Alli Martin's Blog, page 2

The Write Life: Setting Realistic Writing Goals

The end of the year is a time for reflection. For writers, that reflection often includes taking assessment of how many things we published or finished, or maybe how much progress we made in a novel—or if you’re an industrious little tracker (like someone around here), how many words, hours, or pages you wrote over the year. Inevitably that reflection turns to the future and to setting writing goals.

Writing goals for the new year should be set on your previous goals, the progress you made, and what your priorities are now. Frequently I’ll look back on goals I made and realize I didn’t even remember setting those goals, which means I did nothing about them over the year. (And ultimately means they weren’t actually that important to me and I probably should have set different goals.)

Let’s talk about how to set better writing goals that support our long-term writing hopes and short-term realities.

Setting Realistic Writing GoalsDefine Your Priorities & Reality

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

Before you start dreaming up writing goals, you need to decide what’s important to you. While that should include what’s important to you about your writing life, it should also consider everything else about your life.

If spending more time with your kids or learning how to knit has become an important part of your life, you need make time for it. Balance your writing goals against your other goals and priorities so everything fits together.

Your writing goals don’t always have to be about doing more. Sometimes making a writing goal to write for only 1 hour per week, or to write 100,000 words fewer than last year, or to write 1 novel instead of 3 is the right call. You’ll feel more successful when your goals match your reality, and you can check them off instead of continuing to shuffle them to next year.

Limit Your Goal List

One of the mistakes I’ve made in the past is trying to tackle too much at once. A list of writing goals that is ten items long has at least six things that will be forgotten or ignored. It’s too hard to focus when there are too many goals, and it’s too easy to forget what you’re not actively working on.

Three or four focused goals that meet your priorities and reality are more powerful than ten goals you wish you could achieve in a perfect world.

Subjective & Objective

Many writing goals are objective:

Did you finish your novel?Did you write 200,000 words?Did you write every day?

Those goals all have an easy yes or no answer, and you can check your progress throughout the year and have a good idea if you’ll achieve your goal. (For example, if you need to write 100,000 words in October to meet your word count, you can probably assume you’re not going to make it.)

While it’s good to have a goal you can measure, in a creative life it can be demoralizing if you realize you won’t reach your goals. When you know your goals are out of reach, it can be harder to make any progress toward them, which defeats the whole purpose of writing goals!

Instead of basing all your goals around objective metrics, include some goals with a subjective component. These goals might include something about craft development, your mindset toward writing, or how you feel about your work in progress. What’s something you want to change about your writing life or process? What’s a goal you can set to put you on the path to the change?

Writing Goals

Taking this advice, here are my four writing goals for 2024.

Write 200,000 words.
It’s me, you knew there would be a wholly objective word count goal. Complete a novel draft.
The planning is complete, and the draft has started! If you want to follow this journey in detail, check out the Behind the Novel tier on Patreon. I’ll be talking all about my novel writing process (successes, frustrations, and failures) over the course of the year. Clear more mental space for writing.
I’ve been working on getting my physical space more organized in an effort to declutter my mental space. I want a physical space that lets me drop my baggage and focus entirely on my work. While there are some objective elements to this goal, how much mental space is cleared is definitely a subjective assessment. FOCUS.
If I do nothing else, I want to focus on what’s in front of me and not let other projects or ideas distract me—even if they’re really cool! (I do have some leniency for other projects that have been sitting on the burners, but the most time and focus over the year needs to be on the novel until it’s got a full draft!)

So, that’s what I’m working on next year. What are your writing goals for 2024?

 

 

For full access to The Write Life and more about what I’ve done to assist with my creative life, sign up on Patreon for $1 or more per month. You’ll also receive a personalized thank you in a future edition of The Write Life.

The post The Write Life: Setting Realistic Writing Goals first appeared on selfwinding.

The Write Life: Support Your Writing Goals

Saying you’re going to write a book is easy. So is deciding to write 250,000 words this year. It’s also easy to say you’re going to write 1,000 words every day or get a story published. Writers have no trouble setting goals—the difficult thing is taking actions that will actively support your writing goals.

I’m great at making goals and getting distracted. It’s not that I forget the goal I made—I’m just really good at finding other interesting projects that demanded my attention, time, and energy. In some ways it’s a form of procrastination. There could also be a little self-doubt or imposter syndrome worming their way in there if the goal I set feels bigger than what I think I can accomplish. Whatever the underlying cause of the distraction, I wind up working on things other than my intended goal.

