How tumblr Can Help You as a Writer

There is always discussion on the internet, particularly among writers, about how bad the internet is. After all, how will you ever write 1,000 words today if you spend five minutes on Twitter? I've already argued that Twitter can help you revise, and now I want to talk about how another social networking site, tumblr, can help your writing. 

tumblr is often seen as the biggest time-waster of the social networking sites because, well, what do you do but scroll through a series of gifs and artistic photos? However, it is those images and ideas which can help you as a writer, as I will show in this post. 

tumblr remembers the details. Sometimes it's the smallest moments in books which have the greatest impact on us, the ones which make us go, "Yes, I've felt that or been that or done that, I know that." There are multiple tumblers dedicated to those moments. For ones specific to teenagers, try High School Hyena or Teenager Posts. For general ones, try Just Little Things

tumblr is a unique way to interact with writers and writing communities. It is much more difficult to have a conversation with someone over tumblr than it is over Facebook or Twitter, but tumblr offers other ways to interact with each other, and often directs people towards places where the are discussions. Authors such as John Green and Maureen Johnson are on tumblr. On John's tumblr, you'll find posts which talk about his new book, The Fault in Our Stars, as well as ones which show what inspires as him, and ones which, if nothing else, serve to remind us that he is a real person. Maureen is offering NaNoWriMo advice on her tumblr. 

As for communities, nerdfighteria, the community of nerdfighters founded by John Green and Hank Green, has a tumblr. It offers opportunities for different members of the community to communicate about it through art, and really, how cool is that?

tumblr helps with character development. If you scroll through my tumblr, you'll find images which show that I love dance, comedies, musicals, God, and books, and probably more. There is a lot you could infer from that which may or may not be true, but the point is that anyone's individual tumblr has the potential to tell us a lot about them (or the person they want people to think they are.) An interesting character development exercise could be to create a tumblr for your characters. 

tumblr provides inspiration. If dance inspires you, there's a tumblr for that. If music inspires you, there's a tumblr for that. If images inspire you, there's a tumblr for that. Follow what inspires you, and maybe it'll motivate you to write. Young Adult Fiction is a tumblr with the potential to inspire you, as it posts quotes from YA books. 

Do you have tumblr? What tumblrs do you follow? Are there any tumblrs you know of that could be helpful to writers? Let me know in the comments!

Road Trip Wednesday: Understanding the Ladybug

Road Trip Wednesday is hosted by YA Highway.

This Week's Topic: What's your numero uno reason for writing?

The Sequel: How the Ladybug Applied Mascara

One of my earliest memories is learning about fables in elementary school. I loved them, and was as excited as I'd ever be about an assignment when our teacher asked us to write a fable. 

I wrote about how the ladybug got its spots and it was a creative, touching, absolutely ridiculous piece that I was so proud of. 

Fast forward, and I have more questions. I learn about friendship and God and love and dance and sex and history and music, but it's never enough. I always know that there's more to know, but I don't know what else I need to know; I don't know what questions to ask.

So, I write about it. I write about a character who has casual sex to understand why people do that (as well as why people don't.) I write about relationships to understand how they can be so messy and so incredible at the same time. I write about dance to understand why it affects me the way it does.

I write to learn about how the ladybug got its spots. 

Why do you write?

Road Trip Wednesday: Lather, Rinse, Repeat

Road Trip Wednesday is hosted by YA Highway.

This Week's Topic:

What themes, settings, motifs, scenes, or other elements do you find recurring in your work?

Sibling Relationships

I have a great relationship with my brother, but it's not like the sibling relationships I write about. The ones I write about tend to be ones where at least one sibling is totally dependent on the other. 

Dance

This one's an obvious one, as I love dance as much as I love writing. This was the first dance video in my youtube subscriptions today, and it represents how I like to write dance well. It's a classroom opposed to a stage, it's messy and honest and raw, it hasn't been polished to perfection. 

Small Towns

I love intimate settings, places where a story feels close and quiet. 

Self-Worth

This is huge in all my novels. My characters determine how much they're worth based on their popularity, grades, body, relationships, and so on. Ultimately, the coming-of-age moment for them is realizing how destructive that is, and that they are awesome just as they are. 

What themes reoccur in your novels? 

Switching WIPs and Visual Inspiration

Ok.

Remember that WIP of mine, Duets? Remember how I wrote two posts about it, excited to explore music and the ocean and messy love with three characters I loved, a setting I loved, a story I loved?

...Remember when I wrote 2.5k and couldn't write any more? No?

