Just looked at today's date and realized it's the end of NaNo Week 3. No blog post update drafted. Aaaaand that's how my week three is going, folks. I'm solidly beyond the "beginning" parts of the book, into what might tentatively be called the "middle." For me, writing the middle is more than a little… Continue reading NaNoWriMo 2019: Week 3 or Oops, I Forgot to Write a Blog Post
Popping my head up from the word-count trenches to give a quick, week-two update... (Here are my two previous posts about my NaNo foray if you're interested: my commitment to actually participate, and my week 1 update.) Definitely some rough days where my mental/creative energy output wasn't sufficient to hit that magic number (1,667 words). I gave… Continue reading NaNoWriMo 2019: Week 2
Novel outlining methods look so great on paper. Everything is in neat steps. You basically have an organized checklist for writing 50k+ words. But none of them work for me. A large part of being an artist is understanding your own creative process. If you can learn to work with yourself, your strengths and weaknesses,… Continue reading The Feminine Creative Process
I've been largely absent here for 2019. Sorry about that. I've been putting my writing energy and time into my novel. The concept for it has been rattling around in my head since 2014. I only just found an ending in November 2018, and, in May 2019, finished a first, full draft of the whole… Continue reading Stop Writing, Please
You've set aside a couple of hours to write, and you've been looking forward to it all day. You finally get home. You get your snacks, your tea or coffee, settle down to write, and... You can't find the mental energy to begin the process of writing, or stay in the groove long enough to… Continue reading Why is Writing So Hard?
Twitter has made me a better writer. Sounds like clickbait, right? It's totally not. When I graduated with my creative writing degree, I lost a lot of involvement in the supportive writing community I had gotten used to. Thankfully, the internet is teeming with brilliant people building virtual writing communities. In particular, there are amazing… Continue reading The Twitter Revision Experiment: Writer’s Edition
I've been thinking a lot about the concept of liminal space. The English word liminal comes from the Latin word limen which means threshold. It is the in-between. Something has ended and the next thing hasn't started. You have left the security of what has been known, but haven't yet entered into a new understanding. You've… Continue reading the in-between
I haven't been seeing as much progress in my novel as I would like. Novels take time. My brain takes time to understand connections in the story or among characters. I get that. But I was slipping into a kind of stupor with the whole thing, allowing the process to meander rather than chasing the… Continue reading my writing challenge: a case study
One of Flannery O’Connor’s most popular statements goes, "I have to write to discover what I am doing. …I don’t know so well what I think until I see what I say." The more popular paraphrase is a little easier to parse. "I don’t know what I think until I read what I say." Novel writing… Continue reading the novel as multiverse
I've been practicing creative writing since I was a kid. Never studied it formally. My education was free at my local public library. After college, I thought, well, heck, I've read all these books. I'm going to write one. So I did. It was bad. I had no idea what I was doing. I could… Continue reading prequel: why write about writing
Allison Wall 