Guest Blogger K.W. Gish - On Her Favorite Writing Book

Last week, Paul Deane guest blogged on Writing Collaboration. Today, I have the pleasure of having the second part of this collaboration team, Kimbra Wilder Gish, guest blog about one of her favorite writing books! I'm very excited about this post, as I'm always looking for new great books on the craft. Please welcome Kimbra and make sure to check out her suggestion!

I love writing books. I love them a little too much, perhaps - after all, it's always easier to pick up a writing book and congratulate myself on how much I'm accomplishing by learning what this author has to teach than it is to actually write.

 

I wish I could say that I am the type of writer who sits down at exactly the same time every morning, six or seven days a week, and writes. I am sometimes a writer who writes every day, and my life is better when I do it. But sometimes life does get in the way more than I want, and in those times it is a real challenge to make time for writing. I think life is like that for many of us who write: we have wonderful plans and hopes and dreams, but life gets in the way, and so for me the best writing books are those which help me to tap into my writer self, to find a way into that magical place I discover when I really start to write. For that, I most often turn to Leslea Newman's Write from the Heart: Inspiration and Exercises for Women Who Want to Write.

Despite the title, this book isn't valuable exclusively to women - I don't know of any person, male or female, who couldn't benefit from this book - though for women writers, it is as valuable and important a work as Virginia Woolf's famous "A Room of One's Own." It's a book of writing exercises for fiction and poetry, a few words on publishing, and appendices full of valuable writing resources, including lots of reading recommendations. Many of the exercises are simple - sometimes deceptively so. They have a way of sucking the writer in, revealing where powerful memories and material lie buried, revealing things I didn't know about the character I'm working on, unlocking information about a project that I didn't know was there. The exercises are wonderful as a daily writing practice, and many are also fantastic for use with a particular character I'm wanting to develop for a book or short story. I generate more material than will ever survive in the final draft, but in doing so, I discover where the story lies, whom the story is about, what those characters are like.... The exercises are written in a warm and inviting manner - Newman is now a writing teacher in the low-residency MFA program at Spalding University, and it's easy to see what a great teacher she must be, because she has this absolutely conversational tone. It's as if your favorite aunt is a writer and has invited you in for a chat over tea and homemade cookies, and as you chat she invites you to your writing space with all the warmth and ease of an experienced and gentle guide. She gives lots of examples for reading fun; she covers poetry as well as fiction...she's simply stunning. It's so simple and yet it's like a master class you can take over and over and over again, and still gain something, learn something, every time you open the book. It's absolutely my favorite book on writing.

I could recommend at least half a dozen amazing writing books, and dozens of good ones, but if you buy only one book on writing (poor you!), this is the one you MUST have. It's a good size to throw in a totebag or briefcase or even an oversized purse, and it's like having a master teacher with you. All you need is this book, a notebook, and a pen, and you're ready to tap into your inner writer. Through these prompts and exercises, you can discover what matters deeply to you, what matters deeply to your characters, and the inner writer you know is in there, hiding somewhere. Write from the Heart always brings my inner writer out to play. I hope it will do the same for yours!

Thank you, Kimbra, for stopping by! I'm running out to check out this book!

Kimbra Wilder Gish was born in Middlesboro, Kentucky, part of the Appalachian region. By the time she was in elementary school, she often pretended that the back of her parents’ car was a hobbit-hole. In first grade, she refused to color her coloring pages, and instead turned them over, wrote stories on the backs, and signed them with the names of such fictional characters as Bilbo Baggins and Peter Rabbit.

 

Kimbra now lives in Henderson, Kentucky with her supportive husband, Darren, and a ten-pound chihuahua mix who thinks he owns them both. A former librarian specializing in children's and young adult services as well as medicine, she has a passion for information and books and is happiest in a library. Her favorite fantasy authors include J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Rae Carson.

 

When not reading or writing, Kimbra enjoys crocheting and simple cooking. Her YA fantasy books in the Aislin (pronounced "eyes-lynn") saga, beginning with Daughter of the Signs, are collaborations with Paul Douglas Deane, an awesome writing partner and friend whom she met online through a mutual love for J.R.R. Tolkien. 

 

You can find Kimbra on Twitter: @kwgishwriter. And check out her blog.

Quote of the Day

Do you want to know who you are? Don't ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you. 

  ~ Thomas Jefferson

Quote of the Day

(photo credit: Yelena Casale)

People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us. 

― Iris Murdoch

Game of Thrones Fans Reactions Last Sunday's Episode

Ok, if you haven't watched the last Sunday's episode of Game of Thrones, you might want to avoid this. Spoiler Alert!

For the rest of you, was this close to the reaction you had when you saw it? It definitely was to mine. Enjoy!

Contests & Giveaways in the Writing World - week of June 3rd

And check out a few giveaways and contests to make your week more exciting!

Love Vikings, tales of Old Britain and historical fiction in general? Check out this GoodReads Giveaway of The Briton and the Dane: Legacy - 2nd Edition by Mary Ann Bernal.

