When people ask me for writing advice (and God knows why they ask me in the first place) the first thing I tell them is: go find some books on craft and read them. There are plenty of great ones: On Writing, by Stephen King The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes, by Jack Bickham [...]
Writing at the Speed of WTF
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For me, being a writer is sometimes akin to being a submarine commander — long stretches of inactivity punctuated by moments of sheer panic. I’m not a Type A writer by nature. There are days when I’ll do just about anything to get out of writing. I’ll clean my desk. I’ll clean the toilet. I’ll [...]
Are You Starting New Writing Projects to Avoid Finishing Old Ones?
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If you haven’t been reading Ava Jae’s blog, this is a great time to start. Ava posted a great piece on what it takes to finish writing your novel, a struggle every novelist knows all too well. One passage in particular from Ava’s piece stuck out to me: You need to understand that if you [...]
Writing Your Rough Draft: The Show Must Go On
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Many years ago, I attended a showing of The Phantom of the Opera. What does that have to do with writing motivation and your rough draft? Stick with me. If you’ve ever seen the play, you’re familiar with that bit where the Phantom bellows out the final verse of “The Music of the Night” and [...]
Notes From the Writing Abattoir
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Love of writing is a very peculiar kind of love. We spend hours alone, putting imaginary people through the paces, forsaking sleep and mental health in favor of coffee and scrawled character charts. We construct entire imaginary lives and then end them, in a way designed to upset those real people who have spent their [...]
Fear and Criticism: Walking the Fine Line
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Inspired by Anna Meade’s recent blog post. Putting your fiction out there for criticism can be a nerve-wracking prospect. Most writers I know have, at one time or another, believed that their work was no good. Some have frequently considered quitting. A few have never started at all (they’re the “aspiring” writers). A few writers, [...]
I Always Wanted to Be… a Lumberjack!
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A blog post by Rebekah Loper, entitled “If You Couldn’t Write…” got me thinking about what would happen if I really, actually couldn’t write. The heart of Rebekah’s question is really about secondary passions — about how we would fill the time if some mysterious outside force denied us our writing gift. The question itself [...]
[Guest Post] Your Workshop Story Is Probably Shit
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Today’s incendiary guest post comes from Tracy McCusker, former editor, published poet, and avowed pottymouth. There’s a certain kind of story that can be found hanging around self-published short story collections and small-press slush piles. This kind of story has a certain whiff about it. It’s verbose. It’s stylized. It’s littered with impossibly academic sentences. [...]
What You Leave Behind
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This is a response to “All the Things,” a blog post by Random9q, which is in turn a response to Bullish Ink‘s guest post from earlier this week. Lately with this blog, I’ve aspired to be either pedagogical or humorous — optimally, both at the same time. This entry is a bit more personal — [...]
The Lurking Fear
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Among the many stops on what I call the Road to Getting Serious About Writing is a frank conversation I had with a close friend many years ago. He had just finished assembling materials for a book idea he’d been kicking around for years, and admitted to me that he was nervous about starting. “Why?” [...]