So how do you support your writing goals instead of getting distracted?

Support Your Writing GoalsKeep Your Goal Centered

Photo by Neil Thomas on Unsplash

The first thing is to keep your goal centered within your writing practice. If you’re planning to write a book, set daily, weekly, or monthly targets to help you achieve that goal. Those targets can be the number of hours you work on the book, the number of words you write, or some other measurement of progress.

Give the book pride of place in your writing schedule. Devote the most time and energy to that book. If you have other writing obligations (most of us do), try to either work on your book first or devote more quality time to your book on another day.

Ignore Distracting Opportunities

Don’t take on other time- and energy-consuming projects that are unrelated to your goal. If your goal is to get a short story traditionally published in a magazine, don’t work on a novel. Devote your time and energy to reading and understanding and writing short fiction.

Becoming a slush reader for a magazine can help you with your research in that regard—it can give you an insight into what publishers are looking for in a short story within your genre. But agreeing to review novels won’t support your short story publishing goal. (And at some point, you might want to give up that slush reader job to focus on your own writing.)

Goals Take Time

Goals take time to achieve. Remember, it’s easy to list your goals, but it’s much harder to achieve them. Even the fastest novel drafters don’t show up to the page with an empty mind. They’ve spent time thinking about the story, if not writing down their planning.

Give yourself space to focus on your goal and work toward it a little at a time. If you have a deadline, set landmarks to help you get to your goal. If you don’t have a deadline, find other landmarks or ways to ensure you’re working toward your goal and making progress.

And progress does not mean 1,000 words a day, even if that’s your goal. Progress can mean writing 250 words per day for three months, and then upping that daily word count. Give yourself time to get there!

Adjust Your Behaviors or Responsibilities

If you’re able to, adjust your behaviors and responsibilities to align with your goal and focusing your time and energy on that goal. Instead of reading only fiction in your downtime, read books on novel writing or publishing. Instead of blogging those novel reviews, blog about short story reviews.

Or if you have a Patreon and are shifting your goal to writing a novel, maybe change one of your reward tiers to talk about the novel writing process. (Which is what I’ve just done—details at this link!)

If you have other writing responsibilities you normally perform, consider how they can work to support your writing goal, and then shift them so your goal is centered in your writing life.

 

Achieving your writing goals is possible, but first you have to support your writing goals! Look at the other things you do and ask, “how is this going to help me meet my goals?” Make sure you give yourself time and energy to devote to projects and tasks that will help you make progress. And while you’re doing all that—give yourself the grace to make a misstep and course correct. Adjusting your schedule, expectations, and focus is all part of the writing process!

 

 

For full access to The Write Life and more about what I’ve done to assist with my creative life, sign up on Patreon for $1 or more per month. You’ll also receive a personalized thank you in a future edition of The Write Life.

The post The Write Life: Support Your Writing Goals first appeared on selfwinding.

The Write Life: Novel Writing Return!

If you’ve been following along for the past year, you already know I’ve been taking a long break from novel writing to take care of my parents. With the major illnesses under control, and adjustments and new routines established, I can finally inch back into novel writing. This means refamiliarizing myself with plans, getting back into the characters’ voices, and figuring out what’s been percolating in my head while I’ve been away. In short, it’s a novel writing return!

I know I’m not the only one who’s been in this situation—coming back to a novel after a long (sometimes years long) break—so I wanted to share what I did this month to reconnect with my novel.

Take Stock Before Writing

The first step is all about taking stock and figuring out where you left off. For this novel, it included reading over the outline and making notes where the plot seemed a little draggy. (Turns out in the two years away, the outline did not magically fix itself.)

I have many different parts of this story drafted, but since I’m working from a new outline, I decided to not bother rereading any drafts. I will be incorporating things from previous drafts, but I think I’d prefer to revisit those as I get to each scene since my outline is so detailed.

I also discovered I created a writing schedule, which will help with the next step….

Update the Novel Plan

Photo by Omid Kashmari on Unsplash

Updating the novel plan starts with updating the outline. I only had a few notes to address in the opening chapters, but they required shifting scenes and chapter breaks, which also created a need to update the story map. (The story map is a document that tells me who is in each scene, where it takes place, and which plot threads it involves.)

The novel plan also includes plans for how to write the novel, specifically what my writing schedule will be. The schedule I previously devised had me writing 3–4 scenes per week, and while I aspire to that level of productivity, it’s just not realistic with my other obligations.

