Megan Morgan's Blog, page 27

K Is For Killing Your Darlings

For the Blogging From A to Z Challenge I’m doing you all a huge favor and filling you in on the 26 Things To Hate About Writing.** I’m hoping by the end of April, I will have convinced all of you not to indulge in the wild insanity of becoming a writer. If I can save even one person from offering themselves up in sacrifice to the mad and fickle word gods, I will have done some good in this world.

Check out each letter’s post here.
[image error]KILLING YOUR DARLINGS

Kill your darlings! I bet you’ve heard that phrase before. I did, and didn’t realize it meant metaphorically, in your writing, so that’s why I’m writing this from inside a prison cell. I really wish language was a bit clearer.

Sometimes you can only move a story forward by killing someone (I don’t mean someone living in your house, a word of caution there) or it’s simply someone’s time to die. Sounds easy, right? I mean all you have to say is, “Then Erica fell off the building and plunged to her demise, and everyone was sad.” Easy, right? Except:

– It turns out killing a beloved character is really, really hard, even if it’s necessary. You might cry more than the reader does.

– If you kill someone, you have to do it the right way. If your pioneers have been trekking across the lonesome prairie for six months and now Jeb gets killed by a random runaway Volkswagen, that’s gonna be a little bit weird.

– You can’t just use death as a plot device, every time you get stuck in a corner. Especially if this is a sweet romance.

– Sometimes it’s hard to describe the method of death. You’ve never choked to death on a chicken finger, or know anyone who has, so it’s hard to describe it.

Killing off characters, especially ones you like, is one of the worst things about writing. I know it’s necessary, and can bring depth to a story, and may even be the exact right thing that needs to happen. It can elicit strong reactions from your readers and make them love or hate you. It’s a careful exercise that you have to execute masterfully. Eventually, a character has to go, and that’s true for a lot of us. My advice is not to act out the murder in real life for ‘research.’ It turns out the police don’t care how much of an artist you claim to be. Free Megan!

**Disclaimer: If you haven’t figured it out, these posts are pure satire and simply a humorous way to vent my writing frustrations. No offense is intended to anyone. Please, become or continue being a writer. It’s awesome, I swear. It’s super…duper, awesome…heh heh.

Filed under: A to Z Challenge, A to Z Challenge 2017 Tagged: blog hop, funny, writing [image error] [image error]

J Is For Jealousy

For the Blogging From A to Z Challenge I’m doing you all a huge favor and filling you in on the 26 Things To Hate About Writing.** I’m hoping by the end of April, I will have convinced all of you not to indulge in the wild insanity of becoming a writer. If I can save even one person from offering themselves up in sacrifice to the mad and fickle word gods, I will have done some good in this world.

Check out each letter’s post here.
[image error]JEALOUSY

You wrote a book. Awesome. But wait, Super Bestselling Author wrote twenty books. You published your book! But Super Bestselling Author published thirty books. You sold some books! Super Bestselling Author sold one million books. Super Bestselling Author lives in a mansion, writing books, being waited on by servants, and sleeps on piles of money. While you, lowly hack, still have to go to your day job to put food on the table because the revenue from your books can only buy beef jerky (unless you’re really into beef jerky, then I guess life is good).

One of the worst things about writing is jealousy. Consider these facts:

– Someone out there writes more than you, faster, and better.

– Another writer has sold billions of books and pays all their bills with their writing money.

– There are writers whose name everybody knows, and they’re well-loved, and adored.

– Some writers have so many books published they don’t know the number anymore.

I took a look at other professions and found out something interesting. It seems there’s doctors out there struggling through residencies and other doctors who have built successful, profitable solo practices. There’s lawyers who are mostly public defenders and some who have gotten hugely successful and famous for defending celebrities and notable people. There’s chefs who have their own TV shows and those who toil away, nameless, in small restaurant kitchens. It’s almost like…the love of the craft and the desire to excel in it to your own personal satisfaction is what’s important. That makes it sound like comparing yourself to others only stifles you and takes away your joy, and implies that it’s not a race or competition.

Weird.

**Disclaimer: If you haven’t figured it out, these posts are pure satire and simply a humorous way to vent my writing frustrations. No offense is intended to anyone. Please, become or continue being a writer. It’s awesome, I swear. It’s super…duper, awesome…heh heh.

