All right, so today we’re going to talk about three of my favorite little tools when I’m working on creating my story world. That is Google Earth, Dictionary.com and Wikipedia.

First, Google Earth. I like Google Earth because I can fly anywhere and see anything. If you’re not familiar with Google Earth just go to Google.com or put Google Earth in your search and you can download it. Once it’s on your system you can put in an address or a city or a landmark, and it’ll take you there. You can fly over top, you can go from the road view on most areas. But it gives you a sense of the terrain and what things look like and it really helps to add authenticity to your story.

Dictionary.com. I like this because I like words. You can get word of the day sent to you, but more than that, I like to be able to get some of those synonyms. I have my Flip Dictionary, I love my Flip Dictionary, It’s a very useful writer’s tool. But when I’m working, particularly when I’m working up at my office in town, I don’t always have my Flip Dictionary with me because that stays at my house. Dictionary.com is a great tool for me to go and get some of those synonyms.

Wikipedia. Now some people like to besmirch Wikipedia but I actually like it for a couple of reasons. One, because it is so subjective. I can go in there and find out what other people think of certain things, whether it’s accurate or not. As writers we need to understand how other people view things so that we can get inside of that point of view and help create more well-rounded characters. You can also find out interesting tidbits about some really obscure things. So while it isn’t my authoritative text for scholarly research, when I’m trying to create story world I love it.

So for today, using technology to build your writing, I would encourage you to check out Google Earth, Dictionary.com and Wikipedia during your ten-minute break and see if any of these resources will help you enrich your story world or build your writing in a new and exciting way.

I’ll see you next time when we’re going to be delving into some fiction techniques that will help you with your overall writing craft.

Don’t miss a single posting! Subscribe here to receive these postings by e-mail. Tiffany Colter is a writer, speaker and writing career coach who works with beginner to published writers. She can be reached through her website at writingcareercoach.com.

In this blog I’d like to talk briefly about using webinars to build your writing. There’s two ways that you can do this.
• Attending a webinar or
• Holding a webinar.

First, I’m going to talk about attending a webinar. Attending webinars can help your writing because they allow you to use the resources that you have to get the most out of your learning dollar. Another great feature of webinars is many webinars tend to be more interactive where you can type in questions. Many are also recorded so that you can reuse them. I strongly encourage writers to attend webinars. The great part about webinars is writers can pool their resources, so that they can receive learning far less expensively.

This takes me to the next part of writing webinars and using technology to build your writing and that is holding a webinar. When should you hold a webinar? I suggest a professional of any kind should hold a webinar if you have something that you’re frequently asked to speak on. For example, I’m asked to speak on business principles for writers and writing principles for businesses. Therefore, I have a following of a group of people who tend to come to my events and want to learn. And so having these events online allows me to reach a larger population of my clients at one time and it allows me to interact with them in a way that I can’t always do at, say, a writer’s conference or a business group. So that would be one reason why you would want to hold them

Another reason to hold a webinar would be if you have information that is of benefit to writers. Let’s say for example, your day job is nursing. You can speak on topics in nursing that would be of interest to writers. If you are a full-time writer, invite someone to come and speak on your webinar who knows something about, let’s say forensics, or a historical landmark or time period clothing. Certain facets of different industries can help you add depth and richness to your writing. That would be another time to hold a webinar.

Webinars can be great learning opportunities as well as a way to help develop your business. Explore the resources available and if you have ideas for webinars you’d like Writing Career Coach to do, put the topics in the comments section then sign up for our newsletter. We will update you on upcoming webinars.

Don’t miss a single posting! Subscribe here to receive these postings by e-mail. Tiffany Colter is a writer, speaker and writing career coach who works with beginner to published writers. She can be reached through her website at writingcareercoach.com.

We talked about this a little bit last week when we were talking about organizing your time. Now we want to think a little bit about whether you have everything you need to accomplish your goals.

I don’t mean if you have all of the necessary training or background. Writing is a growth process so you’ll never arrive there. What I mean is just simple things. When you sit down to write do you have the notes that you need?
Do you have your character sketches?
Do you have your copy of Writing The Breakout Novel?
Do you have pictures that you use to help describe your main characters?
Do you have pencils to jot down notes?
Do you have your mouse? Your keyboard? Whatever it is that you use as part of the writing process so you’re not getting up and down out of your seat constantly to get things that you might have forgotten.

