motivation

Confessions of a Bad Writer Gone Good

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This post by Julia Scott originally appeared on The Huffington Post on 9/2/14.

There is a certain kind of bad writing that occurs when you are between the ages of 16 and 24 and have an audience of one. ‘Self-indulgent’ doesn’t begin to describe it, and in fact to do so would minimize the intense feeling of urgency of budding writers of a certain age who feel called to bear witness to our years of transition. From falling in love to falling apart, the themes are big and the feelings are bigger. It’s all so overwhelming. The only way to get a grip on the given moment – to slow it down long enough to see it pass — is to write it.

I want to experience LIFE viscerally, but at the same time step back and think about it all.

That’s a line from a journal entry I wrote as a trembling, sensitive 19-year old on the eve of my 20th birthday, rediscovered nearly 15 years later whilst looking through the diary pages of my sad, anxious year abroad in Paris. The ink was green on yellowed stationary, and as I read it, I remembered walking the streets of that indifferent city as a virginal college junior — the dank wetness of winter, the diesel fumes, the existential fear of failure that leveled me for hours on my thin cot in the drafty boarding house I shared with a hundred other women, run by nuns.

 

Click here to read the full post on The Huffington Post.

 

DON'T Do What You Love

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This post by Rachel Nabors originally appeared on Medium on 8/19/14.

I don’t like advice like “Do what you love and the money will follow.” Not because it isn’t true, but because it’s a monkey’s paw: it’s true under the right circumstances with the right people, and for everyone else, it’s just bad advice.

I used to make comics for a living (these comics, right here), and I gave out similar advice and professed similar goals: If I just tried hard enough, I’d make it doing what I love, making comics for a living. If anyone was less successful then I was, well, they must not have been trying hard enough.

To an extent it worked! I won awards, had hordes of fan girls, a weekly syndicated web comic I got paid for (very well by comic industry standards, too). I thought I was doing great doing what I love.

And then it all ended.

I needed surgery.

And I didn’t have health insurance.

Almost overnight the series shut down. My fans and friends ran a Herculean donation effort for me, but it wasn’t enough. I quit comics and went into web development, something I’d enjoyed doing to support my web comics presence, but I wouldn’t say I loved it. Not then.

 

Life after surgery.

 

Click here to read the full post on Medium.

 

How to Write a Book or Blog (The 6 Danger Stages You Need To Overcome)

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This post by Ali Luke originally appeared on Write to Done on 7/24/14.

You’ve probably had the experience of starting a novel or blog with great intentions…

…only to find that, a few months later, you’ve barely made any progress.

Maybe you started strong but lost momentum.

Maybe you jumped ahead when you should’ve paused.

Or maybe you got discouraged and gave up.

And you wonder: how to write a book (or blog).

I’ve coached many writers in workshop groups over the past few years, and I’ve noticed that there are six key stages when projects often stall or go wrong.

Here’s what to watch out for.

 

Danger Stage #1: Once You’ve Got a Great Idea

Let’s say you’ve got a new idea you’re excited about. Perhaps it’s a great premise for a novel, a topic for a blog, or a prompt you want to work on for a short story.

Writers tend to make one of two mistakes here:

They jump straight in, full of enthusiasm, without planning. They make a great start, and might get a few chapters into the novel or a few posts into a blog…but then they get stuck.

They wait – and wait – until the “perfect moment” to begin actually writing. They put off starting until they’ve got past family commitments and a busy spell at work…or they read about their chosen field of writing without getting any words down on paper.

 

Click here to read the full post on Write to Done.

 

Five Great Ways To Combat Writer’s Block

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This post by blurb staff originally appeared on blurb on 8/8/14.

You’re sitting at your computer, staring at a blank document. You’re poised in front of your notebook, but can’t seem to move your pen. Sound familiar? Writer’s block strikes again. But you don’t have to suffer for long. Great writers throughout the years have faced this problem and come up with clever tricks to get the words flowing again. If you’re having trouble getting your writing project finished (or started) here is some advice to get you going.

1) Just start typing or writing
It really doesn’t matter what you’re saying, as long as you’re saying something. Simply typing the same word over and over again, the simple motion of typing with your fingers, can force your brain to come up with something clever eventually.

