To Be A Better Writer, Go Fly A Kite!

I stunk at flying a kite as a child.  My dad had no clue of what to show me – and any attempt I’d made to get my inferior kite to fly ended in failure. When my son bought a kite on our summer vacation I thought it would be fun to try, though I entered into the exercise no more knowledgeable about aviation than my father.

My ten-year-old boy had some ideas on how to get it to fly.  He thought that if I held one end up and he ran while holding the string controls, that it would go up in the air.  It happened to do just that on a few attempts, but then that kite would crash down after a few seconds.  He seemed entertained by it.

The next day we tried it again and saw less than stellar results.  A father and son witnessed our shortcomings and gave us two key pointers.  One was that he needn’t run.  If the wind was strong, there was no need to run.  All that was needed was for me to throw the kite straight up with my son holding the strings tightly at the other end.

It was our Kitty Hawk moment.

The kite flew high, stretching out its full 75 feet of string.

My son started to control the kite like a puppeteer.  All it took was a few words of encouragement and some key pointers, but that made all of the difference between being grounded and being up in the sky.

The winds weren’t too strong and we needed practice on the steering, so that success was short-lived but nevertheless, we felt like early man when he learned how to make fire. Suddenly, the world seemed a lot different.

So it is with writing and promoting books.  Sometimes you just need some words of encouragement and some new information in order for you to see and do things differently.  What could help writers move past their current limitations?

1.      Take a seminar or course on some aspect of writing.

2.      Read a book about writing.

3.      Talk to other writers.

4.      Read books to discover patterns and styles that you may want to embrace.

If all else fails, go fly a kite.

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Brian Feinblum’s views, opinions, and ideas expressed in this blog are his alone and not that of his employer. You can follow him on Twitter @theprexpert and email him at brianfeinblum@gmail.com. He feels more important when discussed in the third-person. This is copyrighted by BookMarketingBuzzBlog © 2015