Wednesday, May 2, 2012

Betsy here with another writing craft tip!! :)

By the way, I hope us Scribble Chicks are helping you guys with your writing questions and confusions and problems. We never want to sound like we're talking down to you or telling you craft advice you already know. We're just throwing stuff out there that either we struggle with or we come across in our teaching or our critiques or even our own edits from our editors. Please comment anytime with specific questions or email me privately at betsystamant@yahoo.com and I can answer your question anonymously on the blog. Just remember, we've all been where you guys are and you get better by asking questions, reading, and of course - WRITING!

Which is my craft tip for today.

We've mentioned this before but it's crucial enough to go over again. You have to actually WRITE. Sometimes word dumps (and this is hard for me to say because I can so rarely turn off my inner editor) are necessary. Writer's block or not, at some point, you have to turn off Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest, turn off the TV (or stick your kid in front of it! hehe), unplug the phone, put your cell on silent and WRITE. Don't read about writing. Don't even read our blog about writing ;)  Just write your story.

Sounds simple but we all know how hard this can be. Sometimes it's a lot easier to just read about writing and talk about writing and ask questions about writing than it is to actually get your booty in the chair and WRITE.

I challenge you today to do that. Because craft tips or not, critiques or conferences or workshops or not - if you don't ever WRITE, you will never truly learn.

Ultimately - You have to put it into practice and learn how to edit yourself in order to grow.

Now go :)

Then come back and leave a comment and tell me how it went and ask your questions :)

5 comments:

  1. Ahh, thanks for this!! I want to finish myWIP but ya know easier said then done. So I headlight plotted& set wrote down goals of word counts I need a week to finish a first draft by August starting yesterday. And I did start, I surpassed my daily word count (although it's loosely set for week) except it all stinks. It was what I intended to write but it came out and I've been like "what do I do? Stop or just push forward?"
    I think your saying push forward, get the word count up. Right?

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  2. * WasN't what I intended to write

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  3. Yes ma'am. If you are having trouble getting the "pretty" words to come, get ANY words now and get the gist of your scene out. Then you can go back and edit when you don't have the pressure hanging on you of meeting your deadline. Make sense? I would advise you in this situation to keep writing, don't worry about if it's great writing quality yet, and just get it out so you have something in front of you to go back and polish and tweak :)

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  4. Makes sense, will try my best

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  5. Thanks for that! I do find this little spot encouraging. :D

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