For those of you following along, Cora, Chapter 1 is on the way. I promised a Sunday evening deliver and I still hope to deliver as much. I just wanted to take a quick break from that creative process to vent a bit here and give my two-cents on the writing process (well, my writing process, to be more precise.)
If you're here reading this, you likely write a bit yourself. So I'd ask each of you, if you could give one piece of advise, one little secret of sorts you might have on feeling successful in your writing, what would it be? Don't worry, I'm going to kick things off with a few of my own.
But I'd also ask why do you write? For me, it's a release from the day to day. Whether it's midnight and I just can't will my eyes stay closed or it's noon and the kids are in school, it's my escape from every day life. I could be jotting down random thoughts to mull over later, starting a new piece of fiction, or just typing up a blog post for something that peaked my interest that day, but whatever it is, it's got my attention. All of it.
This is why I love fiction so much. Fiction is wonderful because no one can say 'Na, that wouldn't have happened that way,' because obviously, it just did. As I'm writing, I'm watching my ideas come to life in my head, sorting them out, then writing down the best of them. Sure, the process isn't quite complete; there's still plenty of editing, tweaking, re-reading, and more editing, but the bulk of it is there out of my head where I wanted it. And on a side-note, this touches a bit on another aspect of being the author of works that I love so much - I get many stories out of one. The reader of my works sees what I let them, what I deemed the best course of action for this plot, but I've seen many different paths our beloved characters could have wandered. Plus all of the little things unmentioned to save time, space, and continuity like our heroine's favorite music genre, hidden tattoos, and deepest, darkest thoughts and emotions.
To me, when the quiet time to do so is available, writing is therapeutic. Just typing out random thoughts, playing with them, maybe turning them into a little haiku only to be deleted when I grow bored with it, words thrill me. But when I get the time to truly delve into a world I've created and build it from the ground up, it's a feeling of something more than accomplishment. It's a euphoria of sorts, I suppose.
So onto the topic, eh? While I fiddle and dabble with many forms of writing, it's the novel and short story that keeps my attention best. I will admit, I've had some pretty bad follow through with many a lonely abandoned plot-line left for dead along some dark and dreary highway of the mind. But the ones that have stayed alive, the one's I've felt most confident in, have made every bit of collateral damage along the way more than worth the seemingly wasted time and energy. So, for my first bit of advice, find, and stick with, topics and concepts you genuinely enjoy. Don't try to write what's trending in Twitter or jump on the vampire/werewolf bandwagon because someone else has brought it up and made it pop-culture. Unless of course vampires and werewolves are your thing, then by all means, dig in. If your topic is something you're actually enthused about and interested in, you'll find it much easier to write about it successfully.
My second piece of advice is to stick with it. Whether you pop your laptop open to re-read and edit something previously written or you set aside a good block of time to sit down and outline, develop and write, devote some time each day, or at least a few days a week, to your craft. While much of it is like riding a bike, even riding a bike comes more naturally to those who do it on a regular basis than those of us guilty of leaving it chained up and neglected for far too long.
Now the last idea I will leave you with is a little more hands-on rather than the conceptual stuff. Outline. Whatever style works best for you, utilize, but outlining is probably the single most important step all-to-many-times missed when we're in a hurry to get something written down. I myself prefer mindmaps and there are a plethora of free programs out there from Android/IOS, MAC, and Windows to Linux. I myself am a Linux man and use FreeMind (screenshot below.)
So now it's your turn. What are your tips for the aspiring writers out here? What helps you keep on track, stay focused, develop your characters, and describe it all for the readers drooling to read your next bit?
