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My Best Writing Advice Part 3: How I Write for Six Hours a Day
This is the (very long) third installment to my “Best Writing Advice” series.Click here for My Best Writing Advice Part 1: “Riding” Like a ProfessionalClick here for My Best Writing Advice Part 2: The Three Keys to a Professional Routine Without further ado, Part 3: In August of 2017, I had a little bit of a meltdown. I had finished the novel I’d been working on since my childhood, and had decided to shelve it. While I’d planned for the book to be the first in a series, I realized it would work much better as a sequel, and the new “first book” had yet to be written. I even…
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My Best Writing Advice Part 2: The Three Keys to a Professional Routine
Last week I drew out a very long analogy to demonstrate why having a professional writing routine before publication is, in my opinion, one of the most important skills you can develop as an unpublished author. I claimed that, “Having a predictable, productive, and sustainable approach to your writing is just as important as writing well.” Now, if I’m going to claim that predictability, productivity and sustainability are the three keys of professional writing, I should probably define what I mean by those terms. Key 1. PREDICTABILITY I work analogous to a lot of women who, on top of writing, carry the majority of the domestic duties in their home, such as parenting,…
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My Best Writing Advice Part 1: “Riding” Like a Professional
Imagine you have a horse, a newborn foal, fresh out of the caul and at first it can’t even stand on four legs. It learns to walk, awkwardly, and you fall in love. Let’s say there’s a parade coming up in a few years with a prize for the best horse, and you believe in your horse and want to get that prize. So you feed your horse and give it water. Sometimes you give it treats — apples and carrots — and it nuzzles you and oh, isn’t everything just wonderful? It comes time to train the horse, which you thought would be easy, since you and your horse…
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Five Things I Got Wrong about Blogging (and the One Thing I Got Right)
Full Disclosure: this isn’t my first blog. In December 2010 I created a blog that lasted almost exactly three years. I had 98 posts and 81,592 views. All things considered, that ain’t bad. So what went wrong? Why’d I quit? And why is the blog nowhere to be found? Well, as far as I can tell, I made five crucial mistakes. 1) I gave unqualified advice. I talked a lot about things I had no experience in or real understanding of. I gave advice on how to write a query; I’d never written an actual query. I wrote about reducing your novel’s word count; I’d never finished a novel. I…
