Every year during the holiday season, I have offered up a list of gifts worthy of any writer on your holiday list, or for yourself, should you be the type to reward yourself with a treat at the end of the year. This year, with the tough times and pandemic, I have chosen a different route.
This series on writing obstacles has looked at three of the four main excuses writers use for not putting words on the page: no energy, no motivation, and no ideas. In our final installment, we’re going to look at lack of focus.
This time, we’re focusing on a lack of ideas. This is a big reason why some people stop writing. It’s simply because they can’t think of what to write next. Here are some tricks to get around that:
This series is exploring the many reasons writers come up with for not writing and the four main reasons for those excuses: no energy, no motivation, no ideas and no focus.
Today we are looking at a lack of motivation and offering tips to help boost yours:
There are many reasons writers come up with for not writing. It’s amazing how many reasons there can be, ranging from being exhausted to needing to defrost the freezer to the absolute crisis of not having any caffeine in the house. As long as there are excuses to use, writers will find them. Heck, we’re the ones who make them excuses up in the first place. We’re writers! But excuses are not going to get your novel finished or get that client project turned in on time.
There are four major categories for these excuses: no energy, no motivation, no ideas and no focus. I’m going to tackle each one and offer solutions to overcoming your particular brand of excuse. First up: No Energy.
Last week, we talked about ways to write faster. The blog was filled with tips and tricks to get those 50k words for NaNoWriMo down more quickly. Though the tricks will work for any project at any time.
Writing faster is a valuable skill. As a professional writer, I know the faster I am able to write, the more I can produce, which means more money. Of course, faster can’t be more important than good, when it comes to clients. When it comes to first drafts, the words matter more. Get them down as fast as possible. You can worry about the quality later.
With NaNoWriMo in full swing, writing faster is a valuable skill. The good news is that it isn’t that hard to rack up words a bit faster than you usually do. Here is the first round of tips to get closer to that 50k word goal.
Last week, we talked about strategies to take on NaNoWriMo, now let’s get into specific strategies you can use to up that word count.
If you are one of many writers who have signed on to do this year’s NaNoWriMo, you are in luck. Here are my top tips for doing it right:
Next month is NaNoWriMo: the National Novel Writing Month. It’s a time when writers around the world hunker down to write 50 thousand words on a novel in a single month. It’s not a small endeavor. So why do it?
Here are my top seven benefits to you from choosing to join NaNoWriMo:
There are no rules.
Just kidding. Of course there are rules. There are rules of grammar, plot, structure, etiquette and all manner of other aspects of writing and publishing. The problem is there isn’t one, single set of rules. There are many.
In this series on rejection, we’ve looked at how to handle the disappointment and reason behind rejections. Now let’s get a little bit of perspective.
Every writer gets rejected. Every one. Even the best.