from asking simple questions: Who? What? Where? When? Why? How?

Most writers are curious by nature. We look at the world around us and wonder at it. Who are these people? What are we all doing here? Where are we heading? Why do we do the things we do? How will we move forward?

Remember how curious you were as a child? Everything you encountered spawned a series of questions because you were trying to learn and understand the world around you. Bring that childlike curiosity back, and you’ll always have a full supply of inspiration.

It doesn’t matter what form your writing takes or what genre you’re writing in. By fostering curiosity, you can create a fountain of ideas.

Below are some questions you can use to get inspired. Mix them up, change them around, and come up with your own list of questions:

Who

  • Who is this about?
  • Who can help?
  • Who is standing in the way?
  • Who am I?

What

  • What is the goal?
  • What are the stakes?
  • What is the underlying message?
  • What if…?

Where

  • Where did it all begin?
  • Where have we been?
  • Where should we go?
  • Where does it end?

When

  • When did it start?
  • When did things change?
  • When will things improve?
  • When will it be too late?

Why

  • Why did they do it?
  • Why does it matter?
  • Why take a risk?
  • Why are we here?

How

  • How did this happen?
  • How does this make people feel?
  • How does this sound?
  • How will this get resolved?

If you can keep your curiosity on fire and continue coming up with new questions, you’ll find that you can write your way into answers and constantly discover new writing ideas along the way.

As you work through your writing projects, you can also use questions to help you overcome hurdles that are preventing you from crossing the finish line. Not sure how to move a plot forward? Start asking questions. Don’t know how to begin your next poem? Ask questions. Want to write a piece that is informative and entertaining? Ask away.

Throughout time, many great thinkers have used questions to prompt creative and critical thinking. Sometimes, one question will lead to the next, and you’ll end up with more ideas than you thought possible. As long as you keep your curiosity well oiled and let those questions flow, you’ll never be at a loss for inspiration.

Activity

Open one of your writing projects, and make a list of at least twenty questions that get to the heart of your project. Be sure to include a mix of who, what, where, when, why, and how.

As an alternative, try using any of the questions from this chapter as writing prompts. Simply place a question at the top of a page, and then start writing in response to the question.

Do you have any favorite techniques for developing new writing ideas? Are there any questions you ask to get through a project or to come up with new project ideas? What are you curious about? Share your thoughts and ideas by leaving a comment.

By Melissa Donovan

Source: writingforward.com

Visit us at First Edition Design Publishing

Choosing Just the Right Words — Guest: Kathy Steinemann

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While I’m recovering from my latest surgery this week, I’m grateful for another guest blog today. Kathy Steinemann is here to talk about word choice, but not in the way we usually think of the issue.

We often talk about word choice in reference to our voice, but choosing the right word can be complex. We need to consider our characters’ voices, which can conflict with our voice, and sometimes we might want to break grammar rules for the sake of voice. In other words, knowing how to apply “the rules” with voice and word choice can require a tricky balance.

The problem increases if we unintentionally choose the wrong word from our brain, whether due to a lack of knowledge or just simple typos. (And typos can get the best of us no matter our knowledge level, so we can’t give ourselves a pass on the issue Kathy discusses in this post.)

Readers won’t trust that we’re breaking grammar rules on purpose if our whole story is riddled with errors. To make a statement with purposeful errors—such as for the sake of a character’s voice—readers have to recognize that we don’t make those mistakes accidentally.

Choosing just the right words requires us to know English usage and grammar rules, consider author and character voice, avoid typos, and of course, possess a large vocabulary so we can pick the best word from our brain. Kathy’s fun post today challenges us to find all the wrong words in an excerpt and then points out why we might choose them anyway.

Please welcome Kathy Steinemann! *smile*

*****

Reader Gripe:
Can You Guess What It Is?

By Kathy Steinemann

~~~~~

W A R N I N G

The following article contains explicit errors.

Reader discretion is advised.

If you continue past this point, your eyes might recover with rest, application of cold compresses, and avoidance of repeat exposure.

Proceed at your own risk.

