#writerbl

[soulsartuniverse]

We're past 10k of me rambling in my brainstorming doc and still no discernible plot in sight

[authorjoeypaul]

Giving you some of the pitfalls to watch for when starting an authortube channel! #Authortube

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[davidfarland]

On the door at my gym, someone hung a sign that says, “Motivation is what gets you started. Habit keeps you going.” I began working out regularly over 20 years ago. Since then, I’ve dropped about 75 pounds, and I’ve run or walked something in neighborhood of 22,000 miles. I can’t even imagine how much I’ve lifted in weights. But think about it, if someone had said to me, “Hey, Dave, why don’t you go run 22,000 miles?” it would have taken an awful lot of motivation to get me going. However, it only took a tiny bit of habit. Writing is much the same way. A lot of us try hard to get motivated to write a novel. But writing a novel is a lengthy process. Being motivated doesn’t help much, but developing good writing habits helps a lot. I learned long ago that exercise is hard when you’re starting out. If you run three days, you’ll want to quit at the end of them. That’s when muscle aches and fatigue are the strongest. But if you run for a week, you’ll begin to notice that you feel better on the days that you’ve run. Soon, the day won’t feel complete without some exercise. Writing is much the same. Jumping into a project is hard. Working on a novel for one day doesn’t really get you very far into it. But if you try making it a habit—if you bundle all of that motivation up and say to yourself, “I’m going to write for one hour a day this week,” you’ll find at the end of the week that you just don’t really feel that your day is complete if you haven’t spent some time engaged in creative recreation. With my writing workshops, I generally hold them for a week. I try to motivate my students to write daily during that time, if only for a couple of hours. The goal in part is to teach the writers and get them to develop new skills, but just as importantly, I’m trying to get them into the habit of writing. Quite often it works. I’ve gotten many letters from writers where the writer has said, “Hey, Dave, I got into the habit of writing at your workshop last year, and I’ve just finished my first/second/third/fourth novel!” Whenever I see that, I always feel as if the mission has been accomplished. So here’s the key to become a writer: Use your motivation to create a writing habit. Long after you have run out of motivation, you’ll still be writing.

[michaelbjorkwrites]

How to easily improve the flow of your writing

When writing a story, your prose can often feel jumbled.

Muddled.

Disconnected.

Like it just doesn't flow.

And for a long time, I never knew a clear, tangible tactic for fixing that problem, except by feel or by trial and error. Then I learned a simple, but effective trick for improving flow:

Go from the known to the unknown: use the last few words of one sentence to set up the information that's about to appear at the beginning of the next one.

Here’s what I mean:

Think of it like crossing a stream, hopping from rock to rock — each rock acts as both a landing spot and a launching point. Writing and revising your sentences to serve a similar purpose can go a long way in improving the flow of your prose.

Let's start by taking a look at a paragraph (prepared by yours truly) that doesn’t do this, resulting in a somewhat bumpy flow:

Vincent Van Gogh's "The Starry Night" had always inexplicably drawn Henry in. The painting was framed as a poster on his wall, and he often stared into its dizzying swirls of blue and yellow, and its fiery cypress tree — marveling at the chaos that entrenched the village scene. Henry had always hoped that Vincent was able to find some peace in expelling this vision from his mind and onto the canvas.

Feels a bit disconnected, doesn't it? It’s still readable, but there isn’t much of a continuity of ideas bridging the sentences — no connective tissue to smooth out your journey through the prose. 

Now let's look at the same paragraph again, but with some simple rearranging done to ensure that the information that ends each sentence also kicks off the next one (I put these hand-offs in bold):

Henry had always felt inexplicably drawn to Vincent Van Gogh's "The Starry Night." The painting was framed as a poster on his wall, and he often stared into its dizzying swirls of blue and yellow, and its fiery cypress tree — marveling at the chaos that entrenched the village scene. With such a vision expelled from the mind and onto the canvas, Henry had always hoped that Vincent was able to find some peace.

Now that reads a little better, doesn’t it? You’ll notice I didn’t even change up my word choice. Sometimes you’ll have to swap out words or change the order of your sentences, but even just rearranging information can often add a lot connectivity.

This obviously won’t be possible in every sentence and paragraph, but it’s a great rule of thumb when you want to smooth out your prose. I hope this proves as helpful to you all as it has been for me!

Good luck, and good writing, everybody.

— — —

Everyone has stories worth telling — including you. For tips on how to craft meaning, build character-driven plots, and grow as a writer, follow my blog or check out my new Instagram.

[casualwriter]

Dialogue Prompts: “Tired...”

1. “Aren’t you tired?”

“No more than you.”

“No less either, I imagine.”

2. “I’m not tired.”

“...no one said you were.”

“I know, I know, I’m trying to convince myself.”

3. “Don’t you get tired?”

“Of what, doing what I love? No.”

“You love dissecting insects. Great.”

[phoenixxxlily]

Prince Caspian x OC (title has not been decided yet)

So I have been working on a Prince Caspian fan fiction at the request of my best friend. It is currently in the very very early rough draft stages but I am excited about it. I have been doing a lot of research for this lol. For age and drama reasons, I am mixing parts of the books and the movies, as well as my own tidbits in order to write this. Here’s a sneak peek? 

[sophiebartow]

There are many stories to tell.  Follow me on my journey as I explore the stories in Swan Harbor, Maine.  You can find me several places. 

FB: https://www.facebook.com/SophieBartowAuthor/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sophiebartow/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/SophieBartow Pintrest: https://www.pinterest.com/sophiebartow/pins/

[abalonetea]

guys im real unmotivated to do actual writing tonight

who wants to send me questions about WIP’s or characters, so I can still feel like im accomplishing something?