Novel….
A novella….
A short story….
An encyclopedia of the Star Wars expanded universe—pre-Disney and post-Disney….
Maybe you’ve done some creative writing in high school and college and now you have the bug to be more serious about it.
Maybe you’re wanting to finally enter into the world of blogging, but aren’t sure how to structure your posts.
Perhaps you want to branch into the world of freelance writing and content creation.
Or perhaps you’ve never put pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, for anything other than required papers a school or emails and now you have the bug to write something. Maybe you even have a great story idea…but you’re not sure how to get it out and down and into the world.
That’s okay. Neither did I.
And, to tell you the truth…I still don’t. Meaning—I’m still learning.
While I mainly talk about writing from a story (“creative writing”) aspect, everything I talk about in here can be applied to all forms of work—blog posts, research papers, podcast scripts, graduate theses, business papers, articles, whatever—even though the type of writing you do has a different structure. All writing has a plot or story, a narrative—a beginning, middle and end—so my suggestions here simply need tailoring to what it is you’re working on.
And even similar works end up having a fully different structure (fiction is well-known for this!) as each piece you write has its own personality.
Everything I’ve ever written is its own beast. Every paper I wrote in college, every email I wrote to clients as a life coach and write to current clients, every poem or story or blog post I’ve written is its own thing. And each one teaches me more about the craft.
Writing is an incredibly daunting experience, fraught with a lot of negativity—your own, from others. As I wrote Backbeat, my first novel, I had someone very close to me say, “Well, don’t get your hopes up about publishing it.” I’m here to make it less daunting and give you ways to create a Teflon shield to any negativity you’ll possibly encounter.
I’m not going to do you the disservice of telling you I can make writing easy for you, but it can become easier. There’s a big difference between the two.
So hooray to you that you want to start a writing project!
Or maybe you’re well into one—or have several works under your belt. Or perhaps you’re published or waiting for that status. And, if you’re like me, I love reading about how other people write and how they get their works out to the world, as it ads to my arsenal of creativity. I’ve found the more tools you have, the easier it is to create.
As Stephen King said in On Writing in his very tongue-in-cheek way, (or at least the quote was something to this effect), “Writing good is easy. Writing well is hard.”
This is not a “how to write” series of posts—as in I’m telling you how you need to write.
Instead, they’re aimed more towards encouraging you to either start writing, or keep on writing, framed around suggestions that have worked well for me, and may for you as well, whether you’re an established writer, or just typed out the first words to your first story, blog post or article.
That means what you read here is more of a “suggestions for how to develop your writing” collection.
I want to help you make writing easier. Writing is still tough and can feel like trying to drag a broken down Volvo Station Wagon up a steep hill. In a snowstorm. At night. If my suggestions work for you, yay! If they don’t—all I ask is you try them on for size before rejecting them. If you want help sorting out how to tailor them to your needs, contact me.
It’s as Bruce Lee said: “Absorb what is useful, discard what is not, add what is uniquely your own.” (I’d love to hear from you ways you’ve found to make the process easier!)
Writing, despite its frustrations and headaches, is worth the effort, and I want to help you through that effort, no matter what it is you’re writing.
I believe that writing is best and most satisfyingly approached if you do it for yourself and only for yourself. Feedback is helpful (opinions about your writing isn’t feedback as it’s not constructive), but the more you focus on what others might think about your story, the easier it is to become beset with so much self doubt you may not even try.
There are writers who are worse than you and writers who are better than you. There are also horrible writers who land three-book deals and writers who are basically sitting on the next Great American Novel Classic, but can’t find an agent or publisher. You’d have better luck creating a trap guaranteed to catch a unicorn than try to figure out the mechanics of the world of writing and publishing.
Yes, it’s thrilling to entertain the idea of a book you’ve written as a best-seller with millions of readers, but even authors who do will tell you they write for the enjoyment of it. The best-sellers and even movie deals are merely a nice offshoot of their passion. It’s not why they write.
That’s what this series of posts is about, really—giving you ways I’ve found that helps me continue to write—and continue to want to write. I do talk about it from keeping your readers reading, yes…but, ultimately, it’s still about you writing for you, even if the stories never leave your possession.
But I also want to encourage you to consider publishing your stories somehow, either through Amazon (which does an amazing job), a well-reputed “vanity press” or a “regular” publishing house. (I’ll touch on the ins and outs, pluses and minuses of publishing in a later post.)
Overall, however, I approached these posts from a perspective of not only encouraging you to continue to write, no matter what, but to also “de-confuse” (to coin a word) you about aspects of writing that are often mentioned as important, but without any kind of explanation.
For example, in many “how to write” articles and books (which again this isn’t) you’ll read, “Editing is important!” but not exactly why. You’ll read, “Research is important!”…but not exactly why. When I mention these aspects of writing to burgeoning authors, I’m often met with the question of, “Why?”
My thought is that by explaining the “Why” and giving examples, how I deal with times I get stuck, you’ll better understand why the more mundane aspects of the writing process, such as editing and research, are helpful and necessary, and how they can keep you inspired to continue your story or stories.
I also speak from my personal perspective about what I’ve found works to make the whole writing process easier.
Here are some of the subjects I plan to cover:
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Publishing
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Editing
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Research
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Writer’s block
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Developing your plot and your characters (to create a sense of realism)
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Creating realistic dialogue
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How to ignore naysayers about your writing goal or goals
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Feedback (giving and receiving)
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How to keep yourself inspired and motivated
The posts are numbered, and don’t follow an order I deem important. Rather, they follow an order in which I tend to get asked questions pertaining to the subject.
