Words unbidden come to fill the space on pages made of white.

The sentence could be shortened, but would it mean the same? A writer speaks utterances that no one dares to think, because the words have meaning that echo through our hearts. No matter how many times you edit a piece, the writer knows the value of the words taking flight.

Because you’re given a message to impart to the world, you should speak it. Write it down and publish those words you’ve worked hard to express, to find, to type into existence.

Often a writer looks at the words written and thinks, I could say that better. And, almost every time, it could be said in fewer words, better than it was said before. But would it mean the same?

As an editor, I have a hard time telling another writer that the way they’ve put the words together should be changed. Their style, their message, their words should be expressed as they say them, because the message belongs to the writer.

Grammar experts sometimes get so caught up in the right way to write that they alienate the meaning of the phrase. The sentence may not have a noun or verb, but does it need one? Stop! You know that line isn’t aimed at your neighbor, you heard it, YOU should do it.

Regardless of the speaker, if the phrase has purpose and value in content, it should stay. Determining the content means understanding the value. More importantly, value determines content and purpose.

As a writer, you have a purpose. You’ve been given a cause and a course of action (yes,  you’re a writer for a reason). Getting your message out is important, no matter what that message is. Someone out there will understand what you’re writing, even if they’ve heard the message a million times before, and NEEDS to hear what you have to say. In order for you to keep sending out your message, you have to make a profit.

You have a responsibility to your audience to be profitable at what you do.

Give your words volume, cause, purpose and value. Make a profit. Speak your words from the deepest part of your existence and allow them to become echoes of the heart.

When a writer complains of writer’s block I sit back and wonder why. There have been times when I had trouble writing what I was supposed to be writing, but NEVER have I ever sat down to write and couldn’t write. If I have a blank piece of paper (or computer screen) before me, I just start writing. Eventually, the words begin to travel across the page and I can’t keep the story from coming out. Editing may be a nightmare of deletes the first time, but writing isn’t a problem.

I have friends who write well.

Of course, they have jobs as writers, it’s an additional income for them, not necessarily a burning desire to put words on paper. Their impulse to write has a different drive than mine, often research driven, as a purpose, their words come from different sources. While my words come from within, and I can do research as one source of writing, their words come from research. This isn’t bad, it’s just different. Their efforts are repaid by publication, fulfillment of source, or enrichment of social projection or purpose.

At least, until they begin to feel the burn.

Watching a research writer develop a burning desire to write is an awesome experience. They’ll figit with the words, ply their minds for the right word, and when they see it… It flows!

It’s amazing!

One particular writer scrubs her work clean before anyone is allowed to see it. She worries over it, bothers it, and struggles to use all the right words. Then, after messing with her own work for a while she wants others to mess with it a while too. After that, it’s ready to publish… Or not. Sometimes, after everyone has messed with it, she rewrites it again.

I love it.

I’m watching, before my very eyes, a writer evolve from the mist of the storm. She’s evolving from whatever other purpose she had, developing a desperate need to fill the paper with words, to express herself and others, to be heard. She’s learned to speak out and share her views. She’s a promoter who markets her community and she’s alive with the burning desire to speak through the written word.

Awakening the writer within doesn’t take a lot, and once it’s done, there’s no shutting down. The pen don’t run out of ink once the writer is awakened.

Do you tell the truth?

My son walked in about seven hours ago and informed me that the average person lies three times every ten minutes. I listened and thought, I haven’t said anything in at least two hours (I’d been writing). So, I looked back at the blogs I’d written and the other stuff I’d written. Yup, I’d been writing fiction, so of course, that constitutes lies by the average teenager.

I considered what I’d have written if I’d been writing actual stories. Um, no, not lies. Not even a stretch to reality. Just perhaps, a mega lean on the rope that holds reality together. And there I was, writing, hoping someone would read what I’d written. There he was… READING it.

Okay, so he was LIVING it. My son was living what I would write later. I know, I know, I don’t usually write about what my kids say, but what he said was significant. I had to share it. Every ten minutes an average person tells three lies. So there he stood, talking for about fifteen minutes. Given his statement, he’d already told me four and a half lies.

I crinkled my eyes, squinted at him, and looked him in the eye. “Do you realize you’ve been talking for fifteen minutes. That means, by your own statement, that you’ve lied to me four and a half times. Ahem!”

He grinned and said, “Not me mom. I’m not AVERAGE.”

Which brought me to the real dilema. Am I an average blogger? Or am I different?

As I sit here listening to Faron Young swoon out some 50’s variety country song on a local radio station, my son (the same one) pick out wanna be country tunes on his/my accoustic guitar, all while the other son plays a video game and I clack out yet another blog article today on my new (Thank You Danielle) keyboard, I consider the dilema of blogging and wonder if bloggers tell three lies every ten minutes too. So, what do you think? Do you tell three lies every ten minutes all you  average people out there?

