Nancy Christie's Blog, page 38
January 31, 2021
31 Days of Rut-Busting Tips For Writers—Day 31: Make Your Commitment.
Day 31 — Make Your Commitment.Making a commitment is easy—and hard.
It’s easy to say you are committed to your writing. It’s not so easy to match action to words, to commit to giving your writing the time and attention it deserves.
Each day, you must choose to make writing an important part of your life, regardless of its income-producing potential. It isn’t being published that makes you a writer. You are a writer as long as you write. Otherwise, you are just talking about being a writer, drea...
January 30, 2021
31 Days of Rut-Busting Tips For Writers—Day 30: Ignite Your Creativity.
Day 30 — Ignite Your Creativity.Creativity is an essential element of writing.
But sometimes you have it and sometimes… well, sometimes your creativity is on hiatus.
On the good days—the creative days—you not only want to write, you have to write. There is a burning deep inside of you that demands that you write. Those are the wonderful times when you can’t wait to get to the computer or paper, when the hours fly by while you are caught up in what you are writing.
And then there are the other t...
January 29, 2021
31 Days of Rut-Busting Tips For Writers—Day 29: Develop Your Curiosity.
Day 29 — Develop Your Curiosity.If you’ve ever watched children play, you know how integral curiosity is to them.
The inevitable question—Why?—is part of every conversation as is their insatiable need to take things apart and see how they work.
Writing requires that level of curiosity. We have to be open to the world, to people, to events and circumstances, and see what we can learn from them. Otherwise, we are just writing the same thing over and over again: the same characters, the same situa...
January 28, 2021
31 Days of Rut-Busting Tips For Writers—Day 28: Find Your Courage.
Day 28 — Find Your Courage.Writing can be a scary process that takes courage to pursue.
You are putting your words out there to be judged, and sometimes it can be hard to take the critiques.
It can also be scary if there is something you want to explore—an event from your past, for example—but you aren’t sure if you have the strength to go down into that dark place.
And then there is the fear that surfaces when you try something new. Maybe you’ve had a modest amount of success writing nonfictio...
January 27, 2021
31 Days of Rut-Busting Tips For Writers—Day 27: Build Your Confidence.
Day 27 — Build Your Confidence.There are days when you are full of confidence.
Those are the times when all the writing gods are with you, the muses are lined up on either side of your desk, no one is bothering you— in short, the conditions and your own self-belief are perfect for writing.
But then there are the other days: those times when your internal gremlins start whispering: “You’ll never be a writer. Who do you think you are— another Shakespeare? JK Rowling? Stephen King?” Your confidenc...
January 26, 2021
31 Days of Rut-Busting Tips For Writers—Day 26: Know Your Value
Day 26 — Know Your Value.Your writing ability has value, both intrinsically and commercially.
Whether you write books or marketing copy, poetry, short stories or essays, your words can be a source of financial compensation as well as a method of building your writing brand.
But this requires you to take off your writing hat and put on your bookkeeper bonnet.
If you are investing time and money in your writing career, make sure that your decisions have a solid financial basis. Writing for corpor...
January 25, 2021
31 Days of Rut-Busting Tips For Writers—Day 25: Be Accessible.
Day 25 — Be Accessible.How accessible are you?
I interview a lot of writers, authors and industry professionals on my blog. And nothing makes me crazier than when I search for specific people online and either they don’t have a presence at all or what they have doesn’t offer any mode of contact.
Unless you are emulating Greta Garbo’s “I want to be alone” attitude from the movie Grand Hotel, you need to be accessible. Reachable. Available. Now I’m not advocating posting your home address for all...
January 24, 2021
31 Days of Rut-Busting Tips For Writers—Day 24: Increase Your Efficiency.
Day 24 — Increase Your Efficiency.When it comes to successfully managing multiple projects, the keyword is “efficiency.”
This is something I learned from years of simultaneously balancing editorial assignments and client deadlines, along with my own writing work and family responsibilities.
If you’re not efficient and well organized, it won’t take long before you have that sinking feeling that you’ll never be able to meet all the obligations that are looming on the horizon!
The key is to create...
January 23, 2021
31 Days of Rut-Busting Tips For Writers—Day 23: Become Social Media Savvy.
Day 23 — Become Social Media Savvy.Facebook. Twitter. Instagram. Pinterest. LinkedIn. Those are just some of the social media channels that help build your writing platform.
That means you must learn how to use it to connect with your readers, increase your visibility and support your fellow writers.
In Social Media for Writers: Which Platforms You Need to be on, Based on What You Write, Kristina Adams highlights some of the ways social media can help you establish your brand and your reputatio...
January 22, 2021
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