Organizing your workspace, as we said in the last post, is not always a matter of eliminating distractions but it’s also including things that will keep you focused and on task.

Till next time, remember to organize your workspace as well as your time.

Don’t miss a single posting! Subscribe here to receive these postings by e-mail. Tiffany Colter is a writer, speaker and writing career coach who works with beginner to published writers. She can be reached through her website atwritingcareercoach.com.

Last post we talked about mentally preparing to write in our writing workspace. Today we’re going to continue with that by looking at ourselves when we’re in our workspace. Think about where it is that you do your work. When I’m sitting at my home desk, as opposed to my office where I do most of my work, my home desk is full of pictures my daughters colored for me. There’s a broken toy that I took away from the dog when it ran under my desk, a necklace I wore yesterday, and an empty bottle for a prescription that needs to be refilled. All of these things remind me of other tasks that need to be done. Whether it’s picking up my clutter, putting away my jewelry or getting that prescription picked up, all of these things will pull me out of the writing zone if I allow them. That’s why it is so important to minimize the amount of things that you keep in the area where you are going to work.

Just as certain things on your desk can cause your mind to stray, you can minimize distractions by introducing things that are going to keep you focused on your writing. For example, I have the book The Elements of Style sitting next to my laptop. I have my good luck eraser that I play with whenever I’m trying to think through a scene. I have my hair clip that I always keep next to me so that I don’t have to get up if my hair starts to fall in my face, and I have my character sketches and notes for the stories that I’m currently working on.

By introducing things that I use in my writing and excluding those things that I use as a mom and wife, I am able to more focus my time and organize my space. This allows me to get the most out of my writing time.

So what is it that you are currently putting around you when you are writing? Are they things that are helping you? Or is your workspace full of distractions? Consider these questions this week and make adjustments as necessary so that you can better organize your time as a writer.

Don’t miss a single posting! Subscribe here to receive these postings by e-mail. Tiffany Colter is a writer, speaker and writing career coach who works with beginner to published writers. She can be reached through her website atwritingcareercoach.com.

In keeping with our theme we are now going to move from organizing our time to organizing our writing workspace. There are three ways that you need to organize your workspace.
• You need to mentally organize your work space.
• You need to organize your workspace to minimize distractions and maximize efficiency.
• And you need to know what you’re going to do each day.

Today we’re going to look at the mental aspect of organizing your writing time.

Where is it that you work? This space can be a separate office or a space at your kitchen table. Wherever it is, make that place your office. Mentally prepare yourself so that is where you write. It may seem odd, but when I was in college I read a study about the brain. It said that studying in your bedroom actually can cause problems with sleeping because your brain becomes trained to study in that place. Our brain associates different spaces with different activities.

The more I learned about that, the more I recognized the truth of that. Think about when you’re heading to work, how you’re mentally shifting. When you move from work to school, school to church, or church to sports event, think about the different ways that you change physically, mentally, emotionally with each place. This same holds true as you prepare to write. Mentally you need to recognize a single spot, even if it’s the same place where you eat. You need to train your brain to be in writing mode when you are there with your writing supplies.

The next thing you need to do is warm up your mind. That means you begin to think about what you’re going to write as you get ready to go write. If you’re working on a novel, start playing scenes in your head. If your writing an article, think about the previous articles you’ve written or the interview you just did. Put your brain in the writing frame of mind instead of sitting down at your computer cold.

Whenever possible write the same things at the same time of day. When I began writing I had a newborn, a 2 year old and a 4 year old. I caught writing time between naps and diaper changes. I was able to write my first full novel in two months during that time because I worked the story through when I was feeding one of the babies or watching Barney for the 900th time.

Next time we’re going to deal with minimizing distractions, but for today take some time to determine where it is you’re going to work if you don’t already have that. If you do, look around that workspace and see what kinds of things that are currently distracting you from getting your writing work done. Is it set up in a way that’s conducive to accomplishing your goals? Then mentally prepare. And get writing.

