Jean Wilson Murray

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How I Work as a Beta Reader

by Jean Murray Leave a Comment

I love to read, and I enjoy doing reviews of what I read. I am available as a beta-reader, but I want to clarify what I will do, and what I won’t do.

Woman with big mug of tea reading a book and making notes

Fiction: I do very few reviews of fiction. I read very little fiction these days (that’s the subject of another blog post). I will read an occasional historical fiction book if the subject and time period are interesting to me.

Non-fiction: I will beta-read most non-fiction, including business, scientific, motivational, humor, history, and biography. I probably won’t read a biography of someone who isn’t dead.

Short stories/memoir/poetry: I’ll beta-read short stories and poetry, but almost no memoir, unless the subject really interests me.

What I will give you as a beta-reader

  • I will read through the entire book – I promise!
  • I will comment on the content giving you an overall comment on its benefits to your target audience.
  • I will give you a list of questions and comments. I’ll tell you what I think works well and what I think doesn’t work, and why. 
  • I will note places (sentences/paragraphs) that are unclear or need more explanation (my opinion).
  • I will tell you when I find inconsistencies, like two names for the same character or place, or when the gun was a pistol in Chapter 1 and a rifle in Chapter 13.
  • If I find something I think is an error or an anachronism (like having a character in 18th century England say, “awesome!”) I’ll point it out.
  • Because I have a background as an English major and teacher, I may not be able to resist  pointing out some egregious grammar/spelling/word choice errors, but I won’t sweat the small stuff.

What I won’t give you as a beta-reader

  • I won’t promise to give you a review unless I feel the book is worthy of 5 stars, I am a bit of a rebel here, because I don’t feel every book is worth a 5 star review. I know that most people want 5 star reviews to boost ratings on Amazon.  Let me know if you want me to do a review (Amazon and Goodreads) knowing this.
  • I won’t tell you how to fix things.  That’s your job.

Still want me to be a beta-reader? Send me an email (jean [at] jeanwilsonmurray [dot] com or comment on this post.

Back to writing…

Jean Murray

 

 

Filed Under: For Readers, The Writing Life Tagged With: Amazon, beta readers, book reviews, Goodreads, reading fiction, reading non-fiction

The Best Music to Write To – My 3 Favorites

by Jean Murray Leave a Comment

What’s the best music to write to? I decided I needed some different music to listen to while I write, so I started on a quest.

iStockPhoto © BONNINSTUDIO

First, just like you’re supposed to do, I set my criteria. I made these up myself, by the way; feel free to make up your own.

The music for writing must have these characteristics:

1. Not distracting. It must not be vocal, as that’s distracting by itself.

2. The music must be quiet, not loud, because I decided that would be less distracting and more calming. But not too quiet; I didn’t want the music to put me to sleep while I was writing.

3. Good “brain” music, to stimulate my brain.  I want something to put me in the FLOW (the concept introduced by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi)

What Music Does to Our Brains

A recent FastCompany article “The Surprising Science Behind What Music Does to Our Brains” discusses how ambient music affects creativity:

moderate noise levels increase processing difficulty which promotes abstract processing, leading to higher creativity.

If the music was classical, that would be a bonus. I tried nature sounds and found that they relaxed me too much. I love to walk on the beach and I meditate when I’m there, and if I listen to beach music, I start meditating; that doesn’t work well for writing.

Individual songs, even symphonies, won’t do. The selection also needs to be long enough that I don’t have to think about stopping to change.

Three new “music to write by” solutions I’ve found:

1. My own playlists on iTunes. I have a large collection of classical music on iTunes, some of it from CD’s over the years, and much of it purchased. I particularly like any Baroque, Bach, Mozart, Schubert, and Brahms. I love Rachmaninoff, but not for writing – too energetic.

I discovered that I could create an impromptu playlist by searching on a specific musician. The musician I select varies by the day – some days I prefer the precision of Bach, while other days I’m in a Beethoven mood.

Creating playlists for writing moods is also something I have done, by pulling specific work by specific artists in. I will usually end up with Baroque, just about any kind except stuff like Handel’s Messiah (I tend to sing along).

2. Focus@Will. (I’m not an affiliate.) This service selects music based on brain science, and they find music they believe will enhance “attention, concentration, focus, flow.” and they have various types of music, like classical to ambient (coffee shop), to acoustic, cinematic, and “ADHD1.” You can also select one of three energy levels – low, medium, and high. (You can get a free trial; then you must purchase, at $24.99 a year).

