If you have never gotten around to it, please give one!
When someone inspires you, or if you see someone who is using their writing gift to help others, please take the time to thank them publicly by giving them this award (and the rules for passing it on.)
This award is open to anyone to use. You don’t have to receive it, in order to be able to give it. Please take the details and images off this page and use it to encourage another writer. The rules for passing it on are very simple:
- You are welcome to give it out as many times as you like, but it is only to be given to a maximum of one person per blog post. If you wish to give multiple rewards, please space the blog posts by at least a week, so the sincerity is maintained.
- Introduce the person; say how they encourage, help or inspire you; then link to their work and/or social media profiles. There may be a specific post you wish to link to which helped you. It’s up to you.
- Please publicise your award post to Twitter or Google Plus using the hashtag #writtenkindness so that others can find and follow the award winners.
Get the Award Badge and Code
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Boxed code from “Grab My Button” Code Generator: http://www.mycoolrealm.com/sandbox/gbgen/
This blog post by Cate Russell-Cole is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. You are free to share and adapt it.
Experts have termed this practice of waiting “creative gestation,” and much like the shaping of a child in the womb, producing quality work requires a degree of time, no matter what genre. By coming back to your writing later on, you’ll find that certain word choices can be improved, images can be sharpened, and other enhancements can refine your work even further. Rather than sending an immature, embryotic creation to editors, you’re handing over “your baby,” fully developed, delivered, and ready.
John Davis Jr. is a Florida poet whose work has been published in literary venues internationally. His poems have recently appeared in Deep South magazine, Saw Palm magazine, and Touch: The Journal of Healing, and he has forthcoming poetry in The Wayfarer. His book, Growing Moon, Growing Soil: Poems of my Native Land, is available through Amazon and other fine retailers. His website is: 
“Pay yourself first,” was the solid advice I was given with business book keeping: and face it, writing is a business, even if you work at it recreationally. If the IRS wants a share, it’s not necessarily a carefree hobby any longer…
Sandra was raised in Montreal, Québec, and graduated from McGill University. As a young girl, she loved reading the Nancy Drew mystery series and was determined to write her own stories one day. Her career choices didn’t exactly lead her along the “yellow brick road” to writing mystery novels—though working in a bank and experiencing a string of armed robberies did ingrain terrifying memories worthy of a story!
In the whirlwind of writing advice, one can always find opposing viewpoints. There are many writers who counsel writing every day, and just as many who find such strictures confining and harmful to creativity. I am one who needs to write every day; even if what I write does nothing to advance the work, it keeps me limber and creative.
I found ways to work around my writer’s block, and in so doing realized that I did not have writer’s block but unreasonable expectations. Still I yearned for time, space, and order. It took me a while, but I realized that I did have time to write, tucked away in the corners of my day job, during the early morning hours when everyone but the dogs were asleep. I did not need hours of time to write a work in a single sitting, but could draft, improve, refine, and tweak, in small pieces of time and space. I did not have to write in linear fashion, but could choose a part of the work that called to me; I could delve into a character’s thoughts and history in a way that might not add words to the page but added depth to the character; I could explore a personal injury in order to find the words to express a character’s pain, grief, loss, or fear; I could write to vent, complain, whine, protest, or endeavor to understand.
In 2000 I published a memoir writing course. It has been revised four times and edited by three trained editors: two at University level. I have put countless hours of work into perfecting it, but guess what? If you read through, you will still find very small typos hidden in it like Easter Eggs. That drives me to screaming point!
So, how do we overcome this? Make your work look new! When I started blogging, I discovered that I would pick up mistakes in WordPress’ preview mode that I couldn’t see in the writing window. In preview, the font size differed and words were in different spots on the page. If you’re working in a word processor, you can try for the same effect by changing fonts, changing margin widths, altering text color, or opening the document in a totally different word processor.
I used to correspond with a published author. Her writing advice was the best I have ever been given: “Every scene, every sentence, every word, must drive the plot forward. If it doesn’t move the plot or reveal something important about the characters, cut it. If you can cut it without impacting your novel, it’s just dead weight, dragging your story down.” It is not easy to do. Even with that advice in mind, there were “dead weight” scenes in my manuscript I didn’t want to cut. I tried to make excuses for them, but in the end, I had to admit they served no real purpose, no matter how much I liked them. This one of the things a good editor does for you: gently, but firmly forces you to see where you’ve gone off-track.
Some of these lessons I learned only in retrospect, but writing is a lifelong journey. I can’t regret my mistakes, because they were valuable lessons. “We’re all apprentices in a craft where none is truly a master,” as the saying goes. I cannot wait to see what I will learn next.
Michael W. Roberts just finished the rough draft of his first novel and was surprised by how emotional he got over it. He works extensively in web media, and he blogs about writing, creativity, and communication on his site 
I have converted to digital as much as I can, but there’s a catch. I always need information fast when my computer is off, there is a thunderstorm or my iPad has run out of battery life! I use my iPod touch when I go out, but I still need the ease of paper. Some days you want to jot down an idea before it’s lost; plus I was totally sick of rummaging around my desk trying to find the separate blog post idea folder, the phone bill, my shopping list for the business, the guest post schedule, my e-book outlines! I just wanted one space which had everything. It was a way to save time and sanity.
