  Noticing Newbies
This week: Inner Editor v/s the Muse Edited by: ember_rain
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As a Newbie, I struggled to find my place here. It took a couple of tries. Then I found a group and a friend that put a smile on my face and made me want to be here. I want to be that friend for all of you. So grab a cup of tea and have a nice read as I help you find your ways through the ins and outs of Writing.com.
The best thing about this place... Even Dyslexics like me, that like to tilt at windmills, have a chance for greatness. If you find a grammar or spelling mistake accept my apology now. Spell and Grammar check just doesn't get them all. I will, on occasion, use this space to explain things I have learned to both help solidify them in my mind and to help others that might struggle with it as well. Homeschooling my kids taught me that I learn best when teaching. |
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I talked about NANOWRIMO in my last newsletter. In this one I want to talk about what doing NANOWRIMO taught me. Before I started this great journey of writing once a year, I found I often had writers block. That inner voice, or inner editor, loved to say, "You can't write about that! You know nothing about that!" Another favorite line, "Your characters are one dimensional and your dialogue reads like a two year old wrote it."
Much to the frustration of my muse, who went to great effort to come up with wonderful story ideas, I couldn't tune out my inner editor. I mean we need our inner editors to make sure we aren't messing the whole thing up. The problem with that is too much negativity and you can't claw your way through it to write anything productive.
Then I found NANOWRIMO. I read posts about putting a gag on your inner editor and binding her up until after Nano so that your muse can reign. After all, editing is what December and January are for.
I began every writing session the first year I won, imagining the English Teacher, who told me that I might as well give up, my writing was horrible. I couldn't spell and no one would ever take me seriously, and putting a gag in her mouth. Then I would glue her hands to her desk and her skirt to her chair. Once she was secured completely, I would imagine going over to her supply closet and setting my muse free.
The words flowed like water from my brain through my fingers and onto the blank screen. It was the best thing I could ever do for myself. The second thing was locking the file away at least until April. I imagined locking it where my inner editor couldn't get to it. Then, in April, I would pull it back out and set my inner editor free.
By the Gods it was brutal. Not only was my inner editor mad but, she had a lot to say about my horrible writing. Only, this time, her barrage didn't run my muse back into her closet. No, instead my muse began to talk to my Inner editor and the two of them decided, what elements worked and what didn't. Suddenly, my muse wasn't just my inspiration, she was my inner editors inspiration. They found a way for a short time to work together.
Then November would roll around again and my muse would begin to focus on a new story and my inner editor would start her old ways. Out came the mental glue and duck tape so that my Muse and I could do the job of writing, assuring my inner editor that come April she would get her turn.
Which is more dominant in your life, your inner editor or your muse? Maybe you should have a conversation with them and then if all else fails... Pull out the duck tape.
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The Newbie Corner Tip of the Week:
This is a short list of Writing ML commands you will want to know. By the way ML means Markup Language.
To start my poem, short story, or chapter. You always put in a title of some kind. The commands I used on my article piece look like this:
My title here
This is widely used for centering any text body, especially poetry, it shows us your word art picture. If the poem does have one. Take a look at the text body first before reading to see if you can see a picture in it. Then you put the end or stop command after the last line or text body you want centered. the "/" command or in this case /center with the curly brackets.
We want our titles big. However the text body should be around 3.5 for best readability. Size ranges from 5 the largest, to 1. The fine print no one wants you to read.
Color = blue then end color. I love the color command I think we use it more than any other command. After all who really likes plain black text when you have all the colors of a rainbow at your fingertips.
The next over used is bold or 'b'. I was once told that if I bolded the chapters or short stories the WDC Writing Police were going to get me. Somehow I just don't believe that statement. Here is why; I use at the starting of my first paragraph for every chapter. It really makes them easy to read. It also makes it easy for the reviewers to spot my bad grammar and mistakes when they review it. You have no idea how helpful it is to have them show me an example of the repetitive mistakes I make.
Now for those of you who love the heart or big smile or thumbs up. Those are emoticons you use  to get your big grin. or  for the red valentine heart everyone loves to use. You can find the whole listing of the emoticons from clicking on the yellow smiley face when you write e-mail or write your stories or poems. It will show you a list of everyone we have. If you click on the one you like, it will show the ML code to type in or you can cut and paste. That always works best for me. |
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merryantics said: Wow, this newsletter is a keeper! My favorite DARE so far has been to challenge myself to try things I've never done before. Actually Writing a story idea (rather than just thinking about it) is the newest.
Thanks for sharing so many tips. I need to discover the types of contests offered and see if I can figure out how to enter any that might interest me. I'm a rather slow learner so I need to try different things and see what happens.
So how do you deal with your inner editor?
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Noticing Newbies: October 22, 2014 Issue [#6612]
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