~~~~~

You’ll see an excerpt below, an excerpt that would frustrate readers. In fact, they might abandon a book containing similar narrative, and never purchase anything else written by an author who is guilty of this no-no.

Introduction to Excerpt:

The following paragraphs are based on sentences and phrases I’ve bookmarked in various novels over the years. Can you find all the errors?

After reading, consider the following questions:

  • What is the problem?
  • How many occurrences are there?
  • How would you correct the mistakes?

Excerpt:

(Edited to Preserve Anonymity of Writers)

Pauline stared at the note, curiosity peaked. She opened it and read the message: “Just one weak. Remember the place? I’ll meat you their. Don’t forget the money. I may seam nice, but just because I haven’t killed anyone yet doesn’t mean you won’t be the first.”

Her stomach serged. Bile rows into her throat. The next thing she new, she was doubled over the toilet and wretching up her breakfast.

After several minutes, she stood and liened against the wall. She was still realing and could feel the vanes in her neck throbbing in thyme with her pulse. The sealing seamed like it was pressing on her head.

Ugh. Her breath wreaked, and all the vomiting had aggravated her rye neck. She needed her left shoulder as she looked into the mirror. Her reflection looked pail—to pail. How am I going to get threw this?

Did You Find All the Incorrect Homophones?

Homophone: a type of homonym; words that sound alike but have different meanings and spellings.

Go back and count them.

…

You should have found twenty-two. If you didn’t, read it again.

Still stymied?

Read this edited version (mistakes underlined).

Pauline stared at the note, curiosity peaked. She opened it and read the message: “Just one weak. Remember the place? I’ll meat you their. Don’t forget the money. I may seam nice, but just because I haven’t killed anyone yet doesn’t mean you won’t be the first.”

Her stomach serged. Bile rows into her throat. The next thing she new, she was doubled over the toilet and wretching up her breakfast.

After several minutes, she stood and liened against the wall. She was still realing and could feel the vanes in her neck throbbing in thyme with her pulse. The sealing seamed like it was pressing on her head.

Ugh. Her breath wreaked, and all the vomiting had aggravated her rye neck. She needed her left shoulder as she looked into the mirror. Her reflection looked pail—to pail. How am I going to get threw this?

Here’s One Solution

Pauline stared at the note, curiosity piqued. She opened it and read the message: “Just one week. Remember the place? I’ll meet you there. Don’t forget the money. I may seem nice, but just because I haven’t killed anyone yet doesn’t mean you won’t be the first.”

Her stomach surged. Bile rose into her throat. The next thing she knew, she was doubled over the toilet and retching up her breakfast.

After several minutes, she stood and leaned against the wall. She was still reeling and could feel the veins in her neck throbbing in time with her pulse. The ceiling seemed like it was pressing on her head.

Ugh. Her breath reeked, and all the vomiting had aggravated her wry neck. She kneaded her left shoulder as she looked into the mirror. Her reflection looked pale—too pale. How am I going to get through this?

But Wait; There’s More!

Dialogue, written notes, texts, and emails should emulate the way real people speak and write. The blackmailer might be uneducated—or an educated person trying to seem uneducated. In either case, the note would contain errors.

In fact, it would likely contain more errors than those in the original excerpt.

Another Rendition of the Note:

“Just one weak, remember the place? I’ll meat you their, don’t forget the money. I may seam nice but just because I ain’t killed no one yet don’t mean you wouldn’t be the first.”

It’s time for detective work.

The blackmailer, although clever enough to:

  • mix up homophones,
  • include a couple of comma splices, and
  • drop in a double negative

couldn’t resist proper usage of apostrophes. A detective might consider this a clue that the writer is well-versed in spelling and grammar.

Takeaway:

Research every word you’re unsure of. Readers and editors will lose patience if they have to repeatedly stop and reread sentences.

P.S.

Here are the contextual definitions of the incorrect homophones and their replacements.

