Category Archives: The Writing Life

Finding Momentum When It’s Gone

Author's Perspective Balancing Acts Being Gentle With Yourself Doing Good in the World Giving Yourself a Break Goals Kristin Luna Life Philosophies Living Deliberately Making Progress as a Writer Motivation Reflection Self-Awareness Self-Motivation The Writing Life The Writing Process Your Writing Career 2 Comments

I work on one big project at a time. The art of juggling two or three big projects at once is lost on me, as all the projects start to blend together in a weird, self-referencing word-soup. That means my writing process is a one-step-at-a-time deal. For a few weeks, I will do nothing but planning, plotting, and outlining. Then, for a few months, all I’m doing is writing. And then for up to year after that, I’m editing.

After I’ve been editing my work for so long, I’m often intimidated when I think of going back to writing. I’m worried I haven’t learned anything, or that I won’t apply what I’ve learned when I edited. I’m worried the flow and creativity has been stilted by too much editing work. I’m afraid I’ve lost my voice. I’m concerned I’m too focused on what will sell instead of what it is I’ve got to say.

It’s taken some time for me to learn how to get back into writing after time away. The “just sit down and write” advice doesn’t always cut it. You can plan your time down to the minute and regiment yourself to your schedule, and that works for a lot of people. Most people. But that doesn’t take care of the lack of confidence or the worries, and making myself sit in a chair and stare at a screen doesn’t help me find the heart of why I’m writing.

Over the years, I’ve learned the painful lesson that inspiration is incredibly important to my writing and my creative identity. It is true that, many times, you’ll have to write when the muse isn’t slinking around your shoulders and whispering in your ear. However, I think it’s easy to become distracted working that way – distracted from your core, from the reason you wanted to write in the first place. Viewing writing as a job, as work, is allowing it one step closer to becoming your job instead of your vocation, and divorcing it from passion altogether. In the day to day, it’s easy to get caught up in the minutia. I’ve found it’s vital to be able to stop and ask myself what I’m looking to accomplish with the project in the first place. What am I trying to communicate?

Those answers don’t always come immediately. I often have to search for them. This is how:

  1. Journal
  2. Go to a natural history museum or cultural center
  3. Watch a documentary or two about subjects that I know very little about.
  4. Go for a hike/ go camping. Don’t allow myself my phone or any digital tethers
  5. Allow myself to daydream. Allow myself to forget my schedule and my to-do list
  6. Use my hands to make. Bake. Work on a motorcycle. Throw a pot on a wheel. Learn glassblowing. Draw. Make. Learn. Do. And let the mind wander

*Bring journal or a notebook when doing 2-6

These things have helped me focus back on my voice, consider my point of view, helped me remember what is important, and reminded me of our connection points as humans and therefore what we can all relate to on a primal and emotional level. I find allowing my mind to wander on these subjects through art, journaling, and being a student of life and nature itself helps focus my mind and prepare it for creativity and communication.

I mean, I get it. I sound like a neo-hippy. Check that language, man. Connection, point of view, creation, daydream, communication. All I’m missing are some essential oils to drip all over this blog post and some vegan gluten-free cookies for you, my awesome readers.

I acknowledge that most people can just put ass-in-seat and write, treating it like a job. Set a timer. Schedule writing time. Have strict daily, weekly, and monthly goals. These are all fantastic strategies to get you back on track with writing after a long break.

But if you happen to be somewhat like me, you need reflection. You need to ask yourself questions about not only your story, but why you’re writing it. And then you need time to think through the answers. Our culture has made it easy to become very busy very fast – to work through a to-do list everyday, go to bed, wake up, and repeat. But if you’re finding that you need less structure, more time – prioritize that. Prioritize time. Loosen your daily schedule. Allow four hours of writing time instead of two, knowing that some of those four hours may be you taking a walk, sitting outside, listening to music, thinking. Sometimes a few of those all at once. I think you’ll be surprised to find how much inspiration follows you on those walks and mind-walks, and soon, you’ll be back in your seat and writing, refreshed, collected, and ready.

The Sun is Setting on Setting

The Writing Life No Comments

[Still not apologizing for the puns]

I’ll admit that when I first came up with the setting topic for this month, I worried we wouldn’t see enough variety of posts. As ever, the combination of our regulars and some really stellar guest posts turned out a month of surprising breadth of topics, which actually shouldn’t have been surprising given the literally infinite forms a story’s setting can take. I hope that you’ll take the advice and experience you’ve read this month forward with you as you tackle your own setting challenges. Please join me in thanking our posters this month for such a great set of posts. Starting tomorrow, Jace will take us to the topic of building and maintaining momentum, which for this writer, hard at work on the first draft of his next novel, couldn’t come at a better time! Thanks for reading!

