Notes, tutorials, exercises, thoughts, workshops and resources about writing or storytelling art
In order to start the week with energy, I want to publish some very motivational writing advices: ten tips for writing, by the English writer Andrey Motion.
Decide when in the day (or night) it best suits you to write, and organise your life accordingly.
Think with your senses as well as your brain.
Honour the miraculousness of the ordinary.
Some time ago, The Guardian published the rules for fiction of several writers. Neil Gaiman was one of them. Here we can see what he thinks about writing:
1. Write
2. Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.
3. Finish what you’re writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.
There is a hot topic on press and blogs this days: how to become an entrepreneur. The economic situation, the high percentage of unemployment and job insecurity make that, suddenly, become our own bosses is not such a bad idea. However, I want to go a step further: Why don’t you become a Writer-Entrepreneur?
Think about it: being your own boss, working from home, doing what you love, writing every day… Sounds good? Does it looks like your dream? If the answear is yes, I hope I can help you to achieve it with these 11 rules to become a professional writer:
We used to write the dialogues by the standard way, but this is not the only one. There are several ways to format a dialogue and, if we know them all well, we can choose better the perfect one for our story.
Coming back with the section of the blog Once upon a time, I want to publish today a beginning of a story that is very special to me because it’s also the first novel I read when I was a child and it’s also the first novel published by Michael Ende: Jim Button and Luke the Engine Driver.
After that, I’ve read many others and Michael Ende was, no doubt, my favourite writer during my childhood: The neverending story, Momo, Mirror in the mirror… But Jim Button and Luke the Engine Driver will be always the one for me, the first. When I finished it many years ago, I was so excited with that book that I made a firm determination: I wanted to write stories.
We are very happy because we’ve just released an update of the app iDeas for Writing , version 1.1, with new useful features. Also, we’ve premiered a video promo of the app. I hope you like it:
NOTE for ANDROID users: we don’t forget about you. We really want to release a version for this OS and we are thinking about it. I hope I can give you some news soon. 
The novelty of this new universal version (avaliable for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch) is the notebook. Now you can also write within the app, so you can do your writing exercises or set down all your ideas.
No conflict, no story. This is one of the first lessons I remember from my writing classes many years ago. Since then, I’ve listened it and read it thousand of times. But, what is conflict exactly?
According to the dictionary, a conflict is a problem, a battle, a confrontation, a fight.. Does it mean that to tell a good story we have to face our characters into a bloody battle? Not at all. Conflict in literary fiction, although it also may appear as a battle (there are thousands of stories that tell us about battles and wars) is much more than that. Conflict is what leads the plot, what helps us to empatize with characters, what forces us to keep reading because we are intrigued, because we want to know how the conflict will be solved at the end. So conflict brings characters and story alive.
Now that we have already agreed the importance of conflict for a story, let’s go deeper in the issue. Today post is about the kinds of conflict that there are in a story but, in a few days, I’ll publish a second part in order to analize how to introduce conflict in our stories.
Among all the exercise I use to publish in the blog, I find more fun the ones that works as creative triggers. Having a line to start a story is the best way to overcome the fear to the blank page and makes writing easier.
So I am going to publish one of these exercises today, but with a little change because the exercise has an extra part for you to consider about structure, about the best moment to start a story. By the way, the phrase of the exercise belongs to the writing prompt of the app iDeas for Writing, which I told you about in the previous post.
Some days ago, thanks to a comment about this blog, I realized that I hadn’t wrote a specific post about our app iDeas for Writing yet. At first, I couldn’t believe it. I had talked so much about it when we released the app in June, by answering mails and comments in social media. It seemed impossible not have a post about it, but I didn’t.
So I want to solve this and talk a little about iDeas for Writing, just in case you don’t know the app yet. Besides, I guess this is the perfect timing because thanks that it’s summer I have more time and I’m using a lot the app, to find inspiration and improve my writing.
But, what is iDeas for Writing exactly? I like to present it with the logline “inspiration in your pocket”, because this app has several writing prompts to get inspired with new ideas and a workshop with a lot of writing exercises (these exercises also work to get the most of the prompts).
In the previous post I talked about how to present the characters to readers. This is an issue in storytelling that I find interesting, so I want talk a bit more about it through the ten rules I’ve developed about protagonists creation: how to create a likable main character or how to create a hero for your story.
The protagonist is the main character in the story, the one who spur the action and we know the facts through him/her (there are even cases where the protagonist changes in the middle of the story, like in Psycho). When there are several main characters, we can classify the story as:
