Being a More Prolific and Professional Writer

So, this will be a shorter post today, but I wanted to riff on something that I read today. I found a writing prompt that I would like to use with my students–Simile But Different. There is an extra box in the Pdf version that talks about being a better writer and not comparing yourself/competing with other writers and that’s what I want to talk about today.
Being more Prolific

The advice that the article mentions is that if you want to be more prolific, you need to set aside more time for writing. This is the change that I’ve been making for the past few weeks and this has helped immensely. I tend to wake up early on most days, so I try to get up and just draft. Sometimes that means working on the blog and sometimes it means working on my fiction. I really need to find a way to shorten the time it takes to write the blog so that I can get both blog and fiction done at the same time. I have a tendency to either 1) write long or 2) spend too much time trying to get everything just right that it also takes more time to write and I end up either giving my fiction not enough time or not working on the fiction at all. I still have a lot of downtime where I’m waiting in lines at the store or something similar where I could whip out my phone and pop a couple of sentences/paragraphs out, so I still have some work to do.

Being more Professional

The second piece of advice that I really liked in the piece is that is argues that if you want to be more professional, you should makes sure your work is edited and revised before you send it out. I’m going to have to work on this myself. Here Be Monsters has had 25 submissions so far without a sale, so I decided that I should probably relook at it and I found so many issues that I could have sworn that I fixed in the original editing pass. Since it had so many problems, I also decided to do what Rhonda Parrish had me do with Faerie Knight which was to cut essentially 1/3rd of the story. Rhonda Parrish also had me look at the ending and essentially end it without any falling action–just climax, and one sentence of understanding/epiphany and then end the story. While I wasn’t able to quite get there for HBM, I did rework the ending to make Rafe (the main character) more appealing than he was originally (one market didn’t like HBM because they didn’t think he was a very sympathetic/appealing character and this change was to alleviate this problem).

Anyway, that’s all for today. Have a good one!

Sidney