writing
FAQ: How do you make yourself write so much and not get distracted?
Jan 01, 2012
This question comes most recently from a school visit, but I get variations on it a lot. (“Isn’t it hard to make yourself work when there’s no one to make sure you’re doing it?”) It seems like an appropriate post for New Year’s Day, when everybody’s busy making resolutions and promises to themselves!
BOOK DEAL NEWS!
Nov 30, 2011
Some of you who are readers of either my blog or Amie Kaufman’s blog may know that we’ve been working on a collaborative novel together. We’ve been writing together in one form or another ever since we met a bit over six years ago, so it seemed like no big thing to evolve from that to writing a novel together, but—at the risk of sounding totally lame—once we started working on WRECKED, we knew it was something pretty awesome.
We finally finished the first draft at the end of October, though “first draft” is a bit misleading—through our collaboration we’d done a ton of editing for each other, so it was a much tighter draft than that implies. We gave it to our amazing agents (we knew being in the same agency would come in handy!) and they raced through it and gave us a weekend to make a few changes before they sent it off to editors.
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.
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.
Progress Updates!
Jun 10, 2011
So first, the big news: THE IRON WOOD has sold in Israel!! My mind is just boggling. The idea that my little book has not just found one publisher, but also found homes overseas, and is now going to be published in an entirely different alphabet? No way to process that!
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!
Transitions
May 23, 2011
Almost exactly one year ago, I got on a plane to fly to Australia. I had about 20,000 words of a new book, a lot of emotional baggage, and a metric ton of doubts. Not much to go on, really, but I knew I had to get moving on my dream of being a writer or I’d be waiting for something to happen to me forever.