Betty Punkert is the Municipal Liaison for NaNoWriMo in Winnipeg, Canada, and has won the NaNoWriMo challenge 5 times before this year (and looks set to get her sixth win this year). Although she hasn’t published any fiction yet, she sees NaNoWriMo as an opportunity to incubate ideas, and feels ready to start pulling some […]
Image by slack12 via Flickr There comes a time in nearly every big writing project when you just can’t seem to move forward. Maybe you’ve written yourself into a corner and aren’t sure how to get out of it, maybe the end just seems too far away to be reachable, or maybe you burned through […]
Image by sirwiseowl via Flickr In my series on collecting and organizing ideas, I discussed mind-mapping as a brainstorming tool. Mind-mapping is a kind of free-association method in which ideas are generated by association with a central idea, and then each of the generated ideas in turn becomes a source of inspiration for further brainstorming. […]
Image by ecstaticist via Flickr The hardest part of any project for me is getting my notes and captured thoughts into some sort of usable format. That’s one of the reasons why I like conputerized note-taking systems like Evernote so much – it organizes for me by creating notebooks and allowing me to tag each […]
Image via Wikipedia Ideas are paradoxical. While hours of urgent deep thought might leave us without a clue, at other times ideas seem to pop into our heads effortlessly, dazzling us with their perfection. Alas, these brilliant moments of inspiration come all too often when we’re busy doing other things — driving, showering, drifting off to sleep, […]
Image via Wikipedia While coming up with ideas might be easy, coming up with good ones is a bit harder. You increase your odds, of course, by coming up with lots and lots of ideas — out of a hundred or so, surely there ought to be one or two you can do something with! Brainstorming is […]
Image via Wikipedia “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,” poet Robert Herrick advised his readers — for all too soon, you’ll be old and rosebud-gathering will be just one of many things you are no longer capable of. That’s the normal reading of the poem, but it occurs to me that it is in the very nature […]
