Writing Using Word Association Lists

Have you ever had a great idea you wanted to put on paper but just couldn't get started? I'm raising both my hands. As a writer you want the best lead-in you can get. Unfortunately coming up with it isn't always easy. One of the tools I've found that helps me is a word association list.


I'm currently working with just one list. I sat down one night and created a list of words that could be associated with each season. So for spring I have words like warmth, breeze, renewal, rain and training. A few weeks ago when I was trying to write a devotion based on a verse about training your children, the spring portion of the list came in handy. As I scanned the list, I saw the entry "training (spring)". I immediately thought about baseball. That launched me on a parallel of how spring training relates to parenting. The devotion basically formed itself from that one word association.


Another devotion about transformation was written from the fall list. The word of choice was pumpkins. I'll share the beginning here so that you can see how thinking about pumpkins gave me the beginning I needed.

                     " Pumpkins know the power of transformation. They can remain a simple pumpkin or become part of a table centerpiece. Some become pie, soup or seeds. Many become jack-o'-lanterns. Whatever their final destination, they all go through a transformation that's not of their choosing. I guess we can say that we are like pumpkins. Just as pumpkins can be transformed, we too have a similar opportunity. The big difference is we get to choose!"

Before looking at my word association list, I struggled for an hour trying to come up with a good first paragraph. Nothing seemed to work. But pumpkins, yes that was just the right hook for this piece. 

I'm currently putting together a new word association list based on geographic locations like the mountains or the beach. It's a good idea to keep things fresh and a new list will help me do just that. What about you? What word association lists could you come up with? What other techniques do you use to help jump-start your beginnings?

Marietta Taylor is an author and speaker. She is the author ofSurviving Unemployment:Devotions to Go. Marietta is a monthly blogger at the Go ask Mom Blog at www.wral.com. Her tagline is Mom of Teens. She was also a contributing author to Penned From The Heart Vol XV. Marietta has a bachelor's degree in Biology from the University of Illinois-Chicago. Visit Marietta at www.mariettataylor.net or www.marismorningroom.blogspot.com or email her at maritaylor@mariettataylor.net.

Earth Day 2012

We've been celebrating earth day for quite a while now. The motto has always been reduce, reuse, and recycle. All very good advice. In honor of earth day 2012, I kept thinking to myself, how could I reduce using trees in my book marketing endeavors, and the idea came to me. Instead of passing out paper bookmarks (which I still do, but my bookmarks are multi-factorial in that they serve as my business card as well as a bookmark) for giveaways on my blog or anywhere else I am a member, why not use yarn bookmarks (my bookworm bookmarks are perfect for this).

I know I'm not recycling the yarn but they are reusable and do reduce the paper floating out around there.

So, in honor of earth day, I decided to do a drawing between now and 22nd, the actual date of earth day, both on this blog and my blog. The drawings will be an Earthworm (Woodsy) bookworm bookmark.

How to be entered in the drawings: (possibly between 17 and 20 bookworms to be given away)

1. Leave a comment on this blog from the 12th through the 22nd to be entered in the drawing. There are 11 scheduled blog postings between the 12th and 22nd, so that will be 11 drawings from comments on this blog. Each day's comments one winner will be randomly picked.
2. Leave a comment on my blog on any of the scheduled postings between the 122th and 22nd and you will be placed in the drawing. There are six scheduled posting plus a possible 2 or 3 unscheduled postings during that time frame. This means you need to stop by my blog every day to see if a new posting is up and leave a comment.
3. Leave you email addy in the comment in the format of eeldering (at) gmail (dot) com so if you are the winner you can be contacted so I can send out your bookworm.

Winners will be announced in the comment section after the winner has been contacted.


Simple to be entered, and remember if you don't win that day's drawing, there is always the next day or the day after that through the 22nd. If you are interested in the bookworms for gifts or if you don't win one, they are available on both my personal author website and my JGDS series website under the gifts tab. They are only $1.50 each plus shipping (anywhere in the United States). See you all in the postings - E :)

Are Your Readers Kids? - Guest Post by Nicole Borgenicht

When it comes to writing for kids, age appropriate language is important. If there are too many difficult words or complicated sentences, it may deter your readers. Therefore, it is always a good idea to research the reading level first before beginning a book.

