Category Archives: The Writing Process

As we grow not only in our craft but also as people, it’s important to establish or re-establish the foundation of why we write, what success means to us at this moment, and what fulfillment means across our lifetimes. And yes, those things can completely change in the span of a few years. Our perspectives shift, our goals change, our focus narrows. As that happens, it’s essential to revisit the foundations on which we built our dreams and goals in the first place.

Here are some general questions to help you consider the root of your inspiration for writing.

1. Why do you write?

This question gets passed around a lot, it seems. But dig deep. “Cause I’ve just gotta!” is a fine answer, but what compels you to do it? Dig deep. “Because I have unresolved issues,” is probably a more honest answer for all of us.

2. What do you want?

“Duh, to be famous.” Sure, that can be your answer. But consider the possibility you won’t be the next J.K. Rowling. Now, what do you want?

3. What is your writing routine?

Has it changed in the past few years. Does it need to change? What’s not working about it?

4. Are you still chasing dreams and goals that are rooted in a genre in which you no longer write?

For example, when I started writing, I wanted to write literary fiction. At this moment, I write mostly YA, which is a much faster market and demands faster manuscript turn-arounds. My goals need to change to fit the genre I’m writing, at least for now.

5. Do your short-term goals need re-evaluating to reflect where you are right now?

I had to re-evaluate my short-term goals when writing YA, as mentioned above, and those will constantly need to be reconsidered depending on the project.

6. Do your long-term goals need to change to reflect where you are right now?

For example, because I’m not writing literary fiction right now, and I had not considered I’d be writing YA, my long-term goals for my career need to adjust to include YA.

A Writer's Guide to Persistence by Jordan Rosenfeld — A Writer’s Guide to Persistence by Jordan Rosenfeld

There are some great resources out there to help you reflect on these things while also help you build your craft and routine.

I highly recommend The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron for an all-out overhaul, but be warned, it takes a lot of commitment to finish. Finish it. Commit to it. It’s worth it.

A Writer’s Guide to Persistence by Jordan Rosenfeld has been extremely valuable to me recently. I see it a lite version of The Artist’s Way. That’s not to demean it in any way; I simply mean it’s shorter and more compact.

Both books have been extremely valuable to me, and I hope they are for you as well.

About Kristin Luna:

Kristin Luna has been making up stories and getting in trouble for them since elementary school. She writes book reviews for Urban Fantasy Magazine and her short story “The Greggs Family Zoo of Odd and Marvelous Creatures” was featured in the anthology One Horn to Rule Them All alongside Peter S. Beagle and Todd McCaffrey. Her short story “Fog” recently appeared on Pseudopod. Kristin lives in San Diego with her husband Nic.

Do Unto Others

July 17, 2015

Evan Braun

Author's Perspective Evan Braun Interacting With Fans Motivation Reflection Reviews The Writing Life The Writing Process No Comments

I’ve written on this subject before on the Fictorians, but I can’t help repeating myself every so often when it comes to the impact of fans. It wouldn’t be honest to say that I primarily write for my fans. Truth is, I write for me, because I love writing and creating. Stories drive me. But I find the energy to keep writing, to power through the really hard days and finish books, because my readers frequently find inspiring ways to remind me that what I’m doing matters to them. And isn’t that what we all want, at the end of the day? To matter?

A friend of a friend recently messaged me on Facebook to say that she had started reading my first book on a Monday and finished it at 5:00 a.m. on Wednesday morning. She then started the second book on Thursday night and finished on Saturday, and messaged to let me know that she thought it was better than the first. She didn’t want it to be over, so she hoped to take her time on the third book. We’ll see how that goes…

The point is not to toot my own horn. Here’s what I’m driving at: those two books took a minimum of four years to write (even longer to conceive) and boom, they are easily read in just four days. Which is a bit lopsided, but one hopes that great books will be consumed as quickly and voraciously as possible. In an ideal world, I want voracious readers to discover me right now, but I also long for the day when voracious readers will be discovering me and my backlist of thirty other books.

Hearing from fans means a lot to me. And I know it means a lot to other writers, too, which is why when I discover a book I really love, I follow the golden rule: do unto others what you’d have them do unto you. That doesn’t necessarily mean that I get in touch personally, but I leave reviews and try to spread the word. It seems to me that word of mouth and personal recommendations are among the most important (if not the most important) way that people discover new books.

So let’s not be stingy with praise and appreciation. Writers are often lonely, socially starved people sitting behind computers in quiet rooms at ungodly hours (unless it’s just me?), so words of appreciation tend to go a long way.

Evan Braun is an author and editor who has been writing books for more than ten years. He is the author of The Watchers Chronicle, whose third volume, The Law of Radiance, has just been released. He specializes in both hard and soft science fiction and lives in the vicinity of Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Like a Movie Trailer for Your Head

July 8, 2015

Gregory D. Little

Gregory D. Little Self-Motivation The Writing Process No Comments

In approaching this month’s topic, I realized something irritating. I’ve already written about my best inspirational stories on previous Fictorians posts. As I had little desire to repeat myself, I knew I had to come at this issue from a different angle. So rather than focus on discrete stories about what’s influenced my writing, I asked myself what techniques I used to get psyched to write day-to-day.