 Don’t miss a single posting! Subscribe here to receive these postings by e-mail. Tiffany Colter is a writer, speaker and writing career coach who works with beginner to published writers. She can be reached through her website at writingcareercoach.com.

Over the last few blogs we’ve looked at ways to organize your time so that you can better accomplish your goals. Today we’re going to talk about the importance of not working.

It is important to schedule breaks to give yourself a mental letdown and also to prevent extremes in your work time.

Think about if you don’t let your kids have candy at all. What happens as soon as Halloween or Easter comes around? They are attacking the candy boxes. Or if you never let yourself have sweets. What happens if you go to a party? You overindulge. This same thing is true with breaks. Now I am very guilty of going for five or six straight hours of focus on a single project. The problem is when I run 14 hrs a day, 6 days a week for months at a time I eventually crash. That is not an effective time management tool.

What is better is a system I learned in High School. The work cycle involves focusing on a single task for  45 minutes then taking a 10-15 minute break. And that seems to be pretty consistent for most people, forty-five minutes to sixty minutes at a stretch. If you need more breaks then work on multiple projects during that 45 minutes rather than taking more breaks. If you’re working on books and articles, switching it up between projects so that you can keep your brain alert is fine.

The right kind of break
Now, what should you do during break?
• Stand up, get away from the computer. Keep your blood flowing, keep your body moving; do some stretches; move your arms. Get the blood flowing again so that your brain can become alert.
• Walk down the hall and get a drink of water. This will help your health and your mental alertness.
I drink water during my fifteen minutes, walk down the hall and then pace around my desk when I’m at my office. When I’m working from my home office I actually do away with breaks because my kids help me have breaks. [ha-ha, but working from home is a topic for another day]

To recap these last few blogs, to effectively organize your time you need to:
• you need to create office hours and respect them.
• You need to define what your daily success goals are and recognize how they play a part in your long-term writing.
• And schedule your breaks so that you can stay mentally alert.

Using these tips will help you better organize your time and become a more effective and efficient writer.
 

Don’t miss a single posting! Subscribe here to receive these postings by e-mail. Tiffany Colter is a writer, speaker and writing career coach who works with beginner to published writers. She can be reached through her website at writingcareercoach.com.

When I started writing, I was pregnant with my third and I had an eighteen-month-old and a four-year-old at home. So I understand how difficult it is for some writers to find time to write. Having said that, I also understand the importance of establishing office hours to our mental preparation as writers. For those of you struggling to keep up with all you have to get done.

Whether you have a 9-5 in your writing business, like I do, or if you only have a few hours that you can grab here and there, there are things you can do to get the most of your writing time. Over the next couple of blogs we’ll be looking at different ways to organize your time. For today, the big thing is establishing office hours and respecting those hours. I’ve talked about these things before, but I’m repeating because all of us need reminders of the importance of taking writing seriously.

Establish office hours and prepare to write. That means if you write first thing in the morning, when you get up and you’re getting ready to go to the computer, start thinking about what it is that you want to write. That’s going to require some prep work, which we’ll talk about later on this week, but determining when you’ll write will help you get the most out of your writing time.

The next thing is to respect your writing time. Once you’ve established those office hours be sure that you are actually writing during that time. Don’t use that time to answer emails or communicate with friends or tag Facebook messages. Get in and get your work done.

The third thing is take your writing seriously by not saying yes to everything. This is especially important for people who are writing full-time, because many of your friends will look at you as a self-employed with unlimited time. Just because you don’t have to punch a clock does NOT mean you’re not working. So one of the first things you have to learn how to do is learn to say no to all the various things that try to steal our time.

I have four very active girls, I really understand how hard this can be. But I also understood that it wasn’t until I respected my writing time and made it a priority that my family respected it. Once I did that, I began to respect my family time as well. I was writing during writing time and I was with my family during family time. Not pushing the two together. That helped my kids recognize that they were important to me, my husband recognized he was important to me, and for me to recognize that my writing was important to me. So create office hours, respect the hours and ask that others do the same. That is going to be the key to organizing your time.

I’d love to hear some of the comments on things that you’ve done to organize office hours and to get into writing mode during busy times. Leave your comments in the comments section below.