Filed under: A to Z Challenge, A to Z Challenge 2017 Tagged: blog hop, funny, writing [image error]

I Is For Inconsistencies

For the Blogging From A to Z Challenge I’m doing you all a huge favor and filling you in on the 26 Things To Hate About Writing.** I’m hoping by the end of April, I will have convinced all of you not to indulge in the wild insanity of becoming a writer. If I can save even one person from offering themselves up in sacrifice to the mad and fickle word gods, I will have done some good in this world.

Check out each letter’s post here.
[image error]INCONSISTENCIES

So, you wrote a book. Congratulations, dummy. Oh, you wrote a series of books, and got them published? Do you know how much time that took away from staring at walls and contemplating your fleeting existence? You could have been brooding over how much you hate life, but instead you went and did something productive that made you happy.

Well, you’re not going to be happy for long. Go back and take a look at your series. Here’s what you’re going to find:

– That side character named Stacy in the first book is now Joyce in the third book. Maybe she hated her name because it reminded her of her dead grandma, so she got it legally changed. Yeah, let’s go with that.

– You wrote a series about vampires who can battle the sun, but in book 8 one of them steps outside at noon and is burnt to a crisp. Maybe he was weak. Maybe he had a skin condition or something.

– Despite the fact that three beta readers, two editors, and yourself read this twenty times, your hero’s dog in the first book became a cat later. Just pretend you were writing a shifter story all along.

Inconsistencies happen, and they’re one of the worst things about writing. They happen in the best-planned books, they happen to famous, successful authors. They get in there and they’re not caught until they are, usually by a reader. It’s okay I suppose, because it’s exactly like life. When I was twenty I could run a mile without getting winded, now I’m out of breath just looking at a set of stairs. Whoever is writing me is keeping crappy notes.

**Disclaimer: If you haven’t figured it out, these posts are pure satire and simply a humorous way to vent my writing frustrations. No offense is intended to anyone. Please, become or continue being a writer. It’s awesome, I swear. It’s super…duper, awesome…heh heh.

Filed under: A to Z Challenge, A to Z Challenge 2017 Tagged: blog hop, funny, writing [image error]

H Is For Homophones

For the Blogging From A to Z Challenge I’m doing you all a huge favor and filling you in on the 26 Things To Hate About Writing.** I’m hoping by the end of April, I will have convinced all of you not to indulge in the wild insanity of becoming a writer. If I can save even one person from offering themselves up in sacrifice to the mad and fickle word gods, I will have done some good in this world.

Check out each letter’s post here.
[image error]HOMOPHONES

One day, someone created the English language and they were like, “Should I make this easy, with only one word pronounced a certain way?” They thought about it for a bit, then they realized someday there were going to be these dumb creatures called writers, and they laughed. They said, “Heavens no, let me make a bunch of words that sound the same but are spelled differently, and they mean different things. They think they’re so high and mighty being writers, let’s see if they can manage to never mess this up.”

So were born homophones. You think you’re smart enough to never mess them up, don’t you? Well, let’s take a look at that manuscript of yours:

– You know you meant knew, but you wrote new. Somehow, you did this six times. By the way, spellcheck completely ignores crap like this because it figures you’re smarter than it is.

– You start to realize you’re not smarter than a computer program.

– This is all writing’s fault.

– They like to meat in the park and eat meet. Then they get in their boat and sale on down to the mall for the big sail. Spellcheck don’t care. Spellcheck hates you.

One of the worst things about writing is getting your words write. This is apparently a prerequisite for being an author, but even after banging on a keyboard for a hundred years you’re going to screw up from time to time. That’s what editing is for, and it helps us to pay close attention to our work and put real effort into polishing it up. But who has time for that? You have that short story about the time your dog ate the cat’s poop and threw up on the bed to self-publish on Amazon. You don’t have time to sort your fleas and flees.

**Disclaimer: If you haven’t figured it out, these posts are pure satire and simply a humorous way to vent my writing frustrations. No offense is intended to anyone. Please, become or continue being a writer. It’s awesome, I swear. It’s super…duper, awesome…heh heh.

Filed under: A to Z Challenge, A to Z Challenge 2017 Tagged: blog hop, funny, writing [image error]

G Is For Grammar

For the Blogging From A to Z Challenge I’m doing you all a huge favor and filling you in on the 26 Things To Hate About Writing.** I’m hoping by the end of April, I will have convinced all of you not to indulge in the wild insanity of becoming a writer. If I can save even one person from offering themselves up in sacrifice to the mad and fickle word gods, I will have done some good in this world.

