Tag Archives: Writers Resources

Keep writing.

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There are moments as a writer when you have to ignore the world around you.

This is related to my post on Tuesday.

I often consider going quiet on social media, in text messages, and everything else.

I want to take this break to finish projects.

There’s a worry, especially as an unpublished writer, that going offline for long amounts of time you’ll lose eyeballs.

I feel this is true and if I leave all my social media I’ll lose everything I’ve built.

Being that I’m publishing on Amazon later this year, I know I won’t leave my blog or Twitter and I may have start a new Facebook account.

I don’t want to but in order to get eyeballs on my writing I may have to.

I’ll keep going on the blog because I’m enjoying talking to all of my readers.

I hope you’re having a good day!

Narration, critiques, and improving.

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The past year I worked on narration and breaking up dialogue with narration.

I have an awful habit having long streams of dialogue with the occasional bit of narration thrown in.

My wife and my writing group have called me out on this.

Fixing this in the he last few short stories and the last novel I finished have been my goals.

Knowing what’s wrong with your writing. Having a support team to tell you what’s wrong is part of the journey of writing. Sometimes their words hurt. Sometimes you’ll want to scream, but almost always, what they tell you will improve your prose.

Fifteen years ago, when I wrote my first novel, I didn’t take criticism well. After time, I realized it’s meant to help me improve.

I wish I’d had a writing group when I started. I only had my wife. She was extra cautious when critiquing because at that point, I wasn’t a very nice person.

Today, I’m better than I was. I wish I’d have learned earlier that honest critiques can be brutal. Especially if you’re not ready for honesty.

I hope your writing is going well.

Braking down…

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Yes, I spelled the title right.
 
Over the last week I’ve been writing a second book to go with the one I finagled to write in a month.
 
 I thought I should go into the second book. sIt was on my mind more than any other story, what happened is I hit the wall and the brakes went out.
 I didn’t break, but the brakes failed when the wall approached.
 
 I’ve never tried to write a follow-up. I didn’t know what it entailed. I had no idea that staying within one universe in my head, at least for me, caused me to reevaluate.
 
 Now that I’m through the wall, onto the other side I’m working on something else. Its different from the fantasy I’d been writing.
 
It will take reading a genre I’ve had difficulty reading in the past.
 
 There are many reasons for the difficulty of the genre but I had realization about it and it “should ” be better now.
 
 Now that I’m through the wall, braking down may have been the best thing to happen.
 
 My mind needed a break from the story. This morning I slept longer than I have in a while, I thank my wife for letting me rest.
 
 Sometimes our work comes crashing to halt because our mind is telling us to take a break. So I’ve tapped the brakes on the story, started another because I don’t have a button that says stop.
 
 Have you hit a wall recently in your writing or life? This one took me a couple of weeks to sort out. But I’m better for it.
 
 Happy writing.

The World Continues To Move.

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The last couple of weeks I talked about writing 86,000 words, and how I overcame narration issues.

What I haven’t talked about is my journey to get where I am.

I used to talk about depression.

How I fight with it, how I get through it every day, and how my life has changed because of the TM technique.

I want to move away from TM, not because I stopped, I never will, but because writing about TM isn’t my focus.

I write stories because its one of the couple of things I’m decent at, making cocktails, and baking the others.

I feel better after writing than at any time during my day. When I edit, sometimes I feel that way, though it is editing so its not always sunshine and rainbows.

I have goals for this year.

I’ll be working on them one at a time. I have books to publish this year. Last year I didn’t understand a couple of things. It took me longer to figure out how to fix certain areas of my writing. Narration was one I spent a few months adjusting.

Today, as the years moves forward, I know better about how to write and I’ll keep going.

The process it different than it used to be. Writing a lot of words wasn’t something I’d ever done. But things change.

As humans we can either change things or left hoping the world changes for us. Here’s a hint, it never will. We have to change, we have to do the work.

What are you doing to change, either in your life, writing, or other things? Tell me about it.

How to get past the narrator.

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As I said in the last post: when it comes to the narrator’s voice I have a fear of it.

On the surface this fear was founded on show don’t tell and info dumping. In hindsight, there’s more to it and it’s about me personally.

I’ve always had a fear of giving too much away about myself. This led to problems with parents and my wife.

I didn’t want to let a side of me out. We are the narrator of our lives and if we don’t control the narrative others will through lies.

I had this fear of people not understanding who I was, what I wanted out of life or whether I was the type of person who would do horrible things. Then I realized, people will judge me no matter what I say.

When it came to narrating a story, I began to look at it similarly.

If I control the narrative of my life and people think what they want anyway, why should I care what they say? Why should the narrator in my novels and short stories be any different?

I shouldn’t!

Before, I would write a story worried about what someone thought about it. Now, after dealing with the narrator issues, I understood I can’t make someone like what I wrote so I should enjoy the process more.

I began to write better.

I put in better detail and stopped caring whether what someone would think about it.

My writing flourished and I started a new novel in the beginning of December 2018. I destroyed my word count because the fear I had vanished.

How has your writing flourished in the past year? What did you do different to improve? Tell me in the comments.