“What I try to do is write. I may write for two weeks ‘the cat sat on the mat, that is that, not a rat.’ And it might be just the most boring and awful stuff. But I try. When I’m writing, I write. And then it’s as if the muse is convinced that I’m serious and says, ‘Okay. Okay. I’ll come.’” — Maya Angelou

Even drawing or doodling—just moving your pen around on paper—can set your imagination going. Consider writing captions for your drawings, word bubbles for pictures of people talking, anything and everything that simply gets words on paper.

 

2) Pretend you’re writing for yourself

 

Click here to read the full post on blurb.

 

Ten Things You Should Know About HP Lovecraft

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This post by Sian Cain originally appeared on The Guardian Books Blog on 8/20/14.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born on this day in 1890. We celebrate his birthday with 10 titbits about the father of weird and wonderful horror

1. Both his mother and father were separately committed to the same mental institution

Winfield Scott Lovecraft was committed to Butler Hospital after being diagnosed with psychosis when HP Lovecraft was only three years old. He died in 1898, when HP was eight. To this day, rumours persist that Winfield had syphilis, but neither HP nor his mother ever displayed symptoms.

Sarah Susan Phillips Lovecraft was later committed to Butler in 1919. She remained in close correspondence with her son for two years, until she died of complications after surgery.

 

2. He wanted to be a professional astronomer but never finished high school

As a sickly child, Lovecraft only attended school sporadically and was essentially self-educated. He was drawn to astronomy and chemistry, and the writings of gothic authors such as Edgar Allan Poe. Due to what he termed a “nervous breakdown”, Lovecraft never finished high school and instead only dabbled informally in his passions.

 

3. He rarely went out in public during daylight

 

Click here to read the full post on The Guardian Books Blog.

 

Pursuing the Creative Muse

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This post by J. Cafesin originally appeared on the Cafe 42 blog on 2/18/14.

How do you get good at anything?
Practice.

How do you get great?
Obsession—Practice most all the time.

Pick any famous author, artist, musician, and they’ll all have obsession in common. And while we, the public, enjoy the fruits of their creative labor, those closest to these individuals were/are generally left wanting.

Charles Schulz, creator of the Peanuts comic strip, “was an indifferent and often inattentive father and husband.”

Rod Serling, of Twilight Zone fame, “worked 12 hours a day seven days a week, [and] his wife, Carol, tended to their daughters, Jodi and Anne.”

Adrienne Armstrong, wife of Billy Joe Armstrong of Greenday said of her husband after the release of the album American Idiot, “I think it challenged us to a new level, pushed us pretty far, the farthest I ever want to go.”

The creatives above are all men. All married and all had/have children.

Now let’s explore a few famous women.

 

Click here to read the full post on the Cafe 42 blog.

 

Why Write?

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This post by Cathy Fyock originally appeared on The Working Writer’s Club on 8/14/14.

Getting clear on the purpose for your writing is one of the significant hurdles to getting your book completed. If you don’t know how you’ll use your book in your business, you may miss the mark or fail to leverage the full value of your authorship.
By being clear on how your book will benefit you and your business, you’ll find that you can justify the necessary time to write it. You’ll also find that identifying your purpose will provide fuel for your motivation and drive.

Look at the list below and determine which of these benefits of writing a book will fuel your motivation for getting your book completed. And, be sure to add to this blog by commenting [beneath the original post, here] on the benefits you plan to derive (or are currently receiving) from authorship.

To give to prospects as a “calling card”

To help sell your professional services

To establish your credibility

To gain media exposure

 

Click here to read the full post, which includes MANY more specific reasons for writing and publishing, on The Working Writer’s Club.

 

Crap Someone Should Have Told You Writers By Now

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This post by Rebecca T. Dickson originally appeared on her site on 9/4/13.

Sometimes, you don’t need preamble. Sometimes, you need someone to give it to you straight.

Hi. *waves*

This is for every writer on this whacked out planet.

• Your early work will suck.

• Your later work, in its early drafts, will still suck.

• No one cares about your writing unless you’re at (or near) the top of the New York Times bestseller list.

• Seriously. You could win the Pulitzer in literature and your friends would be, like, “Yeah, she’s writing or something boring like that. What a waste of time.”

