Mary Kelaher tells a gritty story about life in the cast of a family's shadow.


Mary Kelaher

You're over the first hurdle as a writer and you're finally writing consistently. Now what?

Join me as I trawl my way through all the writing tips, promotion tips and publishing tips to try and find the diamonds in the bedrock.

Girl in a field of grass

Monday, December 11, 2006

I can finally log back in!

I can't believe it. I can finally log back in. Typical. The week I get back from my two month holiday in Western Australia about which I had intended to blog, I can get back into blogger.

I have notes about my holiday, so at least now I can type then up. You can follow along at http://cartentesky.blogspot.com/.

While my experiment to see if you could travel and write an novel without a laptop revealed that technology is so popular for a reason, using blogger as my travel journal completely failed. I had to resort to the pen and paper method. Ironic.

I'm afraid it took too big a commitment to keep going with the novel while travelling and camping. That's ok because I had a great holiday and found that I would really love to do some travel writing, but not before I get a laptop with a modem connection for a public telephone to take with me!

I learnt so much about what can works for me as a writer at the Freefall Workshop in Perth that propelled me onto my journey around WA.

The first surprise was the level of detail required for people to be able to "see" the setting. You don't have to have that many. In fact I think, for me, too much description gets in the way of my story. I learnt this on the third day after writing a piece without so much description because description does not come easy to me and I had spent the previous two days agonising over it. When Barbara finished ready it I was surprised by what people 'saw' from the scant details I gave. Interesting.

The second surprise was that I don't have to feel like writing or have the muse singing to write something worthwhile. On the fourth day I wrote the first half of a story while I was in the zone and I was having a lot of fun doing it. On the fifth day, I really didn't feel like writing and I had to drag the rest of that story out of myself because it was a case of continue on with the story I had started or start something new and I didn't feel like writing anything new so I continued on with the one I had started.

I was so surprised that you couldn't tell one day from the other. The content was seamless. So now I have the evidence that if you just sit down and do it regardless of how you feel you can write just as well on the days you don't feel like writing as on the days when you do.

The third surprise was that my writing was a lot better than I thought it was and people responded to it. It wasn't the best at the workshop, but I wasn't expecting to get any of mine read at all. So I was pleased with hearing it read out and the responses to it.

So now I'm back and ready to roll.