Beginnings

Currently I’m in yet another “final” round of revision on my “Pen” story, and I’ve been having a terrible fight trying to arrive at a beginning that’s good enough to satisfy me. So I’ve been rereading Nancy Kress‘s Beginnings, Middles, and Ends, and listening to discussions of beginnings on Writing Excuses and The Writing Show. […]

Back to Normal

That is, I did not write a lot during the month of October. I can’t say I’m surprised. I know what works and what doesn’t. I know that I meet my writing goals when I write regularly, and since I didn’t write regularly, I’m not happy with how little I wrote. It would be too […]

It feels like I’ve gone completely off the rails

But I haven’t. After crowing about how well writing at a regular time went for me in August, I became much more irregular about my writing time in September. If I skip writing between 11 am to noon, it only gets even harder for me to start. What happens is I get the nagging delusion […]

Flaws and Growth

I’ve been working my way through listening to the podcast, Writing Excuses, and an episode that got me thinking is their discussion of Flaws & Handicaps. After defining flaws as internal and handicaps as external, they talked about how flaws can drive comedy and how handicaps can create constraints that define the story. But the […]

Re: The Writer’s Book of Hope

The first hope offered by The Writer’s Book of Hope, by Ralph Keyes, is that no one can tell who is going to make it as a writer. Therefore you should encourage all aspiring writers. The next hope is a bit darker: that it’s okay to get all worked up about how hard it is […]

I am writing a lot!

September 3 is my writing anniversary. Since that day in 2000, I have written or revised a bit of fiction every day, but it’s always been a struggle to actually get it done. At the beginning of August I was skeptical that writing at a scheduled time, as advised in How to Write A Lot, […]

Am I Writing A Lot?

I devoured How To Write A Lot at the end of June, and decided to try out its advice for the month of July. The book advises you to schedule your writing at a regular hour, commit to that hour, and defend it–even against your own bad habits. So did it help?

Capturing ideas

Where do ideas come from? There’s all sorts of answers to that question, or refusals to answer, but it’s really pretty simple. For example, in the podcast Writing Excuses, the first episode makes some interesting observations about when ideas come to you and how to capture them.

Re: How To Write A Lot

Sounds great doesn’t it? Although How To Write A Lot is directed at academics, any writer will find the difficulties described by Paul J. Silvia all too familiar. The solution is simple. As he advocates firmly, convincingly, and wittily, the only way to write a lot is to set a schedule of writing times and […]

June in Review

I can’t believe I made to the end of June without skipping a day in the blog. Sorry about writing so much about bees and weeds. There’s so much getting away from me, just in my own backyard. No, I’m not sorry. I like the bees. And the bold chickadee who stared right at me. […]