Once upon a time in the land of fiction, I found myself captivated by the allure of morally ambiguous characters—those fascinating creatures who lurk in the shadows of good and evil, making every story they grace infinitely more intriguing. Let’s take a moment to appreciate these enigmatic beings who dance on the fine line between…
You wanna mess up a writer tell them to write something original. See how long it takes them to freeze up and then fall to bits. What many beginning writers fail to realize to their detriment is that purposely trying to come up with wholly original stuff is folly and only results in one thing:…
In any creative endeavor, productivity matters. You can be as creative as you like, but that won’t matter if you don’t finish anything or get your work out there for all to see.
As a writer, if all you do is write and don’t publish anything, or worse, don’t finish anything, how is that being productive?
In my book, that’s about as unproductive as you can get.
But what is the main cause of being unproductive?
In a word: perfectionism.
It’s a curse that helps no one.
If you want to know how to beat it, read on.
Finishing the first draft of a novel for the very first time is for a writer akin to finally learning to swim.
You’ll have spent so much time struggling to complete a finished draft—floundering in a sea of confusion, frustration and procrastination—that when you finally finish it can seem like you’ve been saved from drowning.
You have learned to swim and you are now free to take yourself in any direction you want to go. Suddenly, it’s not about keeping yourself from drowning, but about staying afloat and swimming towards the goal of a fully completed novel.
The choppy seas have calmed somewhat, making it easier for you swim.
Once you know you are capable of finishing the first draft of a novel, things change. A mental shift occurs and suddenly you have the confidence to feel like a real writer.
You now have what it takes to write novels.
There’s no going back after that.
You’ve done it, you know you can do it and you will keep doing it.
It’s a milestone that every novelist has to cross in order to find success, which is why it is so important that you do all you can to insure that first draft gets completed.
If you still struggle to finish the first draft of a novel, don’t despair, all is not lost. It’s not as hard as you think and there are things you can do to make reaching that goal even easier.
When it comes to writing for an audience, either through books or blogging, one of the biggest mistakes writers often make is that they try to write for too wide an audience.
Of course we all want as many people as possible to read our stuff, but in trying to please too many people at once you will weaken your writing and reduce the chances of your work connecting with people.
If you want your writing to have more of an impact, one of the best things you can do is to narrow the audience you are writing for.
By impact, I mean that your writing will be truly useful and valuable to a select group of people, the people that your content is targeted towards. These people already want what you have to offer, you just have to find them first.
Having little or no impact comes from people reading your work who don’t care about it, simply because they have no need for what you are offering.
It makes sense to target people who will give a shit, not those who won’t. The best way to reach those people is to define who they are first.
Writing isn’t all about the craft. The craft is important yes, but so is the groundwork you lay in order to practice the craft of writing to its fullest extent.
There are things you can do before you start to write that will make a big difference to how you write once you actually begin.
It’s about the laying the proper groundwork so you can write at your fullest potential.
Read on to find out how you can give yourself the best chance of producing great work.
Out of everything I have done to try and improve myself as a writer over the years, there is one thing in particular that I did which helped me take my writing and myself as a writer to the next level.
What is that one thing?
I created a good writing environment.
That’s right. I found a place that I could go to every day and write without any distractions.
Before that, I used to try and write anywhere. Mostly I wrote at home, late at night when everyone else was in bed sleeping. That worked for me for a while, but it got to the point where I could hardly concentrate at such a late hour. My mind and body was tired and I didn’t have the energy or focus to sit there and write for the hour or two it would take me to finish something.
Most writers do their writing at home. The problem with that is that most writers also have families and an infinite number of distractions to contend with. This can seriously slow down your progress.
Back when I started to write fiction, one of the things I struggled with was plotting my stories. I wasn’t alone there either. How to structure a novel is the single biggest challenge that I see most beginner and novice writers complain about, and with good reason.
The plot structure of a novel, more than anything else, will determine the success or failure of that novel.
You can have a cast of great characters, interesting settings and all the rest, but without a logical narrative structure to hang those elements on, your story will go nowhere, leaving anyone who reads it unsatisfied, if they even finish the whole book and don’t put it down after a few chapters.