Category : creative process

Not Writing Earnestly

About writing fiction, Ernest Hemingway said:

The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day when you are writing a novel you will never be stuck. That is the most valuable thing I can tell you so try to remember it.

He clearly didn’t have ADHD because I’ve tried that and 90% of the time, when I come back the next day, I cannot for the life of me remember what I intended to write next. What was that character going to say? What were those two characters going to argue about? Where was everyone going to go next? I DON’T KNOW ANYMORE. So I go writing down a different track and maaaaaybe much later I’ll remember what I had meant to write but going back and changing at this point would be a massive rewrite or I never recall it and it doesn’t matter anyway because the story’s off on a new direction and it’s never going back.

Sometimes the best thing you can do with advice is not follow it.

5-12-2020 |

Achievement Unlocked

As 2018 became 2019, I decided to try working a new habit into my morning routine. After feeding my cat and making myself a cup of coffee, I would sit at my laptop and write a paragraph of fiction. Every morning. Not a paragraph of the same story, not a paragraph that would necessarily grow to be larger than a paragraph, definitely not a paragraph I would show anyone. Just write at least one paragraph, at least three sentences long, of something fictional. It could be the beginning of a story. It could be the ending on an unwritten story. It could fall somewhere in the middle. It could just be a description of a person, a thing, a place. It could be some fictional history or other worldbuilding. It could just be practicing sentence structure and otherwise be nonsense. I just wanted to get into the habit of practicing writing the way an artist sketches or a musician practices their instrument.

As of today, I’ve written a full month of paragraphs. What do I do now?

I mean, besides keep writing, obviously.

1-31-2019 | 2

An Impossible Story

On one hand, with the premise “adventurer can travel anywhere in time and space, in stories that can be pretty much any genre or mashup of genres”, it makes sense to me that Doctor Who would be such an incredibly long-running, popular series. But… (more…)

8-28-2018 | 3

Cabin in the Words

I did a thing! It was fun and brilliant and none of you will ever get to see it. Maybe. We’ll see.

I decided to do Camp NaNoWriMo this April. I failed at it, but more importantly, I succeeded at it. It turns out, if I give myself two goals, I have a better chance of hitting at least one of them. At least when it comes to writing. Actually, I can think of some other areas where that works, too, but that’s another blog post or two. (more…)

5-02-2018 |

Here There Be Draggin’

I spend a lot of time thinking about writing. Much more time thinking about it than actually doing it. Okay, that’s not entirely true. I’ve been writing poetry consistently for a while, posting poems twice a week. I tweet a lot, I post little rants and raves on Facebook, but fiction? Not so much with the fiction writing. Just thinking about the fiction writing. (more…)

4-06-2018 |

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