The Points of the Creative Artists’ Code: Eight - Your work is your responsibility

In this article explaining the eighth point of the Code of a Creative Artist, NDK Creative Artist discusses the responsibility artists have to protect the integrity of their art. — Joel Falconer, Editor-in-Chief

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Creative Tip: Working Across Time Zones - The World Time Server

A truly useful resource in the internet age where we collaborate across Time Zones and are constantly confused by date and time and trying to find a location and way to collaborate is the World Time Server, a free internet service that you can use to schedule online meetings or check out times around the world.

Take a bit of time to peruse the link and then bookmark it in your browser or add it as a tab (in Firefox) or a Favorite in IE, you will find it is very useful. We use it to help us shedule meetings with people working across many differnt time zones. It features a Time Converter, a World Meeting Planner (which we use regularly) and a number of other useful features that help us to locate a suitable convergent time for creative collaboration and business meetings. Fantastic tool to facilitate getting things done. No, we’re not sponsoring them, nor do we own share, we just like the service and use it to create and do business.

Creative Tip: Vocabulary Building - One Word A Day

If you’re a songwriter, a poet, a storyteller, a journalist, or indeed anybody who works with words or wants to improve their literacy, there is no better way to consistently add to your intellectual toolkit than by subscribing to A.Word.A.Day.

This fantastic free educational service is one of the longest surviving email deliveries in the world. Every day it brings in a new word, with definitions and often a little history about word origins that fleshes out your understanding of context, which can be very useful for those engaged in historical novel writing, as but one example.

I’m committed to lifelong learning (well, who can avoid it?), and I find that learning just one new word every day, can help me:

• remove a creative block
• stimulate new ideas
• enrich my knowledge of our culture and civilization
• refresh my knowledge of meaning and definition (aiding memory)
• help me write and create the precise desirable effect I want to have with a reader

When I’m editing the work of others, having a veritable cornucopia of words, definitions and meanings in my intellect’s databank makes me an organic thesaurus, banishes the overuse of the same words in repetitive fashion and thus keeps my writing and that of those I edit lively and engaging, rather than repetitive, stultifying and boring.

If you’re not already a subscriber to A.Word.A.Day, but are working creatively with words, then get on over there and begin refreshing and expanding your existing vocabulary. You won’t regret it. Language competence is a highly sought after and extremely valuable skill and even if you’re not creatively inclined, knowing what words mean improves how you work and communicate. Words and their meaning enhance our ability to experience and enjoy life.

Creativity is a fishy business!

Recipes for creative success, we need ‘em. We really do! But here’s a tip for great health and the kind of food that keeps us up late at night burning fish oil in our minds! Seriously, fish is the food I and other Creative Artists eat to keep the words working smoothly. We’ll be bringing you some recipes to make you salivate and stay up late creating later. But fish and chocolate, not together! So what do you eat to keep the creativity running hot?

My favourite tip for songwriter’s block

I once invented a concept that has all but destroyed songwriter’s block in my life. At least, for the time being!

It’s called the tuneback. It wasn’t really created to combat creative block, but because all the members of Midnight.Haulkerton were itching for an excuse to put half-baked music out there while we worked on an album enshrined in top secrecy.

In order to ensure that minimum time was stolen from the endeavor of our precious album, we set a one hour, once a week time limit on the tuneback. It is central to the whole concept, actually. It taught us very quickly that the difference between a song that took an hour to write and record, and a song that took an hour and a half to write and record, is a very big one - and thus, that particular unit of time is very much important and influential on the sound of each final tuneback.

But what has this got to do with songwriter’s block?

I swear, it’s the pressure. I didn’t think it would work that way, but if I know I’ve got a song to write and if I don’t write it people are going to pissed, I write one. Seriously, I was a couple of hours late once, and I got a disgruntled email.

Pressure. It’s horrible for creative minds, but it works (kind of like how crack works for law students).

There and back again - World Building for Storytellers - The Fargoth World Building Project

Through the miracle of modern technology today, it is now possible for a story to be realized and constructed as a virtual world and this has changed the nature of the marketplace and opened up tremendous opportunities for those writers who embrace the idea of not just telling a story, but realizing entire worlds, multiple cultures and races.

Tolkien captured it best when he wrote the immortal lines of “There and back again” for they capture beautifully and simply what is at the the heart of the reader experience when they fall in love with or become immersed in a story; the desire to go somewhere other than this world, and experience what it would be like to be someone else, live in any time, any place, and under conditions far removed from the real world in which we all live. Time travel? Read more

Writing Tip: Writing Action Scenes - Great advice from Poul Anderson

Many years ago, when I started writing my first fantasy epic and was using the internet to research the potential for internet marketing and utilization, and in particular how it could be used as a research & marketing and educational tool (among its many other uses), I came across Poul Anderson’s On Thud and Blunder.

This is a very valuable piece of writing craft that literally makes the difference between amateur and profesional writing in the field of fantasy. It has a focus on writing action scenes, and though this is a fantasy-focused article it has relevance to any storyteller who is faced with writing strong action scenes which need to engage the reader, and put them into the middle of the action.

Poul’s article contains great advice and I wholeheartedly recommend it.