Mel Anastasiou @melanastasiou - Tumblr Blog

Design Your Writing Career in 2021

All writers make something out of nothing. Writers aren’t the only ones who do that, but it’s an exciting thought. Pretty daring stuff. And it’s well to protect your dreams and your writing time with a career plan. “If you don’t design your own life plan, chances are you’ll fall into someone else’s plan. And guess what they’ve got planned for you? Not much.” –Jim Rohn One way to design a…

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How to Revive Writing Energy in 2021

“Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.”― Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky Writing doldrums sometimes create unexpected good outcomes. It might be that you play with your writing schedule and find a…

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Time for Your Writing Career

Now and then, a moment arrives unexpectedly when nobody wants anything from you. You get a chance to draft, outline, or polish your work in progress. You’d love more free moments like these, to help move your career forward. To this end, you might ask: What are you doing in your busy day that you don’t enjoy, and that doesn’t serve you or yours? What if you could quit doing it, either cold…

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Write With Virtuosos.

Working with great writers inspires growth in your career. The trick is to set aside feelings of awe, and approach exceptional work with deep respect and a will to learn from the masters. Read and ask questions. For example… What is this author doing to shake up sentence structure? This novelist wins awards, and almost all her work is dialogue, how does she do that? How is this writer…

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How to Create Suspense

If you can create suspense and sustain tension as you plot and draft, then you save a lot of time on revisions, as well. Here are tips gathered from successful submissions to our press, on creating and sustaining tension throughout your story. Keep the story goal front and centre, perhaps writing it out from time to time, so you remember what matters to your point of view character.Within the…

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Outlining for Outstanding Productivity

Outlining for Better Productivity. To raise your pages count and cut revisions time, you may find great value in the planning process.

If you feel your productivity is down, if you get stuck for ideas or direction, or if you’re bogged down with revisions, it might be worth trying different types of outlining for your Work-in-Progress. I was lucky enough to hear prolific author Terry Brooks give a talk on his process: “Outline, outline, outline.” – Terry Brooks, author of The Sword of Shannara Trilogy. One flexible outlining…

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Your Standout Elevator Pitch.

Lift your writing career to greater heights with a single superb sentence. One of the finest ways to use 10 minutes you’ve carved out of your busy week, is to noodle at a great elevator pitch. That is, one sentence that encapsulates your story and intrigues the listener. You can’t figure this one out too soon. (For a gripping pitch, begin with your protagonist, and use active verbs for the…

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Developing Strong Protagonists.

The Key to Character Development in Narrative Structure. As your story moves along, your protagonist will choose to do what she or he would never have done earlier in the book. And, you’ll need to make these choices believable. Supporting characters and antagonists go through this process, too, but their real job is to force the protagonist to make tough, even impossible, choices. Hard Choices…

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Your Writing Productivity.

How strange, that when you finally get several hours a week to draft, after never having enough, you emerge with less pages than you’d expected. After all, in an hour, a writer with a good plan or an energetic muse can draft a thousand words. We all wonder where the time goes. Of course, sometimes laundry or some other suddenly attractive chore sings its siren song. But more often still,…

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Your Writing Talent.

You come to the writing table equipped with certain skills that come naturally to you. There may be some skills that you’ll need to sweat to develop. But that doesn’t matter, because all craft may be learned if the interest is there. Interest – a love of the work and the learning that goes with it – is one of the most reliable indicators of a writer’s talent. Determination and a deep interest…

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Developing Writing Poise

When somebody asks, What do you do, remember that self-deprecation is not your best professional colleague. “I’m a writer.” Certainly, if you were a doctor or interior designer, you’d say so. But, follow-up questions like, “Would I have read anything of yours?” and “How are sales?” can take you down expository slippery slopes that find you talking about yourself and your burgeoning writing…

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Making Time for Writing - A Writer’s Promise.

Making Time for Writing – A Writer’s Promise.

You have distinctive dreams, talents and abilities. These propel you ever more resolutely towards the writer’s life you desire. In fact, everybody who is doing anything with passion, knows that joy in work comes with taking the time to forever improve your craft. Like most writers, you want more time to work. You challenge your scheduling in order to carve out more writing, planning, and…

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Create Great Turning Points for Your Act 2

One of the reasons your story succeeds so well is that you dig deep for ideas, rather than sailing into the first or second thought that comes to mind. Your Act 2 or, as Campbell and Vogler* call it, the “Belly of the Beast” section, is packed with energy. Your Act 2 is filled with trials and learning for your protagonist. Take a few minutes to brainstorm lists of ten to twenty possible…

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Walking Helps Writing

Your career depends upon your writing mind, your interest in the work, and your determination to keep learning. Small steps towards your great dreams energise your writing career. The New Yorker’s article Why Walking Helps Us Think demonstrates how walking helps your brain. (Walking without earbuds, because it turns out that quiet revives a working mind.) A while back, inspired by the New…

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Create Suspense - 3 Ways to Do It.

Create Suspense – 3 Ways to Do It.

You create suspense when readers trust your ability to surprise them. One way to surprise readers is to set up a third option. Will this happen, or will that? Neither. It’s the third option. It’s difficult to create suspense when you start in the middle of the action. Not impossible, but difficult, and here’s one reason why. If we are not invested in the POV character, then even the…

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Your Novel’s Ending, Closer in the Rearview Mirror.

Sometimes the end of the book seems so far off that you start to feel that fashions will have changed and technology moved on to a still more distant generation before you’re likely to finish it. Start With the End in Mind. When you’re starting a story, it may be worth your time take a few minutes to write the end. This could be the last wordthe last sentencethe last paragraphthe final…

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Create More Time for Writing

One way to increase your writing time is to love the career dream as well as the actual planning and drafting. That’s because the more you love anything, the easier it is to find time for it. One trick is to take time from unloved distractions, not relationships or your good health. Another is to do your best to banish writing worries and love your author dreams. As part of your writing…

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