3. Lord of the Rings. I recently got the idea (who knows where this stuff comes from?) that I should check out the Lord of the Rings soundtrack (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack by Howard Shore). I purchased all three soundtracks, one album for each of the movies. Why?

(1) I loved the movies, and I have seen them often enough that I remember what was going on at each part. I particularly love the hobbit parts, .

(2) They are good background music, with no singing to distract except for a couple of selections, and

(3) I find them inspirational. They make me think of the Hero’s Journey, the triumph of the little guy over the forces of evil. Great for working on my novel.

LOTR selections are diverse. Some sound like Gregorian chants (Lothlorien), Enya and Annie Lennox are featured (both in vocal pieces), and some selections sound very cinematic/dramatic. I will probably be bored with this one soon, but I will always come back to it.

I’m always looking for something new. As part of my research for this article, I discovered Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians. It fulfills my 3 criteria, but I haven’t decided if I like it. Here it is being performed (it’s much better listened to than watched). I’m finding I don’t like it because I want to check to make sure the record isn’t stuck!

Some other authors present their selections for Music to Write By in this article on PLOSBlogs. I found it interesting that several of the authors surveyed preferred silence to background music.

What do you like to listen to while you write or do other creative work? Send me a comment.  I get bored easily and would love some new ideas.

 

Filed Under: The Writing Life Tagged With: brain music, brain science, lord of the rings, music

Enhancing Your Writing Creativity – Be Mindful!

by Jean Murray Leave a Comment

Today I came back from my walk on the beach in a creative mood. I was able to irbeachdig into my novel and my mind seemed to be aware of nothing except my characters and what was happening to them. What a great feeling!

But, as we all know, writing isn’t that easy a lot of the time. What’s made a difference for me is that I’m purposefully drawing on the creative side of my brain – my right brain. The right brain is the feeling, intuitive, imaginative side.  And it’s the part of the brain that’s triggered when we meditate or, as I prefer to think about it, when we are mindful.

I spend much of my writing time in what I call left-brain stuff, as I work on a business-related blog and write a book on business skills for writers. So I’ve struggled with switching off into the fiction writing I’m now doing. It’s a different skill set, I’ve discovered.

But recently I came to a realization that there’s a way I can increase my right brain time to enhance my creativity. Here’s what happened: I’ve been studying meditation and practicing mindfulness for several years, as a stress reliever. You might think this is religious, but although it’s practiced by Buddhists, it’s also practiced by people of many religions – and no religion. A good definition, from Wikipedia:

 the intentional, accepting and non-judgemental focus of one’s attention on the emotions, thoughts and sensations occurring in the present moment, which can be trained by meditative practice.

But with my practicing, I had never made a connection between mindfulness and brain function.

Then I had one of those Ah-Ha! moments while watching a TED talk by  Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor. She told of her experience of a left-brain hemorrhage and how her awareness was switched to her right brain when her left brain shut down. The right-brain experience she described sounded just like meditative practice, mindfulness, awareness of self. I saw that mindfulness is not just woo-woo stuff but it’s actually brain-based.

What I heard Jill saying in this video is that tapping into your right brain can increase your consciousness, make you more aware. Yes, make you more mindful. And, since your right brain is where your creativity lies, tapping into your right brain can, thus, enhance your creativity.

I love it when things fit together! Mindfulness is right-brain activity, and spending time in mindfulness before I write can increase my writing creativity!

So, how do you become more mindful? It has to be worked on, practiced, like anything else in life. We’re used to living in our left brains — don’t forget to take out the garbage – why did Mary not call last night, is there something wrong? – I can’t believe I did that stupid thing. We spend time in our right brains, but we keep getting tugged back and forth. What we need to do is spend more time in our right brains, being more mindful.

The easiest way to practice mindfulness is to go somewhere quiet, and sit and focus on your breath and body and what’s going on around you. What you’re doing is trying to get into – and stay in – your right brain, your creative side. When your thoughts wander, just acknowledge them and go back to focusing on your breath and body and increasing your awareness. I practice at least 10 minutes a day, and I often go longer. I’m by no means an expert, though, and some days are better than others.

Two books have helped me get better at meditation and increasing my mindfulness (think: right brain time). I did a lot of (left brain) research on the subject. This book — Breath Sweeps Mind by Jean Smith– provides an easy, practical way to learn how to meditate/be mindful. It only comes in paperback, but that was okay with me, because I was underlining and making notes as I read it the first time (yes, I’ve read it at least 3 times).

