According to Cindy

I will be reading Chapter 2 over the weekend of Crafting Prose and will post my notes and thoughts on Monday.

Subjects to be included will be "writer's block" and answering some questions at the end of chapter one before I move on to chapter 2.

Promises to be fun reading! HA

Writing Book I’m reading:
Crafting Prose by Don Richard Cox and Elizabeth Giddens
Section One Crafting Prose
Chapter One Advice for Writers

Writer’s avoidance and procrastination is usually due to the intensely personal nature of writing.

To lessen the stress of writing you should:
View yourself as a writer
Make writing interesting for yourself
Set up a comfortable writing environment
Adopt a process approach
Identify and control writing problems
Build self-confidence as a writer
I will concentrate on only two of these, since the others I believe to be self-explanatory. View yourself as a writer and adopt a process approach.

View Yourself as a Writer:
Some people think if they call themselves a writer, they are bragging, calling themselves Shakespeare, Stephen King, Tom Clancy. “Oh, she thinks she’s Danielle Steele…” a writer lady may hear someone jealously deride her. The writing title is something that has to be earned the hard way, people believe and to call yourself that is like equating yourself with celebrity status or almost royalty.
Believing in yourself and thinking of your self as already a writer opens the door for you. Trust that what you have to say is worthwhile and can be interesting to others. Granted EVERYONE will not like what you write. It is fine that some will. Those people are your audience and all the rest can go suck eggs or read something else. Or perhaps they want to spend all their free time watching the idiot box. Forget about them. Stephen King gets hate mail. I even get it on my Xanga blog at times. But, for every one flame I get, I get at least 20 positive responses, so those are the ones I count as my audience. I also get new subbers, so who cares if one or two hate what I wrote. It wasn’t for them anyway.
Somehow we have become a society where anger and bad things get more attention than the positive things that happen day-to-day. Don’t let this attitude control you. You can’t stop what society does, but you can control your own actions/reactions. React more to positive feed back than you do to the detractors.
Develop a persona. In a way, I almost think there is no way one can write and not have this come through. However, you should strive to have a tone and voice that comes through in your writing. This is what you will become known for. He humorous novel, the dark horror novel, and the chick-lit novel will all be written with a different style. Each writer will have a totally different persona. Persona, Character, Guise, Role, Personality, Qualities, Persona. Develop that!
Everyone has their own way of writing. I like to do a loose outline and go back and fill in details later. I find that I write a better story if I know how I will end the story. I like this way because I know how to set everything up for the ending. Other people just sit down and start writing having no idea what will happen at the end. Other people wouldn’t want a “loose” outline, but a highly detailed one. Some stick closely to the preordained outline but I give myself lee-way. If I decide on a better course of action, I will take that and toss my outline or create a new one. Which way is right or wrong? Neither. What works for one would not for another. I also like to do free association. Write down a word that is very important to my story or essay. Like night. Or lightening. Then write down every word that comes to mind associated with that word. Somehow that gets me going on a story.
First drafts don’t have to be good drafts. Just write everything down that comes to mind. You can “fix” it all later. The important thing is to get it down on paper and then it can be rearranged, the language polished, holes filled in, etc.
The only wrong way to write is to not put any words down on paper or screen. If you put the words down, you can call yourself writer.

Adopt a Process Approach:
Writing is a process, not a one shot event. Professionals do not try to sit down and write a finished piece in one intense writing session.
Allow your first draft to come out any way it will. Let it be the roughest of rough drafts. Knowing that it is not a finished product will help you to re-work it later since you know you never intended it to be a final product.
Revise for content, organization, tone, sentences, and grammar.
The writing process is not rigidly progressive. You may start at any point, go back and start over, and do this many times before you are finished. Recursive is what this is called. Recursive means going through the various stages again and again. More research may be necessary right in the middle of a piece of work, a passage may be added, if you decide on a certain ending, you may need to go back and change something at the beginning. This is what I call the deeper work of writing that makes a “good” story “great.”
Viewing writing as a process makes it more forgiving and humane. Let drafts be terrible if need be in order to get to something great. If a kid got on a bicycle and gave up because fell there would be no kids on bicycles. I personally love riding my bike and enjoy seeing my kids riding bikes with other kids. Don’t stop because a draft comes out as a wreck. Make it roll smoothly.

I write a lot – everyday seven days a week – and I throw a lot away. Sometimes I think I write to throw away; it’s a process of distillation.
--Donald Barthelme
During the planning and drafting stages it does no good to worry over details of writing anyway. While you are correcting grammar or searching for the “right” word, sight of the work as a whole may escape you. This inspires frustration.

Writing Book I’m reading:
Crafting Prose by Don Richard Cox and Elizabeth Giddens

Introduction: Understanding the Task

What does writing mean???
It is communicating something to someone. Even if you only write in a private diary or journal, you will be communicating to your self later.
Writing can be complex, and when it is done, you want what you have written to make sense not only to yourself but to others as well. It is easy for your writing to make sense to yourself. You know what you meant. It can be more of a challenge to make your writing sensible to others. This is compounded by the fact that others can put different meanings on the same sentences and paragraphs. Everyone has their own interpretation added to the most clear of writing.
This used to bother me, especially when I was speaking to others. When I’d hear my words back to me, with the other’s person’s interpretation added in, I hardly recognized the words as my own. Now I have come to realize that other’s interpretation of your own words says more about them than it says about self.
Of course that doesn’t help making your own point clear to other’s any easier. In fact, it makes it more of a challenge. But, it does help when you are writing to keep this dynamic in mind.
In this book, the author shows the text in the form of a triangle, and the writer, reader, and reality as three points on that triangle and says that without these three factors, you could not have a reading situation. Whichever factor gets the most emphasis determines what kind of writing you are doing.
Writer emphasis creates expressive prose.
Reader emphasis creates persuasive prose
Reality emphasis creates informative prose
Text emphasis creates literary prose
(I may have just solved the question: What is literary? HA)
For myself, while reading and reporting on this book, I will concentrate on expressive and literary. I don’t really care to persuade others to a different point of view and basic information reporting gets quite dull to me. Although it could be said that the very nature of this blog is informative, I would prefer to inform about the more creative type writing.
A letter or an essay would be expressive, advertisements are persuasive as are most politicians, a how to book would be informative and a novel would be (AHEM) literary. (Though some might argue how literary some novels really are…)
Even when one factor is emphasized, all other factors are still present in the background.