Tip-o-Rama ('Kay, just one, but still...)

I had SO MUCH more I wanted to tell you, about diabetes, our TERRIFIC holiday break, how the Corte Madera Creek DIDN'T flood this time despite a close call... but I am pressed for time. Rather than silence, I decided to share this Random Writing Tip from Nowhere.

*Always leave off in the middle. It’s a proven fact that your brain settles more quickly and easily into a task partially completed than one where you’ve completed a section or chapter. Here’s where I left off in the Novel-in-Progress before rushing off to a Brownies meeting (today is the day of MANY meetings… Sometimes I don’t know WHY I sign up for this stuff… but I digress.):

"Deaths and suicides occurred in all kinds of..."

See? That sentence is just BEGGING to be completed. No, it’s not the greatest sentence on Earth. Sure, I’ll edit it later… maybe even cut it.

The important thing is, it exists, and it is UNFINISHED. What’s more, any idiot could finish it with a noun or noun phrase. Right?

Sometimes, when I dive back into a book… I am just that. Any idiot. I have the lack of confidence, the self-doubt, the sheer conviction that I will never produce anything of value.

This helps. An easy-to-complete sentence launching me into what I’m going to show next.

Today, when I return to my chapter in the library, where I write for about an hour after school while the kids are doing homework (another tip—kids can concentrate in the library! Quiet kids=completed homework=writing time for me), I will have NO CHOICE but to finish it. And THAT sentence will lead me to the next one, and so on, and so on.

More later. Camporee planning beckons!