Revisions are the perfect places to expand your ideas, plot and characters with a few unique ways of saying things. If children like the story, looking up a word or rereading a sentence won’t be a problem to them.

Kids enjoy relating to the characters you write about - assuming it is a fiction story. Heroic traits are often a draw, and a fairly strong adversary, whether inner or outside or both adding conflict as fuel for the story page by page.

Art in all genres (writing/painting/music) must be designed in such a way that excites the creator, with a true understanding and interest of what the readers/viewers will also sense. If you are bored with your characters, so will they be. If you laugh aloud, so will they. Sure, you may be wrong once in a while, but only by giving into your gut shall you decree your voice and let it tell the story as you wish.

I like to exercise a lot of imagination when I write a story. At the same time, I want other people to see and accept the world I am creating, and even desire to go there with me. It is a wonderful world never before experienced, so that they walk into a new territory, and see the world from another standpoint. At the same time, readers are to wonder what will happen to the characters, and what will they say or do next. To me this is fearless story writing. The idea is to allow children to run into your story with you, and become one of the characters. At times, they may change who they want to be, or simply become an observer along with the author. But the strong pull for a young reader is to feel like they are in the story, and want to be in the time and place, in and out of it, turning pages and enjoying the journey.

It is especially important for kids to free themselves in books and engage in the fun of reading and even imagining how they may act in similar situations. In this way, we can spread compassion, intelligent decision-making and honor among our young readers.

 About the author: Nicole Borgenicht is a children's fiction writer. Her most recent picture book, The Bridge was published by Publish America. Some of Nicole's other kid's stories have appeared in The Los Angeles Times Kid's Reading Room section, Stories for Children Magazine and LadyBug Flights Magazine. Additional works comprise poetry and essays, short stories, one act plays or articles in magazines such as Arts and Entertainment Skyline and American Fitness.

You can find out more about Nicole Borgenicht and her April '12 World of Ink Author/Book Tour at http://tinyurl.com/6we4qlj. There will be giveaways, reviews, interviews, guest posts and more. Make sure to stop by and interact with Borgenicht and the hosts at the different stops by leaving comments and/or questions.

In addition, come listen to the on demand April 9th Blog Talk Radio World of Ink Network show: Stories for Children at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/worldofinknetwork. Host VS Grenier and Irene Roth chatted with Nicole Borgenicht about her recently released book "The Kids of Dandelion Township," writing, the publishing industry and experiences. Borgenicht will also shared writing tips, and trials and the tribulations of the writer’s life. (The Stories for Children show aired live, April 9, 2012 at 2pm EST.)

Lastly, come join the April '12 Book Lovers Blog Hop & Giveaway at http://familiesmatter2us.blogspot.com/2012/04/book-lovers-blog-hop-giveaway-april-12.html for your chance to win a free copy of "The Kids Dandelion Township" and two other bonus books!

Freelance Writing - Don't Look Down

Don't Look Down!

Staying on Track
by Kathleen Moulton

I don’t know about you, but I get off track with my writing. I am still in the early stages of earning an income with freelance writing and developing consistent, daily objectives. I have good weeks and I have bad weeks. Because I am a productive person, I can get impatient with myself when I don’t produce.

Sound familiar?

Balance is truly the key to everything in life. We have to learn to take the good with the bad. Keeping a calm, stable attitude helps brings contentment. If we are only happy when we’ve had a productive week or a writing success and discouraged when our week had some unplanned difficulties which kept us from meeting our writing goals, our emotions will be a roller coaster. That may quench and even stagnate creativity. Sometimes the road ahead has a slippery surface, hairpin turns, or detours. Preparation for the unforeseen makes all the difference.

I remember learning to ride a bike or ice skate. The worse thing to do was to look down. It was the quickest way to lose your balance. It was much better to look ahead at where you were going. If you fell, you got up and kept going.

