There’s a fellow who began a deceptively simple exercise of blogging just 40 words — his age at the time — every day for a year, beginning the x365 project. During the process, he captured candid impressions of people who mattered in his life.

I decided to do the same. The discipline of writing shorter when you want to wax eloquent is a useful exercise in word selection, pacing, restraint, and vivid writing. I opted to publish the series on my other blog, CarolynBahm.com, mainly because the essence of those posts for me is the vivid memory, not the craftsmanship of the writing. You can check out my progress so far at this link to my 47×365 category.

You may want to try it out yourself for a zippy little writing project. The hardest part is making the list of 365 people. Even though the list doesn’t have to be exclusively of life-changing characters — it can include peripheral contacts too — I currently have fewer than 200 on my list. So it’s helping me pay more attention to the people around me, and I’m adding daily.

I think I’ll add to my list the nice middle-aged woman who has a brilliant smile that lights up her eyes and transforms her plain face, making my breakfast stops at the local Burger King such a pleasant spot in my morning.

Technorati Tags: writing exercise, x365, 47×365

I’ve got a few writing tips that work for me. If you have others, would you please — pretty please — share them in the comments?

1. Get mental stimulation. This just means being around something other than the inside of your own head. It can be family, community, or people-watching at the mall or coffee shop. Or it can even be online with podcasts, website forums, and blogs. Whatever works for you.

2. Do NOT, however, keep filling in every moment of your silence. Your brain needs time to let images and ideas percolate. How can it do that if you’ve got a constant yammering in your ear from the iPod, the cell phone, or the TV? Don’t feel like every drive to work has to be actively productive or every moment as you fall asleep has to be filled with a book on tape. Even a good field sometimes needs to lie fallow.

3. Think about your story often.

4. Keep pen and paper with you AND by the bed AND within reach of the tub and shower. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve dreamed up a complete story and felt it vanishing from my mind while I scrambled for paper and pen.

Technorati Tags: writing tips, writer’s inspiration, writer’s discipline

Ever have trouble titling a piece? I struggle with them, but the titles always come. I’m not one who can write a title from the beginning, though; it has to come after I’ve struggled through writing something. Usually by then I’ve gotten to know the story inside and out and can find the right title that captures the story’s theme nicely. (I have to slap myself sometimes to resist using puns. Although, sometimes, I don’t resist.)

I bookmark good articles on writing topics when I find them. Here are a few excellent ones about titling your work:

• Title Tale, by John M. Floyd over at Criminal Brief. His 14 rules of thumb are great inspiration fodder.
• Common words in book titles.
• An article that gives many examples of the first-choice titles that some published books almost used.
• A brainstorming list of information to gather when you’re trying to dream up that just-right novel title.
• An online tool to check titles of books already in print. Factoid: I read online that titles can’t be copyrighted, which I didn’t know. But it can’t hurt to check whether your title is already in use. You don’t want people confusing your book with someone else’s, do you?

Technorati Tags: book titles, naming your book