Bleah! Can you believe it. This is the first time I’ve noticed that my links are not showing up in the sidebar Apparently that is because this theme is not sidebar aware. In the very near future I will change my theme and make sure I get important links up. In the meantime you can reach Holly Lisle’s Think Sideways Website here and her main website here. You’ll find lots of terrific free writing information at her website. Mugging the Muse is a must read.

A little more than six months ago I signed up for Holly Lisle’s Think Sideways course. I had understood it to be a writing course. It is that and so much more. Holly is unstinting in sharing what she has learned in her seventeen year writing career. Her life has informed her writing skills and what she has learned as a writer has informed the way she lives her life. The cost of the course is very reasonable and you get a super-size portion of writing knowledge for a small price. You’ll find the link to her website and the Think Sideways course in the sidebar.

A bonus of this course is that the graduates get to continue to access each other, and Holly’s knowledge in the forums as we work through writing our novels. Holly is writing a novel along side of us and posting her methods and results as we all go along.

As a new writer I have picked up all sorts of advice and slavishly applied it to my writing. When you are a beginner is is often hard to know whether the advice given is good advice. Sometimes it’s not, or at least the way you understood it and apply is not. In a previous writing class ‘show, don’t tell’ was a mantra. I learned that too well. Consequently it was pointed out by one of my fellow Sideways graduates that my writing was interesting but lacked emotion. I didn’t take the comment lightly. I have been working so hard and frankly I would have preferred to hear, “Wow, that is a stunning bit of writing.”

I chose, however, to make this a learning experience. You see, if I’d let myself be angry or hurt, nothing at would have been accomplished. Instead I decided to try to find out what exactly it meant to have written prose that distanced the viewer and held back emotion. Let me tell you that if you are going to give your character depth you can go only so far showing emotion and not telling it. Remember those old silent movies with Pauline tied to the tracks with the train coming closer and closer. Her actions were frantic and melodramatic. Maybe that’s what you needed to do when you didn’t have a soundtrack. Trying to portray the subtler emotions we feel is darn hard if you take ”showing, don’t tell” to seriously.  There is a time to show and a time to tell and a time to do both for the same situation.

Now isn’t that a brilliant bit of learning. Furthermore, this isn’t something I didn’t at some level know, but if you are not believing in yourself you are inclined to embrace what other people tell you too easily. It’s all part of being a newbie. I’m beginning to think that I’m emerging into the next writer stage. I don’t know what it’s called, but it’s not ‘newbie’.