Instead, I looked at the estimated word count of each scene and then doubled that number (because I know the chaotic, word-heavy way I draft). Keeping a realistic goal in mind, I decided I am unlikely to write more than 4,000 words per week, so that base schedule has me writing 1–2 scenes per week.

Renewing Voice

Reconnecting to a novel includes reconnecting to the characters. Because it’s been a hot minute since I wrote anything substantial for these characters, I wanted to reacclimate myself to their voices. I picked a few moments and various character combinations to write about and went at it!

Making my novel writing return by starting with some odd moments let me approach the writing at a slower pace while I was still finishing plan adaptations. It also meant I could test some of my plans to see how much I can actually write on a busy day with my new routines and schedules.

Novel Writing Return!

The hardest part of the return is to stop dawdling and get writing. That means officially writing a scene that will—gulp—go into the novel.

So that’s for next month!

(Seriously, updating the outline and story map took longer than I originally thought it would—but no regrets about that time spent! For me, the planning stage is important to keeping my brain on track and untangled as I draft. Other writers struggle with the planning and revision; my writing struggle is drafting.)

I am coincidentally starting my draft in November, though not doing NaNoWriMo. Anyone else setting ambitious writing goals outside of a challenge structure?

 

 

For full access to The Write Life and more about what I’ve done to assist with my creative life, sign up on Patreon for $1 or more per month. You’ll also receive a personalized thank you in a future edition of The Write Life.

The post The Write Life: Novel Writing Return! first appeared on selfwinding.

Writer Prompts: The Devil’s in the Details

Welcome writers, readers, and inspiration chasers! Join me as I dip into my prompt resources and select something to explore and share. These prompts are all about inspiration—what they inspire for me and what they inspire for you.

If you’re inspired by the prompt, whether that’s by creating something epic or just warming up for your creative day, I hope you’ll share your creation.

This prompt comes from the book An Apple a Day by Caroline Taggart (published by Reader’s Digest, 2011). This is a collection of idioms and expressions that explores what the phrases mean and some of the history behind them.

Feel free to go wherever the prompt takes you!

Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t. (page 26)

A cowardly one, I’ve always thought, and Richard Taverner’s 1539 translation of Erasmus’s Latin phrase is sexist, too: “An evil thing known is best. It is good keeping of a shrew that a man knoweth.” It’s often the excuse people give for staying in an unsatisfactory job or a relationship because they are frightened of the unknown alternative. Kylie Minogue reiterated this message in her song “Better the Devil You Know.” In it she describes a woman promising to wait for some dreadful man, ready to forgive and forget if he will only stop leaving her. Honestly, Kylie, whatever happened to Girl Power? I suggest you change your locks and move on.

But one man’s cowardice is another man’s prudence, I guess, so although I am advocating “Fortune favors the brave,” you could equally argue for “Look before you leap.” As I said in my Introduction, you can’t rely on proverbs to make all the decisions for you.

Where I started:

Obviously, when I read this prompt, I was immediately inspired to write about literal devils, because why wouldn’t I be?

Working from the direct phrase, I had to consider how a pesky little human might encounter two devils, one she knows and one she doesn’t. The obvious solution (because I watched way too much Buffy the Vampire Slayer at an impressionable age) is a bar or some kind of night club in which humans and demons intermingle (knowingly or unknowingly). I liked the idea of a human who keeps visiting a bar with her demon guide, looking to meet a specific kind of devil. (Maybe a devil who will make a deal with her?)

Being a vampire girl at heart (see re: Buffy), it made sense that Avis’s demonic companion be someone equally as tortured, so I selected a vampire for her guide. I liked adding a twist that their relationship is ultimately fraught no matter what happens to Avis because despite being friends, one of them is a hunter and the other is food.

Originally posted for the Story Kernels Patreon December 15, 2022.

What I wrote: 

Avis leaned on elbows over the table, squinting in the low light of the club. The flickering candle illuminated her neck, turning it nearly translucent and making her veins stand out even more. “Who’s that?”

Nab flicked his eyes away from her throat. “Which one?”

“By the door.” Avis’s tone sounded annoyed by his inattention, but she’d never appreciated what it was like spending time with someone so full of blood. “The one in the red leather jacket with the fringe. Gold hoop earrings. Blond hair.”

