Help! There’s something I really need to write, but ugh! I just don’t want to! Have you ever felt this way? Careful- your spider-sense is tingling! Sit back for a moment and think about why. Your reluctance may just be pure procrastination, especially if it’s a homework or job assignment. To get past it, you’ll need to flex your discipline muscle, plunk your butt in front of the computer with minimal distractions, and after a few crappy sentences, you’ll be…
Or, ask both. (Image credit: Bill Main) Now that it’s November, I’m aware many of you are involved in an obscure, little-talked-about, mass binge-writing event. If you number among the participants, best of luck to you! Let me offer some help with the planning stages, so you don’t throw down 15,000 words and then realize you don’t know where the hell you’re going with it. Oh, you’re already at that point? No worries! I’ve got some rewrites of my own…
Run! Run like zombies are chasing you! Hey, there’s an app for that… Most of my mornings start the same way: alarm blaring, cat pawing at my hair. I crawl out of bed (eventually), have breakfast and coffee, and post a new “Today I learned” factoid to my Google+ page. Then, unless I’m sick enough to be bedridden, I sit down in my office and write until lunch, with occasional breaks to stretch and read items of interest. What I…
(Image credit: imagebase.net) Research is easier than ever these days- thank you, Internet! Depending on what you’re writing, you may perform zero or tons of research to avoid sounding like you have no clue. You may also perform research for inspiration. Maybe a cool new fact is just the what you need to start outlining your next bestseller. Some things to consider regarding research: You may still want to go to the library. If you’re writing nonfiction, or straight historical…
(Image credit: imagebase.net) Along with the million other things writers must worry about, there’s pacing! Basically, pacing is how fast the story moves. Ever hear someone describe how a book took off running from the first page? Or how it started slow, but picked up toward the end? What creates those impressions? How do you control them? Each individual sentence of your story has an effect on overall pacing. If it’s advancing the plot in a meaningful way, then it’s…
My spouse does long-form improv- similar to what you see on Whose Line Is It Anyway?, only a given scene lasts several minutes instead of a few seconds. It requires tons of practice to keep such a long scene engaging and funny off the top of one’s head. Sometimes, an improv scene peters out when characters get stuck talking about stuff they already did, or plan to do in the future. During rehearsal, coaches will yell “CUT TO THAT!” In…
(Image credit: Imagebase.net) When most people think of “editing,” they think of reclining on the couch with a printout, red pen in hand, making tiny, gentle corrections in the space of an afternoon. Probably followed by a cookie and a well-earned nap. With a novel-length work, though, editing is a complicated slog. You take out extraneous words, and collapse chapters. You add words where they’re lacking, and split chapters. You say, “holy crap, this character would NEVER do/say that!” You…
(Image credit: texturezoom.com) To me, writing fanfiction (i.e. stories set in pre-established fictional universes, like Star Trek for instance) is akin to filling holes in a mostly assembled jigsaw puzzle. You can have a lot of fun, and make something beautiful that lots of people will appreciate, without much effort. In contrast, original fiction requires chopping down a tree, running planks through the wood chipper, creating pulp, turning the pulp into cardboard, drawing a beautiful illustration on the cardboard, scoring…
I struggle to visualize characters interacting inside of a space. There, I said it! My spatial reasoning is poor. Given a description of a set of objects, and a change to apply to one or more of those objects, I usually can’t tell you the end result off the top of my head. I must draw or act things out to arrive at the answer. In my college programming courses, I filled notebooks with sketches of arrays and registers, and…
(Image credit: imagebase.net) A writer logs a huge portion of his or her life at desk, computer, and notebook. Everyone dreams about stories, but only by spending months grinding through sentence after sentence, thinking and rethinking, obsessing, anguishing, tearing down and throwing up, does a story or a book actually come into existence. We’re all too aware of those who dream, but never put in the effort. We’re all too aware of the games procrastination plays with us. When we…