Friday, January 30, 2009
Archive of ‘Plot Whisperer’ category
Another great exercise from Martha at the Plot Whisperer. Check this one out if you have an issue with your protagonist’s past, wants and needs. Fantastic stuff!
The only real antagonist is the protagonist herself.
1) Draw a bubble in the middle of a piece of paper. Write the protagonist’s deepest held belief, the one that prevents her from having that which she wants more than anything else in the world. Or do this exercise on yourself to determine what’s blocking you — I’m not good enough, I’m not smart enough, I don’t do enough — pick one, create one, we’ve all got them.
2) Spiraling out from the bubble, create other bubbles each with an…
Read Martha’s entire post (told you it was great stuff!):
A Tough Nut To Crack at The Plot Whisperer
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Happpy Writing!
Beth
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
The Plot Whisperer is at it again!
The wonderfully generous and insightful Plot Whisperer, aka Martha Alderson, is at it again…this time, posting a daily series of activities and thoughts on plot to help bring your fictional one(s) to life.
Honestly, I really want to know where to find the wellspring of plot knowledge she’s tapping for my own selfish benefit 
but for now I’ll settle for her helpful posts.
She’s got too much stuff over there to condense it down into a line or two. If you haven’t read Blockbuster Plots, you need to. Shell out the bucks because I guarantee you’ll never read another plot the same way again.
In the meantime, go visit her amazing series of posts at The Plot Whisperer
Happy Plotting (I never really believed in that before Martha!)
Beth
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Dreams….at the Plot Whisperer blog
If you know me, you know how fascinated I am by dreams. I’ve kept a dream notebook (which stemmed out of a meeting with Robert Moss, author of Dream Gates years ago and my first stint with Julia Cameron’s Morning Pages) for years and will chat anyone up who’s interested in talking about their dreams.
In visiting blogs by colleagues, I found that Martha Alderson over at the Plot Whisperer blog has a great post on dreams and their potential significance to writers in the midst of creation:
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Allow Your Dreams to do Your Heavy Plot Lifting
Following is an inspirational way to use your dreams to write your stories by hynotherapist, author, and radio personality Kelly Sullivan Walden.
Like Kelly, I, too, use my dreams to support my writing and you’ll usually find me up before dawn, writing.
“While I was up to my elbows mid-way through writing my recent book, “I Had the Strangest Dream…the Dreamer’s Dictionary for the 21st Century” (Warner Books), I developed the practice of rolling out of bed and into my “writing station.” While still in the in-between-worlds place I would open my laptop, take a deep breath, and with eyes half closed, let my fingers do the tapping. Before my logical brain woke up, I would give myself permission to write whatever wanted to be written from my subconscious/dream state.
This “dream state” writing would often wind its way to being relevant to the particular aspect of the book I happened to be working on. Even if my writing took a detour I would nonetheless find myself opened to a smorgasbord of thoughts and feelings that I could apply to the subject at hand that never would have occurred to me otherwise.
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Read the entire post at: Allow Your Dreams to do Your Heavy Plot Lifting by Martha Alderson at Plot Whisperer
It's pretty simple, really. I'm a writer who loves writing about writing, and sharing all the tricks of the trade with other writers. And when I'm not writing, I'm thinking about writing. I have a hunch you know what I mean :)