wisdomous wednesday
Wisdomous Wednesday: Pursue Your Weaknesses
Jul 21, 2011
Wisdomous Wednesday is a weekly series of posts with advice about writing ranging from craft to navigation through the publishing world. If you have some wisdomous thoughts you’d like to share here, don’t hesitate to contact me. I love advice from other writers!
Knowing your weaknesses as a writer is pretty important. But I think it’s just as important not to get caught up in what you know (or believe) to be your flaws. I think a lot of writers (and I am WAY guilty of this myself) tend to avoid writing things they’re not good at, or have no experience with. I know I catch myself taking convoluted paths through stories to avoid writing things I know I’m not good at writing–or worse, avoid writing stories I otherwise love because there’s an aspect to them that I don’t think I can handle.
Women’s World Cup Wednesday: What Does Soccer Have to Do With Writing?
Jul 13, 2011
In honor of the truly spectacular soccer game played Monday between Brazil and the U.S., today’s Wisdomous Wednesday is all about the World Cup—and how it relates to writing. (Trust me.) It was such an amazing game that one of the most common reactions I’ve heard has been “Someone has to be writing this book” or “You couldn’t write a better script than this.” So it really got me thinking about come-from-behind victories in literature, and how to make them believable—and most importantly, as fiercely satisfying as Monday’s victory for the USA.
Wisdomous Wednesday: Stop in the Middle of
Jun 29, 2011
Wisdomous Wednesday is a weekly series of posts with advice about writing ranging from craft to navigation through the publishing world. If you have some wisdomous thoughts you’d like to share here, don’t hesitate to contact me. I love advice from other writers!
I think one of the hardest things about writing is getting started. There’s something about the blank page that is pretty scary–not in an “it’s gonna eat my face” way, but in a “now you have to prove things” way, and a “everyone’s expecting you to be awesome” way. Even harder than getting started at the beginning is getting started on a new scene after stopping a project for a while. You don’t have the excitement of first lines and unlimited potential to get you going.
Wisdomous Wednesday: Write Aloud
Jun 24, 2011
Wisdomous Wednesday is a weekly series of posts with advice about writing ranging from craft to navigation through the publishing world. If you have some wisdomous thoughts you’d like to share here, don’t hesitate to contact me. I love advice from other writers!
So, turns out I’m pretty incompetent at new to WordPress’s post scheduler thingy. It worked for me for two weeks and then the first time I started to get comfortable, turns out I scheduled it but didn’t SCHEDULE IT (there are like two steps to this process, guys, it’s pretty complex) so it didn’t post. So, uh, today’s Wednesday post is actually showing up on Friday. Just pretend with me that it’s two days ago, and we’ll all be happier for it.
Wisdomous Wednesday: Don’t Edit While Writing
Jun 15, 2011
Wisdomous Wednesday is a weekly series of posts with advice about writing ranging from craft to navigation through the publishing world. If you have some wisdomous thoughts you’d like to share here, don’t hesitate to contact me. I love advice from other writers!
Today’s tip is for writers who have a tendency to get “stuck” while writing first drafts. I speak from experience–I often get bogged down somewhere between 10,000 and 30,000 words into the manuscript. The manuscript seems sludgy, and no matter how I tweak it, scenes aren’t flowing the way they should. More often than not I used to psych myself out of the manuscript entirely, abandoning it for a new idea.
Wisdomous Wednesday: Goal-setting
Jun 08, 2011
Wisdomous Wednesday is a weekly series of posts with advice about writing ranging from craft to navigation through the publishing world. If you have some wisdomous thoughts you’d like to share here, don’t hesitate to contact me. I love advice from other writers!
Dreams are tricky. If you never go after them, they’ll always be there as a nice security blanket, a sort of “what-if” that you can take out and admire whenever you’re feeling low. Going after them, though, means that you’re introducing the possibility of failure. And if you fail, that nice shiny dream might go kerplut, and no one wants to carry around a squashed dream. Not nearly so shiny. Writers who decide to pursue publication risk that kerplut every day, which is a pretty terrifying thing when you want something badly enough. So how do you actually go about pursuing a dream that big?
Wisdomous Wednesday: Try Everything
Jun 01, 2011
One of my new goals moving forward is to become a more consistent blogger–I tend to let the blog grow cobwebs far too often! So as step one, I’m starting a weekly feature called (oh-so-creatively) “Wisdomous Wednesdays,” wherein I will share tidbits I’ve gleaned over the years about writing. It’s a bit cheeky, as they’d say in my other homeland of Australia, given that I barely know what I’m doing myself on any given day, but hey. If we can’t pretend to be wisdomous now and then, then why are we writers? I can only share what works for me, but if even one other writer out there finds something in here that’s useful, then I say huzzah!