Check out each letter’s post here.
[image error]GRAMMAR

Grammar. I guess we’re supposed to learn it, or something. If you don’t, you’re going to be dealing with one of those editor people I told you about and they’re going to make you fix everything and put it the right way. There’s always a critic, restricting your creative freedom. I don’t know about you, but I don’t not never like nobody messing with my creativities.

One of the worst things about writing is getting your grammar right. It’s a branch of science that’s always changing, and here’s what’s going to happen when you go back through your manuscript and try to correct your grammar mistakes:

– On the first look through your manuscript you’re going to think you completely forgot even the most basic of grammar and wonder how you got this far in life. I’ll tell you what happened. Writing makes you stupid!

– You fix everything up and on a second read-through, you still find more crap you messed up. Writing is the worst!

– It turns out things you thought were correct for years really aren’t. One day you learn something new from an editor and it changes your entire world. This is what you get for writing books: disillusionment.

Cultivating a mastery of language and all the intricacies and rules involved is an ever-growing skill, and learning it is invaluable to your writing and life in general. It makes you smarter, more coherent, and your work more readable. But HONESTLY, is that what you want? You could instead drink a six-pack (or a pot of coffee if you don’t drink alcohol) and write sixty pages of raging, scattered, incoherent diatribe about your pet peeve of choice and, my friend, that’s called art. Let me tell you, the world needs more art!

**Disclaimer: If you haven’t figured it out, these posts are pure satire and simply a humorous way to vent my writing frustrations. No offense is intended to anyone. Please, become or continue being a writer. It’s awesome, I swear. It’s super…duper, awesome…heh heh.

Filed under: A to Z Challenge, A to Z Challenge 2017 Tagged: blog hop, funny, writing

F Is For Fantasy Worlds

For the Blogging From A to Z Challenge I’m doing you all a huge favor and filling you in on the 26 Things To Hate About Writing.** I’m hoping by the end of April, I will have convinced all of you not to indulge in the wild insanity of becoming a writer. If I can save even one person from offering themselves up in sacrifice to the mad and fickle word gods, I will have done some good in this world.

Check out each letter’s post here.
[image error]FANTASY WORLDS

So, you’ve decided you’re going to write stories. You create these stupid characters and give them stupid things to say and stupid things to do. Now, you have to create some kind of world for them to do all that stupid stuff in. You have to make up a pretend universe and plunk them in it, then pray things don’t go wrong. Well, guess what? It will. It will all go wrong.

Whether another world or this one, you have to give your dumb characters a place to act out their ridiculous story and they have to obey the rules of that world. Ha! Everyone knows characters don’t obey anything. Here’s what’s going to happen when you make up your pretend world:

– You might have to do a bunch of research so that you’re knowledgeable enough to write about the subject matter and where it takes place. Like you have time for learning new stuff when you need to get this damn story written and out of your face.

– You run into walls because of the limitations of your world and you have to creatively think around them. Ugh, what am I, a spelunker?

– If it’s a highly complex world with lots of details, good luck, JRR Tolkien. Everybody knows that really complex fantasy world stories don’t sell.

– The lifestyle your characters live, what they do for a living, and their interconnections are all part of that universe and must be carefully worked out. Maybe even integral to the plot. Wow, you just made this really complicated!

One of the worst things about writing is making up fantastic new worlds and universes in which to set your stories, whether it’s another planet or some super sexy, mysterious spy branch of the government. And, who needs it? Don’t you have better things to do? I find cleaning toilets and painting walls to be more rewarding. I mean, nobody likes a fresh, unique take on a story, set in an exciting world where you can lose yourself and indulge all your fantasies. That carefully-constructed world definitely won’t thrill your readers and make you feel fulfilled as an author at the same time. Better give that wall another coat.

**Disclaimer: If you haven’t figured it out, these posts are pure satire and simply a humorous way to vent my writing frustrations. No offense is intended to anyone. Please, become or continue being a writer. It’s awesome, I swear. It’s super…duper, awesome…heh heh.