The same idea works for writing. When the bad days come, remember tomorrow is another day. When you look “down” at yourself, you lose your balance. Accept the fact you can’t always be on top of your game. If you get off track, just get back on the next day. Set aside the lack of productivity or the rejection letter and keep looking up!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Kathleen Moulton is a freelance writer, wife, and a 25 year veteran homeschooling mother of eight children. You can find her passion to bring encouragement and hope to people of all ages at http://kathleenmoulton.com/

Image: nuttakit / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Where are the bookstores?

Just this week another bookshop has closed its doors in my neighbourhood.  This wasn't one of the big chains like Borders, who closed their collective doors in 2011.  It was just another local small ma & pa owned shop who couldn't compete with the online giants.  Though I myself do a lot of online buying -- after all it's often the best deal by a long shot, and if you buy as many books as I do, that's a pretty important factor-- I can't deny that I miss the hours I spent in the local shop, fingering the titles, purchasing books on impulse, and having conversations with strangers over what either of us was carrying in our trolley.  There was always such a nice feeling in those places, especially the local one where I knew the booksellers by name and where they knew my tastes enough to not only recommend books to me but to order and hold them when an author they knew I loved had come out with a new novel.  I also loved the way bricks and morter bookstores bridged the gap between reader and writer -- offering signings, readings, chats and other fun events. That kind of intimacy is slowly disappearing and online events, while still pretty wonderful, aren't quite the same. 

So we all know where the online bookshops are, but are there any bricks and morter stores worth visiting?  Well yes there really still are some.  If you live in the USA, there are Barnes & Nobles everywhere and they're even longer running and bigger than Borders were.  In NYC alone, there are some 58 stores.  In the US as a whole, there are 691 shops. That's a lot of bookstores, and the nice thing about B&N are that they're also online, which means that prices are as cheap as anywhere.  Of course B&N are hardly "intimate" and personal. Nor are they 'independent' so you won't get that warm fuzzy feeling from supporting them, and it's unlikely they'll be flexible in terms of supporting local authors or catering to your unusual literary tastes. If you're looking for somewhere more independent, you could try The Strand bookstore in NYC. 

I have to admit that this was my favourite haunt as a youngster and it still rates higher than the Statue of Liberty for me when visiting NY as a tourist.  But we don't all live in NYC!  For the top indie bookstores in the US, check out  http://www.bookmarket.com/top700.htm 

If you live in the UK, you could try one of the following bookstores, some of which are so beautiful, they deserve to be coffee table books themselves (and forget Black Books - the customer service is brilliant): http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/gallery/2010/jun/14/your-favourite-bookshops-booksellers

If you live in my locale, you could try MacLeans: http://www.macleans.indies.com.au in Toronto or Hamilton NSW.  They don't serve great coffee like some of the London shops, but they're well stocked and are always willing to order in books (including mine if you ask!).  

The one thing that many of these indies have in common is that they don't do a tremendous amount of advertising.  You'll need to look a bit to find them, maybe asking around or checking the local directory, but  if, like me, you're the sort of tactile person who loves browsing, holding, and playing with books, it's worth supporting these shops, be-friending the owner or proprietors, and participating in their literary events.  

About the author: Magdalena Ball runs The Compulsive Reader. She is the author of the poetry books Repulsion Thrust and Quark Soup, the novels Black Cow and Sleep Before Evening, a nonfiction book The Art of Assessment, and, in collaboration with Carolyn Howard-Johnson, Deeper Into the Pond, Blooming Red, Cherished Pulse, She Wore Emerald Then, and Imagining the Future. She also runs a radio show, The Compulsive Reader Talks. Find out more about Magdalena at http://www.magdalenaball.com

Make Your Mondays Marvelous!

Who likes Mondays? Nobody. Poor Monday, always getting blamed for grumpy moods and work boredom. Poor Monday is the ultimate scapegoat for everything {blah} in our lives.

I am not saying I look forward to Mondays. Like everyone, I sometimes get the where-did-the-weekend-disappear-to? Sunday-evening blues. But the other day I realized something: if I spend every week dreading Monday and slugging through Monday just trying to get through the day, that means I'll be spending 1/7th of my life in a state of yucky, grumpy, get-me-out-of-here dread. And that's just not how I want to spend my time.

