Where Normal Need Not Apply
Longer writing—such as stories—can often be easier to write than something shorter, like a synopsis, query, Twitter pitch, or log line. That’s why the skills important in poetry can strengthen our prose writing.
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One the first day of NaNoWriMo, Pacale Kavanagh share insights and advice on how meditation can help our mindfulness to better focus, ignore distractions, and turbocharge our productivity.
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Unless we’re only ever going to write just one book, we need to improve our ability to develop an idea into a story. That means we need to learn how to brainstorm in a productive way.
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To make NaNo work for us, we need to figure out our goals for the experience—and there’s no wrong answer. However, if our goal is to create a coherent story, we should try to understand story structure.
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A truly broken story is one where the pieces of the story don’t come together in a coherent whole. But if we’re willing to put in the work, virtually any story can be saved. Then question then is: What steps should we take to fix a broken story?
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Just as we have go-to favorite authors that we know we can depend on for delivering a certain type of story, readers are evaluating us for what we can deliver: What’s our promise to readers when they pick up one of our stories?
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After we finish brainstorming and start trying to assemble our ideas into a story, that’s the perfect point in our writing process to avoid major problems by questioning what story issues we might run into before we write too many words.
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We often have more ideas for stories than we actually write, and somehow, we choose and prioritize. Why might we not write a story idea that we’re passionate about—and is there anything we can do to overcome those reasons?
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We reveal our story through countless decisions in every scene, and we sometimes know which options seem right for our story. But other times, we might not be sure. In those cases, how do we decide which way to play out a scene?
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We need to promote our books, as they don’t sell themselves, but most writers avoid thinking about marketing stuff. Yet with the right goals, marketing and promotion can be fun, and Christina Delay is here to show us how.
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