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Music can ease tension and enchant casual listeners, but more importantly, it can even inspire.

This exercise suggests writing words in a sort of free response fashion while listening to various songs. It can be a lot of fun, and maybe even enlightening.

"Write what you know," you're told. But you're itching to write something you don't have direct experience with.

This doesn't actually have to be a problem.

The usually-forgotten second half to the phrase "write what you know" is "and if you don't know it, learn it!" Research is where you will probably spend a lot of time, and there are tons of resources out there.

But what about stuff that is really hard to research? Especially feelings, desires, and attitudes?

This is an intriguing idea that I admit to swiping from Neil Gaiman's graphic novels of the Sandman.
Have you ever had a moment in which you suddenly realized that you could no longer remember what it felt like to be in love with someone whom you were once enamored? Or what it was like to have sex with a long-time lover? Or the face of someone you used to see every day? I've always felt that was a strange experience, to one moment just know that this is something you can no longer recall, when you always thought it was something you would never forget.
I think it would be an interesting exercise to try capturing all the details of one of those moments on paper. Anybody else game for this?

How often have you read a story and rolled your eyes as the author lists off hair colour and length, eye colour, height, girth, clothing style and colour...

But you still want your readers to have a good idea of what the character looks like, so you have to provide some physical description.

This is an exercise in imagination. Write something about a stack of paper.

Here in Europe, and especially here in Norway, SMSes are all the rage. Messages are sent from one mobile to another, and since all the kids have a mobile phone (at least most of those over the age of 12) and since there are more mobile phones than people in Norway, everyone seems to know how to SMS, even grandmothers.

Each message must be shorter than 160 characters. This has led to a shortening of certain words. "It", in Norwegian and Swedish "det", is shortened to the letter "d".

Character isn't physical description. It isn't a resume. According to Aristotle, character is action, but an important corrolary to that is, character is desire.

Guess who had another rejection letter last night? It was extremely encouraging, of course =) I find rejection letters very hard to interpret - when they tell you it wasn't what they were looking for, does that mean they hate it? And surely they couldn't care less when they wish you the best of luck?

I found this page which talks about reading rejection letters creatively, and how you can take the comments more than one way. I wondered what experience other people have had with rejection letters, and what were their best and worse?

I am looking into doing some collaborative writing with a friend or two. I was hoping to use some kind of program/workflow that has been used with great success in business.

Groupware tools allow serveral users to work on documents together. Some of these programs include Adobe Acrobat, Microsoft Word and Lotus Notes.

This kind of workflow is also used in programming, using server applications like CVS and Perforce.

Ultimately, I would like this workflow to use the web as a centralized place to work from. There is a project on SourceForge.com in it's early stages called CoeLab, which stands for "Collaborative Elaboration". But they have yet to release any files.

Has anybody worked with anything like this. I don't want to reinvent the wheel. If this works, maybe it could be the beginning of a collaborative writing community like the free software movement.

-Jaxon

'Show, don't tell' is an oft-heard admonition to new writers, and given that a lot of people new to writing do far too much 'telling' it's probably reasonably good advice. But then there are some people who hold the invalid assumption that 'if a little is good, more must be better', and think that everything in a story must be 'shown'.

There are things in a story that should be 'told' and not 'shown'.