  • Peaked [adj.]: pointed, having a peak
  • Piqued [adj.]: aroused, stimulated [And spell it right: piqued, not picqued, which is obsolete.]
  • Weak [adj.]: frail, feeble
  • Week [noun]: seven days
  • Meat [noun]: the flesh of an animal used as food
  • Meet [verb]: to encounter, make contact with
  • Their [pron.]: possessive case of they
  • There [adv.]: in or at that place
  • Seam (1) [noun]: the stitched area that joins two pieces of fabric or other material
  • Seam (2) [verb]: to join with a seam
  • Seem [verb]: to give the impression of
  • Serge [noun]: a type of fabric
  • Surge [verb]: to move suddenly and forcefully upward or forward
  • Rows [noun]: plural form of row: a line of people or things
  • Rose [verb]: past tense of rise: to come or go up
  • New [adj.]: discovered or created recently or for the first time
  • Knew [verb]: past tense of know: to realize, comprehend
  • Wretch [noun]: a person who is unfortunate, despicable, or unhappy
  • Retch [verb]: to vomit, gag, puke
  • Liened [verb]: past tense of lien: to make a claim against property (until a debt or loan is repaid)
  • Leaned [verb]: past tense of lean: to move into a sloping position
  • Real [adj.]: actual, authentic, genuine
  • Reel [verb]: to lurch, stagger, sway
  • Vanes [noun, plural]: short for weathervanes
  • Veins [noun, plural]: the conduits that transport blood in one’s body
  • Thyme [noun]: an aromatic herb used for seasoning
  • Time [noun]: tempo
  • Sealing [verb]: present continuous tense of seal: to fasten, secure, shut
  • Ceiling [noun]: the top interior surface of a room, compartment, cell, etc.
  • Wreak [verb]: to inflict great harm or damage
  • Reek [verb]: to stink
  • Rye [noun]: a grain used for cereal, flour, or some types of whiskey
  • Wry [adj.]: twisted or distorted
  • Need [verb]: to require something essential or important
  • Knead [verb]: to massage or squeeze with the hands
  • Pail [noun]: bucket
  • Pale [adj.]: lacking color, ashen
  • To [prep.]: toward
  • Too [adv.]: excessively, very
  • Threw [verb]: past tense of throw: to toss, pitch, heave
  • Through [adv.]: from first to last or beginning to end

 

By Kathy Steinemann

Source: jamigold.com

Visit us at First Edition Design Publishing

Good Grammar 101: The Essential Guide

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Good Grammar might seem old fashioned in a day and age when LOL shows up in newspapers, when best-selling authors regularly splice their commas, and where your Facebook wall is filled with seventy-two misused ellipses.

However, agents and editors still care about grammar, and they will reject you if you show you don’t understand grammar rules.

With this Grammar Guide, you will have the chance to use The Write Practice’s model of deliberate practice to improve your grammar skills in less time.

10 Steps to Keep Your Editor From Killing You

Good grammar is like good hygiene.

Often, the last person to know why people are complaining about the dead dog in the room is the person who stinks.

Fortunately, we’ve created this course of ten lessons to help you impress your readers and editors with how good you smell… oops, I mean spell.

To show you how much we care, we’re throwing in a bonus lesson, The Case Against Twilight (or why Stephenie Meyer needs to hire a copy editor).

Grammar Rules

In this tutorial, we will go over some of the most important (and most often neglected) grammar rules in a way that’s both fun and practical. Remember: good grammar is hot!

Grammar Exercises

In every lesson, you will be challenged with grammar exercises to help you cement what you’ve just learned into your daily practice.

Source: thewritepractice.com

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The Bi-Cultural Writer

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I’ve spent my life living between India and the U.S.A. One blog post can’t begin to describe the challenges, privileges, lows, and highs of it all. I can, however, talk about being a bi-cultural writer and writing in various global dialects through one language. I am a weird kind of third-culture kid. I was born in the U.S and finished elementary school there. Then I did middle and high school in India and returned to the U.S for another 8 years where I finished college and my Master’s degree. I’ve since been back to Bangalore, India since 2011.

