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
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
Ursula K. Le Guin is one of the best and most important contemporary writers of science fiction. Her prose is immaculate, whether she was focusing on gender politics in The Left Hand of Darkness, consumer culture in The Dispossessed, creating sci-fi tech that others will use for decades (the ansible: a communication device that relays… Continue reading Steering the Craft, Part 1: SOUND
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'm reading the novel 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami (totally recommend, though I'm starting to take issue with 800+ page novels; they're EXHAUSTING). There's a character in it who's an aspiring fiction writer named Tengo. He has a revelation part-way through the book. He realizes he's never really been passionate about anything. He's performed well in… Continue reading when to give up on a story
Almost every writer successful enough to gain a platform to talk about such things prescribes setting a consistent writing time. So, desiring to be a successful writer yourself, and maybe even a good one, you set aside a block of time to write. You look forward to it. You have visions of filling up all… Continue reading Ways to Spend Your Writing Time That Aren’t Writing
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 my students is obsessed with the concept of writer’s block. In her mind, writer’s block is this metaphysical monster or force that’s totally impossible to overcome. If she's got it, she finished. She’s right to be worried. An unknown entity that stops her from being able to write completely? Yikes. If her conception… Continue reading writer unblocked
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
Allison Wall 