Bookmark Giveaway!

GIVEAWAY!! TORN comes out next week—I kinda can’t believe it! To celebrate I’m giving away handmade-by-me, fabric-accented, signed bookmarks. Open anywhere the mail goes, enter on Twitter or Facebook! Open through midnight Sunday (ET).

I'm giving away five bookmarks minimum in each place, so feel free to enter in each!

Good luck!

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Accountable to the Page: Writing and Schedules

Tuesday I shared what gets me motivated to write--today I'm thinking about what I can do to hold myself to write. Having a schedule or goal or other expectation keeps you accountable to your work--and the best partner, I think, to creativity is accountability. We writers have a little problem most of the time during our writing careers: We aren't accountable to anyone but ourselves and the page--no boss, no time card, no nosy coworkers--so we have to create that accountability for ourselves. I want more of a schedule-based writing life, and a few ways of doing so have emerged for me: 1) The Clock Method . This one is basic--you clock in, you clock out. Your butt is in your chair for a set number of hours each day, hands on keyboard, writing. 2) The Goal Method . A little more flexible, but also, in my opinion, harder to hold yourself to. You have a daily (or, depending on your schedule and lifestyle, weekly) writing goal, and you meet it by ...

Plot Crap

If you ever watch a movie with my husband and I, you're very likely, if it's not a great movie and sometimes even if it is, to hear me exclaim at some point, "OK, this is total plot crap, right?" What do I mean by plot crap? And does it apply to books? Are you calling this plot crap? Plot crap does not mean crappy plot. In fact, it can often have nothing to do with how well a story is plotted. A great example of plot crap is the movie Gladiator . Now, I love this movie. I love the story, the incredibly orchestrated battle scenes, even the soundtrack. But the historical facts framing the film? Total plot crap. Sure, Marcus Aurelius and Commodus existed...but there are a lot of factual missteps. There's no evidence that Marcus Aurelius ever wanted to restore the Republic, therefore the basis of the film's struggle is historical plot crap. (Commodus also didn't die in the arena, but was strangled in his bath. Sometim...

Best-Laid Plans: Outlining

Every writer has answered the question at least once--panster or plotter? I'm sure there is no right way--maybe there are more efficient ways, or ways that produce more creative twists, or, most likely, ways that are the most right for each individual. In college I had a roommate who literally outlined every paper down to the paragraph. Beautiful, typed, complete outlines, and they took forever to create--but the actual paper-writing part was shortened because she already knew what she was going to say. Me? I never outlined more than what was in my head already. Even my thesis outline was pretty much section titles and quick notes. (I think that drove my advisor batty.) Still, a novel isn't a five-page essay, a twenty-page paper, or even a thesis. Despite that, I pantsed at first. It was what I knew, and what worked for me. You know what? It worked for writing novels, too. Just not very well. That is, I doubled back...

Rowenna, Writing

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