I was embarrassed that I'd abandoned a novel so early on, one I was so excited about, but it wasn't the right time for me to write it. I knew that when I danced so hard one night that I had to laugh afterwards, because it had made me that happy.

I knew that I wanted to write about dance. Again.

And from there I remembered Tiffany, a dance team captain, her boyfriend Ethan, her best friend Adelle, her rival Tessa, and her town. That was as far as the idea when I first brainstormed, but as I struggled through Duets, I gave Tiffany two sisters and a brother, a krumper to figure out life with,  and a football field where she danced the way I did that night.

My last novel was, in a sense, about dance, and I was worried that I'd be repeating myself with this one. But, Tiffany is not Callie (my MC in Duets was much closer to Callie than Tiffany is, and I think that's partly why I found it so hard to write), dance team is about as far from improv as you can get, and there are no car crashes or wheelchairs or random sex. It's a different story, and it's one that I love to write, which is why I feel comfortable with it as my current project.

So, I thought I'd share some visual inspiration for this WIP, through both pictures and dances. The order of these pictures and videos, while not chronological, is definitely intentional and meaningful. I'd love to hear what you think of these and, in turn, what kind of sense you have of the story!

That picture of the boy and girl starting to slow dance? They look exactly like the couple they're meant to represent, and it freaked me out so much when I first saw the picture! So cool when stuff like that happens. Let me know what you guys are thinking in the comments!

Road Trip Wednesday: Moving the Block

Road Trip Wednesday is hosted by YA Highway.

This Week's Topic: How do you beat writer's block?

Look what Calvin did to us, folks. Just look.

I struggle with two types of writer's block:

1. My muse is taking a nap/I'm not inspired.
2. I've pantsed the entire novel and now find myself in my underwear with nowhere else to go/I don't know what should happen next.

If my muse is asleep, I bribe it with artistic activities that will inspire it, such as reading and dancing. Reading's good if my muse is fully rested, but if they're groggy from an hour-long sleep, I need to dance. Dancing makes me raw--though I'm not as big of a fan of her as others, Adele's music is the best for this--and that naked, pumped-on-adrenaline state allows me to write with the honesty I need to.

If I'm in my underwear, I look for pants. I recently realized that writing through blocks does not work for me, because the plot either goes nowhere or somewhere ridiculous (gosh, I love plot-twists far too much), and my frustration causes my writing to fall flat. So, I close my document, hide my computer, and go for a walk, out to coffee, to my couch to watch Big Brother, anything that will distance me from my novel. Even I leave to do something mindless like the dishes or laundry, I don't intend on focusing on my novel. But, if I'm bored, I default to thinking about my novel, from there I brainstorm, from there I come up with plot points, and from there I write. The most important thing is that I take time and space away from my novel.

In both scenarios, I also like to act out my scenes. When I had to play Romeo in a performance for my Shakespeare class (this paragraph gets better and better, doesn't it?), I struggled to project my voice. To practice, I acted out a fight in my novel, and because I knew it would be easier for me to project as characters I cared about, and I'd go from there. That exercise did more than help me with my performance, it inspired me to write. Even if I don't go as far as acting, I'm always talking to myself through my stories.

Like anything else, sometimes these methods work, and sometimes they don't. They're a start, at least, an attempt to move the block Calvin gave us.

How do you beat writer's block?

Road Trip Wednesday: Setting

Road Trip Wednesday is hosted by YA Highway.

This Week's Topic: What is the most inspiring setting you've ever visited? 

The picture on the left is of the mountains in Almaty, Kazakhstan. I lived in Almaty for a month, and the walk to the university involved fifteen minutes of walking along a canal with an incredible view of the mountains, and fifteen minutes of walking in a beautiful park.

Almaty was a new, foreign, and beautiful city. I fell in love with it.

But it hasn't--and I don't imagine it will--inspired any stories. The city that has inspired multiple stories, and really, has had the strongest influence on who I am as a writer? 

Orangeville, Ontario. 

Uh, yeah. That's Orangeville, and it's as average of a town as that picture makes it look. I have family there, so my summer vacations have been in Orangeville for as long as I can remember. Maybe I'm so inspired by it because it was the first time I saw people living day-to-day lives outside of Nova Scotia, but I didn't think that way when I was five.

I was fifteen when we were driving through Orangeville on a vacation and I thought: Wow, this place is small. Really, it's not that small, but it certainly was in comparison to the city I grew up in. 

From there, I thought of what it would be like to live in a small town, and from there, characters were born, and from there, a plot was beginning to form, and by the end of the car ride, I knew I had something good.

And for a fifteen-year-old who didn't know who I wanted to be as a writer, I did. I wrote a ridiculously long piece of  fanfiction and had the most fun I'd ever had writing. Looking back, it's so bad--I was re-reading it the other day and yelling at myself, honestly--and I wasn't totally oblivious to that back then, especially once I had some distance from it. I knew the writing wasn't great--not to mention that I was yet to realize loose and lose were two different words, the dramatic "I don't want to loose you!" scene lost some of its effect--and the plot was sloppy, but there was something in the characters and the heart of the story that was worth something.

I realized that I'm a character-driven writer, that I love to write about relationships (romantic and non-romantic ones) and it's what I'm best at it, and that I really love to set my stories in small towns, or at least in a setting with few people and few distractions from each other (like the cottage where three people stay in Duets.) The majority of the work I've written since then has taken place in an intimate environment, even if that wasn't my intention when I started the piece. It always turns out that way.

I always loved going to Orangeville because I loved seeing my family, but now, I love the town itself, too.

What setting has inspired you?

Road Trip Wednesday: Do You Hear What I Hear?

Road Trip Wednesday is hosted by YA Highway.

This Week's Topic: The Five Senses. How you use them in your writing, how you are inspired by them, pictorial essays, that character with smelly socks, books that have used them well, the ones that are currently missing from your work, etc.

Guys, I'm so bad at this. Detail is not one of my strengths as a writer, so I rarely write passages which describe a sunset, the sound of a train, the texture of snow, etc. 

My current WIP, Duets, calls for description. My last novel was intentionally set in Nowhere Specific--it's a nice place--but Duets is set in the maritimes, where I've lived all my life and love too much to misrepresent. Also, the three main characters in Duets are musicians, so sound and how that affects all the other senses is incredibly important.

I'm going to share what inspired this novel in terms of the five senses, and hopefully it'll help me see what details I need to incorporate in this novel.

Sight

The ocean, especially when the waves are big

The inside of a cottage, where my characters stay

Smell

One of my absolute favourite smells: Sunscreen

 Touch

The texture of saltwater-hair

Taste

Barbecue!

Sound

Since Duets is about, well, duets, there are so many songs I could've picked for this. The Civil Wars' album Barton Hollow pretty much is my playlist for this, and I chose "Forget Me Not" to represent it because this video is adorable and captures everything I love about The Civil Wars. Most of the music in Duets is folk or country, and this is its playlist (which is also a work in progress) if you're interested: Duets' Playlist.

How do you use the five senses in your writing? 

What Fuels You?

I am burned out.

The past month or so has easily been one of the craziest ones of my life, for both good and bad reasons. However, I finished exams on Wednesday and moved out of my dorm room yesterday, and now I feel a bit like someone stopped me mid-marathon and said, "It's ok, you can rest now." But, since I'm halfway through the marathon, I want to finish.

I'm currently unemployed open to opportunities, which means the best way for me to maintain my momentum is to write. Yet, I haven't opened my novel's document since I've been home.

The next scenes I have to write are big, messy ones, which have to drain me in order to be effective. The problem is, right now, there's nothing left to drain.

Of course, sleep will help with that, and I've convinced myself Boy Meets World marathons will as well. Then, I'll at least have the motivation to unpack, search for a job, and all those other things I need to do. But, to write? Not only to write, but to write scenes that will drain me all over again? I'll need more fuel than that to return to my novel, and to start my summer writing schedule where I'll spend more time with my novel in a day than I do in a week throughout the school year.

Above all else, I write my novel because I care about my characters, and need to tell their story. But, when I need motivation beyond that? I, shocker, turn to dance. Yesterday, though, I did more than just dance. I made a dance playlist for my novel.

And it was so much fun. I've come across dances before which remind me of my novel, as well as ones which have inspired dance scenes in my novels, but I also hunted for videos that would capture the moments I needed captured. Most of those scenes are dance scenes, and it was so cool when I found videos that looked like what I imagined. The first video, for example, just is the first scene of the novel.

I spent an embarrassing amount of time putting the dances in order, thinking about which ones best represent each moment, and how the playlist itself flows as a story arc. I cut dances which reminded me of my novel, but were fillers as opposed to scenes, just like I do when I revise. I made sure the dancers I used represented my characters in the way they danced, and in some cases, taught. Sometimes I had to ignore the fact that the dancers in the videos are, well, better dancers than my characters, but I did try to match skill level where possible.

Every time I watch the playlist, I get excited about my novel, and want to write it. Not all the dances look exactly as I imagined, of course, but the emotion behind them is always the emotion in the scenes they represent. That's all the fuel I need.

Beyond your love for your story and your characters, what fuels you write it? Is it a music playlist, pictures, videos, etc.? Let me know in the comments!

Just Sharing Some Inspiration

Sometimes we're struck by stories that aren't in books, but in music, in photographs, in film.

In people.

This dance has hit me in a way that's like that breathless feeling you get after you read a book, one that worked its way right into your heart, that somehow found a home in you. I won't say anything else about the dance. It is what it is, and just like with books, you'll like it or you'll won't. I'm posting this in hopes that someone else will get knocked out by it like I did.

Choreography: The brilliant Erica Sobol.

Dancers: Leah Moyer and one of the most underrated dancers ever to be on So You Think You Can Dance, Thayne Jasperson.

Music: "The Moment I Said It" by Imogen Heap, and "I Don't Feel it Anymore (Song of the Sparrow)" by my favourite artist of all time, William Fitzsimmons.

Enjoy. 

I'd love for all of you to share what stories (that aren't found in books) have left you breathless.

Inspiration: Taylor Swift

Whenever someone asks me who my favourite artists are, my response is, "William Fitzsimmons, Mumford & Sons, Florence and the Machine, and Taylor Swift."

One of these things is not like other, right?

I was fifteen when Taylor Swift came out. I was fifteen when I had my first crush that went beyond, "Oh, he's cute." I honestly thought that I had a shot with this guy, but then he started dating his ex-girlfriend. I didn't know her, but from what others told me, she was pretty much exactly like me, just better according to him. It doesn't sound like a big deal now, but when I was fifteen, it completely crushed me. When I heard "Teardrops on my Guitar" on the radio, it was the first time as a young adult I'd heard a song and thought, "Oh my gosh, someone gets it." I quickly downloaded the rest of her music, and had the same experience with "Tied Together With a Smile", "Stay Beautiful", and "A Place in the World." Even though I couldn't relate to the other songs, I loved them just as much. In fact, "Cold as You" is still my favourite Taylor Swift song.

I didn't have the same experience with "Love Story" that I had with "Teardrops on My Guitar". I liked the song and thought it was cute, but it didn't strike me like Teardrops did. Still, I loved Taylor, and bought Fearless. I enjoyed it, but again, it didn't hit me like Taylor Swift did. That summer, I went away for a week to a random small town, where I met a boy. That boy was one of the biggest rushes I've ever experienced. We clicked and flirted like crazy (and until this point, I didn't flirt at all), but in a week, it was over. Suddenly, Fearless was the soundtrack to my life, just as Taylor Swift had been. "Love Story" and "Fearless" were my week, and "White Horse" was the rest of my summer. I also felt a connection to "The Best Day", "Change", and, unsurprisingly after reading the last section, "Fifteen."

The difference between Fearless and Taylor Swift was that I got bored with Fearless after my boy-drama ended, whereas I still love Taylor Swift. When Speak Now came out, I wasn't that excited. I thought I'd either outgrown Taylor or that she'd lost some of what made her first CD so magical. I didn't plan on listening to it, let alone buying it. "Mine" didn't change my mind. In fact, I rolled my eyes a little when I heard it: a cutesy love song from Taylor, how original. Her performance of "Innocent" at the VMAs also came off as little self-righteous to me, which didn't help matters (though, spoiler alert, I love the song now.) Taylor's performance of "Back to December" at the CMAs is what made me listen to the CD. Both the song and the performance itself were so honest, and for the first time since "White Horse", Taylor struck a chord with me. I listened to the rest of Speak Now, and now I'm in the process of falling in love with it. "Dear John" and "Sparks Fly" (yes, another cutesy love song, but now I know a cute boy to go with it) were instant favourites, but I'm sure as I continue to listen and continue to live, more of her songs will hit my heart.

Taylor Swift's success is no accident. She gets what it's like to be a young adult, and can capture moments of that with an almost uncomfortable amount of honesty in three minutes. In three albums, she's managed to capture the life of a young adult.

That's why, as a writer, Taylor Swift is an inspiration of mine.

Now, you tell me: what musicians inspire you as a writer?

PS: The guy I liked when I was fifteen? Turns out he was a jerk. The ex he was dating when I liked him? She's now one of my best friends. Amazing how things turn out, huh?