Don’t miss a single posting! Subscribe here to receive these postings by e-mail. Tiffany Colter is a writer, speaker and writing career coach who works with beginner to published writers. She can be reached through her website at writingcareercoach.com.

One thing business owners understand is the need to periodically stop and gauge their progress. Whether they do it every day by balancing down the cash drawer or they do it quarterly with their taxes, there is a period accounting of.

The same holds true in a writing business. The difference is success isn’t measured in dollars and cents. It’s measured in word count, contracts and rejection letters. The growth of your writing business is limited to what you’re willing to put in to it.

Last night my husband and I were talking about his college classes. He is going back to school for his nursing degree. [He's currently a paramedic.] When you’re working full-time and going to school full-time one day and run in to the other without ever feeling like you’re at a completion point. They used to call it a hamster in a wheel, then a treadmill. Whatever you call it, that monotony kills the spirit and dries up your creativity.

However, when we looked over his courses we realized how incredibly close he actually was to completion. We were much farther along than we thought we were.

What about in your writing and your business goals? Are you trudging along with the assumption that you aren’t getting anywhere? Are you defining success by a single contract? The amount of your cash advance? The number of books/units sold? or attendance at your last speaking event?

Why not instead take a moment to look at the process that gets you to the result.

* How many words have you written?
* How many queries have you sent out?
* How many books on craft have you read?
* What have you done to develop your platform?
* What networking opportunities have you taken advantage of?

These are the steps that get you to the goal. This is what a writer does for conditioning. A teenager may hit a free throw from half way down the court and sink it, but that one shot will not give him an NBA career. It is the person who consistently sinks one shot after another that goes pro. It is consistency of the process that distinguished success from failure.

Evaluate your performance in terms of what you’re doing rather than what you did.

You might have to re-evaluate, but those of you who are discouraged may realize that you’re closer to the goal than you realized.

Don’t miss a single posting! Subscribe here to receive these postings by e-mail. Tiffany Colter is a writer, speaker and writing career coach who works with beginner to published writers. She can be reached through her website at writingcareercoach.com.

In my previous blog I suggested looking for work in other venues. Today I want to show how this will help you with your book or novel writing.

1. You learn to write by writing. While there is a difference between a term paper and a romance novel writing is still writing. You learn to express yourself better as you write, no matter what the writing is for.
2. You learn about people. Interacting with people is a great way to deepen character development. In novels our characters will not always react in a way that seems logical to us. We need to learn how others react to certain situations so we can integrate that in our writing.
3. You make connections with other people who could be future readers. Becoming visible in your community helps increase your platform and will lead to more sales.

While these are just a few ways you can benefit from writing for other venues, they are important. Why don’t you take a few minutes to think of how writing for others will help you build and develop your writing career and share your thoughts in the comments.

Don’t miss a single posting! Subscribe here to receive these postings by e-mail. Tiffany Colter is a writer, speaker and writing career coach who works with beginner to published writers. She can be reached through her website at writingcareercoach.com.

Do you dream of one day living the life of a novelist? Each morning you wake up full of creativity and then spend a few hours typing beautiful prose that whisk your reader off to a world they never knew existed. As you finish one book and send it off to your agent the next one flows. You get book deals with substantial cash advances. Royalties come in and your only work is going to the book signings.

Well, that isn’t the reality. The truth is many books get a cash advance of only a few thousand dollars and first time authors don’t often get more than $12,000 for a book that took them more than a year to write. Of that 15% goes to your agent, 30% goes to the government and another sizable chunk goes to marketing. Those book signings? You set them up, not your publisher, and you handle all travel expenses.

So, why would a person want to be a writer? Passion. We cannot deny the thoughts buzzing in our minds. Our stories need to get out.

How do you earn a living at it? Diversifying is one option. Find individuals, groups, or community organizations who need writers. Offer your services to them and commit a specific number of hours each week to working on these projects.

Think of three places where you could offer your services for a fee.

Don’t miss a single posting! Subscribe here to receive these postings by e-mail. Tiffany Colter is a writer, speaker and writing career coach who works with beginner to published writers. She can be reached through her website at writingcareercoach.com.