How many words do you put on the page in a typical writing session? 500? 1,000? When I wrote my novel, Emma Jean's Bad Behavior, my deal with myself was to write 2,000 words a day. Didn't matter when I wrote them, but if I hadn't written them before bedtime, I had to stay up […]
I've been mulling the concept of momentum in writing lately, because I think I'm finally getting some in my new novel. As I pondered, I hit on the idea of writing velocity. What is writing velocity? Here's the dictionary definition of velocity: "the distance an object travels in a specified direction during a unit of […]
Sometimes, as a professional writer, I worry too much about product and don't focus enough on process. Yes, I need to worry about outcomes–my income depends on it. So it would seem to be a no-brainer to focus on it. Over the years of practicing writing every day, you get better at the game. The […]
So, I'm looking for an agent. I have an offer to publish my book and in the old days this would be a slam dunk. I remember sitting in sessions at writing conferences hearing stories of people who got a contract with a publisher and were told it was a sure-fire way to get an […]
On Monday, I wrote a post about writing as discovery. And after I finished it, I intended for that to be my last word on the subject. But then I started thinking (I do that once in awhile) about how writing as discovery impacts our works in progress. Because it does. And if you're not […]
Here's something I forget: We write to figure things out. We write to discover what we know. We write to uncover what we don't know. And yet. We sit down to the page and think we have to be experts. We sit down to write and think it has to come out perfect. We sit […]
On Monday, I began this series on prepping to write a novel. In the first post, I talked about the tools you'll need to get going, and if you head on over to that post you can get caught up. In today's post, I'm going to talk about the idea and the process–what to […]
I've been hiding from the world because of my new hair color cleaning my office and going through old files and I found a sheaf of notes from a long-ago writing class that I took. (It was in 1991, to be exact, because I dated it.) What happened was that my writing group at […]
There comes a time in every writer's life when she or he must let go. Most likely, it will be letting go of the work, sending it out into the world to find its own way. But it might also involve letting go of something such as a preconceived notion, a story idea, or the […]
When I arrived to meet with a client yesterday, she looked sad. "What's going on?" I asked. "Oh, not much, I'm not getting much done," she said. And so I proceeded to question her about what she'd been doing. Turns out she had been reading, researching and taking notes on her project like mad. It […]