First, let me tell you about my accent. I code shift – my accent and cultural references can change according to country, and who I’m talking with. I still get teased about it.

Because of my experience, I see English as two very different kinds of languages: Indian English and American English. On the macro level you might think it’s just the accent that’s different, but there are more nuanced differences that are a result of specific cultural backgrounds and responses to very different realities and environments. I admit, it’s easier for me to write for a specific cultural audience. That’s why I’ve been involved with the way I think about writing for a global audience. How do I hold a place in a specific narrative and allow for people from all kinds of backgrounds to find a point of similarity to their own reality?  Over the years, I’ve done a lot of relearning and decolonizing. Here are 3 important things I have learnt as a bicultural writer.

Letting Go Of Italicizing Culturally Specific Words

Growing up, I’d read Indian authors italicize or explain very Indian terms in strange ways. I acknowledge that for many non-Indian readers, if I made one reference too many to terms or concepts uniquely Indian, I would risk losing them, and worse, boring them. That said, using western-centric explanations and using italics takes away from the authenticity of the environment. I’d read ‘samosa’ with descriptions like seasoned potato filled pastry, and I’d chuckle. This is not because the description is inaccurate; in fact, it is probably the best way to explain what it is in English to a western audience, but it’s not how people raised in India would think of it.

I found authors who were owning their language with the English they spoke, offering more of a realistic picture of life in such a setting. Many Indians grew up reading British and American books with descriptions of food items we had never tasted in the 80s and 90s, and we had to make do with the names and imagine what they were. In fact, my father had grown up reading Archie Comics in India and assumed pizza to be a sweet dish. When he came to America in the late 70s he was shocked that pizza was savory! We never got explanations and we’re probably all the richer for it. While the world is a lot more globalized now and many readers are more exposed to cross-cultural habits and foods, there are still things that will be very specific to a culture and environment. It’s also the age of the internet where terms and cultural usage are just a Google search away. As long as you are being sensitive to your readers there is no reason to exoticize the culture you are writing from with explanations and italics. This however, is a strong stance to take and I know there are people who disagree, it’s just my evolving opinion of the matter.

Knowing When to Use Culture-specific Idioms and Expressions

 Some idioms and expressions in English have become universal, especially classic ones like ‘a rolling stone gathers no moss’ or ‘cool’. That said, your character, their environment, and socio-economic background determines a lot of how they process the world around them. It’s good to get some culturally specific expressions in your narrative as long as you are being true to your character map. Sometimes I slip and write a dialogue that would seem more authentic to someone living in the U.S rather than India. For example ‘nah, I am good’ in response to being asked if a character wants a snack would be more authentic to the U.S rather than India. There are exceptions for everything of course, but it’s always good to check your character’s language in context to their lived experience.

Checking Social Privilege

This one can get me very disoriented at times. When I am in the U.S, a lot of people put me in the bracket of POC woman writer and therefore a marginalized voice in the U.S. All things considered, this is accurate and true. However, I don’t at all speak for all Indians, no one can. There are far too many stories, realities, and social cues at play to represent one country. In India, I am very privileged, by class as an example of visible privilege, but also by invisible ones like caste, these elements give me more access and network to the world. This means I’ll have several blind spots to many marginalized communities that live in India. I must acknowledge the responsibility I have to keep educating myself on how my privileges play a role in a grossly unfair world. I have to find a balance between creating, and using my imagination while still not attempting to be the ‘voice’ or ‘savior’ for people that don’t need me to represent them. When you have social privilege, you want to be able to do the best you can with your writing career and remember to make space for others.

How do you look at bicultural realities? Being bicultural is definitely not limited to just living between countries, many experience different forms of culture living in the same country or even city/town. How do you negotiate your curiosity and experience of our world in your writing?

