Writing can be a lonely profession. We often work on our own, toiling alone for hours at a time, sending our work into what can feel like a marketplace vacuum, and waiting for feedback that can be hurtful, even brutal. It’s hard, and our solitude makes it harder. Yes, we have loved ones on whom we can lean for support, but there’s no substitute for talking these things out with people who understand the process and the pain, the toil and the isolation.
Today’s Quick-Tip Tuesday post at Magical Words is about writing communities — conventions, retreats, crit groups — and the benefits they bring to writers of all levels. I’m recently back from ConCarolinas and the Roaring Writers 2016 Retreat, where I led critiques and taught, and I have a new writing group in my town, so this topic has been on my mind lately. I hope you enjoy the post, which you can find here.
We never know when we’re going to draw upon experiences in our lives, be it for setting or character, plot or emotional content, dialog or action or romance or any of the myriad other narrative elements that come, at least in part, from our own lives.
We writers are pack rats. We hoard everything. Maybe not in a physical sense (though I’m that kind of pack rat, as well), but certainly in a conceptual sense.
It’s Quick-Tip Tuesday over at Magical Words and I have a post up today about travel, experience, and turning memory into narrative. I’ve been drawing on my own travel experiences for my fiction for nearly twenty years, and as we move into summer travel season, it strikes me as a good time to discuss such things. The post can be found here. I hope you enjoy it.
Last weekend, at the Chattanooga Steampunk Expo, I had the distinct pleasure of meeting in person and hanging out with my longtime internet buddy, Alex Bledsoe, author of the Eddie LaCross and Tufa novels, among others. (Visit his site for more info.) During the convention, Alex and I did an hour-long interview with Dietrich Stogner and Josh Mauthe, also known as the Library Police. It was a great discussion, wide-ranging, irreverent, fun, and, I hope, informative.
The interview in now up and available for download as a podcast. You can link to it here. I hope you enjoy it!
But simply adding a character isn’t always enough. Sure, a love interest can spice things up, or a new villain can ratchet up the tension. But sometimes what a story needs is both more subtle than those options, and also more dramatic.
This week’s Quick-Tip Tuesday post is up at Magical Words. Today we’re talking about adding characters to our stories to shake things up a bit and infuse energy into our narratives. The piece was inspired by watching an old Star Trek: The Next Generation episode. It’s called “Quick-Tip Tuesday: What We Can Learn From Ro Laren.” I hope you enjoy it.
The writing profession throws plenty of trials our way; we shouldn’t pile on with unrealistic goals that we can’t possibly meet.
And the great thing about making writing a part of your regular routine is that you don’t have to set unreachable goals in order to accomplish great things.
It’s Quick-Tip Tuesday over at Magical Words, and I’ve got a new post up about setting realistic expectations for our work. Too often, aspiring writers undermine their confidence by setting goals for themselves that they can’t possibly meet. Read my take on this here. Enjoy the post, and keep writing.
There is a sort of alchemy that takes place when we manage to convert our own emotions into the different-but-related emotions of our characters. Spinning gold from that straw carried me through my grief. Had I given in to the temptation not to write, that book never would have been as good, and I don’t think my creative development would have followed the same trajectory.
Quick-Tip Tuesday is here again, and I have my post up at Magical Words. Today, I’m writing about whether or not writing every day is a good idea. It’s a more complicated question than it may seem. I don’t necessarily think we need to write each day. But we should. Although not EVERY day. But yeah . . .
Quite often, what separates the professionals from those who only aspire to the profession is not talent or even luck, but rather the willingness to risk rejection. If you send out a story it might be sent back, or it might be published. But you will never, ever publish anything that you don’t submit.
Today’s Quick-tip post is up at Magical Words. In it I issue a challenge to the aspiring writers who visit the site. Don’t allow the pursuit of perfection be the enemy of your success. Finish polishing your manuscripts and send them out, sooner rather than later. You can read the post here.
I hope you enjoy it. And I hope you’ll accept the challenge.
We as authors have enough to worry about in this business as it is — the market is tough, writing good novels and short fiction is no easy task, finding time amid work and family to do all we want to do can be difficult. Don’t compound the challenges we face by imagining problems where they don’t exist. The story you have in mind to write is uniquely yours.
Today’s Quick-Tip Tuesday post is up over at Magical Words. It’s on the worry so many aspiring writers have of being “scooped” by better established authors, and it argues, in essence, that you don’t have to be concerned about that. I hope you’ll read the post. You can find it here.
Giving secrets to our characters sets up plot points for our stories. But secrets do more than that. They add dimension and richness to our characters. Those secrets become the source of our characters’ vulnerabilities, and often their strengths as well. They get in the way of relationships; or they enhance them. They can put the lives of our characters in danger; and they can enable our characters to escape those perils.
Today’s Quick-Tip Tuesday post at Magical Words grows out of a course I’m teaching for Odyssey Online. The course is called “Point of View: The Intersection of Character and Plot,” and I’m having a great time teaching it.
The post that went up this morning is on giving secrets to our characters as a way of making them deeper, richer, and more interesting. I hope you find it helpful and interesting. You can find the post here.
The first step is to remember that despite the way the “Plotter v. Pantser” debate is usually framed, we don’t have to approach this decision as an either-or proposition. I know people who don’t outline at all; I know people who don’t feel comfortable writing a novel with anything less than a fifteen to twenty page outline. I usually work somewhere between these two extremes. As most people do. Again, it’s not either-or; rather it’s a choice that exists along a continuum.
It’s Quick-Tip Tuesday, and in today’s post over at Magical Words I take on the Plotter v. Pantser debate, with what I think might be a third way. This post is personal for me this time around, because I’m dealing with the issue in my own writing. I hope you enjoy the post and find it helpful. You can read it here.
