Please welcome our very first male author! Ladies, be kind *wink*.

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How do? My name’s Rob Graham. I’m pretty new to this writing business, so I’m honoured to have a chance to write here at Romantic Inks. What I’m going to write about is what I regard as the central question to our field, what do you want to do with your writing?

I can’t speak for others, but for myself I write to tell stories, stories about people. What happens to these people, why it happens, and how they handle it. And above all, the emotions the people in the story feel.

That, I believe, is the single most important thing about writing. A writer transmits emotion to their reader. They feel the characters’ hope, love, passion, fear, anger. Emotion makes the characters is a story real. And for a short time, draws the reader into the world the writer has created.

The next question is, how does a writer do this?

My opinion is that first the writer has to create fully fleshed characters. A writer has to know what their characters look like, what they think, what motivates them, how they react to circumstances. When a writer has full characters, much of the rest is easier.

The second thing the writer has to do is plot. They have to put the characters together and decide how they’ll interact. Will they be drawn to one another? Repelled? Both? How do they act? Why? How do the characters feel about their actions? With a good plot a writer has many opportunities to raise emotion in their characters and readers.

Finally, there is the quality of writing. Myself, I find myself striving for a balance.

Some writers are verbose. This, I think, can be a mistake. Too many words can bury the story. The reader will end up wandering someplace far from the central thrust of the story, wandering in a storage room when the action is taking place in the Grand Hall.

Some writers can be terse. Their word use is sparse, precise. This can be a mistake as well. A writer might not be able to catch the emotions of the moment with too few words.

So a balance, I believe, works best. As Han Solo would say, “That’s the tricky part, isn’t it?”

But that’s what a writer should strive for with their writing, balance.

So, there you have it. The primary goal of a writer is to tell a story. They do this with character, plot and quality writing. If a writer does those three things well, they’ll catch their reader, draw them in, make them feel emotion.

Your readers will love you for it.

I know there aren’t any really new insights here. But this is a personal bugaboo of mine. Too often when discussing writing people end up talking about style, method, schools of thought. But the centre of writing, in my opinion, is the story. If you don’t have a story much of anything.

Thanks for reading my little attempt at philosophy. This was fun.

My Space Site

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Keeping a Writer’s Notebook

Hi, I’m Emma Sanders and I want to thank Haven for having me today. And thanks for your patience, Haven!

My topic today is using a writer’s notebook.

Do you keep a writer’s notebook? I have notes scattered throughout that I eventually put on my computer. One liners that might develop into an entire book later. Scenes that pop into my head that don’t go with my work-in-progress but I may can use in my next one or even the next one.

I also have a spiral notebook where I jot things down, but it’s hard to go back through it and find something I know I wrote. I created an organized binder once but don’t ever use it for some reason. Maybe it’s the fact that it’s actually organized, and I feel confined in my creativity.

I think it’s important to keep some sort of notebook, whether it’s a completely organized binder, a spiral, or on your computer. Or like me, have several at once. (Of course, this makes things harder.)

A writer’s notebook is a good place to jot down things that pop in your mind. Maybe you don’t want to forget the way the sun sinks into the earth and explodes into color, so you write that down and use it later in your work. Or a title pops into your mind. This notebook is different than a journal. I have a journal, too, but my journal sometimes branches out into my writer’s notebook. It’s hard to keep them separate sometimes.

Notebooks can be used all sorts of ways but you have to use what works for you. I’d love to organize mine into subjects. Scenes, titles, characters, settings, descriptions, etc. I’d love to have different pictures I may have colored (hey, coloring is a great creative outlet), photos, trinkets, but I just can’t. I can’t get myself organized enough. Sometimes I’ll try something new and it won’t work, so I finally bought an accordion file folder where I can put pictures, sheets of notes, even my journal. Of course, that isn’t used very often and isn’t organized because it doesn’t really work for me. Then again, if I forced myself into the habit, it might work. The only organized thing about me is my computer. I have different file folders for everything there! But maybe one day…

Keeping a writer’s notebook is a good idea to remember things you don’t want to forget, which I’ve done plenty of. Soon I plan to add a digital recorder to my stash so I can actually record something in my head when I can’t write it down. I may not ever be able to find all my notes!

Thanks for reading! Id’ love to hear about your writer’s notebook!

Emma Sanders

www.emmasanders.com/