Tag: author

Twitter: For Writers?

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I’ll be the first to admit I’m not a social media buff.

Sure, I enjoy browsing tweets and scrolling mindlessly through Instagram, but I’m more of an observer than a participant. However, when I stumbled across Writing Twitter, I knew it was something I wanted at least try to be a part of.

Hundreds of thousands of users all creating content about a common interest: writing. From published authors to newbies, tweets are dedicated to sharing their experiences with writing, daily frustrations, moments of inspiration, word counts. It’s all there.

I’ve only been on the writer’s side of Twitter for about two and a half weeks now, (I’ve had a personal Twitter for years, so I was already familiar with the layout), but I feel it’s been enough time to get a bit of a handle on the site.

With that being said, this is my experience with #writingcommunity so far:

Pro: Interaction

This is obviously a huge advantage. It’s much more encouraging to write when you know there are others who support you–and writing twitter is all about support. Constant tags to promote twitter friends, retweets about published books; you’re definitely not alone here. You’re with people who want you to succeed.

Con: Overwhelming

A lot of writers on twitter follow hundreds, if not thousands accounts, and usually returning the favor is the norm. This means your timeline is constantly over-brimming with content. Your notifications are constantly blowing up (especially if you interact with others). It’s overwhelming how much goes on, and easy to feel lost.

Pro: Finding new books

Everyone loves to promote their books on Twitter. Everyone loves to promote their friend’s book on Twitter. Want to find a book recommendation? The writing community will help you with that. There’s no shortage of new material and you can come across books you never would have even looked twice at.

Con: Content Graveyard

With that much content, you can be sunk to to the bottom of someone’s feed very easily. If you don’t have followers retweeting your work, you may feel like no one is seeing it. (And this is very much a possibility.)

Pro: Inspiration

Writing slump? Not here. With constant writing samples and prompts, there’s no shortage of inspiration flowing your way. Writers often offer peeks of their work and words of encouragement to work past your block.

Con: DISTRACTION

Just like any other form of social media, Writing Twitter is a distraction. Instead of spending time on your manuscript, you may feel compelled to scroll mindlessly through your feed to find content to retweet and reply to. After all, are you really a writer until you think of a hundred ways to not write?

These are just some of my observations about #writingcommunity. If you thrive on interacting with other people, twitter may be for you. If not? Don’t sweat it. Your ability to carefully craft 280 characters has nothing to do with how successful of an author you can be.

What are thoughts about Writing Twitter? Let me know below.

Quelling the “Editor Brain”

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If you’re like me and thousands of other writers out there, the thought of a red squiggly line makes you see double.

Awkward sentences cause queasiness and you can’t even bear the thought of having one word out of place.

Messed up tenses, wrongly named characters? Forget it. Not in your manuscript.

The result? Time lost to antagonizing over word choice and structure. If something sounds weird, I stare at it for a minute before inevitably editing.

It’s really quite difficult to make much progress on an 80,000+ word novel when it takes you an hour to write 500 words.

I’ve read lots and lots of posts instructing writers to “turn off your editing brain”. They suggest software and websites that don’t let you backspace or hide the words you write as soon as you write them.

I was never much sold on the idea of not being able to change things as you write them–knowing that I wrote something riddled with mistakes leaves something close to self-despair growing in my bones.

But at the same time, I knew that I would never finish my book if I kept pausing every time I made a mistake.

So, one day after a particularly non-productive writing session, I antagonized over my dilemma. Should I just resign to the fact that I was going to take ages to finish my novel? Or could I find a way to adapt?

That’s when I had an idea. I wouldn’t call it a strike of brilliance by any means, but I knew I had to give it a try.

I had an extra keyboard lying around, a wireless freebie I picked up from my job. It doesn’t get much use–it’s just as convenient to type from my laptop keyboard, if not easier–but it’s not clunky and the keys aren’t clacky.

So I plugged in the keyboard, pulled up my document, and then moved my laptop so I could just see the side of my screen.

Away I typed.

Immediately, I found an increased tenacity and ferocity in my speed. I wasn’t distracted by red lines telling me I misspelled a word or misplaced punctuation. I could type and type and type without cause to stop. And, if I wanted to go back a sentence or two because I forgot what I was going to say, I could just lean forward and double check my screen.

After an hour, I found that I had written nearly 1300 words–nearly double what I was doing before! And I found that the mistakes I made didn’t nearly bother me as much after the fact as they would have during.

I confess, I went back to what I had written and cleaned up misspellings and anything else jumping out at me during a quick skim read. But this took less than five minutes and was more for my sanity than anything else.

I plan to do most, if not all, of my writing sessions like this. The excitement of getting all my words onto the page far beat out the excitement of a well-written sentence.

After all, there’s time for that later!

What do you do to get past your editing brain? Let me know below.

Knowing When Your Idea is “Good Enough”

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I feel like this is the question every author wants to know the answer to.

When should you take a leap of faith and dive into writing a full-fledged novel? Perhaps your idea came from a vivid dream you had one night after indulging in too many chocolates before bed. Maybe it’s the result of a conversation you overheard on your morning commute. No matter where an idea sprang from, it’s never easy to know if it could fill a couple hundred pages.

I’ve seen blogs and posts about the difference between having an idea and having a plot. Ideas are scraps of dialogue, fragments of scenes–generalities without fully fledged characters or obstacles that face them.

“Ideas are a dime a dozen.”

While I agree to an extent, I think it’s also important to remember that no matter how good/bad your idea is, it’s what you do with it that matters. You could have the most creative, never before written ideas, but they’re not worth much if they don’t lead to something. Ideas are meant to inspire–so if you’re not excited about something, scrap it or store it away for later.

If you feel good about an idea, try to shape a plot around it. Figure out your main characters. What do they want? What’s stopping them from achieving their goals? Is there some kind of outside shaping event?

There’s nothing wrong with sitting on an idea for a while and letting it marinate. Sometimes you may be struck with sudden inspiration and race to write it down lest you forget it.

And sometimes, you realize your idea is frozen and you can’t get any further.

My main point is: it’s okay to drop an idea after working on it. There’s no shame in coming to the conclusion that your idea isn’t a viable plot.

So don’t be afraid to experiment with all your ideas. After all, that’s half the fun!