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Overanalyzing My Writing Process
Hi. 🙂 I’ve been thinking. Hahaha. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about my writing process and how to improve it. When I think about the stories that I love the most, the ones I’ve written, they have a couple of interesting things in common. First, I didn’t overthink the minor details. Or the plot. Or even character arcs. I had the main things in place. The main characters, the main plot, the beginning and ending, and some points along the way. I had moments of doubt, of course, that I conveniently and unfortunately keep forgetting about. But the fact of the matter is, I didn’t think too much about what I…
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Writing Life: Experimentation Files
Sometimes when I’m in an experimenting mood I feel like I take it too far. Like, a story set 1000 years in the future sounds super fun! But sometimes it’s too much at once. I get overwhelmed and then curl into a ball and quit. So I decided to try experimenting in a different kind of way. It’s not that I feel like I can’t write a story set in the future. It’s that I need to figure out how to do that without getting overwhelmed. I have a story set 500 years in the future, I think, and tackling all the world building was fun, but it was also…
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Story Life: Finding The Right Intro
I didn’t finish any of the books I’m reading this month, so I’m going to talk about writing instead. ^_^ So, the story I’m calling the current project has been a work-in-progress for a while. Sometimes, for fun, as part of my general writing process, I mess around and write a potential opening scene. It helps me get a feel for the characters and their voices and the world. Sometimes I get to keep this. Most times I don’t. For the current project, it was great for getting into the MC’s head and finding her voice and getting used to her personality, because she’s a strange one, but what I…
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Letting the Bad Guy Win
Guys! Have you ever been watching a movie and wanted the villain to just…get away with everything? I don’t want this all the time. There’s something so satisfying about watching a hero rise up and slay the beast, metaphorically or not metaphorically speaking. But sometimes, I want the bad guy to win. Sometimes I identify too much with them. Sometimes I don’t like the hero! One of my favorite movies of all time, that will remain nameless for this example to avoid spoilers because that twist is too good, has a main character who’s being stalked by a someone who’s getting increasingly more threatening to our hero every time he…
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Random Writing Thoughts
Fun backstory: In 2008, I spent the entire year writing and editing one story. It was the first new novel in 5 years, and even though I knew the story would likely be terrible, I put my tiny amount of creative energy to work and did it anyway. That may not sound like a long time, but spending an entire year on one project was actual torture for me. I felt like I was trying to dig for treasure with my bare hands in the driest soil on earth. It was painful. Needless to say, that book wasn’t great. But it was the first time I had written a novel…