“Oh.” The specifics were needed as there were several people by the door in red leather. Not that surprising at the Devil’s Club. “Summer, I think. Sumner? Something like that.”

“Introduce me?” Those two words were one day going to get Avis killed, but Nab never had any inclination to deny them. Afterall, if he ever delivered Avis to someone who wanted her, he’d get some kind of favor in return. (And he wouldn’t have the displeasure of losing his control and being the one to do her in.)

“Another devil to add to your list?” Nab asked in weak protest. He was already on his feet, hand extended to help her up.

She didn’t take Nab’s hand, keeping her eyes on the door and her quarry. “Bring him here?”

It wasn’t a good idea—it was never a good idea—but humans often only acted on the worst ideas.

He shrugged, said, “Your funeral,” and hoped he was once again proven wrong.

Now it’s your turn:

What’s the devil your character knows and the one they don’t? How do they navigate between those devils? Is there another portion of this prompt that speaks to you in a different way?

 

If you enjoyed this prompt and would like another, the October prompt on Patreon inspired a story about a woman dealing with a dithering memory.

The post Writer Prompts: The Devil’s in the Details first appeared on selfwinding.

The Write Life: Trust Your Gut

Ask a publishing professional what you should write next, and they’ll never tell you. “Write what you want to write,” they’ll say. They might say writing what you want will produce better results, or that no one can guess a trend. But there’s another aspect I’ve never heard someone say but am now realizing is essential to the creative process: You have to trust your gut.

Trusting your gut as a writer applies to many different aspects of the creative process. You have to trust your gut when you’re drawn to write your next project. Or when you’ve chosen a weird name for your main character. Or when your characters go off your planned course, but it feels inevitable and right in your gut.

Photo by Austin Neill on Unsplash

There’s also a point when all your research looking for the right home, agent, or editor for your manuscript ends, and you just have to trust yourself to make the right choice. Sometimes you just feel good about something, so you send your email off into the world because it feels like the right time, the right person, and you hope.

That hope is part of the publishing process, too. It’s the thing that keeps writers going after a stack of rejections and years of work and refinement. It’s what pushes writers to write the next thing, submit the next story, and do it all again, despite the difficulty, frustration, and feelings of failure. But we keep going because something in our gut keeps pulling us forward, and we keep trusting it to lead us in the right direction.

I’ve been too in my head about writing recently. I’ve been too caught up in the “right way” to start a novel. Too busy analyzing where to best spend my time. Too lost thinking about writing instead of slapping words on the page like a writer. I haven’t been spending much time listening to my gut, and that has got to change.

I’ve had a lot of distractions this month (mostly in the form of covid), so I haven’t made much progress on this change, but knowing what my next steps should be is making me feel more confident about my writing future.

How about you? Do you trust your gut when it comes to writing? Any suggestions on how I can get better at trusting my gut again?

 

 

For full access to The Write Life and more about what I’ve done to assist with my creative life, sign up on Patreon for $1 or more per month. You’ll also receive a personalized thank you in a future edition of The Write Life.

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The Write Life: When Life Becomes a Lot

Photo by tabitha turner on Unsplash

This month has been A. LOT. There’s no other way to describe it, honestly. When life becomes a lot, there’s often nothing you can do about it except hold on, ride through, and hope you can figure out how to get some writing done while everything else is happening.

Many other writers would (and should) take a break from writing when faced with all the chaos and uncertainty I dealt with this past month. I find solace in maintaining my writing streak and keeping one element of my life somewhat steady, so I continued using daily prompts as a low stress way to take a break from writing while continuing to write regularly.

I also made progress drafting a new writing workshop about how to evaluate writing advice and decide what fits your life and what can be discarded. (Look for that in 2024.)

And I spent my time not stressing about life to stress about getting ready for DragonCon—which is happening right now!

If you’re hanging out around Atlanta, you’ll be able to find me at these fine panels over the weekend (schedule subject to change, as is the will of DragonCon):

FRIDAY11:30AM Stargate: The TV Movies and Beyond2:30PM Coping Strategies in Military Sci-Fi Media7:00PM It Was Kang All AlongSATURDAY11:30AM Mythology and Religion in the Worlds of Stargate7:00PM BFFs in the MCUSUNDAY8:30PM Firefly: It All Comes Out in the WashMONDAY11:30AM Titans: Brother Blood2:30PM Guardians: Rocket’s Story

I’m on exclusively fan-focused panels this year, though I’m sure I’ll discuss some writerly worldbuilding during the mythology and religion panel, and I’ll be talking about the importance of relationships in action stories while discussing Marvel friendships, and I’m already planning a little English 101 exploration of protagonists to lead off the panel on Rocket Raccoon. (They may be fan panels, but I always bring my writing game.)