I’m sure I don’t have to tell any of you writers that some days the effort to get started writing can be too much. Unless you are already a professional writer or are both independently wealthy and childless, you spend your days expending energy on something or other that isn’t writing-related. You have to divert energy to writing that could be used elsewhere on higher-priority things, like earning money to eat.

So in order to get any writing done at all, we have to find ways to slip past exhaustion, laziness or a bad case of The Mondays and get excited about it. Quite without meaning to, I stumbled upon an admittedly silly technique a number of years ago that works well for me.

The answer? I advertise my book to myself.

Think about how you felt the last time you saw a really well-done movie trailer. Maybe it brought a rush of excitement you thought you’d left behind with youth. Maybe you watched it over and over again on Youtube just to wring that little rush dry. It makes sense. The people who make movie trailers mostly know their business. Their goal is to get you to mentally commit to seeing the movie in advance, ideally without paying attention to those pesky review aggregate sites before plunking down your hard-earned cash.

Now take your work in progress and try translating it into a movie trailer that you play in your head. Your hero, covered in grit and with a wound on their forehead from all their heroic efforts, stares stoically into the middle distance just to the right of the camera lens. A series of sequences flash by in which characters dodge bullets or spells or leap off of buildings only to turn back around and fire lightning bolts at their pursuers while their hair flows in the wind, all in slow motion with a dramatic swell of the soundtrack.

Writing it out like this makes it seem silly and self-indulgent because it is. You’ve seen these sorts of scenes in a million movie trailers, and after a while they all start to look the same. But guess what? If scenes like this didn’t work, the people making the trailers wouldn’t use them. And there’s one big difference here: these are your characters in your world, both of which you are (hopefully) already excited about. I suspect you’ll feel at least the hint of a giddy little thrill imagining them starring in their own expertly produced movie trailer.

A lucky handful of us may someday write works popular enough in print to be able to see our characters brought to life on the big screen (or the small). For the rest, a little daydreaming can give us that spike of excitement we need to sit down at the keyboard after an otherwise long day.

Give it a try. Don’t worry, you don’t have to admit it to anyone.

INTRODUCING: The Law of Radiance

June 17, 2015

Evan Braun

Action & Adventure Author's Perspective Evan Braun Marketing Publishing The Writing Life The Writing Process No Comments

After six thousand years of captivity, the Grigori are free. With time running out, Ira Binyamin leaps into action, amassing a network of allies to wage all-out war against this new yet ancient threat. But as his mentor Aaron warned him long ago, to wage this war he must bear an awesome responsibility, one that will exact a crushing toll on his body, his conscience, and his very soul.

Dispatched by his new masters on a mission to the northernmost reaches of the world, Sherwood Brighton must come to grips with the consequences of his life-altering decision in Shamballa. To find what he’s searching for, he’ll have to look deep within himself and confront the harrowing terror shrouded in the recesses of his own mind.

Opposing forces swirl toward their ultimate confrontation as Ira, Brighton, and those they hold most dear return to the place where it all began… where the worth of humanity will be settled once and for all.

* * *

It goes without saying that it’s a lot harder to finish a project than to start one. Finishing a project when a crowd of people are watching you with their own silent (and sometimes not so silent) expectations is even harder. This is where I find myself now, upon release of my third novel, The Law of Radiance, which also happens to be the concluding volume of The Watchers Chronicle, a story I started telling back in 2011 with my friend and writing partner, Clint Byars. 1,232 pages—and 322,141 words—later, the story is complete. And it’s one that I am immensely proud of.

In 2011, when The Book of Creation came out, I felt ecstatic. How could I not? My first novel was published, right there in print, on the shelf in the bookstore, the fulfillment of a very long dream. But the Watchers Chronicle, really, is a single story, so while the book was out, the whole story was not. Indeed, I wasn’t even a third of the way there (29.9 percent, to be precise). I still had a long way to go. I didn’t even know how many books it would take to finish, which is why I pointedly didn’t call it a trilogy right off the bat.

But here we are, and I can finally say that I’ve completed my first large-scale writing project. If you happen to be one of those people who only likes to start reading a series once the whole shebang is available at once, then have at it. I invite you to dive in!

Along the way, I’ve gotten some favorable reviews. My favorite came from the Winnipeg Free Press, my local newspaper, which wrote: “There is an important difference between someone like Dan Brown and Evan Braun: Braun writes with some literary sophistication.” Depending on what kind of emphasis you place on the word some, that’s great validation!

The Law of Radiance was a much longer and more complex affair than I anticipated at first. Indeed, as late as this past March, I contemplated splitting the book into two separate novels which would have each been approximately equal in length to the first two books in the series. Instead I took the alternate route, trimming down the fat to fit it all into a single book, working on the presumption that editing down is almost always preferable to expanding outward—at least for me. And each time I browse through Radiance, I become more certain that I made the right decision. Even at a smaller word count, it’s still a full third longer than either Book of Creation or City of Darkness. I’m quite sure that every word is earned.

It’s currently available for $3.99 for the Amazon Kindle, the Kobo, and the Nook. Not only that, but the print edition is on the way, hitting stores and catalogs on Thursday, July 9. I’ll be hosting a launch party at McNally Robinson Booksellers at 7:00 p.m. that night—so if you happen to be local to Winnipeg, Manitoba, I hope to see you there.

Excerpts and reviews are available here.