Elmore Leonard, is an American novelist and screenwriter, and as he’s called in the video – perhaps the king of the hard-boiled novel. But even though he specialized in crime fiction and suspense, his earliest novels were westerns. I’ve to say, I’m more familiar with the movies that have been made out of his writing. That’d be works like Get Shorty, Out of Sight, Hombre, Mr. Majestyk and Rum Punch, which was filmed as Jackie Brown. His short stories have also been made into films – 3:10 to Yuma and The Tall T, as well as the current TV series on FX, Justified. Pretty awesome, yes? And I LOVE how he talks about the rhythm of dialogue and voices and how that gives a “sound” to your writing.
WWW: FILDI
I’ve been on a Ze Frank kick recently, and I think that’s one of the better kicks to get onto as he’s perhaps one of the most creatively motivational voices I’ve come across. Both in that he motivates creativity and motivates creatively. And Ze Frank is where I got FILDI from. What is FILDI? Well, I’ve been trying to find the video where he first brought it up, but I can’t, so I’m going to try and explain it in my own words.
FILDI stands for F*@% It, Let’s Do It. It’s that moment in the creative process where you realize that the only way something is going to get done is to buckle down and actually do it, the realization that you are the creator for your own little world and that nothing is going to come of it except by your own hands and the sweat of your own brow. It means that it’s time to stop playing around, looking at the project from every different angle, and doing everything except working on it…and actually work on it.
I’ve been doing what I can to channel my FILDI when it comes to writing this week, and I’ve learned that my FILDI is strong. It’s what powers me through 2000 words on a night that I really didn’t want to write to begin with. It’s what has my novella mostly outlined even though I hate outlining. My FILDI is me sitting down at a computer, opening Scrivener, and saying that I am going to write and that none of the little excuses running around my head about why writing doesn’t feel like a good idea at the particular moment are valid. Because it’s time to write.
FILDI.
The FILDI doesn’t always work. But when it does, it’s creative magic. So find yours, chase it down, catch it, then be nice to it to make sure it doesn’t run away, without being so nice that it starts to get complacent and fat. Like my cats. They have no FILDI, except when it comes to naps.
Video Saturday – Nora Roberts’ Advice to Writers
Okay, today’s video from Nora Roberts isn’t so much “Advice to Writers” as it is talking a little bit about her own process. This Video Saturday is from her talk at the Washington Post to an audience of over 500. Nora Roberts has written more than 209 romance novels. She also writes hard-boiled futuristic mysteries as J.D. Robb but has also written under the pseudonyms of Jill March and Sarah Hardesty. As of 2011, her novels had spent a combined 861 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List, thats like 16 years! And of that, 176 weeks were in the number-one spot! Hmm, maybe I SHOULD pay more attention to her process.
WWW: Unleaded Strikes Twice!
I’m excited to announce that my story The South, Rise Again has been picked up for inclusion in Q&W Publishers upcoming anthology Old Weird South. I’m announcing this here on Unleaded because a quick browse of my the accepted contributors also turns up the name of fellow Unleaded scribe and Day’s Trust & Treachery co-editor Meriah Crawford!
There you have it, the big news, our humble little writers blog has put two contributors into a single anthology. Here’s a description of the anthology from the call for submissions:
The American South is a haunted place — full of ghost stories, native legends, persistent devils & angels, souls sold at the crossroads, and moon-eyed maidens living in the Okefenokee. The South’s best writers — Faulkner, O’Connor, McCullers — all keep this sense of the otherworldly in their fiction.
In this spirit, Q & W Publishers is looking for submissions for an anthology of short fiction and non-fiction that explores the fantastic, eerie, and bizarre side of the American South.
So look for Old Weird South currently aiming for publication later this year.
Back to more advice-y columns next week, I promise.
Balancing Writing and Social Media
Writing a novel takes an incredible amount of time — often more time than I like! But of the bigger challenges I’ve found is balancing my writing with social media. Social media is becoming an essential tool of promotion for writers, both traditional and indie alike — and yet, what would be the point without a book to sell?
When I first got my feet wet with Twitter, I lasted about two months. It was fun at first, but then it became a huge amount of effort to keep pumping out tweets to remain visible. Between work, writing, and normal life things, it was overwhelming — and still can be. Sometimes I want to run screaming from the computer!
So these are 3 things I do to help keep social media from consuming my writing:
- Use a Blog Reader. I subscribe to the blogs I read through a blog reader. This gives me the ability to do a quick scan of blogs I to pass along to my followers. I can ignore the ones I don’t want to deal with now and hit the ones I know will probably give me at least one link. I also will drop in on at least one blog and post a comment.
- Schedule Tweets. I do Twitter early in the morning. I don’t write that early (takes a while for the muse to wake up!), so it isn’t taking away from the writing. I use Buffer to schedule timed tweets throughout the day. Then I scan through HootSuite for the conversations and use that program’s timed tweets to send those out. I also will scan for interesting links, and either retweet or post a comment to them.
- Prepare blog posts in advance. I have a Word file for my blog and one for Unleaded. I reuse the file for the next post. Word is so much easier to use then WordPress’ editor because I can run a macro to search out all the unnecessary words and weasel words to make editing speedy (if only it could catch my typos!). I write my posts for the week over the weekend. I’ve found it’s best to do them at one time — it gets too stressful when I remember that I have to come up with a topic for tomorrow and don’t know what to do. WordPress handily allows me to schedule the posts, so once I’m done setting them up, I don’t have to think about them any more.
Right now, I’m running about an hour a day for Twitter, and the time it takes on the weekends for the blog. But by grouping everything together, it frees up chunks of time in the evening for novel writing.
Your Turn: How are you balancing your social media time with your writing? Do you have any other tips that weren’t mentioned? I’d like hear them! You can leave a comment by posting below.
Video Saturday – Garrison Keillor’s Advice to Writers
Garrison Keillor is an American author, storyteller, humorist, and radio personality. You’ll likely recognize him the moment he begins speaking on the video. Why? He’s best known as host of the Minnesota Public Radio showA Prairie Home Companion. Today’s just a quick short little piece of advice we’ve all heard but it bears repeating, especially when we’re stressing over deadlines and unfinished pages.
