A Novel Creation www.WatersWords.com

This post is personal. Personal…not private. You are invited to read it. It is about writing, yes, but so much more. It is about listening and yielding. It is about preparing. It is about coming to terms with who you are and who you want to be.   I have many author friends who choose a word each year to explore. I may have even mentioned this at some time or another on this blog. I don’t remember. It is a great idea and I’ve heard incredible stories come of it. None of them were mine. I didn’t choose a word last year. Had I been pressed to do so, I may have chosen survival. I look back now though and realize God allowed me to do much more than survive after losing my husband so suddenly. It has been the most difficult experience of my life but now I see that through the pain or perhaps in spite of it, God gave me incredible opportunities to grow this past year. I digress. I was talking about choosing a word for 2016. At first I gravitated to words such as rest or st...

Meet Gloria Doty! Gloria Doty is a published Christian writer, author, speaker and blogger. She has 5 children, 13 grandchildren and 7 great-grandchildren. She currently lives in Fort Wayne, Indiana with her adult autistic daughter, 1 dog and 2 cats. Gloria and I met a few years ago at a writing conference. As you will see, Gloria has a great sense of humor and a zest for life! Me: Gloria, I am so excited to interview you for my blog this week. Welcome. Gloria: I know it will be fun today. February 24 is my birthday so it is great timing! Me: Yay! Happy Birthday! Gloria: Thank you. Me: Well, I know you’ve seen how I do this. I have a few questions I think my readers would ask if they were here with us. Many of them are relatively new to the writing/publishing game. So let’s get started. I want to start with your latest book and then talk a bit about the journey to get there. I read Bring a Cowboy Home and loved it. A romance for baby boomers? Yes! Tell us a...

As I go through this series of comparing the working of a jigsaw puzzle to writing a novel I am working a puzzle on my dining room table. It’s a slow go…but then so is writing. I first put together the straight edges. I sorted several pieces by color and then started finding the pieces that stood out in the picture on the box –the pieces that when put together created the focus of the picture on the front of the puzzle box. The puzzle I chose to use is a picture of a garden. There is an old chair on the stone patio, an earthen pot in one corner. Flowers spill over the garden wall. It is the promise of springtime. The picture is a composite of elements. The chair alone wouldn’t tell the story, nor would the flowers or setting. It is, in essence, a compilation of scenes. Before I wrote my first novel, Breathing on Her Own , a more experienced writer told me to identify eight to ten specific scenes significant to my story and write each down on a separate piece of paper. Her...

  If you read last week’s post you know that I am looking at working a jigsaw puzzle as a metaphor for writing a novel. Last week’s post was about keeping our eye on the “box.”   [Click HERE if you missed that one.] Today I want to talk a bit about a strategy experienced puzzlers use early on: finding the straight edges. For the jigsaw puzzle, the straight edges offer definition. They create a framework wherein the picture will be completed. I think that’s where novelists begin as well. As many puzzles have four sides and four corners, this week’s blog addresses four angles to explore when framing the novel. First, I think each writer needs to consider his or her own situation. How much time can you give to your writing? What do you want as your end product? Do you see this as your magnum opus or first attempt? When I was drafting my doctoral dissertation, I received excellent advice from my mentor. He said, “There was a time when a dissertation was a lifelong...