If you want to go further into the concept of mindfulness, in the context of Buddhism, I would suggest Jack Kornfield’s The Wise Heart. Again, I’m giving you the link to the paperback version, in case you want to mark/note (as I have), but this one’s also available in ebook format.

Now, when I get ready to write fiction, I spend some time in meditative practice, to increase my right-brain activity and creativity. It’s that simple. Oh, and you don’t need to walk on a beach to try it.

 

 

Filed Under: The Writing Life Tagged With: Buddhism, creativity, meditation, mindfulness, right brain, writing advice

Why Reading Inspires Me as a Writer

by Jean Murray Leave a Comment

"Ray Bradbury (1975)" by photo by Alan Light. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
“Ray Bradbury (1975)” by photo by Alan Light. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

What inspires you to write, to write better, to write more? For me, it seems there are three reading experiences that inspire me: reading great writing, reading interesting stories, and reading writing how-to books.

In this post, I’m going to focus on the first: great writing.

Ray Bradbury says, rather emphatically:

“I absolutely demand of you and everyone I know that they be widely read in every damn field there is; in every religion and every art form and don’t tell me you haven’t got time! There’s plenty of time. You need all of these cross-references. You never know when your head is going to use this fuel, this food for its purposes.”

All the great writers say you must read, read, read. Some examples I’ve come across recently:

Reading Great Writing

A new novel by a previously unknown writer, Christopher Scotton, who was discovered by Hachette (see, there’s hope for all of us!). His novel is The Secret Wisdom of the Earth, a coming-of-age story that’s reminiscent of To Kill a Mockingbird, Stand by Me, and a little of Deliverance. What first caught my eye was the language. Some examples, gathered from random pages:

I was up Monday morning before Pops, just as the sky was beginning its run to purple and blue. I put on a full pot of coffee for him and sat at the kitchen table until he woke–coffeepot dripping and spitting as the first yellow light from the east fired tops of the Medgar mountains. Then stirrings from upstairs and the creaking of floorboards under weight.

(from the first page, but not the first paragraph):

June was midway to my fifteenth birthday and I remember the miles between Redhill, Indiana, and Medgar, Kentucky, rolling past the station wagon window on an interminable canvas of cornfields and cow pastures, petty towns and irrelevant truck stops. i remember watching my mother from the backseat as she stared at the telephone poles flishing past us, the reflection of the white highway line in the window strobing her haggard face.

(I’m not sure if “flishing” is a typo for “flashing” or an invention, but I’ll give him credit for a new word.)

We walked over to a corner [of the attic] piled with fishing rods, discarded creels, an old baseball bat, and various retired sporting equipment: Pops’ high school football helmet, an ancient leather fielder’s glove with none of the fingers linked. I tried to put it on, but the leather was unforgiving….I wandered over to a light-blue and yellow trunk with ARP written in gold lettering under the hasp. inside was my mother’s high school career. Her yearbook from senior year, a prom picture, sheaves of A-plus papers, class president certificate, first copy of the school newspaper she started, founding president of the Student Volunteers. All of her teenage accomplishments compiled before me like an old newsreel.

I also noticed in these cases how Scotton shows instead of telling. It’s one of the important things we ingest when we read great fiction.

Here’s another example, from The Gift of Rain by Tang Twan Eng, a lyrical, poetic novel. It begins:

I was born with the gift of rain, an ancient soothsayer in an even more ancient temple once told me.

This was back in a time when i did not believe in fortunetellers, when the world was not yet filled with wonder and mystery. I cannot recall her appearance now, the woman who read my face and touched the lines on my palms. She said what she was put into this world to say, to those for whom her prophesies were meant, and then, like every one of us, she left.

(skipping a paragraph)….The day I met Michiko Murakami, too, a tender rain had dampened the world. It had been falling for the past week and I knew more would come with the monsoon. Already the usual roads in Penang had begun to flood, the sea turning to a sullen gray.

Notice how Eng sets a mood immediately, how he establishes the place and the tone. And you know exactly what the book will be about – the author and this Murakami person. And, of course, rain. When I began reading, I settled back immediately with a sigh of contentment. And I wasn’t disappointed.

I also want to note how the author makes every single word count. Not one could be removed without altering and diminishing the power of the story. This is great writing.
Finally, and certainly not last, my favorite book of 2014, and one I have re-read and given to others to read: All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr.

The story is about the experiences of two young people during World War II. One is a blind French girl; the other is a young German soldier. They meet in the town of Saint-Malo, as it is being bombed by the Americans.

