Living in a small town affords us certain luxuries that folks in the city don’t have, like being able to understand directions by landmarks rather than street names, building an extra ten minutes into most errands to make time to talk with the friend or
Bob (photo by Renee Gable)
neighbor you’re bound to run into, and appreciating the little things that make us slow down and take notice.
Last year, I wrote about how the bridge was out beside our subdivision, forcing me to drive a different route to practically everywhere I went. Each morning I was greeted with something that made me smile – a family of deer, a pair of red foxes, purple grass blooming on the side of the road, and wild turkeys.
While not domesticated, Bob the Turkey wasn’t exactly what I’d call “wild” either. Although his Facebook page touted him as “Serenade’s Mascot,” he truly was a mascot for all of Woodstock, and a Bob sighting always resulted in a smile.
Getting a Better View (photo by Wesley Matthews)
Sure, he tied up traffic from time to time, but where are we going in such a hurry, anyway? The speed limit along that end of Main Street is posted as 25 MPH, and I almost think Bob was planted by the Woodstock Police Department as a gift to help people avoid a speeding ticket.
He was nowhere to be found during the hubbub of the Christmas Jubilee Parade in December, but I have no doubt he was perched on a rooftop nearby, wondering about all the noise and commotion on “his” stretch of road.
Bob even garnered television time for our growing town, allowing for a feel-good story on the nightly news a few times last fall.
Folks who heard about but hadn’t seen Bob slowed down just past Woodstock Flowers & Gifts, hoping to catch a glimpse of the bird chasing a car or preening in the reflection of the electrical box near the railroad tracks.
Kids and grown-ups alike loved Bob. They shared photos and stories about the bird who was as familiar as the old Welcome to Woodstock sign once was.
You never know what will drive inspiration – the inspiration to create stories voiced by a quirky bird, start a conversation with someone you’ve never met, slow down and take notice of the things that usually pass by too quickly – but Bob inspired all of those things.
Bob is gone, but the kindness he inspired in the residents of our little town should be his legacy.
photo by Ashley Wilson
Tags: Beth Hermes, Canton, Georgia, writing prompts
Sometimes it’s hard to write. There are so many things going on around us, trying their darnedest to pull us away from our writing projects – kids, laundry, the phone…
Enjoy these Words of Encouragement brought to you by WritersRelief.com
Winners: 100 Words of Encouragement For Writers
A few weeks ago we asked you to send us your thoughts on how you would encourage a struggling writer in 100 words or less. And we got so many wonderful entries from all over the globe! Over 70 writers sent their beautiful, inspiring words; it was difficult to narrow it down to just a few that could fit in a blog post.
But narrow it we did, and these five entries particularly stood out. If you love the words of these writers, let them know in our comments section! And of course, feel free to post their paragraphs (one or all) near your writing space to inspire you when you’re in a slump.
Thanks to everyone who entered! We may post entries in future issues of Submit Write Now! But until then, enjoy these wonderful gems!
Katie Dilts: Write. Write when it hurts. Write when it feels good. Write when you want to. Write when you don’t. Write when you have a direction. Write when you have no idea where it’s going. Write when you want everyone to see. Write when you want to keep it to yourself. Above all, write for you. Too many writers write solely what they think their readers want to hear. Write truth. Your truth. Whenever a great piece of work is written, the world takes notice. Sometimes the world just takes longer than we would all like.
Glenn Hameroff: Fall in love with rejection. Everyone starts off their career bemoaning their receipts of these daggers to the heart. I took the opposite strategy. I wanted as many as possible—organized into a folder with plastic pages. Editors who invested more into their rejection notice received a full-page display. Mimeographed rejection notices received a poorly constructed collage. The dichotomy of rejection so occupied my mind that when I received an acceptance letter, it was simply a matter of fact. I even wrote an essay about the variety of rejection notices, which was quickly and impersonally rejected. Take joy in rejection notices.
Diann Tongco: If you’re struggling with your writing, I have good news. That means you ARE writing, which is the first and hardest step. Here are two tips: The first is to simply skip the hard part. Move on to the next chapter or scene; find a section that’s not so difficult and start there. Second: Don’t take it so seriously. Write a silly scene; free your creative juices. Granted neither of these two ideas will result in a well-honed final draft, but you can always edit later. If you don’t write, you won’t get to the editing part. Now go, write!
Helen Colella: Appreciate all writers. Believe in yourself. Challenge creativity. Dream of success. Explore fact, fiction, and fantasy. Focus on your writing career. Go the distance. Hold tight to dreams. Invest in classes, workshops, and conferences. Join a critique group. Keep abreast of publishing needs. Live, love, and laugh. Make every word count. Nourish the body, mind and soul. Open your mind to knowledge. Prepare and be positive. Query first. Read, read and read. Set goals. Trust in yourself. Understand the impact of words. Venerate language.Write. Write. Write. X-out all negativity. Yodel and yell over every accomplishment. Zoom in—complete projects.
