SisterMuses has a new home on the web! Please update your bookmarks and come join the party at our new website!!!
http://www.sistermuses.com
Hope to see you there!!!
Merry Christmas and a happy New Year!
SK and J. Leigh
SisterMuses has a new home on the web! Please update your bookmarks and come join the party at our new website!!!
Hope to see you there!!!
Merry Christmas and a happy New Year!
SK and J. Leigh
In my prior life as a university English professor, all I did was nonfiction writing. I taught it. I wrote it. I lived it. And I discovered something in the process: there is a strong tendency to want to divorce creativity from nonfiction writing. When you take a “creative writing” class in school, no one teaches you about crafting an essay or a research paper. You learn to write poetry and fiction. You learn about descriptive writing and crafting compelling characters. Unfortunately, I’ve never yet come across a creative writing class that focuses on the elegance of the written medium: crafting compelling sentence constructions, learning to manipulate the music of the language to delight your reader…even if you’re writing about astrophysics or remodeling your bathroom. I’m a huge believer in the power and beauty of language. And learning to appreciate and use this tool is truly “creative writing”.
When we’re organizing our table of contents, we don’t often stop to consider that we’re creating something beautiful. But just as there is beauty in the structure of a snowflake and elegance in the symmetry of a flower’s petals, there is beauty and elegance in the logical ordering of a topic. Headings, subheadings, topics, subtopics, indices, appendices…all of these contribute to the order of a work. For nonfiction, the topic determines the ordering techniques. A work of literary criticism won’t have the same structure as a DIY handbook of home repairs, but both will have structure. As you determine how best to organize your work, do it with intention. Is a topical grouping approach best for your topic, or does it require a more architectural approach, with each chapter building on the last? Your book’s structure is integral to the work as a whole, much like the skeleton is integral to the human body. A badly structured book is not likely to be successful, because, ultimately, it won’t be understandable. So consider carefully how to lay out your project, and don’t be afraid to rearrange things in the editing phase if the structure doesn’t flow.
Order operates on both a macro level — the table of contents — and a micro level — the ordering of words and sentences and paragraphs. Both are critically important to the success of your project, and both are opportunities for you to be “creative” in your use of your tool (language).
Yes, fiction is also prose. And it’s helpful to remember that! Just because you are writing about the works of Mary Shelley or the physics of motion doesn’t mean that you have to avoid figurative or descriptive language. But it does mean that your language needs to suit your topic. Elegance and beauty in language can come in many different forms. Language doesn’t have to be ornate and flowery and full of metaphors and descriptors to be lovely. There is beauty in simplicity and clarity too.
Know your topic, and know your audience’s expectations. If you’re writing a serious medical text, humor probably doesn’t have a place. But a book on dieting for mass consumption might call for a dash of humor to lighten up the topic. (Did you notice the food and diet imagery in that sentence? Don’t be afraid to have fun every once in a while! It’s good to make your readers smile.) Proportion is key: too much play with your subject can become tedious, so use it judiciously.
Delighting your reader is one of the best ways to keep them returning to you and your writing. No matter what you write, you will develop a unique style that sets your treatment apart from other books on the same subject. Your style is what keeps your audience coming back. Your readers learn to identify your name not only with a certain unique approach to the subject matter, but also with a mode of expression. The way you use humor, the way you break complex ideas into digestible pieces, the way your sentences flow, the vocabulary you use…all of these contribute to your unique treatment. It’s not too much to say that your style is part of your brand, and it carries through everything you write, whether it’s on your blog or in your latest book. So pay close attention to the way you craft your prose — it will become a hallmark of your work.
As you work on your project and consider your style and approach and presentation, pay special attention to these four areas: diction (word choice), sentence structure, syntactical order, and sentence length. Let’s work through a short example so you can see how powerful tweaks to these elements can be, and how “creative” writing can make an enormous difference in your nonfiction project.
Version 1 (rough draft)
Getting a baby to sleep through the night is a task most parents dread. Sleep training methods seem either harsh (letting a baby cry it out until she falls asleep or the timer goes off) or too time-consuming (some gentle sleep training methods take weeks, if not months, to get results). Parents may feel added pressure from grandparents or friends to “do something” about their baby’s sleep habits. Adding this to exhaustion makes for a desperate situation.
Not bad, but not great. It’s a bit of a yawner. The audience for this piece is clearly exhausted parents who are confused about the best way to help their baby sleep. They’re a bit desperate and strung out, and they may be feeling sensitive or even defensive about the decision they need to make. So let’s try livening this up by addressing the four elements I list above.
Version 2
Whoever coined the phrase “sleeping like a baby” never had kids. Helping a baby learn to sleep on her own is one of the most challenging aspects of parenting, not least because of the dizzying array of sleep training methods out there today. Should exhausted parents set the timer for their baby and just walk away, fighting down tears as their baby wails in her crib alone? Or should they invest weeks — or even months — in a gentle method that may not provide a solution soon enough? And in our social media culture, grandma isn’t the only one sharing her opinion — everyone has something to say about the decision. It’s almost too much for the sleep deprived mind to process.
What do you think? It’s more fun and more relevant, and the flow is much better. There’s a bit of humor in there as well, because this is an emotionally charged topic for many parents, and a smile can cut through some of that frustration.