If you are someone who follows me on the internet and are able to find me at DragonCon, don’t be shy about saying hello. I’m always happy to chat with fellow writers and nerds.

 

 

For full access to The Write Life and more about what I’ve done to assist with my creative life, sign up on Patreon for $1 or more per month. You’ll also receive a personalized thank you in a future edition of The Write Life.

The post The Write Life: When Life Becomes a Lot first appeared on selfwinding.

Writer Prompts: The Creature from the Black Lagoon

Welcome writers, readers, and inspiration chasers! Join me as I dip into my prompt resources and select something to explore and share. These prompts are all about inspiration—what they inspire for me and what they inspire for you.

If you’re inspired by the prompt, whether that’s by creating something epic or just warming up for your creative day, I hope you’ll share your creation.

This prompt comes to you via the book Complete the Story released by Piccadilly USA Inc. The prompts in this book give you the first few lines of a story and lined paper for you to continue writing.

Feel free to go wherever the prompt takes you!

Ever since the creature crawled out of the lake, the whole town had begun to show their true colors. The uncertainty, the fear, and the fascination combined into a potent cocktail that brought out the best in some, the worst in others. The creature was…
– page 39

Where I started:

I really liked the first sentence of the prompt—especially if I turned the metaphoric idiom about “true colors” into something literal. After discarding what wasn’t as inspiring, I had to decide what creature crawled out of the lake, who found the creature, and what colors it could make people turn. (And why—what do those colors mean?)

I quickly decided the colors must mean something about the person. Maybe what drives them, or what kind of person they are. I also liked the idea that a person’s color could change through their actions—so that exists in my mind, even if it isn’t on the page in this snippet.

I wanted my creature to be small, and for some reason lake + creature immediately made me think of a reptile. Adding the color-changing features, it wasn’t difficult for me to decide my creature was a chameleon. (Which also meant it was scoopable, another quality I liked for this little visitor.)

I usually spend a lot of time writing about adults and decided to do something different. Since E.T. is imprinted on my soul, I decided a child protagonist who finds an extraordinary creature and hides it from the adults might be fun to explore.

With all that decided, I knew where I wanted to start.

Originally posted for the Story Kernels Patreon January 12, 2023.

What I wrote:

The little chameleon curled in the warmth of Charlene’s aquamarine-stained palms. Cupped in a cocoon that blocked the chill blowing off the lake, his tail flicked over her skin like a happy tickle. He should not have been outside at this time of year! Chameleons are cold blooded, and this little guy was lucky a wandering ten-year-old well-educated in reptiles spotted the glimmering red body at the shoreline. Or else he would have frozen in a matter of minutes!

Charlene tucked chapping hands to her chest, wrapping them beneath the rainbow scarf she had knitted all on her own. Sticks and rocks crunched beneath her boots as she trekked the hill back to the house her dads had rented for fall break.

She might have to take a serious scrub to her hands, since whatever was on the chameleon’s belly wouldn’t rub off, but she’d worry about that after she found a jar and a warm place to keep her new friend. The desk lamp in her room should work for heat. She could come out and grab some sticks and swipe a few leaves of lettuce from her salad at dinner. Bugs might be harder to find, but that spider in the bathroom was surviving on something.

On the porch, Charlene peered into the hole of her cupped hands, the crimson glistening even in the diluted light.

“Ruby,” she decided in an instant. “We just need to make sure Daddy doesn’t find you.” Daddy, unfortunately, didn’t understand a thing about lizards.

Now it’s your turn:

What creature crawls out of a lake? What does the creature bring out in those closest to it? What about those who know little about it? Are the colors the townspeople experience literal or metaphoric?

 

If you enjoyed this prompt and would like another, the August prompt on Patreon inspired a story about another unusual creature, this one a celestial feline who seems literally impossible.

The post Writer Prompts: The Creature from the Black Lagoon first appeared on selfwinding.

The Write Life: Burnout

No daily writer even wants to think the word “burnout.” But at the end of June someone directed that word at me, and I had to accept that part of my recent problem is related to burnout.

