Now that I have a whopping one month of extra writing experience under my belt, it’s time for the next set of Writer Confessions! Let’s get down to it.
- I admitted to the leader of a prose-writing workshop my worst fear was being misunderstood. He misunderstood what I meant.
- Procrastination can be weaponized. If you have trouble motivating yourself to write, assign yourself another pressing task to do. Slap a deadline on it the coincides with your latest writing goal. You will be amazed how much writing you’ll suddenly find the excuse for.
- My handwriting now is much worse than my handwriting in kindergarten. It no longer resembles English in any way. People ask frequently why I write in hieroglyphics, and how much Arabic I know.
- There’s a place for planning, timelining, and regimenting, but also a place where you need to just…let go. Do some yoga breathing. Mutilate the stress ball. Make the best decision for your story, even if it’s spontaneous or contradictory to your original idea. You can’t force the shape of your narrative.
- Even if you’re a free spirit who doesn’t buy into literary shtick about theme, motif, and symbolism, it can’t hurt to brainstorm a word cloud of things you associate with your gestating story. Plus word clouds are fun.
- If you hate yourself but love your novel, use your word processor or an online application to hunt down the words you use most often. “Phantom,” for instance, is a neat adjective you might use on one page, but probably should not use on every page.
- Many writers draw profound inspiration from pain and tragedy, and pour it out as raw expression. I fell down both sides of a snow-covered hill yesterday and am still trying to find the meaning.
The second one works perfectly for me and the last one too. I always love to read your Writer Reports a lot.
The writing process is twisty, but fun! It’s always interesting to hear how other writers handle it, especially procrastination.
Enjoyed reading this!
I’m a horrible procrastinator! I remind myself everyday that I am as I look at my story I wrote last year. I know I have to get back on it but I’m afraid, the love I had for it as I worked furiously to craft it, is lost. Maybe it’s just exhaustion? I dont know but I’ll find it again. I just hope sooner rather than later.
One of the worst feelings in the world is for a writing teacher to misunderstand what you said.
Right?! Thanks for stopping by! I personally find that playing with setting for scenes I’ve written or am planning to write makes them much more exciting to return to. I hope to read your finished work eventually.
Have you ever participated in Nanowrimo? Once you get into it, it can be a great motivator.
Oh goodness no. Nanowrimo, is too much for me. I dont have that much time to devote to it. And my fear with that is writing won’t be fun anymore for me.
What I have been doing is writing little stories hear and there. Or I wrote back stories for my characters featured in my book, hoping it would spark an interest in going back to it. The jury is still out.
Ha ha, I understand! If you do the April or July version you can set your own goals (hours, paragraphs, words, pages), so you might have a better time there, but I know it’s really not for everybody.
Sometimes you just kind of lose the Writer Feelings for stories, but then sometimes they come back with a vampiric vengeance a year or so later. That happened to me with my current WIP, “Lost and Found.” I left it to work on a different project because I was sick to death of writing nothing but (ridiculous 200,000 word novel), and then by the middle of THAT project I was pining for it like an ex I hadn’t gotten over.
You are god of your creation, and a beautiful human. I wish you the best of luck!
😊 same to you!
🦉(my emoji for you) BTW
*screeches inarticulate love*
I wish there was a way to create an emoji, then it would be a ghost owl, but alas😔