What is writer’s block?
It’s that inexplicable dead silence in your brain when you fire up the laptop to work on a novel, a chapter, a short story… a blog post. It’s that debilitating feeling of utter emptiness where a story should be. You know its there, just moments ago while driving home you had a great idea but now you’re at your laptop and it’s nothing but crickets. Right?
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My knee-jerk reaction is: “Pfft. Absolutely not. Chaos is terrible and serves no purpose, there must be order in all things.”
But then I wrote a book and it changed my mind.
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Have you ever been disappointed in a show or book because the villain is taken down too easily? Or conversely, lost interest because the villain is just too powerful, or to indestructible?
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Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
-E. L. Doctorow
I have been working on my first novel for a year now, but if I’m being honest I’ve not been serious about it. It’s always just something I work on when I don’t have anything else and even then only half assed. I guess subconsciously I put it so far up on a pedestal that it sort of became this magical, unobtainable glass ceiling that only “real authors” were allowed to achieve.
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Have you ever participated in a writing contest? How about a flash fiction one? How about a flash fiction challenge with only 48 hours to write, edit, and have beta read a story, in an assigned genre you may or may not be familiar with? You should, it’s a great teaching tool.
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A few months ago I wrote a short story about a gangster who was beaten and left for dead and forced to walk back into the city to exact his revenge. I drew on all my experiences of pain,
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There’s something to be said for holding and reading a book; the smell of the ink, the crackle of the dust jacket, the weight of its pages… that is someone’s imagination right there in solid, tangible… destructible form. Continue reading Anachronism: Someone not of their time or a lover of a simpler time.
Do you ever find your story wandering off down random paths or fizzling out into mundane nothingness or worse halting at the first sign of a plot twist?
Right now, there are dozens of
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Some people thrive with a deadline looming up head and some people freeze into a block of ice.
For me, if the deadline is for my scheduled spot on the group blog, a paid for contest, or some other reason where people are counting on me then the project is first priority.
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The pen is an instrument of discovery rather than just a recording implement.
-Billy Collins
Holding a pen in my hand is like having a magic wand with the power to turn the images, emotions, and ideas in my imagination into a tangible and shareable piece of literature. There’s something organic and pure and cathartic in using a real pen that you can’t get from a lifeless keyboard.
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