From the prologue:

At dusk they pour from the sky. They blow across the ramparts, turn cartwheels over rooftops, flutter into the ravines between houses. Entire street swirl with them, flashing white against the cobbles. Urgent message to the inhabitants of this town, they say. Depart immediately to open country.

The tide climbs. The moon hangs small and yellow and gibbous. On the rooftops of beachfront hotels to the east, and in the gardens behind them, a half-dozen American artillery units drop incendiary rounds into the mouths of mortars.

What a great beginning! It really grabs you as a reader. Doerr took ten years to write this novel, and it’s just about perfectly written. In another place, chosen at random:

Werner walks home oblivious to the rain, trying to absorb the immensity of what has happened. Nine herons stand like flowers in the canal beside the coking plant. A barge sounds its outcast horn and coal cars trundle to and fro and the regular thudding of the hauling machine reverberates through the gloom.

See what I mean? “Nine herons” (sounds like haiku, doesn’t it?) and “the regular thudding of the hauling machine…” One more – you really need to read this book:

Marie-Laurie wakes and thinks she hears the shuffle of Papa’s shoes, the clink of his key ring. Fourth floor fifth floor sixth. His fingers brush the doorknob. his body radiates a faint but palpable heat in the chair beside  her. His little tools rasp across the wood. He smells of glue and sandpaper and Gauloises bleues.

Read excellent fiction. Don’t read junk; you won’t learn anything from reading junk, and you’ll absorb the junk and think it’s okay. It’s not; not all fiction is NOT created equal.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Filed Under: For Readers, The Writing Life Tagged With: All the Light We Cannot See, book review, fiction writing, novel writing, Ray Bradbury, writing advice, writing tips

Stories – The Fabric of our Lives – And our Writing

by Jean Murray Leave a Comment

Fright
By DaigoOliva CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Stories are everywhere around us, and they weave together to make up a huge part of our lives.

I watched a TED presentation by Karen Thompson Walker about fear in which Walker, the author of a novel about the whaleship Essex discussed why we have fears. Primarily, it’s because we have a story in our heads about the subject (spiders, let’s say) that causes us to act in a specific way. She calls fears “unintentional storytelling.”

Let’s say you are afraid of spiders, because you have heard stories about people being killed by spiders or people have warned you about them. You have created an unintentional story about spiders that keeps you fearful. The stories, you’ll notice, build up like a game of “telephone,” and the stories keep getting more fantastic and lurid.

In the case of the Essex, by the way, the sailors had heard stories about cannibals in the islands nearest them, and they didn’t go that way. The cannibals weren’t actually that bad, and that would have been the best way to sail. They chose the least scary way, the way their stories told them was least scary, which was the worst way. All died.

Where do we get our stories? The vast majority come to us when we are young, from our parents and others. The story of our religion is a good example. This story forms what we believe about life and death. The story of our family is told over and over, at the breakfast table, at holidays, at funerals and weddings. “Remember the time when…?”

Our stories about ourselves are powerful. In the Wise Heart, psychologist Jack Kornfield says, “Who would you be without your story?” I stopped and thought when I read this, and had a bid “Ah ha!” moment.

Who we are is the stories we tell ourselves. If I say, “I’m a writer,” I am what I think I am, what my story tells me I am. If the story you tell yourself is, “I can’t write,” you aren’t a writer. Take away the stories we have told ourselves, and others, and what do we have?

A recent article in The Atlantic discusses the human need for stories.

Stories can be a way for humans to feel that we have control over the world. They allow people to see patterns where there is chaos, meaning where there is randomness. Humans are inclined to see narratives where there are none because it can afford meaning to our lives—a form of existential problem-solving.

In one example in the article, research subjects saw several triangles and a circle moving around and when asked what they saw, all but one subject had created a story out of the movement of these inanimate objects. We do this with animals too – my husband insists that the dog licks his face because she loves him. Ha!

Stories may one of the most important links our brains make. We are “wired for story,” and our brains are built to make sense of what we see, creating context so we can figure it out. Our survival depends on it. If our ancient ancestors didn’t have stories about sabre-toothed tigers, for example, they wouldn’t know to run when they saw one, or how to kill it, and they would not have survived.

Thinking about the stories we tell as writers can help us be better writers. Are you telling a riveting, funny, sad, important story?

A couple of books to help you think about storytelling and how it relates to your writing:

 

Filed Under: For Readers, Story and Storytelling, The Writing Life Tagged With: Karen Thompson Walker, stories, storytelling

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