Awakened before daybreak, I listened intently to the sound of a mouse chipping away at the skirting of the trailer under my bed. There’d been a hole there last winter and this winter I’d fixed the hole. But he was determined to get inside.

(I knew it was a HE, because a SHE would have figured out she wasn’t wanted and would soon be captured in a trap if she entered the domain, and found another hidey hole for cold weather.)

For more than five minutes I listened as the clock ticked away on the sewing machine beside my bed. I thought of Oris and his birds. The concept of mouse holes in a place where I didn’t CARE if mice gathered blitzed through my mind, and I realized the solution was actually quite simple. I could FEED the mice OUTSIDE and help them solve their housing issues. After all, if there are fewer mice looking for housing, housing becomes readily available, right?

I got up and gathered my shoes, my jeans and my shirt, along with a very warm coat and slipped out the front door. In the shed just north of my trailer sits a huge bin of grain ready for planting with chemicals that deter mice in a rather permanent manner. It’s been there for a few years, and I hadn’t thought about it before. I opened the shed, opened the bin and took out a bucket full of the wonderful kernels. I spread them along the edge of the trailer and a nice little trail along the shed to the north so those little meeces would hopefully find their way out of my yard.

I’m certain the neighbors will love them, they have cats.

And just in case there’s already a platoon of the delightful nibbling creatures in my house, I brought a bucket of that wonderfully flavored grain in the house and dribbled it in places meeces might like to make their home… behind the stove, in the wall where they tried their best to live last winter and under the back of the Television.

I washed my hands and put the bucket way and went back to bed. Only to hear my conscience feeling sorry for those little mice. After all, they just want to be warm today….

Jan (the evil one who isn’t feeling guilty at all)

When I started writing, I didn’t have much trouble finding motivation. It was like breathing. I could breath in and out, words spewed forth and I just wrote them down. Then along came school, education and the implication that I had to write a certain way.

Ummm, maybe not so much.

The word games we played at school annoyed me and didn’t express my feelings. I wasn’t happy with the outcome of educated writing. I wanted to express myself, not some grammar specific rule that meant nothing to me.

I learned. I ditched the lessons that didn’t work for me, and now I’m back in school, writing with grammar rules again. They suck!

I’d really rather write with positive affirmations that give something to the society I live in than to worry about whether or not my prepositions are suggestive or elemental. Is there anyone out there in the blog-o-sphere or the real world who cares what prepositions are? Not me.

Okay, so one year and six months into Criminal Justice and here I sit, working my way through yet another creative writing class where I have to know the difference between APA and MLA style or Chicago style and various formats and there you have it. I’m working my way through the course one citation at a time, wondering if I’ll get cited for bad grammar or for quoting myself without a proper citation. The answer is probably, after all if I quote my pseudonym, isn’t that a copyright violation of some kind – do I even remember all my pseudonyms? Hummm

The CHANGE of memory has set in and I’m thinking I ought to go write about it!

Happy writing – writers.

When the title “Expert Author” showed up on my mouse pad a while back, my son asked, “What’s an Expert Author?”

“It was a gift,” was my answer.

Somewhere along the past year, I realized I hadn’t answered his question, either to him or to myself. So, I started thinking about what being an “Expert Author” means to me.

The title is earned from a site where many of my articles are published, once you publish 10 articles you gain Platinum Status and are labeled an “Expert Author”. It’s a nice honor. It does have meaning as far as the site is concerned. The implication is that you have a field in which you excel and write specific content.

The title for me needed to have greater personal meaning. I wanted to know what the title meant to me personally, before I tried to explain it to my son. That concept of knowing meant I had to delve into my own psychic and determine the value and meaning of the word “Expert” to understand.

To me, the word Expert means someone who has specialized training, or long term experience in a given field of interest. Looking back over my life, I realized that I have expertise in several areas of interest, given my own definition. To state how many would appear like a resume, and who wants to read a resume on a blog?

Then I realized I really don’t need to write about myself to tell anyone the purpose of the Expert Author title. The meaning of the term came rushing in and I understood, after spending an evening with friends explaining and answering their questions about writing.

An Expert Author is a writer whom people seek out to ask more information of, when they want to know more about any given topic.

Being an expert author isn’t about anything I do for myself, anything I actually know, or in any way a skill or position I’ve taken or learned, but rather a status others give you when they ask you to provide information for them. For all those who call and ask my advice, or email and ask me questions about writing, Thank you for giving me this title.

Now that I understand the meaning of the term, I’ll gladly acknowledge and appreciate the title (and hopefully, wear it with grace and appreciation).

The articles and posts here will be written responses I so often give when writers contact me and ask my advice and information about writing.