Tips and Tricks
-
Writing never has to be perfect. It does have to be understandable. A writing session can be anything from 1 word and beyond. If you wrote on your phone, you’re still a writer. Reading is inhaling, writing is exhaling. Not all days have to be writing days. Some days you can just live. Art inspires…
-
I wrote a near 130K novel in 60 days from November 1st to December 30th. While it was a wild adventure and a wonderful flurry of words, I’m so happy I documented my progress day by day and took notice of what worked and what didn’t. It was a great experience and I would definitely…
-
This is a game I’ve started playing with myself to get story ideas while I drive in the car. Using license plate letters, I come up with characters. Urr is a caveman in the Neolithic times, one of the first to find fire. Yeedle is a Jewish teen, growing up in the 1980’s during the…
-
This past month, I began editing the first novel in my series. I’ve edited this piece before, but with kid gloves. The first time, I wasn’t ready to cut and maim and kill my darlings. This time, I’m back with a vengeance and murdering sections left and right to make it a cohesive narrative. Here’s…
-
For the first time this month, I’ve done something I have never done. I finished Inktober, but it was Inktober with a twist. In October, I participated in Inktober (Writer Edition). Fifty words of fiction daily. I did it with a twist yet again, and added ink drawings as well. Here’s what I learned: Writing…
-
The internet is full of people and ideas and social media platforms. There are hundreds and hundreds of posting challenges happening at any time. In September, I participated in Instawrimo. Instawrimo is a thirty day posting challenge on Instagram for getting prepared for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). Here’s what I learned over the last…
-
I have been working on a novel and its series for nearly eight years now. Several of them have had outlines and several of them haven’t. All of them have been started during National Novel Writing Month and a few of them have been finished. Why am I telling you about my projects in a…
-
Yes, you are reading that correctly. Just three sentences. Life is busy for most writers. We have day jobs, kids, pets, outside life to deal with once we leave the page. Several things interrupt us from our stories and as more days pass it becomes more difficult to get back into the story. We also…
-
No matter what kind of writing project you attempt, you are going to run into roadblocks, or writer’s block, or mental blocks. All kinds of blocks are bad. I recently won NaNoWriMo 2016 with a whopping 100K. It was such a huge accomplishment considering the past few years I have always struggled to write every…
-
What are you writing right now? Is it a novel, an essay, a smut filled fanfiction, literally anything else where you put words on paper? First: Good for you! You’re writing. Second: Don’t stop writing and don’t ever throw it away. It’s important to your writing craft. Every Piece You Write is Important. Think about…
-
So you’re all set to start writing. You have your favorite drink or snack on hand, you have the timer set for at least 10 minutes, ready to get down at least some words that sound semi smart in this writing session, and you have your characters all fleshed out and ready to go. Or…
-
Writing is a difficult task, and yet the easiest task in the world. All you have to do is put words on paper, any words at all. That, unfortunately can become pretty complicated when you add in work, school, family time, shopping, etc etc etc. When you add in all the other aspects of life,…
-
We’ve all read stories where it seems like nothing is happening. Stories that are boring, or slow, or maybe the characters just aren’t working for us as readers. I find that most of the time when stories bore me, it’s because the conflict doesn’t resonate with me, or that there doesn’t seem to be a…
-
Welcome back to me! These past few months have been crazy intense with writing and work, but this months topic for How To Tuesday is Conflict. Fitting, right?
-
Imagine how much work we would all get done if we stopped to research every little thing in our writing to make sure it was factually accurate. I don’t know about you, but I would probably get no work done. I would be so into researching and making sure that every little detail was painstakingly…
-
Over the past three weeks of How To Tuesdays concerning characters we have talked about how to find characters, how to name them, and how to develop characters. This week, is not necessarily a new How To, it is an addition to the rest of the information we have talked about. This week, we are…
-
Progress is measured in several different ways. If you are an athlete, progress is measured by how well you perform at your sport or sports. If you are an artist, progress is measured by your art portfolio. If you are a writer, progress is measured by words written on the page, and the amount of…
-
There are several schools of thought on naming characters. Some say to name your characters names that are common every day names. Others say to name them special names that will stick in your readers’ heads. Still others tell you to always use name books and find the exact meaning of each of your characters…