on Writers Helping Writers: How can you make your author blog more successful? Whether you’re just starting a new blog or you have one you’ve been working on for a while, the following steps will help you increase your readership. Continue reading HERE
6 Ways to Make Your Author Blog More Successful – by Colleen M Story…
Sometimes You Need to Make Friends With The Delete Button
In many ways realising that sometimes you need to delete your work is one of the most valuable lessons that a writer can learn. And when I say delete your work, I’m not talking about getting rid of the odd word or sentence, although obviously sometimes that has to happen too. I’m talking about deleting whole pages, chapters, even sections of your work. In fact at these times, the delete button alone won’t cut it. What you need is Select All and then Delete. Or even – if you save chapters as separate Word documents, Document Delete.
Writing Through The Rubbish
This is something that I have learnt both through my own experience and through other writers. Stephen King writes about ‘killing your darlings’ but I don’t think I realised how important this was until I started writing the novel I’m working on at the moment. As I’ve already said in previous blogs, I started this novel as my project for an MA in Creative Writing at Lancaster University. And BTW if you’re considering a Creative Writing MA, I can heartily recommend this one. It’s not cheap, partly because of the wonderful week long summer school mid-way through the two year course, but it’s pretty damn fabulous, partly because of the wonderful week long summer school mid-way through the two year course.
Anyway, I ploughed straight into my novel, thinking at first that it would be a thriller – turned out it’s not. I wrote without any real clear idea of what was going on but gradually through the writing, the key premise at the heart of the story emerged. Once that was in place, I wrote, and wrote, and wrote, and wrote. I would say I wrote close to a hundred thousand words before I realised that most of what I’d written was pretty poor. I’d submitted some of it for tutorials and had some feedback on it, not all bad. But some of the characters and situations just didn’t ring true for me. And so I got rid!
It is hard, of course it is: I’d worked hard, written hard, been consistent in my commitment to my writing, but the truth is, those tens of thousands of words just had to go. And in getting rid of them, surprisingly, I didn’t feel that the time I’d spent on all that writing was a waste of time. Far from it. Those deleted words led me to the narrative that I could finally get my teeth into.
Great For When Your Writing Feels Less Than Inspired!
Once you’ve got past the sense of waste at sending all those hours of writing to the Recycle Bin, the feeling of liberation will definitely help with your writing. I’m currently writing a number of different scenarios to help my main character make her way to the end of the novel. Knowing that they won’t all make it to the final draft has helped me to just get on with the act of writing rather than worrying about whether they’re good enough, or whether they’re going to work.
I try to do the same with badly written incidents in life, but it’s not quite as easy.
Writing Episodically
This bit of advice came from a tutor and published writer on the Creative Writing MA that I did at Lancaster University called George Green who, besides his novels, has written a book called Writing a Novel and Getting Published for Dummies.
George Green suggested that it can be a good idea to write your story as a series of events or episodes that you will then decide how to join up. Up until that point, I took it for granted that I would write in a linear way: starting at the beginning of the story and writing through the action heading towards the end. I had never really considered writing in any other way.
When I mulled it over, however, I realised how much such an approach can free you from the trap of the plot entangling you until you’re completely caught and unable to move. If you write in events, you don’t need to worry how things are going to play out; you can just let the events come together. It works in perfect synergy with Stephen King’s advice to let the characters work the story out for themselves rather than working to a tightly planned plot.
With Freedom Comes Inspiration
If you’re writing in a series of events, each event brings forth at least one other event. When that happens I start a new document for each one and summarise it briefly before getting on with the current event. The freedom this brings is twofold: 1. I can just happily write and not worry too much about how far everything is going to work out; 2. It gives me the chance to explore my characters in a number of situations. I can then find out what they will do in these situations. It is also incredibly useful if you’re at the point that I’m at now with my story: near the end, with some idea of what is going to happen, but no very clear way of getting there.
Order – Order – Order – Plus The Big Question
The really great thing is that I don’t even have to decide immediately what order these events will appear in. This is where a good writing software is invaluable. It’s very easy to slot each event in as a new piece of text, give it a name, a summary and then leave it until you decide where, if anywhere, it’s going to go.
The one thing that does strike me in all of this, as I’m writing in chapters and events, naming, summarising, using the virtual cork-board of my writing software to give me a clear overview of the action, is – how the hell did those writers of the past do it? How did Jane Austen write a novel like Emma with all it’s twists and turns, sub-plots and brilliance with only a small, round writing table, paper and a quill? Just how?
Woman Working with Words 