Filed under: A to Z Challenge, A to Z Challenge 2017 Tagged: blog hop, funny, writing

E Is For Edits

For the Blogging From A to Z Challenge I’m doing you all a huge favor and filling you in on the 26 Things To Hate About Writing.** I’m hoping by the end of April, I will have convinced all of you not to indulge in the wild insanity of becoming a writer. If I can save even one person from offering themselves up in sacrifice to the mad and fickle word gods, I will have done some good in this world.

Check out each letter’s post here.
[image error]EDITS

Let’s face it: the worst thing about writing is rewriting and editing. It’s like, I already did this once, now I have to go back and fix all my mistakes, make sure the story flows, and that there’s no plot holes or inconsistencies? What kind of masochist do you think I am? I already put up with this awful story this long, now you want me to invest more time polishing it up and making it perfect?

Unfortunately, there’s these awful creatures called ‘editors’ and they seem to believe that you can’t do anything right the first time, like they’re sooooo much smarter than you. If you write a book and expect to publish it, they’re going to make you fix it up, and here’s the awful things you’re going to find when you look at that terrible steaming heap of story you chose to write against all my warnings:

– You thought you connected point A to point B, only to find you veered so far off the path you somehow ended up in the next state over at a rural county fair eating funnel cakes, and this is a sci-fi story. You gotta fix it now. Like there’s no frickin’ funnel cakes in space or something.

– You wrote whole scenes that were pointless and didn’t do anything for the story. That’s why the story ended up being 200,000 words long. But you’re a writer, right? Why are you being punished for writing?!

– You created a gaping plot hole big enough to swallow a bus. Maybe you should just turn this into a story about disappearing busses.

– It becomes plainly obvious you never learned how to spell, use homophones, or apply basic grammar skills. It’s freeform art. These editors are clearly trying to cramp your creativity.

If you write a story, and expect to sell it to people, you might as well do the editing thing. I mean, you’ve been dumb up until this point, why break a streak? And then you know what’s gonna happen? You’re going to have a polished, well-constructed, coherent story with concise writing and no mistakes or typohs. You’re going to learn from all those mistakes you made and not make so many the next time. And you know what that makes you? A better writer. And that means you’re gonna end up writing more stuff. Fool! It’s a vicious cycle!

**Disclaimer: If you haven’t figured it out, these posts are pure satire and simply a humorous way to vent my writing frustrations. No offense is intended to anyone. Please, become or continue being a writer. It’s awesome, I swear. It’s super…duper, awesome…heh heh.

Filed under: A to Z Challenge, A to Z Challenge 2017 Tagged: blog hop, funny, writing

No News Is Good News

If you are here for today’s letter in the A to Z Challenge, please see this post.

[image error]This post is part of the Insecure Writer’s Support Group blog hop. The first Wednesday of every month is Insecure Writer’s Support Group day. Post your thoughts on your own blog. Talk about your doubts and the fears you have conquered. Discuss your struggles and triumphs. Offer a word of encouragement for others who are struggling. The awesome co-hosts for the April 5 posting of the IWSG will be Chris @ Madness of a Modern Writer, Madeline Mora-Summonte, Fundy Blue, and Chrys Fey!

Most unusual for me, I don’t have a lot of insecurity this month. After the past few months complaining about lack of productivity and scarce ideas on the IWSG, I’m now writing regularly and working on a pretty big, meaty project. This is what always happens to me and I should have learned by now that the fallow times are not the end of the road. I whine and moan and complain for a bit, then I get back to work.

If anything, I’m chewing my nails as I wait for responses on some submissions I’ve sent out, so there’s that. Fingers crossed!

April 5 Question: Have you taken advantage of the annual A to Z Challenge in terms of marketing, networking, publicity for your book? What were the results?

Hilariously, shortly before this year’s challenge I turned my posts from last year’s challenge into a free e-book (at the request of numerous people). You can now get Pandora’s Tacklebox FREE in an assortment of different formats, through Smashwords! Hopefully, I can help folks learn a little about writing while giving them a laugh at the same time.

I haven’t used the challenge for any other marketing, though of course, it drives people to my website and social media, which can result in sales.  I just let my personality shine through during the challenge and hopefully that makes people want to buy my books!

Filed under: IWSG Tagged: blog hop, blogging, creativity, insecure writer's support group, writing

D Is For Dialog

If you are here for the IWSG, please see this post.