• You cannot please everyone.

• YOU CANNOT PLEASE EVERYONE.

• So don’t try.

• Write for yourself. Failing that, write for one person.

• Listening to ten other people means ten extra people in your head when you write.

 

Click here to read the full post on Rebecca T. Dickson’s site.

 

Break Out Of Your Funk

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This post by John Grover originally appeared as a guest post on The Wredheaded Writer on 4/21/14.

For about twenty-five years, I’ve been having a love affair with writing horror. I’ve been writing for as long as I could hold a pen but I really took it seriously around the age of eighteen and wrote my first serious horror story. After that I wrote a novel. The short story was picked up by a magazine that went out of business soon after and the novel still sits in my closet, unpublished. Did that stop me from writing? Not in the least!

I love writing. It’s part of who I am; it makes me infinitely happy and I’ve written horror since I was able to read the likes of Mary Shelly, Bram Stoker, Edgar Allen Poe, Shirley Jackson and H.P. Lovecraft. I never have a lack of ideas or the ever-growing list of projects but sometimes I discover that what I truly lack is time and energy.

There never seems to be enough time to write everything I want and there are days when I’m just too tired to care, too tired to put in the time and think to myself where did that young guy go that wrote every single day no matter what?

 

Click here to read the full post on The Wredheaded Writer.

 

How Much My Novel Cost Me

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This post by Emily Gould originally appeared on Medium on 2/24/14.

Writing my first book got me into debt. To finish the next one, I had to become solvent.

IT’S HARD TO WRITE ABOUT BEING BROKE because brokeness is so relative; “broke” people run the gamut from the trust-funded jerk whose drinks you buy because she’s “so broke right now” to the people who sleep outside the bar where she’s whining. But by summer 2012 I was broke, and in debt, and it was no one’s fault but mine. Besides a couple of freelance writing assignments, my only source of income for more than a year had come from teaching yoga, for which I got paid $40 a class. In 2011 I made $7,000.

During that $7,000 year I also routinely read from my work in front of crowds of people, spoke on panels and at colleges, and got hit up for advice by young people who were interested in emulating my career path, whose coffee I usually ended up buying after they made a halfhearted feint toward their tote bag–purses. I felt some weird obligation to them and to anyone else who might be paying attention to pretend that I wasn’t poor. Keeping up appearances, of course, only made me poorer. I’m not sure what the point of admitting all this might be, because I know that anyone who experiences a career peak in his mid-twenties will likely make the same mistakes I did, and it’s not even clear to me that they were all mistakes, unless writing a book is always a mistake, which in some sense it must be.

In 2008 I sold a book-in-progress for $200,000 ($170,000 after commission, to be paid in four installments), which still seems to me like a lot of money. At the time, though, it seemed infinite. The resulting book—a “paperback original,” as they’re called—has sold around 8,000 copies, which is about a fifth of what it needed to sell not to be considered a flop. This essentially guarantees that no one will ever pay me that kind of money to write a book again.

It took me a while to realize that my book had failed. No one ever told me point-blank that it had.

 

Click here to read the full post on Medium.

 

3 Takeaways for Writers from the 2014 World Domination Summit

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This post by Jane Friedman originally appeared on her site on 7/15/14.

This past weekend, I attended the World Domination Summit (WDS) in Portland, which attracts 3,000 creative people who are concerned with answering the question: “How do we live a remarkable life in a conventional world?” They are guided by three values:

1. Community
2. Service
3. Adventure

Speaking personally, I’m really into the first two, as well as the third when it’s tied to travel and experiencing new cultures. (Some of the attendees are really into physical adventure.)

The weekend was full of insightful and passionate talks by accomplished people from around the world. Here are three takeaways I was left with.

 

1. You don’t need to have it all figured out to take the first step.

Some creative people get tripped up and never start things because they can’t envision how they’ll tackle a seemingly insurmountable project. And they can get paralyzed by everything they don’t know. Some people want to feel safe and take action that reduces risk or feels comfortable.

 

Click here to read the full post on Jane Friedman’s site.

 

Pity the Poor Writer's Husband

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This post by Holly Robinson originally appeared on Shelf Pleasure on 4/22/14.