Photo by Anne Nygård on Unsplash

It was pointed out that the last year has been, um, stressful. Putting my career on hold to take care of my family was one kind of stress, but then coming back to my job with my hair on fire, desperate to jump in and make things work better was another kind of stress on top of that. Add to that daily struggles, my own chronic illnesses, isolation and loneliness, and the state of the world—it’s been a lot. So, yes, I am burned out, even if it’s not the creative burnout I fear. (And that’s not to say that all the other burnout isn’t sapping my creative energies.)

I decided to take the end of June to clear my plate, so I could spend as much of July as possible relaxing and refueling.

There was one problem with my plan—I’m a daily writer. I can’t stop writing. So, if I’m not working on my novels, short stories, or anything else that is “for work,” what can I write while still taking this very necessary break?

A Writing Break for Burnout

I decided the solution was daily prompts.

I obviously enjoy writing to prompts and had first thought to dig into my vast resources and pre-select a few that jive with me. But that might feel a little too much like what I do monthly on Patreon and might encourage me to “do something” with whatever I write. The point right now is to not do anything. To keep up my writing practice without trying to set a goal, make something perfect, or even refine it in any way. If I stumble across an idea I want to develop later, great, but everything I’m writing currently should come with guilt-free disposability.

I downloaded an app promising daily prompts and resolved to use them regardless of how much I liked the prompt on its own. And the results? Have been pleasantly surprising!

Knowing whatever I write is meant for My Eyes Only has provided much more freedom than I usually experience while writing. I haven’t needed to worry about coherence and can jump from thought to thought or moment to moment without trying to find a transition or make a note to figure it out later

There’s also no pressure to write anything of substance or quality because no one is going to see it. I don’t have to release it for any audience or please anyone with what I’m writing. Everything can suck! There are no right answers! These are just words to keep my writing streak alive and keep myself connected to creativity!

Having the rule to write to every prompt, even if it’s not one that really engages me is another form of freedom. The first question I ask the prompt is “what will I do with it?” instead of “do I want to do something with this?” That subtle twist of language shifts my focus from me to the writing (and from the future to the present) and has allowed me to write something for every prompt.

Bonus: because I’m not editing and am just putting words on a page, I can complete my 250-word daily minimum in 10 minutes without any fuss!

More and more I’m feeling like using a daily prompt randomly supplied might serve as a good warm-up for my normal writing routine or as a way to reconnect when I’m feeling out of sorts. Has anyone else tried using daily prompts like this? What’s your experience been like?

 

 

For full access to The Write Life and more about what I’ve done to assist with my creative life, sign up on Patreon for $1 or more per month. You’ll also receive a personalized thank you in a future edition of The Write Life.

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The Write Life: Writing Kindness

After an up-and-down month in May with some extreme writing highs and lows concurrent with my vacillating mental health, I decided June needed to be about kindness. Mostly that was kindness in the way I treated and talked to myself, but I also allowed for kindness related to my writing. This writing kindness wasn’t just about writing kind things (though I did a lot of low stakes writing in June), it was about being kind to my writing life, accepting things for how they are, and recontextualizing what productivity and progress means.

Photo by Dayne Topkin on Unsplash

The writing life is often NOT kind. We spend hours isolated, chipping away at our ideas, only to have to rewrite and revise and polish (and then rewrite and re-polish)—then to be told all the things we did wrong, or could do better by editors, agents, and audience. The stories we actually manage to finish and publish can be our dearest creations and still be met by rejection or—worse—apathy. The writing business is not kind, which means that writers need to be as kind to ourselves as possible.

What does writing kindness look like in terms of a writing life?

First, it means throwing out expectations and rules dictating what a writing life “should” be.

Do you have to write every day? Nope.
Do you have to write 1,000 words a day? Also, no.
Do you have to write for at least an hour every time you write? Very no.
Write from an outline?
Use Scrivener?
Draft in a Moleskine notebook with your literal blood, sweat, and tears?

Hopefully you’ve caught on that the answer to all those questions is no—unless of course any of those things are part of YOUR writing process. But none of them are part of every writing process and none of them mean you are a “real” writer simply by subscribing to them.

Beyond putting aside what you think a writing life should be, an important writing kindness is changing what you’ll accept as productivity.

Some days writing productivity might mean writing 1,000 words. Other days writing productivity might mean thinking about your story in spare moments as you’re in the shower, folding clothes, or sitting in traffic. Dreaming up character backgrounds and names, working through worldbuilding details, outlining or researching—all of those things can be writing productivity!

