Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts

Sunday

Blogging for beginners: for whom do you write

This is a challenging question for all writers. The fact is you really cannot please everyone and it is often useful to find yourself at odds with at least some audiences. The alternative is to so average yourself that you end up not standing for anything. It is far better to be respected as a leader or authority in your focal area.

Writing, tough as it is, is still the easy part. Getting published, a near impossibility, is also relatively easy especially if you self-publish or put your own money on the table. Those all represent big enough challenges, of that I have no doubt, but the greatest challenge, by far, is marketing your work.

Friday

Blogging for beginners: what should you write about?

Only you can really answer that question.

That said, the answer is as relevant as the answer to your career choices? Most people who choose to do what they were never designed to do, fail to do much that matters. Oh, of course, life is often like Joseph's dungeon, where we end up in spite of all our best intentions, yet, even then such dark moments are not about diverting our life course down another road. Indeed, it is in such dungeons that God lights up the dark to enflame the passion of our lives.

Who knows how relevant you will be for all your struggles and what a difference you could make for having worked through the issues that stand between you and victory?

We are but pie in the sky, empty clouds without water and hollow vessels, if our conversations are merely the product of reason. No amount of reason or learning can ever substitute for experience. Thus it is all about experiencing the heart that beats for this world, because we can only truly bring life once our hearts are ignited by the zeal of God.

Some inspirational quotes and poetry for writers


"Writers, like teeth, are divided into incisors and grinders” ~ Walter Bagehot

"We talked about our voices as writers--how they are strong and brave but how as people we are wimps. This is what creates our craziness. The chasm between the great love we feel for the world when we sit and write about it and the disregard we give it in our own human lives”~ Natalie Goldberg

"The story arises in the unconscious” ~Dorothea Brande

"What is The Subconscious to every other man, in its creative aspect becomes, for writers, The Muse”~ Ray Bradbury

"One writes out of one thing only--one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from the experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give” ~ James Baldwin

"It is a paradox of creativity that the very way to move beyond the conventional stage [of writing] is not to try harder, but to take a seeming step backward: to reawaken and cultivate in ourselves some of the ways we had of perceiving and expressing when we were children" ~ Gabrielle Lusser Rico

Poem by Frederick Lehman

Could we with ink the ocean fill,
And were the skies of parchment made,
Were every stalk on earth a quill,
And every man a scribe by trade,
To write the love of God above,
Would drain the ocean dry.
Nor could the scroll contain the whole,
Though stretched from sky to sky.

Tuesday

7 habits of great writers: 7. Develop multiple communication channels

Before Jesus was born, the way (channel) was prepared so that when He stood up to speak to the people, his platform would be assured. God actually prepared that platform over a period of 4,000 years so that His ministry would have relevance to that world. Sin and judgment were two primary concepts that were ingrained in the social conscience before He came.

God also prepared the physical distribution channels, by introducing Jesus to the world only once the Romans had completed their roads and the Greek language had universalized communications. This also shows great attention to detail, which reflects how deeply serious God was about the process of salvation and judgment.

Sunday

The oldest profession

We all know what comes to mind when we speak of the oldest profession, but for various reasons I think writers have a greater claim to this title. No I am not saying that writers were the first prostitutes although the term does describe how writers are tempted to sell the soul of their craft to popularity, commercialism or plagiarism. I am merely arguing that writing is the older and more worthy profession.

Prostitutes may be "professionals", but they are not "professors". They do not occupy seats of learning, although they may at times share the beds of the learned. A profession speaks of a collection of professional occupations that includes doctors, lawyers and so on. They are highly skilled specialists in a given field of practice. Writing, by implication, can be regarded as a profession, prostitution is just prostitution.

Secondly, we have been around for as far back as history goes, because that is in fact what defines how far back history goes. History is the recorded past. If it isn't recorded it isn't history and it most certainly isn't recorded history. Okay, so maybe dinosaurs didn't write and they predated humans so perhaps fossils go back further, but as far as human activity is concerned our records of their existence are substantiated through cave graffiti, carvings, clay tablets and written scrolls.