We could continue to tweak this passage, but I think you get the picture. Creativity isn’t just for fiction writers, so add facets to your work until your gem of a project truly sparkles. Fascinating, creative, and well-organized writing will keep your readers coming back for more!
All right, folks. We need your help.
Some of you may already know that David Farland has been a huge inspiration and wonderful teacher for both S.K. and me. Well, last month, his son Ben was in a terrible accident which will likely run his family into over a million dollars in medical bills (they don’t have insurance). Because of the brain trauma and all the related injuries, he has been fighting for his life and there were times when the doctors weren’t sure if he would live. He seems to have turned the corner and is doing better every day. But the ordeal has been so hard for his family, and it’s far from over.
So, we would like to announce that, for the month of May,
all the money we make on the sales of our books will go to Ben’s cause.
DaLR is free, but that means that basically you can download the whole Lost Road Chronicles trilogy for under $10. This fundraiser also applies to the paperbacks.
On S.K.’s side of things, Silesia: The Outworlder is free for Kindle right now, so you can get both available volumes of the Silesia Trilogy for just $2!! (That’s a steal, folks!) As with the Lost Road Chronicles, this fundraiser also applies to the paperback versions.
We really want to make this a huge success for our friend and mentor and his family…and we can’t do that without you, our awesome readers. So if you would, please take just a second to tweet this post and share it on FB, Pinterest, and all your social media sites! Better yet, gift the books to someone you think might enjoy them. And even better, do all three! 🙂
Please help us help a friend! Dave is just an incredible teacher and writer, and we really want to give back somehow for all that he’s done for us.
Learn more about Ben Wolverton’s case here:
http://www.helpwolverton.com/
Find the Lost Road Chronicles on Amazon here. And find the Silesia Trilogy on Amazon here.
Thanks, y’all!!!
Peace and love,
J. Leigh and S.K.
Well, it’s that time of year around here…for some reason the nasty bronchitis/cold/ick goes around in early spring down here, and I swear half the people I know are struggling through it right now. Being sick is, generally speaking, a rather unpleasant sort of thing, and I try to avoid it as much as possible. I’ve warded off this spring’s epidemic with my favorite tea. Anything that can keep me writing and fighting is good in my book! And this tea has the benefit of being insanely delicious.
So. Here you are…Lemon Ginger Tea. Are you ready for this? It’s really, really complicated.
You need:
Got that? Now here are the uber-difficult instructions. Squeeze the lemon into the hot water. Grate in about a teaspoon of fresh ginger, or toss in a few shakes of powdered ginger, or add a chunk or two of crystallized ginger (or heck, add crystallized ginger AND fresh ginger!). Add honey to taste. I like about 2 teaspoons. Stir. Enjoy.
That’s all there is to it! It’s incredibly powerful as an immune booster, because lemons have much more Vitamin C than oranges (and orange juice in cartons loses its Vitamin C due to denaturing in about a day after opening), and ginger is a huge help for respiratory and circulatory health. And of course honey is just a super food all on its own.
Now grab that cup of tea and go cozy up with a good book to write or read!
I’m in the process of renovating my author website…Wordpress is making things so much easier for me! *happy dance* I didn’t really have time to keep the old site maintained, because I’m a terrible coder and it takes me hours to figure out how to do anything. It should probably annoy me that I spent almost an entire day trying to figure out how to create a Lightbox gallery for my artwork on my old site, and now I can just create a page and click “Add Gallery” and voila! Easy-peasy. But it doesn’t annoy me. Not much, anyway.
Anyway, pop on over and see how you like it! I tried to keep the feel of the old website while streamlining it a bit. And excuse the mess…it’s still coming along.
Hi all!
I’ll be back with some more serious posts next week…but in the meantime, would you like to know a few things about me that aren’t in my author bio?
Like the fact that I have a horrible time making decisions when sunglasses and restaurants with atmosphere are involved?
Or the fact that Silesia: The Outworlder was inspired by a nightmare?
If you’d like to see the rest of my quirky facts, head on over to BestsellerBound Recommends for my “Tell Us One Thing” author interview! (And no, I don’t ship cheesecakes.)
Happy writing and reading!
SK
Hi all!
Goodness…the holidays and the New Year obviously swallowed up the SisterMuses! We have both been busily writing…just invisibly. I am feverishly working on The Artifex (Book III of the Silesia Trilogy), which will be released on August 31, 2013. J. Leigh is immersed in the world of The Madness Project, which she plans to release on June 1. It looks to be an exciting year for the SisterMuses!
Today, I’m over at Engelia McCullough’s blog guest posting about the editing process. If editing always gets you down or you feel daunted by that phase of your literary journey, head on over here for some easy ways to take the sting out of the process! Thanks, Engelia, for hosting me today!
Happy writing (and editing)!!!
S.K.
It’s finally here, everyone! So excited to announce the release of The Lords of Askalon, Book II in the Silesia Trilogy! The ebook is available today on Smashwords! The Kindle version should be out tomorrow and the paperback will follow shortly!
A few words of thanks are in order…
To my amazing husband and kids for being so enthusiastic and supportive of this project!
To J. Leigh Bralick, my SisterMuse, my beta reader, and my cover designer! You are a treasure…and it is so much fun to collaborate with you!
To my parents, who always encouraged me to meet any challenge with chin up and a smile…thank you for giving me the confidence to follow my dreams!
And finally…a huge thank you to all my readers and fans who have waited so patiently!