For the Blogging From A to Z Challenge I’m doing you all a huge favor and filling you in on the 26 Things To Hate About Writing.** I’m hoping by the end of April, I will have convinced all of you not to indulge in the wild insanity of becoming a writer. If I can save even one person from offering themselves up in sacrifice to the mad and fickle word gods, I will have done some good in this world.

Check out each letter’s post here.
[image error]DIALOG

As we discussed yesterday, the worst thing about any story is the characters, but if you insist on having some, they’re going to have to talk. I mean, they don’t have to, they can communicate exclusively through interpretive dance and eye blinks, but they’re probably not going to do that the way you want them to either because characters never behave themselves. You want one blink to mean “yes” and two blinks to mean “no,” but then someone blinks three times and a world war starts.

If you created characters, against all my caution, you dingus, and now they have to talk, here’s what you’re going to have to put up with:

– Lines of dialog that don’t sound natural and in fact sound as if they’re spoken by someone who learned English as a fifteenth language, because you somehow forgot how English works.

– When you read the lines out loud to see if they flow, you have to be careful how loud you get, because if you’re reading the scene where your characters are discussing a murder your neighbors might call the cops.

– If you have more than two characters talking in a scene, it’s going to turn into a mess of he said, she said, and the dog said that will make your head spin.

– Someone always has an accent or dialect in your head that’s impossible to write.

– Unique voice? Everyone has to have a unique voice? How do you manage that?!

One of the worst things about writing is trying to make your characters have a sensible conversation that flows well and conveys everyone’s special snowflake uniqueness. You write it out and think it’s brilliant, but when you go back over it, it reads like cats yowling at each other. It’s totally not worth it to keep practicing until you create a strong voice for each character, witty and snappy dialog that moves the story along, and engaging conversations that sound natural and brilliant. I mean, you could keep trying to make that happen, but that just proves how crazy you are.

**Disclaimer: If you haven’t figured it out, these posts are pure satire and simply a humorous way to vent my writing frustrations. No offense is intended to anyone. Please, become or continue being a writer. It’s awesome, I swear. It’s super…duper, awesome…heh heh.

Filed under: A to Z Challenge, A to Z Challenge 2017 Tagged: blog hop, funny, writing

C Is For Creating Characters

For the Blogging From A to Z Challenge I’m doing you all a huge favor and filling you in on the 26 Things To Hate About Writing.** I’m hoping by the end of April, I will have convinced all of you not to indulge in the wild insanity of becoming a writer. If I can save even one person from offering themselves up in sacrifice to the mad and fickle word gods, I will have done some good in this world.

Check out each letter’s post here.
[image error]CREATING CHARACTERS

The absolute worst thing about any story, hands down, is the characters. Nothing can ruin a story faster than having characters in it. The best book ever written is a little-known title called A Tree Growing Alone In the Forest. There’s no characters, just eight hundred pages of a non-sentient tree surrounded by other non-sentient plants, just doing what trees do like turning carbon dioxide into oxygen and absorbing nutrients from the soil. No one visits it. Nothing important happens. It’s a wonderful read. The author didn’t have to tear their hair out or gnash their teeth because the tree was entirely predictable and never wavered from the plot.

Why are characters the worst? Because one of the worst things about writing is creating those idiots. Here’s what characters do:

– Half of them don’t know what their frickin’ name is and so you try to name them but nothing sounds right and I’m sorry, Sheila Rufflebottom, but I’m sending your ass into space to fight in the space war anyway.

– You want them to do something and then they do something else. They’re like cats, in that way.

– Sometimes they’re not interesting no matter how many tattoos and mommy issues you give them.

– Sometimes they don’t like each other even though they’re supposed to because they have a common unifying force, kinda like your parents meeting your in-laws.

– They’re never grateful you gave them life, they just screw up your story anyway.

Don’t write stories with characters in them. If you do, eventually you’re going to write a character who just works, who is interesting and fun and sympathetic and will be loved by your readers. You’re going to adore this character and they’re going to feel real to you. You’re going to love telling their story. They’re going to have great interaction and relationships with other characters. Is that what you want? Is that what you really want? You maniac!

**Disclaimer: If you haven’t figured it out, these posts are pure satire and simply a humorous way to vent my writing frustrations. No offense is intended to anyone. Please, become or continue being a writer. It’s awesome, I swear. It’s super…duper, awesome…heh heh.

Filed under: A to Z Challenge, A to Z Challenge 2017 Tagged: blog hop, funny, writing