Hurry to see the Release Event and Giveaway for Everly by Raine Thomas, hosted by Into The Night Book Reviews. Prizes include signed copies, Everly inspired bracelet and an Amazon GC! 10 Days to go...

The Autumn Review is participating in the Endure Book Blast. Endure is book #4 in the Protector Series by M.R. Merrick. Prizes include the winners' choice of eBook from the series, with the Grand Prize winning signed copies of all four books in the series.

English Historical Fiction Authors is giving away a copy of Blood Between Queens by Barbara Kyle. Just leave a comment for the chance to win!

Looking for a good writing contest? Enter the 2013 Weta Nichols Writing contest! 42 days to go. Note that the contest is open to both published and unpublished authors, but the piece submitted must be unpublished and not be under contract to be published. Categories include contemporary, Paranomral/Sci-fi and Young Adult. Find out more details on here.

*As always, please contact me for the inclusion of your contests/giveaways into the Monday Contests and Giveaways in the Writing World posts.

Have fun and good luck! 

Also, don't forget to become a follower of this blog to make sure you catch giveaways coming soon!

Guest Blogger Paul Deane - Working Together is Grown-Up Play (On Writing Collaboration)

As many of you know, I'm one part of a writing team, the other part being my amazing friend Tina Moss. One of my first posts when I started this blog was on Collaborative Writing, in which I talked about how it helped me personally and what our process was for writing our first novel together.

Today, I'm super excited to have a guest blogger, and agent mate from Literary Counsel, Paul Deane, who shares his collaborative journey with co-author Kimbra W. Gish.

Paul, take it away!

 Working Together is Grown-Up Play

Most people are very surprised when they learn that Kimbra and I are coauthors of a novel. They give me a funny look, and ask how we manage it.

It seems that they think of writing as a very solitary act, something people do by themselves. They're wrong, of course -- writing is all about having good beta readers and critique partners. But they wonder how anyone could give up any creative control over something that takes so much personal investment as a novel.

I don't know how other writing teams do it. But Kimbra and I started writing in an environment where collaboration was the norm. You see, we met on a text role-playing game, where each player writes their own character in a growing, ongoing fictional world. Writing your character in that kind of world isn't the same thing at ALL as writing a novel, but it does foster a certain mindset. You know you don't own the scene. You own your contribution. The events of the world emerge as a kind of interactive fiction, and the quality of the experience is determined entirely by the skills of the players. When it goes right, the back and forth and the interaction create a magical experience.

 That kind of creative dance is what our relationship started with. It was all about creating conditions for the other person's ideas to bloom into a thousand new possibilities. We worked well together. We sparked ideas. One thing led to the next. And we had habits that made it possible to play with ideas without taking total ownership over the end result.

If we'd stopped there, we would never have written a novel. it's great to play out scenes interactively, but finishing a novel requires so much more. That's where differences in our personalities and styles also help.

Kimbra is the person who sees an arresting image, or captures a voice, and plays it out. I'm the person who imagines an evil plot twist that makes the main character suffer or turns a minor character inside out.

Kimbra is the person who always remembers to proofread. I'm the person who will happily spend hours and hours tweaking sentence-by-sentence to tighten up the language.

Kimbra never met a sensory detail she didn't like (especially if it involves food!). I never met a landscape description I didn't like. But we know that if our partner says, 'Cut it',  it has to go.

 
I have no idea how I would teach someone else to collaborate the way we do. We started working by playing together, and a large part of the reason we work well together, is that much of it still IS play.

Interestingly enough, we still occasionally play out a scene interactively when we're stumped and need the extra spark that comes from not knowing what the other person's character is going to do or say next. Sometimes it takes us to very unexpected places.

Writing is a lot of hard work. But one of the reasons we're able to keep plugging through all the hard parts that every writer experiences -- is that it's rooted in a sense of play.


Paul, thank you for stopping by my blog and sharing the story of your writing collaboration. It was a fascinating and inspiring insight into your writing team process!

And guess what, dear readers...Kimbra is going to guest blog in the next couple of weeks, so don't miss it!

When Paul Douglas Deane was 11 years old, one of his father's co-workers gave him a copy of Lord of the Rings. When he was twelve years old, his mother got a Valentine's Day poster that had the words 'I love you' in twelve different languages. Both events changed his life. The first gave him a lifelong love of fantasy. The second led to his getting a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Chicago -- which may not exactly constitute following in Tolkien's footsteps, but certainly qualifies as trespassing on his turf.

Paul now lives in Lawrenceville, N.J. with his wife Debbie and works as a computational linguist. His favorite novels include Tanith Lee's The Birthgrave, Meredith Ann Pierce's The Darkangel, and C.S. Lewis' Till We Have Faces, though he cherishes a love for quirky Victoriana and Edwardiana, such as William Morris' The Story of the Glittering Plain  and G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday. He is coauthor with Kimbra Wilder Gish of the YA fantasy novel Daughter of the Signs. Kimbra and Paul met online in a Tolkien text role-playing game. The rest (as they say) is history.

Quote of the Day

The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people.

  ~ Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture