Urban Inspiration: Discovering the Muse in Your City

Urban writing inspiration.

Please welcome our guest, author Belo Cipriani, with a post about finding inspiration in an urban setting.

Most of my recent writing has happened in the city due to travel, teaching, and other time constraints.

When I told my students, they struggled to believe that I got the ideas for my essays and fiction from a metropolitan area. They assumed that I—like many writers they had met or read about—spent months at a cabin or retreat typing away in isolation.

Many talented writers and artists talk about isolating themselves in nature, and I myself have been fortunate to get writing residencies in some of the most beautiful regions of the world. It’s no wonder people think being out in the country is the purest way to inspire art. As a writer who is blind, I find spending time in nature can very constructive to writing: the sound of birds chirping, the scent of ancient trees, and the peaceful song of branches dancing in the wind always led to inspiration.

But getting a writing residency is very competitive, and many writers can’t afford to leave their daily lives for weeks or months to focus on their craft. For any writer who feels stunted because he can’t escape to a natural place, I’d like to tell you about urban inspiration.

Tapping Into Every Sense

We’re often told to look up at the sky or to a lavish garden for inspiration. Being in nature forces people to use their senses to absorb instead of analyze. The smells, colors, and animals that serve as muses trigger memories and help us conjure up other worlds.

When I lost my sight, the doctor told me our brains receive 80 percent of information through our eyes. The rest is distributed among the other four senses. In other words, vision is distracting.

I often asked my friends and family members to decode unfamiliar noises or scents and soon realized most people don’t know the smells, sounds, or the feel of their own cities.

Great writers can bring every sense into their story. The books I love the most are those that leave me with distinct scents, flavors, and sensations on my skin. Learning to describe urban places is just as important as writing about a forest or a lake. Although you may not have noticed, your city has a story to tell just as much as nature does, and learning to use your senses in an urban environment can become a powerful writing tool.

Connecting to Your Environment

I’m sure by now you’re wondering how to deploy this urban inspiration technique. Here are some tips to help you open your senses:

1. Listen. Start by closing your eyes and learning the noises that make up the soundtrack on your street. Once you identify them, learn who or what makes them. If it’s a car, find out the make and model. Write the sound out in its onomatopoeia form, and start a list. You’ll be surprised how those sound words can come in handy when writing a memoir or fiction. Researching something you hear can also lead you to think of a new story.
2. Feel and Smell. Take a walk. Get to know the physical feelings and scents of your city. Find out what the bus stops feel like and what they are made from. Figure out the smells on busy streets. Go into coffee shops, restaurants, or markets and investigate what ingredients are calling your nose.
3. Notice Colors. Although I’m completely blind, I still notice colors. I have a machine that reads colors on objects in a robotic voice. I walk to places and scan things to get a reading. I get strangers on the street involved by asking for their feedback on a color. After asking three to five people the same question, I end up with a list of different ways to express the same shade of paint. Sometimes, I ask people what color their neighbors’ houses are, and I’m never surprised when they don’t know. Learn the color palette of your street. Learn the different shades of blue that make up the sky above your house and pay attention to the time of day.
4. Get to Know People and Places. In researching my second book, I delved into my city for inspiration. I visited the car museum to get a feel for seats and steering wheels. I wanted to touch with my hands and feel how cars have evolved in the past 100 years. I went to a Buddhist temple to get a sense of the energy during chanting, and I met with a perfume maker to learn the vernacular of fragrances. Each place and person I experienced in my city helped inspire hours of writing. Your city has a wealth of people with different experiences and backgrounds, and many cities also have treasure troves of history and culture waiting to be discovered.

Nature works as a conduit for creativity because isolation helps people tap into all of their senses. Most people think the only way to produce art is by running away to some desolate place. The truth is that my inspiration comes from experiencing the world around me — whether I’m in the country or the city.

Opening your mind to experience the world in different ways is an integral part of writing. Until we fully learn to absorb and experience the world we live in, we’ll never be able to communicate or connect our readers to that world.

About the Author: Belo Miguel Cipriani is a freelance writer, speaker, and author of Blind: A Memoir. Belo was the keynote speaker for the 2011 Americans with Disabilities Act celebration in San Francisco and was a guest lecturer at both Yale University and the University of San Francisco.

Amber Clovers, his first work of fiction, will be published in 2013. He welcomes anyone to reach out to him at belocipriani.com or on Twitter @Beloism and Google+.

Five Ways to Spot a Writing Contest Scam

Do not enter writing contest scams!

Today’s guest post is by John Yeoman of The Writers’ Village.

Have you ever been scammed by a writing contest?

I run a short story competition at Writers’ Village, so I have an interest in asking. We attract around 1200 entries each year, and with total prize values of £1500 ($2400), we’re edging into the big league. So I get angry when I hear about contests that don’t play by the rules and give all story awards a bad name.

Here’s a recent example.

One of my contestants told me he was about to submit an entry to a contest that we’ll call GeeWhiz Stories (not its real name). The contest announced total prize values of £4000 ($6400). That’s top money! At a £10 ($17) entry fee, it would need to attract 400 entries just to cover its prizes. Yet with low page rank, its website couldn’t be getting much traffic. Nor did its name appear in the web’s top contest directories, like Ask About Writing, Places For Writers, or Compete Around The World. So how did it attract over 400 entries annually and fund its prizes?

It didn’t. GeeWhiz was a scam.

I ran a Google search for ”geewhiz scam” and the results were hair-raising. It seems contestants had to wait up to a year to get their prize money. Sometimes the check bounced. The contest demanded first publication rights for winning stories, yet it took six years to publish them. Was the anthology available on Amazon? Did it have an ISBN? No. It could only be bought at an obscure page on the GeeWhiz site.

GeeWhiz had been operating like that for seven years. How did its directors sleep at night? None of this points to deliberate fraud, of course, but it suggests incompetence on an epic scale. From the comments I read on writing forums, it seems GeeWhiz is not an isolated case.

To be sure, the vast majority of contests are honest. Many are staffed by hard-working, unpaid volunteers. However, standards in the writing-contest industry — and it is an industry — differ wildly.

Several of my contestants have been entering shady contests for years. I asked them to share their thoughts about where some contests go wrong, including the ethical ones. Here’s what I heard:

Seven Ways Writing Contests Get it Wrong

1. Contests typically hide their deadlines and entry instructions. To find them at the site is a game of finding a needle in a haystack.

2. Their rules are often so complex you need a PhD in law to interpret them. Only after you’ve sent them your cash and story do you realize entries are accepted only from green-haired Klingons who are willing to attend an award ceremony in Mordor. You tell them that, alas, you are not a Klingon. Do they send back your entry fee? No.

3. They fail to acknowledge your entry. Your self-addressed postcard is not returned. Nobody responds to your increasingly frantic emails. Have they received your entry? Who knows? Who cares? Obviously, they don’t.

4. You’re never told if your entry was unsuccessful. You have to work it out for yourself by studying the photos of the smug winners posing at the award ceremony in Mordor. Are you pictured? No. You conclude you didn’t win.

5. They demand that your entry be anonymous. Your name must be revealed only in the entry form and thereafter concealed by a reference number. Can’t they trust their judges to be impartial? If not, their judges are amateurs. Would you trust amateurs to assess your story?

6. ”No correspondence will be entered into.” Nor will they give contestants even minimal feedback on their entries, except occasionally upon payment of a large extra fee. Why? Is it because the judges have not read the stories and subsequent correspondence would reveal that?

7. The winning stories are not published at the contest site or elsewhere. True, there may be a good reason, having to do with first publication rights. But unless a reason is given, it suggests that the names of the winners were made up, all entries were round-binned, and the promised prize money was not distributed.

How to Spot a Writing Contest Scam

Here are some clues that will help you spot a writing contest scam:

• The promoter has no obvious credentials in literature, academia or business.
• You’ve never heard of the judges and cannot easily do an online background check on them. Worse, no judges are named.
• The text on the contest website shows evidence of illiteracy. If a contest cannot even place its apostrophes in the right places, it is not qualified to determine which stories deserve awards.
• The contest does not showcase the work of previous winners. Why not? Unless the contest has not been run before, the organizers should flaunt such proof of their credentials in order to encourage future entrants.
• If the winning stories are showcased, did they, in your opinion, deserve an award? If not, you might feel motivated to enter the contest because you think you could easily beat that standard. In fact, if the stories are terrible yet still won money, ask yourself this: did the organizers write the stories themselves? If so, did they ever hand out any cash prizes?

In other words, if a contest smells like a money-making scam, it probably is. There’s nothing wrong with running a contest to make a profit. How else can the prizes be funded and the overheads paid? But if a contest demands an entry fee, it should maintain professional standards.

About the author: Dr John Yeoman has 42 years experience as a commercial author, newspaper editor and one-time chairman of a major PR consultancy. He has published eight books of humor and judges the Writers’ Village story competition. Dr. Yeoman is not courting your entries but would welcome your comments. His free 14-part course in winning story contests for profit can be found at: http://www.writers-village.org/master-seminars.

Film-Friendly Writing: Crafting a Story with Hollywood Appeal

Do the stories you write have Hollywood appeal?

Too many authors write a book or other story, cross their fingers and hope that one day Hollywood might come calling. But in the words of the world’s most successful filmmaker, James Cameron, “hope is not a strategy.” Like it or not, if you want your story to be a movie, the first step is up to you. That first step is to make your story film-friendly, long before Hollywood ever sees it.

Oscar-nominated producer Michael Nozik has produced literally dozens of films, many of them adaptations, including Quiz Show, The Motorcycle Diaries, Syriana, Love in the Time of Cholera, and The Next Three Days. “One of the first things I ask, and I’m sure every other producer who looks at a piece of material asks,” he says, “is this: is this thing a movie, or is this not a movie? Sometimes I’ll look at source material and think, this could be great, but I have no idea how to make it work as a movie, the story’s just too difficult to translate.”

Your job, as author of the book or other source material, is to make your story easy to translate. There are certain things Hollywood looks for in source material, that many books simply don’t have. (For simplicity, I’ll use “book” throughout, but all of these points apply equally to other storytelling formats.) And while there’s not enough room in a blog post to cover all of them, I’ll touch on two of the most important: concept and structure…

Concept

First up is concept: you need a basic premise containing three things: the WHO, the GOAL, and the OBSTACLE. Who your story is about, what their goal is, and the nature of the obstacle that must be overcome if that goal is to be reached. Ideally you figure this out before you start writing, but if you’ve already completed the story, you can also distill the concept afterward.

Either way, the end result is called a “logline;” your story in ten seconds or less. If you think this can’t be done, think again. Here’s a logline I wrote for The Fugitive:

A fugitive doctor wrongly convicted of killing his wife struggles to prove his innocence while pursued by a relentless U.S. Marshal.

That covers the WHO (a fugitive doctor wrongly convicted of killing his wife), the GOAL (struggles to prove his innocence) and the OBSTACLE (a relentless U.S. Marshal), all in seven seconds. But why do you need this?

Two reasons: to make sure you have a cinematic concept in the first place and to be able to get concept across in the aforementioned ten seconds. Even screenwriters sometimes fail to realize the importance of this.

Terry Rossio is a screenwriting icon. His Pirates of the Caribbean, Zorro, Shrek, Aladdin, upcoming Lone Ranger and other adaptations have earned billions of dollars. One of his screenplays, Déjà Vu, sold for a record $5 million.

“Most aspiring screenwriters,” says Terry, “simply don’t spend enough time choosing their concept. It’s by far the most common mistake I see in spec scripts. The writer has lost the race right from the gate. Months—sometimes years—are lost trying to elevate a film idea that by its nature probably had no hope of ever becoming a movie.” The same is true of aspiring book authors. And if you want your book to be a movie, concept becomes doubly important.

Christopher Lockhart is the story editor at reigning Hollywood superagency WME (formerly William Morris Endeavor). “With hundreds of thousands of stories from new writers circulating around town,” he says, “there has to be some kind of vetting process. And concept is the quickest and easiest way to vet. If you don’t have representation or a solid recommendation, concept is the best way to catch someone’s attention—and in all cases, it’s helpful. Concept, concept, concept.”

In short, no one in Hollywood has time to read your story. Period. But—everyone in Hollywood reads loglines. When they find one that catches their attention, that’s when they ask to see a longer pitch, or the story itself. Then they’ll make time to read it.

(For more on this, see Building the Perfect Logline for Your Book, Screenplay, or Other Story.)

John Robert Marlow wrote the book!

Structure

Despite occasional examples to the contrary, Hollywood wants good stories, well told. A good concept gets things off on the right foot, but it also needs to be well-executed throughout. And for Hollywood, a big part of that execution is structure.

Screenwriter/producer/director Jonathan Hensleigh’s credits include Armageddon and Die Hard 2 (an adaptation). “Any study of motion pictures and how they fare with the public over time,” he says, “reveals that there are certain aspects to script construction that need to be honored for a film to be commercial. For the most part; there are exceptions.

“The people who run studios are not stupid, and they know something about film and finance. They also know that a traditional three-act structure, with a beginning, middle, and end, is vastly more likely to be successful in the marketplace. Whereas something that, for example, just ends abruptly or is unresolved or unsatisfying is not going to be commercial. So those types of projects are rejected. I’ve heard it said that 90% of all commercially successful films are classically structured. But I’d say that percentage is too low.”

You want those 90% odds working for and not against you. If your story is already structured like a movie, it’s going to be that much easier for Hollywood to see it as a movie, instead of thinking, in producer Michael Nozik’s words, “the story’s just too difficult to translate.”

So—what is classical story structure? Boiled down to basics: three acts, with seven plot points. In proper story order, the plot points are: inciting incident, first act turn, midpoint, low point, second act turn, climax, and wrap-up. It sounds complicated and formulaic, but it’s not. Rather, it’s a recognition of patterns that have been used (consciously or otherwise) by storytellers for millennia. The following is a highly compressed explanation.

• The inciting incident is the event that throws a wrench into your main character’s everyday life, setting the story into motion.
• The first act turn is the point where your hero (as I’ll call the main character) realizes what it is he or she must do (the GOAL) and sets out to do it, taking action to reach that goal.
• The midpoint can be one of two things or both: a no-turning-back point for the hero, beyond which his actions cannot be undone—or the revelation (perhaps to the hero, perhaps only to the reader) of an as-yet-unsuspected element at work in the story.
• The low point is just that—the hero’s all-hope-is-lost moment, where he is as far as it seems possible to get from attaining the goal. If your hero were going to commit suicide, then this would be the place.
• Midpoint is followed closely by the second act turn—where the hero rebounds from the seeming defeat of the low point and implements a new plan to achieve his goal.
• The climax happens when the hero (WHO) and OBSTACLE confront one another in the final showdown, the outcome of which will determine whether or not the hero succeeds in attaining the GOAL.
• The wrap-up is everything that follows after the climax has ended.

Once you think about it, this kind of story progression seems perfectly logical for pretty much every storytelling medium. Nevertheless, a great many aspiring storytellers are unaware of this classical structure and, consequently, fail to tell their stories in the way most likely to meet with commercial success—in Hollywood and elsewhere.

Sometimes, one or more of these required elements will be completely absent. This hurts the storyteller’s chances not only with Hollywood, but with publishers as well. Story is story, regardless of medium.

Hollywood did not invent this; they merely codified it—because they have the greatest financial incentive to do so. When you’re plunking down millions or hundreds of millions of dollars to tell a story, you tend to sweat the details, to peek behind the curtain for a look at the structure holding up the beauty of a well-told story. And when you find that 90% of all commercially successful stories share the same structure, you want to see that structure firmly in place before hauling out your wallet.

(For more on structure, see Story Structure: Laying Down the Bones.)

Conclusion

None of this means your story can’t be chock full of other things as well, but these are some of the elements Hollywood considers crucial in its source material, including the books on which screenplays and movies are based.

To be sure, Hollywood is more comfortable reading screenplays and generally pays much more for scripts than it does for film rights to stories told in other formats (unless the source material is already hugely successful in its own right). As producer Michael Nozik notes, “studios are less willing to consider source material than finished screenplays based on the same material, and they’re willing to spend more when they can see it well executed as a screenplay, because you’re helping them get to the end zone—a finished film—quicker.” In short, when you have a screenplay, no one has to wonder how to “translate” the source material; you’ve done it for them.

Still, if you don’t have a screenplay to offer and are not interested in writing one (or hiring someone else to write one for you), the next best thing is telling your story in a way that makes it obviously cinematic. And while there’s more to that than concept and structure alone, these do form the foundation upon which all else is built, regardless of medium. And getting them right will help set you apart from the great mass of writers who, unknowingly, do not.

About the Author: John Robert Marlow is an award-winning novelist, screenwriter, and adaptation consultant. He recently closed a Hollywood script deal, an adaptation he wrote and will executive produce, with an estimated budget of $60 million. John’s nonfiction articles have appeared in the Writer’s Digest annuals, The Writer, Writers’ Journal, Parade, The Huffington Post, and elsewhere. John’s new book, Make Your Story a Movie: Adapting Your Book or Idea for Hollywood, contains advice from authors, screenwriters, producers, directors and others whose movies have collectively earned over $50 billion and scores of Academy Award nominations. John blogs at makeyourstoryamovie.com.

Don’t Let the Decline of Spoken English Ruin Your Writing

Keep your writing sharp by following the rules.

Please welcome author Debra Brenegan with an insightful guest post about grammar and writing.

We are all a little sloppy when we speak. We skip some of the basic grammar rules in order to create intimacy and shortcuts — like secrets between best friends. Such conversation helps us connect to others. But when casual phrases and speaking patterns seep into your writing, it can reflect negatively on you as a writer.

What Your Writing Says About You

In these Internet times, written communication is king, and the proper use of it separates the pros from the wannabes. Readers take writers’ messages more seriously when those messages are properly punctuated and correctly written. Readers don’t want to work to understand meaning. They might not realize it, but readers feel calm, serene, and cozy when you don’t make them strain for understanding. Realistically, the only time most people want to struggle with written language is when they’re stopped in traffic and faced with a vanity license plate.

In our split-second culture, time is essential. You want your message to get there fast and without misinterpretation. If the reading is easy, then the argument you’re making is easier to follow and easier to agree to. Let’s face it: All writing contains an argument, even if that argument is simply, “Read me – you won’t regret it.”

Good writing communicates that you are smart, or at least educated. This is not a bad impression to give – really! It makes what you’re trying to say more credible if you know how to say it.

In addition to demonstrating your education, you help educate others when you write correctly. Bad language/grammar usage is like a cold – it spreads until everyone is cranky and sick, and nobody remembers the days of clear-headedness. Don’t be afraid to counter this.

Remember Your Audience

Proper grammar matters most when you’re trying to communicate with people who aren’t your best friends, people who might judge you or think you’re unintelligent. Instead of giving you what you want – a job, attention, a vote — you end up turning off people because of your “spoken word” writing. Many people understand this regarding professional writing. Of course you want your résumé, application letter, and business memos to be clearly written and easy to understand, but creative writers need to know – and use – proper English, too.

Even in creative writing, editors and readers judge the writing. They want gorgeous prose, but they also want to be able to read it, to disappear into it, to forget that there are any mechanics behind the spin. Proper grammar and writing provides that invisibility and lets readers slip into your ideas, your story, and your writing.

Know the Rules before You Break the Rules

One of the underlying problems with rule-breaking is the question of its cause. Are you breaking the rules because you’re exercising your poetic license or because you can’t remember the difference between insure and ensure? If your reader can’t tell, you’re in trouble.

There’s certainly room for realistic-sounding dialogue and conversational prose, but underneath any stretching of proper rules are – the rules. You have to know the rules before you can break them. Good creative writers break the rules all the time, but they do so with purpose. It is unknowing breakage that damages credibility and your ability to communicate.

If you’re not feeling overly confident in your grammatical understanding, pick up a copy of the book Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss [Editor's note: this book uses British grammar] for a fun and simple review of the basics. In the meantime, here are a few common errors you can watch out for (and avoid!).

Common Mistakes

Misuse of prepositions has spread like the plague. I fumed one day when I was standing in the check-out line at Wal-Mart. After I swiped my credit card, the automatic display read, “Waiting on authorization.” It should be waiting for. Another misuse is “meeting up with” someone. People meet other people. They always have, and they always will. Only in a brief period of history (now) will anyone know what it means to meet “up” with someone else.

It is also common for people to say, “A student needs to learn all they can.” This is mixing a singular subject with a plural pronoun. Realistically, it should read, “A student needs to learn all he or she can.” The he/she construction, although correct, is bulky. You can usually avoid this type of confusion by making the subject plural so that it reads, “Students need to learn all they can.” [Editor's note: using they as a generic pronoun is becoming more acceptable, though it's still technically incorrect. Grammar Girl has a detailed article that thoroughly addresses "Generic Singular Pronouns."]

And finally, it seems too obvious to even include here, but people often use texting shortcuts in professional settings. “OMG” and “UR Gr8” have no place outside of texts and Twitter. And even in an email, don’t forget to capitalize things like my name. I’ll be much more likely to finish reading what you wrote.

Outdated Rules You CAN Break

Comma use has become more streamlined, thanks to widespread Internet copy and Associated Press (AP) style for journalism. Moreover, colons and semicolons seem like daguerreotypes of great ancestors, especially in modern writing. Yes, they are sometimes needed, but often, a comma or a dash will do instead. Don’t use a hyphen (also known as an en dash) instead of a dash (the big one, or em dash) or vice versa. Hyphens bring together, and dashes separate.

The rule most commonly broken without freaking people out is the one about fragments. They are now considered almost cool. As long as they’re not overused. Or senseless. Or too repetitive. Or used when someone is allergic to verbs. But other than those occasions, fragments are a nice way to occasionally break the rules. Just don’t use comma splices, which is the fancy word your 5^th-grade teacher meant when he/she wrote, “run-on sentence,” over and over, down the right margin of your essay.

The English language is beautiful and complex, but it can also be a little daunting if the rules don’t come naturally to you. Take the time to relearn some of the rules you may have forgotten. Your readers will appreciate it, and there will be more of them!

About the Author: Debra Brenegan is the author of Shame the Devil, a historical account of nineteenth-century American writer Fanny Fern. Debra is also an English and Women’s Studies professor at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri.