Category: Writing

Living and Telling Great Stories: AWBU

AWBU, Alison Chino, Stephanie McCratic
Me + Stephanie Mc.  my conference sponsor.

 

I’m flying home from Arkansas, completely filled up to the brim with all kinds of wonderful from a fabulous weekend in Rogers for AWBU! What a great conference with a wonderful group of folks!

As usual, I learned a ton and got to connect lots of names with faces.

I also had the opportunity to share a little bit from my own blogging journey.

These days, my favorite thing about blogging is the storytelling, so at the conference I shared three ways I think we can find those great stories for our blog.

First we talked about what compels you to subscribe to someone’s site?

I’ll tell you what it is for me.

They make me laugh.

They inspire me.

Or they take me outside of myself, my day, my world for a magical moment.

And the blogs I keep reading over and over for years and years do all three.

They tell great stories.

But in order to tell a great story, you need to live one.

 

Three Kinds of Stories To Live and To Tell

 

The Sacred Everyday

Noteworthy Days

The Grand Adventures

 

The Sacred Everyday  is an easy story to get started in telling because it is the one you are already living. Maybe you think you can’t tell a good story because your real life is boring. And it is. Sort of. Every day we wake up. We do dishes. We do laundry. We take care of kids and pets and lunches and work. We get takeout. We go to bed. Then we wake up and do it again.

Recently I saw this movie, called About Time about a man who could time travel. His father could also time travel and at some point he told his son that his secret to having a happy life was to go back and live each day again. Only the second time around, since he already knew how the day was going to go, he could pay closer attention. Appreciate all the little details of life, people’s expressions. Celebrate the mundane.

So the man started to do that and he found that he appreciated life more. And pretty soon, he stopped needing to go back and live the day again, because he started living the day that way from the start. From the moment he got up, he was awake to life. To people. To miracles.

Donald Miller says this about life in his book about story,  A Million Miles in A Thousand Years:

The experience is so slow you could easily come to believe life isn’t that big of a deal, that life isn’t staggering. What I’m saying is I think life is staggering and we’re just used to it. We are like spoiled children, no longer impressed with the gifts we’re given. It’s just another sunset. Just another rainstorm moving in over the mountain, just another child being born, just another funeral.

He says that maybe we fail to acknowledge the brilliance of life because we don’t want the responsibility inherent in the acknowledgement. If we think life isn’t remarkable, the we can be “unwilling victims rather than grateful participants.”

The small details of life are miraculous if we are paying attention, if we are willing to be struck by the fact that life is staggering.

I’m going to stop there and share the other two ways we can live + tell great stories on another day.

For now, I would love for you to do one of the following:

a) Share a small miracle in the comments, preferably one you noticed in the last 24 hours. A Sacred Everyday moment that could be a story or blog post.

b) Share a link to a blog post where you are focusing on telling a Sacred Everyday kind of story.

c) Write a Sacred Everyday kind of story on your blog and link back to this post or tweet it at me so I can read it.

Bonus: A few blogs I love who do this Sacred Everyday story well:

Kyran Pittman at Planting Dandelions

Jerusalem Greer

Ann Voskamp at A Holy Experience

PS

I LOVED getting to visit with so many of you at AWBU! I’m already looking forward to next year.

XO

Alison

 

 

ARWB and OnlyinArk.com

On behalf of First Security Bank, I am happy to announce the launching of OnlyinArk.com, a site  focusing on and celebrating the uniqueness of our state. 

The Women Bloggers has been hired to provide five posts per month for this wonderful site through our Arkansas Women Blogger gals.

onlyinArkscreenshot

Go check out some of the wonderful stories already published on the site, such as;

Hoof it for Heifer by Lisa Mullis
Canoeing the Mississippi River by Talya Tate Boerner
Spies, Traitors, and Saboteurs: Fear and Freedom in America by Sarabeth Jones
Museum of Discovery by Natalie Zanatta
An Ode to Hwy 71 by Bethany Stephens

“There’s a lot to celebrate in Arkansas. It’s unique. Southern. Delightfully eccentric. Which is why we love every nook, cranny, cave and corner. In fact, some of our favorite things can’t be found anywhere else. They’re only in Arkansas. So we love them even more. The attractions we visit, the food we crave, the festivals we attend, the mountains we hike, the rivers we float, the stories we tell and the company we keep – it all adds up to one incredible state. And that familiar, meandering silhouette? Looks like home to us.”

 

How to Write More (When You Already Think You Have No Time)

By Sarah E. White

When I wrote my first book, I thought the deadline was tough. I had about nine months to write the book, design and knit all the patterns and take all the pictures. I quit my job (I’d been looking for an excuse) and worked on the book day and night for months. This was long before my daughter was born.

There are parts of the book I’m proud of, but it looks like a book that came together in about nine months. I was burned by that experience, and then I had a kid, so it was a long time before I considered doing another one.

But when my daughter started going to preschool around age 2, I decided it was time to try again. A publisher had approached me, and I did a little more homework this time before agreeing to write a book for them.

The contract was signed at the end of 2011, I turned in the manuscript at the end of last year and the book just came out in July. That sounds like a lot of time, but when you’re fitting writing (and, in my case, knitting) in around all your regular work and parenting duties, if can get tricky.

You may not be interested in writing a book, but most busy bloggers I know are interested in being able to blog a little more frequently. So I thought I would share some things that have worked for me that make it possible for me to even contemplate writing books with a kiddo in the house.

1. Have a Plan

blog planning
I do calendars by hand, usually with two colors of ink and two of pencil.

The most important thing when it comes to writing more is knowing what you want to write about in advance. If you can plan out a whole month’s posts – or even a whole week’s – then when you find yourself with a little time to write you’ll know what you need to write about.

Of course nothing need be set in stone if you decide to write about something else, but just thinking about what you want to write about means those ideas will already be simmering in your brain while you’re busy with other things, which will make the writing go that much faster when you’re ready to do it.

2. Have a Notebook

I have notebooks everywhere. There are four in front of me on my desk as I write this. One is usually in my purse at all times. Sometimes there’s one on the living room couch, and one in the playroom.

That way no matter where I am, if my daughter is playing by herself or watching TV and doesn’t need my full attention, I can work on a post right there with her. I wrote part of this in my notebook while she was playing at the park.

I also use my notebook for those lists of stories and other to-dos, projects I want to complete and other essentials. These books are precious until they’re full, then I go through, pull out the pages I still need and recycle the rest.

3. Try to Get Away

When I was in the last weeks of writing my book (and way behind schedule, I might add) the only way I survived was that my husband would take our daughter on little adventures that would get them out of the house for most of a day. His mom lives in Bella Vista, so they went to visit her without me a few times, and they took my parents to the drive-through safari once.

Being able to work for long, uninterrupted stretches every now and then is a great help, whether you’re writing a book (or a book proposal) or just trying to get ahead of your blogging schedule a little bit.

I know it can be hard to get free time, or to ask for it, but for me it was, and still is, essential. I love those few hours when the family is gone and I’m holed up in my office, typing away. It feels like I’m getting away with something. I seem to always be super-productive on those days, and I’ll bet it would work for you, too.

What do you do to get more writing done? I’d love to hear your thoughts, since I just might be writing another book soon!

Sarah E. White is a craft writer and mom of one in Fayetteville. She blogs almost daily at her website, Our Daily Craft, as well as at the knitting sites for About.com and Craft Gossip.com. She’s the author of Picture Yourself Felting Your Knitting, the book she doesn’t like to talk about, and Quick & Easy Baby Knits, which she’s super proud of.