Tag Archive for: writing advice

The Write Life: Trust Your Gut

Ask a publishing professional what you should write next, and they’ll never tell you. “Write what you want to write,” they’ll say. They might say writing what you want will produce better results, or that no one can guess a trend. But there’s another aspect I’ve never heard someone say but am now realizing is essential to the creative process: You have to trust your gut.

Trusting your gut as a writer applies to many different aspects of the creative process. You have to trust your gut when you’re drawn to write your next project. Or when you’ve chosen a weird name for your main character. Or when your characters go off your planned course, but it feels inevitable and right in your gut.

There’s also a point when all your research looking for the right home, agent, or editor for your manuscript ends, and you just have to trust yourself to make the right choice. Sometimes you just feel good about something, so you send your email off into the world because it feels like the right time, the right person, and you hope.

That hope is part of the publishing process, too. It’s the thing that keeps writers going after a stack of rejections and years of work and refinement. It’s what pushes writers to write the next thing, submit the next story, and do it all again, despite the difficulty, frustration, and feelings of failure. But we keep going because something in our gut keeps pulling us forward, and we keep trusting it to lead us in the right direction.

I’ve been too in my head about writing recently. I’ve been too caught up in the “right way” to start a novel. Too busy analyzing where to best spend my time. Too lost thinking about writing instead of slapping words on the page like a writer. I haven’t been spending much time listening to my gut, and that has got to change.

I’ve had a lot of distractions this month (mostly in the form of covid), so I haven’t made much progress on this change, but knowing what my next steps should be is making me feel more confident about my writing future.

How about you? Do you trust your gut when it comes to writing? Any suggestions on how I can get better at trusting my gut again?

 

 

For full access to The Write Life and more about what I’ve done to assist with my creative life, sign up on Patreon for $1 or more per month. You’ll also receive a personalized thank you in a future edition of The Write Life.

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The Write Life: Creative Confidence

The main difference between finishing a project and not is often confidence. The confidence we feel about our creative work is what keeps us going through the hiccups, the rough days, and the multiple revisions. It helps us make choices, stick with them, and show our work to other people. Confidence in our creativity is what gets us to write in the first place—and what sees us through to the end.

Friends, let me tell you, this month my creative confidence has been shaky.

It’s no great secret I’m a planner by nature. (Have you been around here for ten seconds? I talk about it constantly and probably have it documented in a spreadsheet.) I leave space in all my writing plans for some serendipitous pantsing—a connection or worldbuilding detail that blooms as I draft and will be folded in to enhance what’s already planned—but by and large, I draft an outline, I set a scene list, and I follow that basic structure.

The reason I follow that structure is not because that’s the way I should write, it’s because, largely, it’s a solid structure! I know what I’m doing when I plan out a story. I’ve internalized story structure through all my watching and reading and studying, so that when I record my plan and step through the story, everything makes sense and builds to satisfying climaxes and resolved character arcs. When I start rearranging the furniture as I draft, it becomes very obvious why I arranged the events in this order in the first place.

It’s been frustrating this month when my brain just hasn’t wanted to write the scene that way. When I get stuck in a moment and can’t find my way out without inventing a new twist or direction in the plot. When I think the timeline is both too long and too short because (wait for it)… I lost my creative confidence.

The problem isn’t that my story plan was wrong or weak or lacking in any way. My problem is that I’m having difficulty in other areas of my life and it’s shaking my confidence. Since writing comes from our emotions and current headspace, mental health is key to a writer’s ability to write. When stress, anxiety, or depression affects us, it can stop us in our tracks in huge ways unless we can find some way to maintain our creative confidence.

I’m regaining it in fits and spurts—and I’m almost through this chapter that’s been plaguing me—but creative confidence is an ongoing struggle. If you’ve been struggling with your confidence, I hope you can find some solace in knowing you’re not the only one and I hope you find your confidence again soon.

 

 

For full access to The Write Life and more about what I did to restore my creative confidence, sign up on Patreon for $1 or more per month. You’ll also receive a personalized thank you in a future edition of The Write Life.

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The Write Life: Prepping October

October is always a busy month for me because it’s all about the NaNoWriMo Prep. As a Municipal Liaison for my local region, I spend less time prepping myself and my project, and more time prepping events and social media posts and coordinating with local writing groups. One of the biggest events I handle in October is the NaNOrlando Writers Conference.

This is the third year I’ve put on this conference with the help of the Orange County Library System and generous writers who have willingly let me bully them into donating their time and experience to teach wrimos about quick drafting, preparing their characters and world, and using conflict and inspiration to fuel their novel throughout the month. (I’m mostly kidding about the bullying. If you ask a writer to talk about writing, it’s harder to get them to stop talking.)

Since this year was a virtual event, I reached beyond our usual stable of local writers and drew in my friend Karen Osborne (whose awesome science fiction novel debuted in August) and Pitch Wars mentors Sofiya Pasternack and Emily Colin. I loved getting to have a few new ideas about writing conflict and approaching world building, and Emily tackled a topic on inspiration that has been on my wish list for a while. Joining our distanced instructors were Jenny Broom (Developing Your Main Character), Elle E. Ire & José Iriarte (Finishing Your First Draft), and Jennie Jarvis (Basic Plot Structures). With these six workshops we covered pretty much every basic element of storytelling and every trick to help writers get through a 50,000-word draft of a novel in a month.

I took a lot of notes throughout the conference, tweeting some of the best quotes and advice to our NaNOrlando Twitter account (some of which also appeared on our Facebook and Instagram), but I figure the best way for me to talk about the conference is to leave you with some of my favorite quotes. So, here’s what I learned or was reminded of during the 2020 NaNOrlando Writers Conference:

  • Considering why was a recurring theme in developing worlds and characters.
    Sofiya suggested that every time we answer a question about the world, ask     why to learn more about the underlying structure of the world.
    Jenny also reminded us that the     why of a character’s choices says a lot about the character.

  • Karen compared story conflict to a three-lane highway, with the story-car weaving in and out of these lanes to switch between conflict with the self, conflict with others, and conflict with the environment. Considering that I always think of story threads as braiding, this description really appealed to me.

  • I’ve heard José and Elle talk about writer XP in other presentations, but I always love this quote from them, “You don’t get those points until you finish writing the book.” I think about this every time I leave a story half-finished, or when an outline stops without an ending. I have to keep going if I want to level up!

  • Emily reminded us to revisit what first excited us about our projects when we feel blocked or bored. José also noted that when he feels blocked, it means his subconscious knows what he planned doesn’t make sense. Both thoughts made me feel better about going back to planning in the middle of drafting—sometimes you have to go backward to go forward.
“Aristotle believed that the whole reason we engage in stories to begin with is because we’re able to experience something vicariously that we can’t experience in our own life.” — Jennie Jarvis
“We write to get into a story, so even if you don’t use it, it helped you get into the story.” — Jenny Broom
“Nano is a hot mess while it’s happening, but you get words on the page and you can turn it into awesome stuff.” — Sofiya Pasternack
“The things that make you feel bad about sitting down to write are the killers. Forgive yourself for what you did not do yesterday. Every day is a clean slate.” — José Iriarte

 

 

For full access to The Write Life, sign up on Patreon for $1 or more per month. You’ll also receive a personalized thank you in a future edition of The Write Life.

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