By Rheea Mukherjee

Source: writerunboxed.com

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How to Write a Short Story: Free Tutorial

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Short stories were once the training grounds for the best writers in the world. Writers like Ernest Hemingway, Leo Tolstoy, Mark Twain, and Stephen King learned the craft of writing through short stories before they published their first novels. Even though short stories have gone out of favor, they are still the best way for writers to learn the craft quickly.

In this free tutorial, you will learn why short stories are important for aspiring writers, how to write a short story, and how to submit your short stories to magazines and get them published.

Ten Steps to Publishing Short Stories

This effective tutorial will be conveniently delivered to your email inbox in ten manageable chunks. You’ll also get links to helpful resources and professional services. Here are the topics we’ll cover:

 

How to Write a Short Story

Everyone needs a little kick in the pants every once in a while. If you want to write but have been struggling with the discipline to do it, this tutorial will help by providing practical challenges given with a dose of inspiration.

Get Published

Thousands of literary magazines exist today to publish up and coming writers like you. This tutorial will help you discover those magazines and submit your short stories the right way so you can get published sooner.

Source: thewritepractice.com

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Fascinating Words for Colors (and the Battle of Magenta)

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Imagine not having a word for “yellow” or “beige” or “orange.” For many years, English got by with a lot fewer words for color than we have today.

By

Mignon Fogarty,

Grammar Girl

 

This a Stitcher Premium exclusive Grammar Girl podcast episode. Want to hear it? Head to stitcherpremium.com/grammar and use code GRAMMAR to sign up for your free trial and get access to all archived ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, and more.

Colors are such fundamental, tangible things that it’s hard to imagine not having names for them, but the number of words for colors varies widely by language and for many, many years, English got by without a lot of the color names we take for granted today.

In nearly all languages, the first colors to get names are black and white.

Black

“Black” comes from very old words that meant “to burn” or “burned.” But the same old words also gave us “blake,” which is a now obscure word that meant pale, pallid, and ashen. In fact, the Oxford English Dictionary says that it is often difficult to tell which of these two colors is meant in Old English texts when the context doesn’t make it clear. And to make it even more complicated, at some point, “black” could also be used to describe something bright, shining, or glittering, perhaps related to the idea that something that is burning is all those things. So it took “black” a while to be limited to what we think of as black today.

White

“White” is a little more straightforward. In Old English, it meant “bright and radiant, or clear and fair.” It could be describing something we think of as white such as snow, milk, or an old person’s hair, but it could also describe something transparent, or something light yellow, pale gray, or silver. Online Etymology Dictionary says “White” is also one of the oldest surnames in English, originally referring to people with fair hair or a fair complexion.

There are still languages today that have just two words for colors that are essentially white for all light or warm colors and black for all dark or cool colors.

Red

That surprised me, but one thing that surprised me most was that the next color almost all languages name is red—one theory is that it’s because it is the color of blood.

Although black, white, and red all likely go back to the prehistoric language Proto-Indo-European (PIE), Online Etymology Dictionary states that red is “the only color for which a definite common PIE root word has been found.”

Red shows up in a lot of place names where it referred to the color of natural elements such as rocks and soil. For example, the Oxford English Dictionary lists Radcliffe, Radclive, Redmile, Redford, and Rattery, all from 1086, and slightly later Radly and Redhill. The same root for “red” also likely gave us the word for the color “rust.”

In those early days though, “red” was probably the name for the color rust, as well as purple, pink, and orange.

In fact, we call people redheads instead of orangeheads because at the time we started calling them anything, the word “orange” hadn’t entered the language as a color word, and the word “red” included the orangey color of red hair.

Interestingly, the Irish writer Stan Carey told me that the Irish word for red hair is different from the general Irish word for red.

Grue

After red, most languages add a word for either yellow or a spectrum that includes both green and blue that language experts sometimes call “grue.” Since blue and green are so prevalent in nature, I would have expected one of them to be the third word more languages would add, but I was wrong!

