My day job is in the finance/accounting field and Q1 tends towards stressful due to yearend audits, which often lead to a creative desert. These badlands are harsh and full of self inflicted anxiety over wanting to focus on creative endeavors and having little motivation left outside of the 9-5. It’s a horrible place to…
With most long-running shows, characters often diverge from established character arcs to stretch the narrative. While I’ve enjoyed The Handmaid’s Tale with its dystopian themes and horrifying relevance to current societal issues, it also falls into the character arc trap. Think of June’s multiple decisions to stay in Gilead. These read as a need to…
I started this blog a little over a year ago to catalog the trials and tribulations of a writer’s life and the search for a writing process. All the foibles and mistakes were made while stumbling around being a writer. But when it came to writing, the content took on a different tone, not for…
A piece of advice floating around the writer community from established authors is to carve out a portion of the internet for yourself. I.e., a website or blog (yes, a blog is technically a website) somewhere you have complete control. Do this so that in the very real and present future, if someone takes control,…
There comes a time in every work in progress, around thirty-three thousand words, might be different for you, where the writing becomes a slog. For most normal novel length manuscripts this is right smack dab in the frothy middle. The roads so bright and clear when the idea was new have run there course. Characters…
In all my previous failed attempts at crafting a novel, my writing style was that of a pantser (one who writes by the seat of their pants) in the truest sense of the word. I didn’t plan any part of the book. From the moment the idea hit I let the words fly. Characters? They’ll come. Setting? Whatever works. Story? It’s on the blank page all I have to do is find it! Where this haphazard methodology led was stalling out when ideas ran dry and leaving the work behind. That is until I learned to use the concept of a roadmap to help give direction to my pantser style.
The process of editing a novel can seem daunting to us amateur authors. After completing my first draft, I took Stephen King’s advice from ‘On Writing’ and put the draft away for six weeks. In the intervening couple of months, I read a couple of writing books and outlined a plan for completing my first revision. As with writing…
One piece of advice going around Twitter is “don’t compare your draft to someone’s final product,” which helps emphasize the idea that a project should go through a development process. This got me thinking about how writing compares to the process of shooting movie. How the various stages of the production sync up with…
Often while editing there is a scene or character that doesn’t feel right even after several passes. By doing research online about various methods of drafting and how to read your own work I was able to construct a method to proceed through the process. However, after listening to Joe Abercrombie’s interview on ‘The Bestseller Experiment’ episode nine I began to develop another test to use while editing. Joe received harsh, but fair criticism when he was starting out from his Mother who, per Joe, said:
Yesterday was a good day of writing. The coffee next to my laptop tasted better than usual. The words flowed onto the page without a fight and rereading it was a pleasure, not a ……