 

About the Author: Gregory D. Littleheadshot

Rocket scientist by day, fantasy and science fiction author by night, Gregory D. Little began his writing career in high school when he and his friend wrote Star Wars fanfic before it was cool, passing a notebook around between (all right, during) classes. His novels Unwilling Souls and Ungrateful God are available now from ebook retailers and trade paperback through Amazon.com. His short fiction can be found in The Colored Lens, A Game of Horns: A Red Unicorn Anthology, Dragon Writers: An Anthology, and the upcoming Undercurrents: An Anthology of What Lies Beneath. He lives with his wife and their yellow lab.

You can reach him at his website (www.gregorydlittle.com), his Twitter handle (@litgreg) or at his Author Page on Facebook.

Sharkasaurus!

Horror Mary Pletsch No Comments

Have you been swimming in Fossil Lake?

Be careful if you do.  There’s something in the water…

…and it’s got teeth.

The first two Fossil Lake anthologies explored the beautiful horrors of Fossil Lake.  The third, Unicornado!, mixed fantasy, disasters, and terror.  Now, for the fourth, we’re back at the Lake and it’s now hosting some very toothy critters in its depths.

Sharkasaurus! draws inspiration from monster movies, Jaws, and Jurassic Park to take on our fears of what lives in the dark water.  Proving that gory and funny aren’t necessarily opposites, my story, How to Make a Monster, puts a new twist on the old mad-scientist character so often responsible for The Brain That Terrorized The City…

A female academic, taking the fall for ethics violations, moves to the tropics and tries to rebuild her life to the tune of Jimmy Buffett songs.  But when the land sharks start mawing down on tourists, and her old co-worker shows up to track down who’s responsible, this mad scientist has to say, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em….

Plus thirty-six other weird works of fiction prose and poetry.

You can catch your own Sharkasaurus in print on Amazon or in ebook on Smashwords.

Shared Settings

The Writing Life No Comments

Sometimes your setting isn’t yours.

When you’re writing in a shared universe, you, as the author, are coming into a setting where someone else has already done some of the designing.

This might be franchise work (consider a setting such as the Star Wars Expanded Universe, or a novel series based on  a video game or role-playing game), or perhaps you’re just role-playing for fun.  The setting that you are writing in has already been outlined.  Your job, as a storyteller, is to create a novel or short story or character that fits into that universe.  This involves reflecting not merely the setting, but also “flavour,” themes, and overall experience.

If you’re writing in a shared setting, my number one advice is to respect the rules of the setting.  If the setting states that human beings each have one and only one magical talent, or there are no aliens in outer space—please follow those rules.  Your characters don’t have to defy the rules of the setting to be interesting.  The franchise owners are looking for people who can tell compelling stories within their pre-existing setting.  They want characters who are complex and interesting and who fit within the rules—characters who embody the kinds of people who can live in the world of the video game, or role-playing game, or movie universe, or whatever kind of world it might be.

Sometimes it seems as though beginning writers think the best way to make their characters interesting is to break the rules of the setting—to be the first known alien in the no-alien galaxy, or to have three magical talents in a setting where most people have only one.  What makes a compelling character isn’t what their character can do, it’s the kind of person their character is, and the ways in which that character interacts with other people and the world around her/him.  Similarly, a powerful, rule-breaking artifact doesn’t, in itself, make for an interesting story.  Readers are looking for a tale that conveys the flavour of the setting, not a story intent on breaking the setting to suit itself.

If you’re writing in a shared setting, please read the lore before you begin outlining your story, and ask your editor, lore keeper, game master or overseer if you have any questions.  It’s much easier to ask about an idea first, rather than have to make major edits to a completed novel because you assumed that all sci fi would have aliens, or forgot that in this setting there are no aliens in outer space.  Suddenly you’ve got a book about human-alien relations that doesn’t fit in the setting you’ve been contracted to write about.

Shared settings work because of common rules accepted by everyone who’s creating works within that setting.  If you’re hired to work for a shared setting, it’s because the people who hired you want stories that reflect the world of that IP (intellectual property) or setting.   Your job is to reflect the world of the shared setting, as creatively as you can, while providing an experience of that setting that its audience is seeking.