Top Ten Monday Motivations from 2019 (Part 2)
Ever since we started All About Writing back in 2011, facilitator and writing coach Richard Beynon has been helping you start your week with some Monday Motivation, of the writerly flavour.
To wrap up the year, we’ve compiled ten of the best from 2019, for you to read, or re-read. Here’s the second installment of five. You can read the first installment here.
6. How empathy helps you create better characters
Writing fiction requires that you deliberately trigger out-of-body experiences. You create characters whose consciousness you attempt to inhabit, so that you might the better be able to describe, from the inside, what that character sees, feels, thinks, hears… [more]
7. Writing hones a key life skill
One of the little-regarded spin-off advantages that writers enjoy, is that, through their writing, and through the stories they fabulate, they exercise a skill essential to us all, writers and non-writers alike. The core of this insight was driven home for me by a little quote I read recently from Ursula K. Le Guin’s book, The Wave in the Mind… [more]
8. You can’t write well if you don’t do this simple, difficult thing
Are there secrets to good writing? You know all the platitudes as well as I do, the ones that insist that it’s mostly a matter of sweat, and very little of inspiration. The idea that persistence ultimately pays off. But these are hardly well-kept secrets… [more]
9. Read like a writer, write like a champ
Writing can be hard. When you set out to write a scene, you are conjuring into existence circumstances, characters, actions and dialogue that you have never, in life, precisely encountered before. You’re inventing a bit of what appears to be reality… [more]
10. On truth, subtext, and good writing
I recently read a book called Moneyland, in which Oliver Bullough explores the many and ingenious ways in which the world’s superrich hide their wealth and avoid paying taxes. It’s as if the wealthy have contrived to create an alternate reality, the existence of which is concealed from the great majority of us… [more]
