Proofreading & Editing Blog » Fun with Writing

Jumping in the Dark

Supaproofread — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 00:10:10 +0000

"You don't jump ... you step, like walking off the pavement when you cross the road.

It's noisy but you don't hear anything as you are concentrating on what you are going to do.

Smell is the sense that is heightened the most when you are scared and can't see anything and your ears won't work. It stinks of piss and puke with a waft of pure freshness coming at you in insufficient quantity to clear your gut from being scared and taking away the metal taste in your mouth.

Now it's your turn with the rear-front shuffle taking you to the black hole while your arms are aching with holding onto the weight and I want to throw up but I didn't eat anything on purpose.

It's pointless looking up because the cloud blanks out the stars you otherwise would expect to not see, a double negative on a good night that tells you it's open.

Now your ears tell you what's happening. Shouts from others that have gone before and are coming after.

Fumbling around with D-rings that pose no challenge to someone who has spent a brief life unhooking a rear fastening bra, one-handed when inebriated with a nice pair waiting for your attention.

A firm tug, gentle oscillation and then the wait for the sound that tells you Mother Earth is claiming you and she is a hard mistress.

"Fear - Relief - Panic" but I prefer "Every landing you can walk away from is good one."

It's taken several hours of being thrown around to get here but less than sixty seconds to get back where God intended - walking on the ground and giving it the "Big I Am" with colleagues.

Then there is the awful dawning realisation that the nearest pub is seven thousand miles away and jumping in the dark is not the scariest thing in your life."

Twenty years ago I would not have been able to write this.

If you read this far, you know how far I have come.

No related posts.

Helium – A Writers Marketplace?

Supaproofread — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 23:18:46 +0000

Helium has just turned one year old. You may have seen the Google adsense marketing blurbs when you are researching writing and resources for writers, and I think they are probably the number one writing services advertiser at the moment.

Helium is a site that allows you to submit your articles in anticipation that they will be sold (by them) and you get a percentage of the fee. You can also earn a share of advertising revenues generated by the site and there are writing competitions which may can earn you extra pay as well. The big issue is that you are not being paid for the time you spend crafting an article and getting paid any realistic amount is totally dependent upon the article being sold.

I've never contributed to Helium as I always shied away from submitting work with no guarantee that I'll be paid for my efforts. I wrote for a short while for a similar site Suite 101, but nothing ever really came of it and I stopped as work with upfront pay began to dominate my working time. The buzz on the various writing blogs regarding Helium is very mixed in terms of the effort required for no certain return but like almost everything else in life, it is a gamble.

That said, Helium has lasted a year so the business model would appear to be working, otherwise why do so many writers bother submitting to it? Currently there are almost 70,000 writers submitting articles to Helium though how many are still active is a matter for debate. Helium allows you to view what a publisher is looking for and produce the articles as appropriate. The publisher then will select articles and buys them; Helium's starting rate for sale is $16 but they take a 20% commission. Now comes the bad news, if the publisher does not select your articles then you are left with a work product that has taken you time to create but no buyer unless Helium finds someone else interested.

Like I said, Helium is a gamble!

I am going to break my Helium cherry and submit some articles to them this week, not least because of an email I received from a writing mate in Canada. Chris outlined why he uses Helium and I think he has a point - Helium writers make money if their writng meets certain market based criteria:

article quality - if it's any good it will rank better and gain the opportunity to earn more;
readership interest - if the subject matter is of no interest to anyone, no-one is going to bother with it; you need to write about interesting topics to gain a following;
advertising attraction - in keeping with Chris' philosophy, the market decides how much something is worth and advertisers will decide what rate they are going to allocate depending on subject popularity. If you want to write on Aboriginal Hunting Habits you can expect a far more restricted audience than if you keep to personal finance which is a very popular subject, and advertisers follow suit with their rates.

Helium provides a naked and raw writers battleground for commercial success and if you can deliver what the market is asking for then you'll get paid.

FuN wItH wRiTiNg

Supaproofread — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 18:52:27 +0000

In this post, let me share ideas with you to allow your creative juices and imagination to flow, by me naming people, objects, places and incidents in their own terms. Not necessarily to mock them, but to bring out their actual trails. The greatest writer of all, who we knew played around with the names of their characters effectively, was Charles Dickens. Remember his characters Fagin, Uriah heep (yes, later to be an 80’s band), Mr. Bumble, Mrs. Sparsit and so on. Contemporary Scottish writer, Irvine Welsh, also often plays with this form, through his otherwise dark and brooding characters.

So, let us start by playing with names to extend our imaginative faculties a little. Choose a couple of unnamed photographs. After you have a considerable number of them, sit down and makeup you own nicknames for the characters. Closely observe their body language, background, and attire. Now spin write a fun account of the reasons to the origination of their names. Have their caricature play on the group photographs, the result is intoxicating humor. After you have names and explained the origins of the characters, give a name to the entire group and have a fictive reason for them coming together. You can do similar caricatures for the people around you. The next time someone bugs you at the office you can just take a look at your creation and laugh to yourself. From time to time, add and subtract features so your characters reflect reality more.

All this is doing, is loose character sketching, looking at people in a detached way. When we apply a fun name, based on a detached look at the person, we have an understanding over them that our personal, daily interaction allows. This exercise in writing then becomes creative therapy. Writing for fun is indeed the best therapeutic treat that you can give yourself – absolutely free.

For your photograph collection, gather pictures from a range as wide as you can. A group of teenagers, rock bands, a bevy of models, a class group photograph, a bunch of friends….anything & everything goes. Even if you know the people, detach yourself from the knowledge of their popular image as much as you can, and create your own Fagin or Renton (Irvine Welsh’s creation in ‘Trainspotting’).

If this doesn’t work when it comes to your personal group, then try the detachment technique as much as you can; when you choose associates characteristic traits will be so familiar, they will undoubtedly strap around your delineated analysis.

After considerable work on these, you will have your very own notebook of detached and semi-attached characterization, and believe me, there will be enough to keep you going, to create a few short stories or a dramatic monologue if you want.

You will need to do a lot of browsing to arrive at a considerable collection of sketches. Inventing and re-inventing names and profiles for situations that we find ourselves in our daily fix or pleasure; can also give oodles of insight. For example, a particular traffic hazard in the city can be called the “Star Trek Mission to Woodstreet” or a regular problem with the vending machine as “The Jinxed Maniac”. Look at other people, commercial goods, and public places around you. If they were not named what they are, what would they have been named?

This way you can open up a whole new portfolio of your own characters that you can use in your writing. Try it! Its fun!