Zoe Carmina's Blog: Zoe Jane Carmina, page 18

How Many Drafts Does it Take to Write a Novel?

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Hello lovelies and welcome back to the blog.

We’ve gone through previous posts talking about the drafting process and specifically about zero drafts and first drafts. If you haven’t by now you’re probably starting to wonder just how many drafts will it take?

As with many things the answer is going to be that it depends on a number of factors. Let’s talk about what some of those factors are right now.

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The Comparison Game

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Hello lovelies and welcome back to the blog.

Have you ever read a really good book? I mean one of those great books that made you want to become a writer? The ones full of descriptive worlds, achingly real characters, and beautiful prose? You read certain pieces of writing, and just about die on the spot because the writing is so good. Then you come back to your own draft and you want to burn your entire...

Are You An Intermittent Writer?

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Hello lovelies and welcome back to the blog.

Do you write in multiple sessions in a given day, squeezing in writing time in the in-between moments? Do you dictate on your morning run, feverishly use your phone to access your project when waiting in any line or for any reason, bring your laptop with you when visiting the in-laws, just in case they go to bed early and you can stay up to write? You might be...

2021 Q2 Goal Setting

Hello Lovelies, and welcome back to the blog.

It’s a new quarter, which means it’s time to set some new goals, so let’s jump straight in.

Here we are back at the Kanban-style Trello Board. If you’ve been here a while, you’ll already be familiar with this, but for those that aren’t, I use Trello as a digital sort of Kanban board. I still have categories for my tasks, but I don’t use the “to do, doing, done” modifiers. They all just stay on their lists and I modify the cards within them with chec...

2021 Q1 Goals Recap

Hello Lovelies, and welcome back to the blog. We’re ending out another quarter, so it’s time for another goals recap post.

If you remember from last time, I set some goals at the beginning of Q4. As a refresher, they looked like this.

Now, my Trello board looks like this.

Not bad, right? A decent amount of completed tasks, plus some extras added in. Let’s go over it in more detail.
Writing – 79/106 Goals Completed – 75%
I was able to get a lot accomplished this quarter. I didn’t w...

Do You Write Every Day?

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Hello lovelies and welcome back to the blog.

Do you set daily or weekly writing goals, and consistently meet them? If you live and die by the idea that you have to write every day, you might be someone who writes slow and steady. Slow and steady writers will chunk out their work and try to reach a certain word or page count goal every day or every week. This type of novelist keeps a steady pace, pushing forwar...

Are You a Binge Writer?

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Hello lovelies and welcome back to the blog.

Are you a binge writer? There are a lot of bad connotations associated with binging anything. Perhaps you binge watch shows or you binge eat when you’re stressed. Did you know you could also binge write?

The hallmarks of a binge writer are people who get a lot of writing done in a small amount of time. If you write between school sessions, on NaNoWriMo, or ...

What is Your Writing Style?

Hello lovelies, and welcome back to the blog. Today I want to take some time to talk about how authors get their books written.

Do you have a way that you like to write your books? What I mean by this is a process of getting the words down on the page?

There are plenty of other steps to getting a book written, but to generalize,  there are three elements that go into drafting any piece of work. To clarify, I’m just talking about the drafting portion where you are actually trying to write this da...

What is a First Draft?

Hello Lovelies, and welcome back. We talked last week about what a Zero Draft is and whether or not you want to write one. This week, I want to talk about a more common concept, that of a first draft. Let’s dive in.

What is a First Draft?

A first draft, also known as a rough draft, is the very first completed version of a piece of writing—a rough sketch of what your finished work will be like. A first draft is generally written after the outline or Zero Draft is finished and is usually done with...

Zero Draft to First Draft

Hello there lovelies, and welcome back to the blog.

We’ve been going through a series about drafting and have covered both Zero Drafts and First Drafts. Today I want to talk about how you move from your zero draft to a finished first draft.

As I’ve spoken about before, I consider any zero draft to be one in which I have not yet written “The End” on a novel. No matter how many times I attempt a draft, if I can’t bring it to completion, it is a zero draft for me.

Remember: you want to have laid th...