“So, what do you want for Mother’s Day?” my husband asked a few years after our youngest son was born.

I hesitated, not wanting to appear too greedy. “Oh, I don’t really need anything,” I murmured.

“Come on,” he urged, taking me in his arms. “Tell me what you really want.”

“Um, okay. Can I have a weekend alone?”

He rolled his eyes. “Again?”

Yes. Again. Dan had given me a weekend alone the previous Christmas. Not in a fancy spa, but in a cheap hotel half an hour from home. It was the kind of hotel room where people lie on floral bedspreads still wearing their shoes, and pull the room-darkening drapes to either sleep off a bender or have an affair. I did neither. Instead, I holed up to write 10 hours a day on a novel. Pure bliss.

 

Click here to read the full article on Shelf Pleasure.

 

Research Unleashed! And Leashed.

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This post by Rebecca Meacham originally appeared on Ploughshares on 6/16/14.

I knew I had a problem when I started envying my dog’s cone collar.

Now, my dog’s problem was a hot spot. Allergic, itchy, hot, and double-coated, my German Shepherd had chewed her hind leg raw over the course of a single evening.

My problem was research. Engrossing, surprising, discomfiting and endless, my novel-in-progress was generating fact after fact, but very little story.

Neither of us could resist the itch of our obsessions, which were self-ruinous and spreading. For my dog, the vet imposed a “cone of shame”—a demoralizing, and mostly effective, plastic barrier denying her access. This is what sparked my envy, for what kind of restraint could I impose on myself, a writer whose project requires research—research that also derails the project at every turn?

 

Latest Findings: Novel Research Leads to Pornography

How does research become a problem? Well, for one, it’s larky. You wonder if your character’s pants would have buttoned or zipped, which means you need to know about the invention of zippers, and then, hours later, you’re pouring over sketches of Victorian pornography.

A surprising number of research inquiries lead to vintage porn.

 

Click here to read the full post on Ploughshares.

 

Try Harder or Walk Away: The Decision.

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This post by Rebecca Lammersen originally appeared on elephant on 6/23/12. While it has a spiritual (though non-religious) bent, those who are struggling with the decision between continuing on their current path toward success in authorship and changing course may find it offers some helpful food for thought.

“One of the hardest decisions you will ever face in life, is choosing whether to try harder or walk away.”
~ Anonymous

Try harder or walk away—this is the only choice we make in every moment of life. We either try harder or we walk away from being present, loving ourselves, loving another, pursuing our passions or completing a task. We choose to continue doing, thinking, saying, listening, eating and being what we are, or we break up with it.

There is only one way to do everything, completely or not at all. If we half-ass life, we cheat our truth, stop growing, we suffer.

Imagine if an architect half-assed plans for a building, or an aerospace engineer half-assed the construction of an airplane. The building couldn’t stand on its own and the plane couldn’t fly. We are the architects of our lives. We have to devote entirely to our project or walk away from the drawing pad until we are willing to do the work.

The choice to stay or leave, determines whether we free ourselves or we suffer. How do we make the “right” decision?

We learn how to discern between the doubt of the mind and the surety of the spirit.

The discernment is in the volume. The mind is loud and the spirit is quiet.

 

Click here to read the full post on elephant.

 

10 Things You Should Never Say to a Novelist

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This post by Josie Brown originally appeared on her Author Provocateur site on 6/9/14.

I’m being serious.

Okay, here goes:

 

1. “I’d write, too, but I can’t stand the thought of all the trees I’d be killing.” 

Yes, I’ve heard this one. My response back then was, “Don’t worry. You won’t sell enough books to raze a sapling, because your pub house won’t push you that hard to begin with.”

Today, I’d add, “And besides, most books are digital, so you can’t use the tree-killer bullshit as an excuse not to write anymore.”

 

2. “I’d write, too, but I just can’t make the time.”

Good. Stay busy. The world doesn’t need anothor author. Here’s a hint: It’s not a hobby. It’s a profession.

 

3. “Why don’t you kill off your series’ villian?” Because then I wouldn’t have a series. And if I don’t have a series, I don’t have the rent money. I’ll make you a promise: when and if he quits paying the rent, I’ll quit writing about him.

 

Click here to read the full post on Author Provocateur.