Writing does not always mean writing because a lot of writing is thinking. It’s coming up with options, and then making decisions. And to come up with those options, you have to spend time thinking.

If you happen to be someone driven by word counts (cough, me, cough), then you can write down those options and thinking and brainstorming, so you can “get credit” for that productivity, but YOU DON’T HAVE TO! Be kind to yourself! Be kind to your writing life!

Another way to treat your writing life with kindness—and this is one I’m looking to develop more—is by surrounding yourself with supportive people.

Find readers and other writers who will tell you what you’ve written is wonderful and who will encourage you to keep going. Find someone who is so excited for the idea you’re currently obsessed with and check in with them to feed from their enthusiasm. Find a writing group that is interested in what you’re writing. Find people you can talk to about your work. Don’t accept jerks or critics into your creation process! Surround yourself with kindness and wear that kindness like armor and a shield to protect yourself from all the times writing is not kind.

It’s good to be kind to yourself and your writing life because so many other things will not be kind. Writing kindness is one way writers can cope with the rejection and isolation that’s baked into the writing process and find the motivation to keep going.

 

 

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The post The Write Life: Writing Kindness first appeared on selfwinding.

Writer Prompts: Raising the Stakes on “Fake-Dating”

Welcome writers, readers, and inspiration chasers! Join me as I dip into my prompt resources and select something to explore and share. These prompts are all about inspiration—what they inspire for me and what they inspire for you.

If you’re inspired by the prompt, whether that’s by creating something epic or just warming up for your creative day, I hope you’ll share your creation.

This prompt comes from The Lover’s Dictionary by David Levithan. The words defined in The Lover’s Dictionary create a story, and just as Levithan uses those definitions to construct a novel, so too can you take a word and definition and retool it for your own creative purposes.

Feel free to go wherever the prompt takes you!

ersatz (adj)

Sometimes we’d go to a party and I’d feel like an artificial boyfriend…

Where I started:

The word “ersatz” is forever linked in my memory to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Phillip K. Dick, so this prompt immediately brought to mind replicants and androids.

The rest of the prompt—an artificial boyfriend—reminded me of an idea cultivated by my writing group. We wanted to put together an anthology of stories based around the people who rent artificial friends. These android friends can fill any need, the person in the friend group who takes all the pictures, the best friend of a shy individual, or an impressive date to a high school reunion… which is the direction I took the prompt for this snippet.

A high school reunion is a place where a person wants to be seen as visibly successful. Short of being crowned during the proceedings, that typically translates to an enviable physical appearance and a stable romantic partner. Many other rom-coms have already trod the path of bringing a fake date to a high school reunion, I just put more emphasis on the “fake” part of the scenario, giving dear Kay her own artificial boyfriend.

(One day I am putting together this anthology—mark my words.)

Originally posted for the Story Kernels Patreon Oct 7, 2022.

What I wrote:

Kay smiled broadly as she stepped under the balloon archway. Welcome Back Sycamore High Class of ’99 screamed from nearly every wall of the hotel ballroom. Clint’s arm kept her upright as they approached the check-in table.

This was such a bad idea.

“Everything’s fine,” Clint whispered. His voice modulated perfectly so only Kay could hear him. “We’ll stay an hour, make sure to be seen by the right people, and I’ll sing all your praises.”

Kay clutched his hand, which suddenly felt smoother and less lifelike than it had when she’d picked him up at the Fast Friends facility. “You know not literally, right? Like, don’t sing.”

Clint chuckled softly, his smile pleasant and perfect, and exactly the kind of man Kay’s high school friends had expected her to marry. “It’s an expression, Kay. I promise, FF’s programming is flawless.”

No one near them reacted, everyone lost in their own conversations as the line inched forward. Still. “Don’t say the p-word,” Kay muttered.

“Then don’t question my p-word.”

The man in front of them turned around abruptly, eyes wide, and Kay laughed through her intense blush. She could only imagine what p-word he thought they meant.

Now it’s your turn:

What might be fake in your scenario? Who is the artificial boyfriend and how are they artificial? Is the artificial feeling a constant or situational?

 

If you enjoyed this prompt and would like another, the June prompt on Patreon inspired a story about a woman silencing the petty man who had imprisoned her.

The post Writer Prompts: Raising the Stakes on “Fake-Dating” first appeared on selfwinding.