You can, if you wish, skip around by clicking on “Table of Contents” in the top menu, then “Heather Curry Self Posts”, then “Writing About Writing”. That sub-header will then present you with groupings of chapters, which then list each one individually.
There is also a search box on the right-hand menu, just below the orange “Subscribe” button.
Here are my first few suggestions to get you started:
1. Make sure you have notepads everywhere as you never know when an idea will strike you.
And by everywhere, I mean everywhere.
That way you won’t forget it. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thought of something I want to include in a story or a blog post and think to myself, “Oh, this is good! I’ll definitely remember this!” and then, later, all I can think is, “Dammit…I had a good idea. What was it?!” Sometimes it returns, but often it doesn’t.
I use my phone’s notepad feature, and I will also email ideas to myself, sometimes in the subject line, then expand upon them in the body. This way I’ll see it when I log into my email and be reminded of it.
Another great way to get your notes down is to send yourself an email; this is my favorite way of noting an idea if I can’t actually write it down, such as in the grocery store or 2 a.m.; in these moments it’s easier to pull out my phone, create an email with my idea in the subject line, then send it to myself.
And get a white board for your bathroom. It’s amazing how often plot holes fill in or I figure out how to fix a badly-written scene—or even something to add in that’s new—and I’m shampooing my hair.
2. Do your best to have a dedicated space to write. Or at least a time.
This can be a comfy chair with your laptop on a tray, alone in a favorite pub or coffee shop, the basement, the garage, a corner of your living room. Your writing space doesn’t have to be tidy. It doesn’t have to be an official office. It could simply be a closet where you sit inside on the floor, laptop or tablet on your legs. Or may vary frequently. That’s fine. But having a dedicated space/time (as best as you can) helps instill the habit and even keep the motivation fires burning.
However…I do and don’t agree with the idea of needing to write every day.
Let me expand on that.
Sometimes schedules vary due a wide variety of reasons and you may not have the ability to block off a specific writing time every day. But if you make writing a priority, it’s oddly amazing how time suddenly appears, seemingly out of nowhere, even if it means 20-30 minute spurts.
This is how folks with busy families work on their writing—as do people who have odd work schedules, like nurses or first responders.
It’s harder, I know. But it can be done.
Most of the time, I do personally find it easier to cordon off a specific time if I’m actively working on a project such as these posts or a novel. When I had an office job, I would get up a little earlier and write solidly for a couple of hours before work, then again in the evening.
But if I’m in a lull for writing, I don’t create a specific time.
That’s my time to catch up on my reading, or back episodes of a favorite TV show sitting in my DVR. And sometimes this is exactly what your creative mind needs, as it’s often in these lulls you suddenly get an idea for your story—how to fix a plot hole, a new scene or conversation. This is why having notepads within reach everywhere is handy.
To all that, when you choose to write is up to you. If you want to make it a habit at a particular time, that’s fine. If you have a schedule that varies from day-to-day and it’s harder to establish a set time for writing…that’s fine, too.
3. Be gentle with yourself as you craft your writing projects, whatever they may be.
This does sound rather sappy, I know. But I hear from many writers who are so hard on themselves about their writing (being in a lull, not able to fix a passage exactly as they want) that it’s almost as if they’re trying to bully themselves into a creative mode.
This doesn’t work.
Writing is challenging and even grueling at times, but getting upset with yourself because you can’t make something perfect, or you can’t quite get down what you have in your head—or any number of ways you can possibly beat yourself up over your writing—only serves to make the process harder and to exacerbate your frustration as a whole.
4. Your stories will not fall out of you perfectly made; it’s likely you’ll find that you’ve written some absolute schlock—sometimes so schlocky you’re embarrassed.
You will get stuck (and these posts are aimed to help you get unstuck.) You will sometimes scrap entire scenes, chapters or even a draft and have to start completely over. Sometimes even works you’ve spent weeks and months and maybe even years on.
Or maybe, like when your best friend reads an early—but decent—draft of your novel and says, “I like the story. But your ending needs to go at the beginning, and the beginning at the end.”
(And you realize it’s true…so there you are, five drafts in and essentially having to start completely over.)
That’s okay. That doesn’t mean you “can’t” write—it’s something all writers run into. Trent Reznor, the frontman for Nine Inch Nails, got to a point with an album (nearly completed!) where he became so frustrated with the outcome not being what he wanted, he scrapped the whole thing and started over.
So if you’ve been procrastinating on starting something because of the fear of writing schlock, start writing. If you have something that’s simply not going the way you want…consider the possibility that draft was a dry run and it’s time to start over.
As Ernest Hemingway said, “The first draft of anything is shit.” My joke is that as soon as I finished my first draft for Coming Home, I started a second first draft. The first one was terrible from a story-telling aspect, but it was a great framework from which I could build upon.
You have to put down something—even if it comes out sounding embarrassingly awful. That’s when you can make changes and keep improving it.
That’s the neat thing about writing—it isn’t set in stone; you can edit it.
I would love to have feedback from you.
I’d like to hear what you liked about the posts, what you think I should add, how the exercises I provided did (or didn’t) work for you.
I would also love to hear the way you create your writing process.
Writing is an ever-morphing craft, and that’s what’s so amazing about it. I learn something new every time I create something.
Writing is a fabulous, terrible, exciting, frustrating. But it’s also an extremely rewarding process. My goal is to help you continue to hold the joy of writing within you, even if you’re feeling quite flummoxed or thwarted by a character, scene, chapter or plot line.
“Writing a book is a tremendous experience. It pays off intellectually.
It clarifies your thinking. It builds credibility.…You should write one.”
— Seth Godin Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?
Maybe you’ll be the one signing a book for me!