All posts tagged: writing

Write What You Know

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Originally posted on The Sunflower Cafe:
Everyone knows that phrase uttered in every creative writing course. The famous, “write what you know.” This is solid advice for writers both new and experienced. My only problem is that people tend to take it at a face value. They assume they should only write about plots or settings that they know well. If that were the case, then fantasy and sci-fi wouldn’t exist. I doubt J. R.R. Tolkien truly experienced a trek to Mordor. Writing what you know doesn’t always have to be a place. Sometimes putting qualities you see in yourself or those around you into your characters is writing what you know. Sometimes looking at the way people speak to one another or the way emotions are handled in times of stress or happiness is writing what you know. To create a character who breathes, it helps to be perceptive on the way real people think and act. When I write, I tend to give my cast a few of my own flaws. This normally…

Write Everyday

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Originally posted on Confessions of a 20-something:
Inspiration and time are the two major writing blocks that I seem to be experiencing lately. Even as I type “time” I think to myself, “If it’s important, you make time.” I know! But after staring at a computer screen for 8+ hours a day, the last thing I want to do when I get home from work, is continue to stare a computer screen. And then when I write on actual pen and paper, I have to then transfer that to the computer. And that almost never happens. Because then I am forced to confront my writing again. And quite often the feelings that I was writing about. So, I have a list of prompts that I think I will genuinely enjoy writing about. I’m not going to promise that they will be written about every day. I’m not going to promise that they will be in order. I am definitely not going to promise that all of them are going to be posted to this blog.…

Blogging 101: Blog Posts

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After months of fishing through numerous blog pages to find millennial bloggers and posts to reblog, there are a few things we, the G.U.M team, have noticed. It’s time for us to share some tips based on our findings. We’ve decided to do our own series of Blogging University to share with all of you. To kick off we’re diving right in with blog posts. One of the, if not THE, most important part of blogging. A good blog contains posts that meet three major elements:

A Letter to My 20-Year-Old Self

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Originally posted on Am I Thirty Yet:
So tomorrow is the big day! The day this entire blog was written about. I turn 30! Turning 30 has made me think a lot about what it was like when I was turning 20 and saying goodbye to my teens. I didn’t handle it very well. There were panic attacks and I actually wet the bed the night of my birthday. (This is a true story and maybe I’ll tell you lucky people about it in another post.) For now, let’s go back to poor, little 20-year-old Liz. She was not excited about leaving her teens behind her and entering her twenties. Current Liz still isn’t 100% sure on what she wants with her life and the direction it is going to take. But 20-year-old Liz might as well have been on another planet. She didn’t even know what hairstyle worked best for her face or how to put on eyeliner. She was a lost soul who needed a lot of guidance. Now being a wise, almost 30-year-old (that…

My Type of Romance

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As it was Valentines Day recently I have decided to write about relationships and my own experience with the crazy roller coaster world of love. This is a romantic story straight out of (certain) types of movies, TV shows and books, but trust me when I say it is not a fairy tale. When I was 18, I became involved with a man. This man seemed like he was straight out of a story. He was eight years my senior, which made him just the right age in my mind, and he reminded me of many of the characters I had learned to love over the years. But this was no fairy tale story. Not a romcom either. No. This man reflected the kind of relationships I was fascinated with at the time. When I was younger, I wasn’t interested in ‘normal’ on screen romances and soppy rom coms. I didn’t want a knight in shining armor, un-complicated, sweet, and ‘normal’ guy.  When I was younger, I was obsessed with phantom of the Opera. With the angst page of …

Suzanna the Slapper – 3rd & 4th July 1998

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Originally posted on If Destroyed Still True:
Friday 3rd We had today off school coz it’s an inset day so Rachael came to my house. We were phoning everyone to try and get them to come down to the village but we decided not to bother in the end coz it wasn’t fair on Emma coz she’d gone shopping. We rang Freddie and had a short conversation with him and we also rang Ralph. I was on for quite a while to him. I apologised again for last night and he said he wanted to ask me something but he wouldn’t tell me over the phone. I told him I still liked him and that I wouldn’t never go out with him. That didn’t seem to help matters and he said he was just getting depressed again. Later on we phoned Graham Baxter. Rach really wanted someone else to do it coz she fancies him and was embarrassed but I wouldn’t. She ended up asking him if he wanted to come to the cinema next…

Wolves & Sheep

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Originally posted on The Renegade Press:
‘The price of being a sheep is boredom. The price of being a wolf is loneliness. Choose one or the other with great care.’ – Hugh Macleod If you were forced to make a choice between living a life of boredom, or one of loneliness, what would your decision be? Would you choose a stifled existence of mundanity in which you are forced to conform to the whims and needs of the masses? Or would you be comfortable in a life of isolation? Could you find comfort in the knowledge that you will forever be without inspiration, surrounded only by the mediocre and the monotonous? Or would prefer a life of seclusion and segregation? The truth is that you wouldn’t wish to be afflicted by either. If I pushed you into a corner and forced you to make a choice, you would probably shove me back and call me insane. Why would anyone want to make such a ridiculous decision? No matter what avenue you pursued, you would be…

Manhattan

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?? ?I exited my apartment building, curt note in hand for the UPS delivery person: The buzzer for 2R is broken – please leave delivery inside the door. Contrary to what somebody told you yesterday, there are tenants in 2R – one especially who would have loved to have slept on a mattress last night. I crammed the note between the old brick wall and the broken buzzer and made my way down the now-familiar street to get coffee at a café that I had been referred to by seasoned locals. They’d been here since August, anyway. The rectangular olive-green sign beckoned me onward, steel and hard with flashing bulbs that made it look like an old and woefully lost Vegas sign. I ordered an almond croissant and a cappuccino and took a seat at a small, round marble table. I found myself flanked by hipsters, the luminescent glow of chalky white Apples and the click-click-click of their modern keyboards surrounding me. Extremely conscious of being the only person in the large café without a…