Annie Star: To begin is to be half done! Corny, right? Cliché, definitely! But, oh, so true. Getting started is the absolute hardest part. Just write. Get down all your ideas no matter how crappy or disorganized. Rewrites and new inspiration are easy once you have that sloppy copy down. I can personally testify that this advice has worked for countless school papers and/or deadlines. Any of my children will tell you that it’s my mantra. Beginning is truly your biggest obstacle. And you can handle that!
Congrats (and thanks!) again to the winners!
Tags: Beth Hermes, Canton, Georgia, professional writer, success, writing, writing prompts
I’m a rebel. I tell my students I don’t believe in “writer’s block” – not as some amorphous mass that envelops the writer’s idea
bank, anyway.
Perhaps it’s the idea of writer’s block that causes that momentary panic, which morphs into something that renders us unable to conjure a thought, complete an assignment, even hunt-and-peck a simple sentence about our chosen topic.
Why is it that so many blame “writer’s block” for their lapses, then? Confidence – or lack thereof.
I was sitting in a coffee shop not long ago, in a meeting with a client, when a writing friend of mine appeared from the “comfy couches” in one part of the cafe and set up shop at one of the hard tables near an electrical outlet so she could plug in her laptop.
She said she was on deadline for an assignment and asked if I had a cure for “writer’s block.”
My client smiled as I asked my friend to tell me about her subject, which she was able to do with much enthusiasm. I smiled back and said, “that sounds great! Now, go write it down that way!” (She did, met her deadline, and the article is – as always – wonderful).
There’s a point to this story, as it pertains to writer’s block. But I’ll get to that in a minute.
Tags: Beth Hermes, Canton, Georgia, professional writer, writing
When it comes to the argument about writing and sending greeting cards for Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Thanksgiving, Boxing Day, what have you, people cite everything from lack of time to lack of funds as their reason for cutting back – or not sending at all.
Whether you agree or disagree with the commercialization of the holidays or the price of Postage 
stamps, holiday cards are a tradition that would be a shame to lose.
For personal greetings, many families have opted for the “Christmas Letter” in which they share everything from children’s academic accomplishments to employment changes and more. To make this easier, you may want to compile a list of your Facebook posts and organize them in a letter – throwing in a few photos to break up the monotony. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Beth Hermes, Canton, Georgia, writing
“When will I ever find the time to write?”
Earn one of these when you finish 50,000 words
It’s the lament of everyone who has ever sat down with a pen or a laptop and attempted to create a memoir, a poem, a short story or a full-fledged novel.
Excuses begone! Stretch your writing fingers, pull your best characters and storylines out of the deepest, darkest regions of your brain and get ready to begin writing at midnight on Tuesday, November 1 – the beginning of the 13th Annual NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), during which writers pen a 50,000-word novel in 30 days. (For those of you who don’t like number-crunching – and what writer truly does? – that’s roughly 1,666 words a day!)
FoxTale Book Shoppe in Woodstock has been kind enough to open their doors to us crazy writers for six evenings for 1 ½ hours at a time – every Monday in November, and the the first and third Thursdays (Nov. 3 and 17) from 6 until 7:30 pm.
Depending on the number of people who participate, there’s no guarantee of a chair or an electrical outlet. So make sure you bring a pillow or blanket to stretch out on the floor, and make sure the battery in the laptop is fully charged.
For more information about National Novel Writing Month, visit www.NaNoWriMo.org and sign up to begin logging your daily word counts on November 1.
For more information about the Write-Ins at FoxTale, contact writing workshop facilitator Beth Hermes at 678-524-7518 or Beth@eIRISMarketing.com.
Happy Writing!
Tags: Beth Hermes, Canton, Georgia, NaNoWriMo, success, Write Every Day, writing
Does your writing have a voice?
Writers know how hard it is to present an authentic voice in a piece of work. Readers know how essential it is – even if they’re not aware that’s what “it” is.
The “voice” is the style that captures – and keeps – a reader’s attention, that speaks to your preference, and conveys the personality of the topic – and often of the writer.
Just as each human has his or her own distinct voice, each story has one as well, giving it the personality it needs to attract a reader, bring the characters to life and make the reader either fall in love with a piece or put it aside.
Many writers use the same voice from story to story, even if the topic and characters change. Voice is often what attracts readers to a particular writer. When writers change their regular voice (think John Grisham in “A Painted House”), they often leave their readers scratching their heads. The new voice may help them attract a new audience. (“A Painted House” is my favorite Grisham novel, by the way).
Funny thing is, your story’s voice has as much to do with who your reader is as who you – the writer – are. One of the writing “rules” is “write what you know,” but that would be a scary prospect, given the number of thriller authors and crime novelists out there. And how would an historical fiction writer “write what they know”? Sure, there’s research, but that can only take your writing voice so far.
Writers and readers both have a comfort zone. But to grow as a writer, you may have to stretch outside your zone and try on new voices.
