I started an editing company when I was working on my MA in Literature. Then I started another one when I began my PhD. I’m pretty awesome at editing books, but up until recently I hadn’t written my own fiction. Now that I’m almost done with my first book, I’ve learned a few things about the writing process. But the biggest thing I learned, is that most authors are telling stories that don’t matter. Most authors approach writing like a sandbox. They see a nice castle and they try to reconstruct if from memory, or by looking at it, with…
If we could give every individual the right amount of nourishment and exercise, not too little and not too much, we would have found the safest way to health. – Hippocrates Exercise can easily be defined as something one has to do in order to improve oneself in a particular area. That sounds rather broad, so to put it into perspective, we do physical exercise in order to keep fit and healthy, we exercise proper hygiene in order to stay clean, we exercise discipline in order to keep our lives and our affairs in order. And, of course, if we…
So you’re done with writing your piece. What next? The answer may sound easy, but the path that you undertake to get to wherever you want to get definitely isn’t. There are a lot of options that you can choose from after finishing your piece (for the sake of this article, let us assume that it is your first draft). It is important that you should know what your options are, and where these may lead you. There is one very, very important step that you should go through, though, regardless of what you plan to do with your piece: Leave your work alone for a…
Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go. – T.S. Eliot The word “risk” may evoke something terrifying, or give a feeling of repulsion. When you say something’s risky, or that undertaking a particular thing is a risk, you can get the impression that the negatives are heavy and substantial that they may possibly – probably – balance out, or even outweigh, the positives of a particular undertaking. “Too risky” would mean the odds are stacked against you, and therefore undertaking a particular activity may just be your downfall. Sometimes risks…
I never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude. – Henry David Thoreau Making art, in general, is a solitary process, and we have established that several times in previous posts. It’s an experience as individual as eating – you are a self-contained unit as an artist, and while you are encouraged to show your work to others so that you can defend it and improve it, taking other people’s pieces of advice is not required. And this is probably one of the reasons why artists – in our context, writers – lock themselves up in their rooms…
Writers have the interesting – sometimes productive, sometimes just plain bad – habit of thinking of a lot of ideas that can be penned down and used for later. In other words, really, there are a million worlds running through a writer’s head, and they’re just dying to be written. It’s fun, of course, especially if you go through a rather productive brainstorming session when you’re looking for a new project to work on. It’s a blessing when you’re looking for those ideas. It’s a curse when you’re midway through a story idea and something else tries to grab your attention. While…
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