How She Writes

As a side effect of being a writer, I have acquired some strange quirks in the past year or so. Some of them just come with the job, others are my own peculiarities that come out through writing. I talk to myself While I'm immersed in a project, or trying to work out a problem with a story, I can be found muttering to myself. I'm not crazy...probably. I just have a tendency to think out loud, and it usually happens when I'm writing. I have a weird search history This is definitely a side effect of being a fiction writer. (There are some crazy things writers need to know.) Search history is a running joke in the writer community, and a quick search will bring up plenty of jokes about it. While most of mine aren't too crazy, I do have a few gems, like: What are the best ways to knock someone out? (this one also includes, what are the side effects of chloroform.) Would someone die of a stab wound to the side? What are the symptoms of a bruised rib? Wh...

If there is anything I've learned about writing recently, it's that if there is something stopping you from enjoying writing, you need to deal with it. I had something like that not too long ago. As I mentioned in a recent post , I hit a writing slump, and it resulted in me not wanting to write. What I didn't realize was that as the problem continued, I was the cause. I set up a schedule and tried to organize myself into staying productive. I couldn't do it I tried so hard to stick to that schedule. I failed to meet goal after goal. As I continued to fail, I added more goals. I became more and more determined to succeed until I couldn't do it anymore. I felt trapped in problems I had created and realized that more work wasn't going to cut it this time. So I let go I  closed my spreadsheets, turned off my alarms, and set my schedule aside. I didn't stop writing entirely, but I did allow myself to write what I wanted to because I enjoyed it, not ...

To be honest, I find that there are many days when I don't want to write. I know that sounds crazy, coming from a girl who's always talking about her love of writing, but it's true. I'm passionate about a career that is hard, and while it's worth it, I have days when I really want to do something easier. Over and over, I have heard people say that if you don't write for the love of it, or because you can't not write, you're not cut out to be a writer. I've thought about that. A lot. And I've come to the conclusion that writing because you can't not write is a myth. I've never met a writer with that particular ailment. That, and just because you love doing something doesn't mean you enjoy every minute of it. I love my work. I really do. I love seeing the characters come alive in my mind, I love being able to put the stories I imagine into a form in which other people can enjoy them. I don't however, love sitting down at...

Today we're going to look at the usual way I take stories from an idea to a finished product. My writing process can be divided into six steps. Prewriting, outlining, drafting, editing, polishing, and publishing. Prewriting When I begin a project, I usually start with a vague idea or a story that I never finished.  Then I write all my for that story down. This ensures that I remember those ideas, and often gives me a firmer understanding of the plot and my main character. My prewriting also includes fleshing out the main character's personality and coming up with the setting for the story. Outlining As far as outlining goes, I take the character I came up with in prewriting and work the plot around them. To do this, I ask a few major questions about my character. What do they want? What do they fear the most? What is the one thing in their past that has shaped who they are? With this information, I can design a plot to test my character. My character spends the plot ...

Every writer faces their own unique problems and employs their own unique methods of dealing with them. These are my top five, including the strategies I'm using to work through them. 1. Distraction The problem: I tend to get distracted a lot. Whether it's going back and forth between projects, 'researching', or just getting distracted by the internet, I have trouble remaining focused. My Solution:  I have made it a habit to only do productive things while I'm sitting at my desk.  That takes care of most of my distraction. For the rest of it, I discipline myself to work non-stop for a certain amount of time, usually somewhere between ten and thirty minutes. That ensures that I am consistently being productive and focused in several small blocks of time, rather than being distracted in one large block of time. 2. Writer's block The problem: At the beginning of a project, before I have an outline to build off of, I struggle from writer's block. ...

Today, I want to share a bit of my story. For as long as I can remember, I have loved a good story. As a kid, I read as many books as I could get my hands on, and now, I have been known to come home from the library with more than one novel. To my memory, the first time I tried writing my own stories, was when I was about nine. At that point, my stories were very short, and never very good, but I enjoyed writing them. Around eighth grade, my passion for writing really took off, and as time went on, I began to write more and more often. During that time, I wrote several short stories and attempted two novels. I didn't finish many projects, but I grew to enjoy the more I wrote, the more I grew to enjoy the process. It was in my junior year of high school that I really began to consider career options, and being a writer was my first choice. At that point, I didn't think that writing was a viable career option because I had heard about how hard it can be to get publishe...