One of my recent assignments for my writing students was to create a persona using a character’s name, then change the character’s name and see if the persona still fit. For this piece, we wrote a personal ad, and we had some funny, interesting characters who grew out of the exercise. Dialect that was appropriate for diner waitress Emmy Lou Purdy, for example, was awkward for financial analyst Alexandria Welbourne.
The writers grew from this exercise as well. It’s amazing how much we can mature as writers, if we only stretch outside of our comfort zones and test the range of our voice.
Tags: Beth Hermes, Canton, classes, Georgia, writing, writing prompts
every writer should have this on their book shelf
Omit needless words.
Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.
~ The Elements of Style, by William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White
Tags: Beth Hermes, Blog-writing, Canton, Georgia, writing
BUSY – (adj) – actively and attentively engaged in work or a pastime; not at leisure; otherwise engaged… not immediately accessible. (Source: Dictionary.com)
It’s hard not to be busy this time of year, with the kids back in school, festivals nearly every weekend, and cooler weather that makes yard work and house cleaning more appealing than just a few weeks ago when you’d break a sweat just walking to the fridge.
But busy doesn’t have to mean frenzied (also an adjective, and whose definition includes “violently agitated, frantic, wild”), which is what we tend to become when we take on too much “busy.”
For writers, “busy” often means “not writing,” which creates even more chaos in our lives. For those of you who live with writers, please understand that words are like oxygen to us. If we’re not scribbling a few thoughts or ideas into a notebook – or onto the closest scrap of paper we can find – we do, indeed, become frothing-at-the-mouth frenzied.
Perhaps, as the title of this post implies, writing is an addiction that we must tuck into the appropriate compartment of our calendars, like doing the laundry, shopping for groceries or dead-heading flowers. The only issue with this idea is that we’re not thinking about laundry, groceries or flowers while we’re writing, but we are thinking about writing while we’re doing just about anything else.
Be honest: How many of you have watched a distraught mother dealing with a tantrum-throwing child in the grocery story and infused the scene with a crazy theory about how the child doesn’t belong to the woman but no one wants to get involved? Or have you ever seen someone wandering aimlessly along the side of the road and given him some sort of “back story” that you can use in your writing?
IT Guy or Super Hero?
Of course you have! That’s what makes being a writer so interesting.
And for those of you who live with us, it’s what makes your lives more exciting because, to us, you’re not a banker or a lawyer or a bus driver or a teacher; you’re a spy or a special agent or a super hero or a knight whose true identity comes to life when we’re not too busy to scribble in our journals!
Tags: Beth Hermes, Canton, Georgia, professional writer, Write Every Day, writing, writing prompts
I used to have a fantastic watch collection. They weren’t made by a famous designer, they weren’t valuable collectibles – in fact, I think the most expensive one in my collection set me back about $35. They were just a fun addition to my wardrobe.
There was the fantastic green one with the antique-looking beads on the stretchy band; the one that looked like little Renoir-style portraits on each of the links; the three snap-cuff watches: the chunky silver one with the square face, the bright orange one with the silver geometric face and the really fun leopard-print cuff.
There was my single gold watch – a slim number that had a matching gold bracelet, which looked Egyptian-inspired. I had the band made out of pink stones; the Swatch-style waterproof watch that I’d wear to the barn; and my everyday fall-back, the round silver face with the huge numbers and silver “O” bracelet. Oh, and the one I made at the bead store: the silver case with the red face that I added to the blue-and-white bead bracelet with two silver hearts, in
honor of my birthday.
Tags: Beth Hermes, professional writer, success, writing, writing prompts
Why do we do what we do? Writers, I mean. Intoxicated by our own love of words, we just keep pounding away at the keyboard, hoping that something we share with somebody will make an impact, inspire someone, or at least get read all the way through.
Since I was about 10 years old I’ve wanted to be a writer. Not just any kind of writer, either. I wanted to write novels. (I’d sing along to “Paperback Writer” at the top of my lungs – but I harbor a secret wish to publish first in hardcover!)
I’d always loved to read, and even worked in the library during fifth and sixth grades so I could get the inside scoop on the latest books coming in and check them out before anyone else. My “book caterpillar” in elementary school had at least two new titles every week, and by the end of the school year, its body wound all the way around the classroom – each circle representing another book whose story I’d devoured.
I can’t quite remember what year it was in school, but I read The Pearl, by John Steinbeck, and I thought it was one of the most incredible pieces of fiction I’d ever read. Then we read Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, and I thought, “this guy’s a genius!” Our class discussed symbolism and the beauty of brevity and I dreamed of being able to write that way.
My journals held the beginnings of stories alongside the news flashes of my days. I’d write beginnings to novels, character descriptions, sample conversations. Ah, it was heaven!
With five novels under my belt – two of them edited all the way through – I have discovered the Dark Side of the writing business, and that would be the publishing business. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Canton, Georgia, professional writer, publishing, success, writing
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