So I was thinking back to when I was in elementary school, and we had adjectives associated with all the days of the week, cute alliterative names like: Super Sunday, Stupendous Saturday, Fantastic Friday, Thrilling Thursday, Wonderful Wednesday, Terrific Tuesday, Marvelous Monday.

How does that sound? Marvelous Monday.

I kinda like it.

The thing is, back in elementary school, Mondays *were* marvelous. I don't remember dreading Mondays then. Weekends were great, of course, but school was fun, too. I think a large part of it was that even school had a sense of excitement and discovery about it. Every day, even Mondays, were filled with the possibility of surprises. Magic was around every corner. Back then, even the most everyday incidents would be cause for celebration: ice cream for someone's birthday, a trip to a new restaurant, a note from your best friend passed secretively during class, a new game on the playground, a gopher discovered behind the kickball backstop...

I think it's about time to bring some of that everyday magic back. Especially to poor Monday.

From now on, instead of moaning about Monday, I am going to try to make each Monday particularly marvelous. Maybe I'll try something new, do a random act of kindness or gratitude, act spontaneously, bring out my inner 12-year-old. Then, I'll go home and write about it, bringing that renewed energy and zest for life to all of my writing projects.

Will you join me? What is marvelous about your Monday?

Dallas Woodburn is the author of two award-winning collections of short stories and editor of Dancing With The Pen: a collection of today's best youth writing. Her short fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize three years in a row and her nonfiction has appeared in a variety of national publications including Family Circle, Writer's Digest, The Writer, and The Los Angeles Times. She is the founder of Write On! For Literacy and Write On! Books Youth Publishing Company and is currently pursuing her Master's degree in Fiction Writing at Purdue University, where she teaches undergraduate writing courses and serves as Assistant Fiction Editor of Sycamore Review.

Do You Use Flashbacks?

What is flashback? It’s someone remembering, in the present, what happened in the past. If you tell of bygone events in narrative summary, it’s exposition (telling). If you dramatize them as a scene, it’s a flashback. The virtue of flashbacks is that, unlike exposition, they’re showing, not telling. They have action and drama.

However, many writing experts advise not to use flashbacks, or to limit them Of course this is one of those “rules” that has exceptions. In writing, never say never.

Here are the reasons for trying to avoid using flashbacks:
1.They’re not as strong or vivid as present-time scenes, simply because they’re done with. Readers tend to take the past less seriously than the present because it’s over. We’re only hearing about it rather than seeing it happen—even though it’s presented as a scene.

2. Any flashback, no matter how well written or interesting, can distance your reader from the action. This is because flashbacks shatter the illusion that the reader is a fly on the wall, witnessing events as they happen, right now. Are you more thrilled by a kiss you experience today or one you remember from a year ago?

3. Flashbacks disrupt the story’s timeline and can stop the momentum. And if there are a lot of them, they can leech the vividness out of the whole story and invalidate the story’s present.

So, whenever you feel the need to fill in backstory, ask yourself first:
• Is this needed to move the story along?
• If the answer is yes, then ask yourself, can this be written as a real-time scene?
• If no, try to determine if you gain more in depth and clarity than you lose in immediacy.

Every story has its history or backstory. But we can’t start every one at birth and include all of the traumatic childhood or life events that shaped the character and made him what he is today. You might choose to write up this background in one or more scenes—just for your own personal knowledge of your character—and not use much or any of it in your story.

When to use Flashbacks.
This is not to say that you can NEVER use flashbacks. They can be done effectively. Like with so many writing techniques, it’s a matter of moderation.

Again, according to the experts, don’t open with a flashback. (Of course there’s an exception to that rule, too.) But the danger of opening with a flashback is that in the early stages of a story, interest is a fragile thing. Your reader is in search of entertainment, and he’s not sure yet if he’s going to find what he wants in your particular story.

Sometimes flashback might be the only way to develop your plot. But make sure to spend the largest proportion of your time in the present.

So, if you’re going to use a flashback, make sure the running plot in your story is strong, clear and well-established before splitting off to do anything else, whether following a subplot or embarking on a flashback. Make sure the flashback is vivid and interesting in itself. Connect the flashback plot with the present plot.

Next month I'll talk about how to handle flashbacks when you do use them.