You can think of these as the five base colors that most languages have: black, white, red, yellow, and green/blue. And English today is described as having 11 main color words: those five base colors (black, white, red, yellow, and green/blue) plus brown, orange, pink, purple and gray, but some languages have more or different words. For example, Russian, Greek, and Turkish have separate words for light blue and dark blue.

Gray, Brown, and Orange

Gray and brown are both very old words that go back to Old English, and orange came from the color of the fruit after oranges were introduced to Europe, around the mid-1500s.

Purple

Purple was originally a shade of crimson “obtained from mollusc dye” and associated with people of importance such as emperors, kings, cardinals, and so on. It came to describe many colors in the spectrum between red and violet. The color we think of as purple today was first called purple in the 1400s.

Pink

Pink is especially interesting. According to the OED, “pink” originally referred to “a greenish-yellow lake pigment made by combining a vegetable coloring matter with a white base such as a metallic oxide.” It seems like that first “pink” was more of a description of the process than the color, since the OED notes there were colors such as green pink, brown pink, rose pink, and pink yellow. The origin of the word is unknown, but in the 1600s, the word “pink” also started being used to mean the light red color we think of today. The origin of the greenish-yellow pink and the light red pink are both listed as unknown, and it’s unclear to me whether etymologists think they are related, but I think not.

This second pink—the one we think of today—probably comes from the color of the flower Dianthus, but the flower probably got its name from the spiky, scalloped shape of its petals because if you’ve ever used pinking shears, you know that “pink” has another meaning: to cut a scalloped or zigzag edge on fabric. Earlier, it also meant to punch holes or slits into fabric. So the “cut fabric” meaning of pink came first, the flower Dianthus was called a pink because of the shape of its petals, and then we got the color pink from the color of the Dianthus flowers.

But English also had a different word to describe the color pink before we started using “pink.” In the 1500s and into following centuries you could use the word “incarnate,” which comes from the Latin word for “flesh.” It doesn’t look like it was used alone the way we use colors alone today, as in “That flower is pink.” Still, you could describe something as “an incarnate color,” meaning a pink or fleshy color, or say you picked “incarnate clovers,” meaning pink clovers.

Colors from Nature

Colors continued to come from nature through the 1700s. For example, ultramarine, a blue color, comes from Latin that means “beyond the sea,” probably because the color originally came from a blue pigment from the mineral lapis lazuli which came from Asia.

The late 1700s gave us “maroon,” from the French word for the color of a chestnut, and “puce,” from the French word for flea or the color of a flea (yes, the insect).

Colors After Chemical Dyes

Advances in chemistry in the mid-1800s that allowed manufacturers to make synthetic dyes led to an explosion of new colors, and the fashion industry in particular embraced the ability to add novelty to its products and drove the adoption of many new color words. According to a book called “Bright Modernity: Color, Commerce, and Consumer Culture”:

“Women’s magazines disseminated the names of new colors and sometimes their origins. Acquiring this knowledge was part of keeping up with fashion for the  middle-class female consumer.”

Many of these new color words came from French. Some of the colors this new era gave us include the following:

  • Mauve: The French word for the color of the mallow plant’s flower
  • Ecru: From the French word for “raw or unbleached” because it is the color of unbleached linen
  • Beige: From the French word to describe the color of undyed, unbleached wool
  • Burgundy: Referring to the color of wine through the Burgundy region in France
  • Turquoise: From the Old French word for “Turkish” because the turquoise-colored stone was originally imported from the Turkish region

The mid-1800s also gave us “aquamarine,” which comes from Latin and means “sea-water,” and “khaki,” which comes from the Urdu word for “dusty.”

Tangerine, the fruit, got its name in the mid-1800s because that particular type of orange was imported from Tangier, and it started being used as a color word in 1899.

There are so many more interesting color words, and I just learned that Kory Stamper from Merriam-Webster is writing an entire book about color words, but I’ll end with the two words that got me started on this grand expedition into color words in the first place: magenta and solferino.

