I was tickled pink when James Scott Bell, writing guru and suspense author, and also one of my professional heroes, wrote a post a few days ago, “What I Wish I’d Known When I Started Writing”. He starts the post with: Next year will be my 24th as a professional writer. So I knew I […]
I’ve mentioned more than a few times here and there how damaging it is to your impetus if you let yourself click away from your manuscript, for any reason at all. I just haven’t formalized the idea as a strategy for getting more words down until now. Interruptions are the bane of modern offices. There’s
Most writers procrastinate about writing because (most often) they don’t have a good enough handle on their story. Others doubt themselves and think their writing sucks, or fear success, and twitter away their time for those reasons. Then there are writers who have reached a point where they loathe writing. If you’ve never hated
What To Do When Writing Every Day Feels Like A Chore Read More »
If you’ve lost your get-up-and-go and loathe the idea of writing, you might be tempted to self-diagnose and decide you’re suffering from burnout. Alas, this might merely be yet another creative form of resistance. I’ve seen several group discussions lately, where “burnout” is tossed around casually, as a reason why writers don’t write. But
Is It Really Burnout? Read More »
In the Part 1 of this post we covered the brainstorming part of plotting, where you capture everything you know, then fill in the blanks, amalgamate, then drop all that information into your favourite story structure. In Part 2, we looked at making a scene out of the beats, and time saving hacks for organizing
In the last part of this post we covered the brainstorming part of plotting, where you capture everything you know, then fill in the blanks, amalgamate, then drop all that information into your favourite story structure. This post, we sort that amorphous blob of information into a well-developed story outline that will speed your writing
I’m halfway through a series on plotting that I will finish next week. In the meantime, I have spent some time trying to explain to a pair of authors who wanted to know more, exactly, how I use Microsoft Word and why I am such a fan of it (as opposed to Scrivener, et al). It
How to Maximize Microsoft Word – Hacks to Write Your Novels Faster Read More »
Back in July, Rob asked me in comments: The place I currently get hung up when it comes to being more prolific is the plotting/planning stage. I can write fairly quickly and cleanly, but it takes me a while to plot out a new book, especially if it’s the first in a new series. All
This is a three-part series: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | If you have followed along with Part One and Part Two of this blog post, then you will have all your prep work done and be ready to dive into building your first production schedule. So let’s go. Backwards or Forwards?
