Yes, I collect beautiful sentences. Here are two from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

One character describing the way another character speaks: “It reminded him of slicing a yam with a newly sharpened knife, the easy perfection in every slice.”

Describing how a boy from a rural village describes his first sight of the larger, affluent town:  “…how the bungalows here were painted the color of the sky and sat side by side like polite well-dressed men, how the hedges separating them were trimmed so flat on top that they looked like tables wrapped with leaves.”

from Half of a Yellow Sun

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hairspray

“I never purposely thought I was making a movie that was any more commercial than any of the other ones. I was just accidentally obsessed with something that was appealing to more people.” John Waters on Hairspray in an interview in The Washington Post (1/19/13). My italics.

Love the way he puts this. Reminds me of why it’s better to follow your personal obsessions and passions rather than trying to write the hit.

 

Mary Amato reading in Jefferson City, MOAt the 2013 Golden Globes, Quentin Tarantino (Django Unchained) thanked a group of friends to whom he reads his scenes aloud. “You don’t tell me what I’m doing wrong…” he said. “Reading it to you helps me to hear it through your ears.” So important! But kind of hard to find friends who have the time to sit and listen to you read an entire novel aloud, eh? Well, whenever I teach a writing class, I always encourage students to read their own work aloud and imagine that the room is filled with an audience. If you are able to put yourself into the mindset of your audience while you’re reading, you will be hearing your work as if for the first time and you’ll discover lots of mistakes–and insights– for revision.

See my guest post about writing wish poems on the Pencil Tips Writing Blog.

 

pencils in vase

Writers who want to cross that threshold from amateur to professional often ask whether they should focus their attention on a project that seems marketable or write whatever they want to write. Look at it this way…whatever you write might not get published, even if you believe it is a marketable idea; so why not spend your time writing what really speaks to you? Write what you need to write.

“Go to your bosom, knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know” (William Shakespeare, Measure For Measure), and remember amateur comes from the Latin lover.

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Glen Echo Graffiti

After giving my SCBWI talk, which included a personal story about how I had wished my mother had written me a letter before she died, I came home and took a walk with my husband along the canal. I spotted this piece of graffiti. I have already written my letters. If you’ve been thinking about it, take a moment and write yours. They can be very short. “I love you” goes a long way.

 

A student wrote to me saying that she was having trouble with the climax and ending for her story.

My advice?

Try writing out a simple outline of what happens in the story. Work on that outline so the story make sense and comes to an ending that you like. Don’t write a new scene or revise an old one until you’re really happy with the outline.

 

pencil amato write e

I am hard at work on the next novel, and I’m using a different process. Usually I find the voice of the novel first (Is it the voice of the main character? Is it the voice of a narrator?) and then I write my rough draft in the voice. So, I started this project by writing in the voice of my main character, but it quickly became difficult. What is happening in my character’s life is emotionally hot and overwhelming; and so I found that her energy was too scattered and unstable to follow. My story wasn’t moving forward; it was just a hurricane of her thoughts and anxieties. So, I gave my character a sedative and put her to bed and then I wrote a rough draft in a completely unattached voice, just describing what was happening to her. Behold: a coherent plot emerged. Now that I know what the story is about, I’m revising from the beginning, releasing her voice, allowing her to be fully present in her completely whacked out way.