Magenta was originally patented in 1859 by a French chemist and called “fuchsine,” after the fuchsia flower, but soon thereafter was changed to honor a French military victory over the Austrians near the northern Italian town of Magenta. And solferino is a bright crimson purplish red or purplish pink (sources disagree) named around the same time as magenta after a village in northern Italy, again because of a battle that took place in the region.

Solferino also appears to be a coloring that can be added to liquor, at least it was in 1866 when it was used as a tincture that was mentioned alongside caramel and turmeric in the book The Independent Liquorist. The author described solferino as “The handsomest, as well as the most powerful color known to the trade.”

Source: quickanddirtytips.com

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Magic Without Rules

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Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Margaret, and Howard

When we say “without rules” we’re talking about stories whose magic is not held under logical scrutiny for the reader. There are lots of reasons why you might do this, and in this episode we’ll talk about not just about the why, but also the how.

Credits: This episode was recorded by Dan Thompson and mastered by Alex Jackson

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 20:18 — 14.0MB)

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Take a story with rule-based magic. Now have the rules all go wrong, the characters realize they don’t really understand the rules at all.

Source: writingexcuses.com

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3 Questions Every Creative Person Must Ask

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I’m starting to find that the same dilemmas come up again and again when I talk with a group about online media and marketing.

These are dilemmas that I can’t solve. They boil down to three questions you have to ask yourself—and be able to answer honestly—to find a path that’s your own, not mine.

1. Are you creating primarily for yourself or primarily for an audience?

Almost all of my advice is based on the assumption that you want to entertain, inform, or increase your audience. Not everyone is concerned with this, nor should they be.

If you’re producing work for an audience, it means:

  • playing by at least some rules of the industry
  • caring what others think of your work
  • interacting with your audience and being available to them
  • doing things not for your art, but out of service to your audience
  • putting on a performance, or adopting some kind of persona
  • marketing and being visible

If you’re creating for yourself, it means:

  • the act is worthwhile regardless of who sees your work
  • fulfillment comes from your struggle with the practice, not from distribution or feedback

Of course, you may be creating for both yourself AND an audience. But some artists who believe they are producing work for an audience aren’t willing to make the sacrifices required to do so. Which means there’s another level to this.

Are you:

  • creating for an audience
  • creating for an audience that earns you money

Once money enters the equation, you have to start sacrificing more of what you want, and bend to the demands of the market. (Or find a generous patron or foundation!)

What is it that you truly want out of your creative endeavors? Do you really know?

2. How much of yourself are you going to share? And which part?

Let’s assume you do want an audience (of any size). It necessitates some kind of persona. Deciding not to have a persona (removing yourself from visibility, Pynchon style) is a persona.

You can’t imitate someone else’s persona. You can only be yourself. Some of us think famous people are (or ought to be) aloof and distant, so we imitate aloofness, even when it has nothing to do with our personality.

After I give talks about digital marketing, relationship building, and social media, inevitably one person will come up and say, “I don’t want to be visible online. I just want people to read my stories.”

That’s a rather boring proposition in this day and age.

So you have to ask yourself—even if you’re shy or think you’re boring—what part of yourself are you going to share and put on display? It’s got to be something, so let’s make it interesting. Let’s really dive into the fiction of who you are OR aren’t. Make up something you can believe in, so others can believe in it, too. (That’s what we all want, most desperately. Meaning.)

3. What is your killer medium?

For me (personally), it’s not the book form. It’s the workshop or the conference keynote. It’s the ability to answer any question thrown at me. It’s my desire to be of service in a personalized way.

Speaking about writers specifically, the book is often assumed to be the most authoritative and important medium, but that’s only because we’ve all been led to believe that (through a culture that has created The Myth about the author as authority).

It’s a Myth, neither good nor bad. Just a belief system that, increasingly, we’re all moving away from.

Creative people too often pursue mediums that have been pushed on them by other people, and because it’s the well-worn path. Instead, follow the Apple motto: “Think different.”

By Jane Friedman

Source: janefriedman.com

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