lori sizemore

Setting yourself up to write as a professional from someone in the know.  Check it out.

Are you a Twilight enthusiast? A Bella-Wannabe? Mooning endlessly over Bella’s identification withWuthering Heights and thinking the only thing as great as being the author of Edward would be being the author of Heathcliff?

Just so you know: the author of Heathcliff was dissed by her publisher, left unpublished until he could ride the coattails of her sister Charlotte, then published in a terrible edition with sloppy typesetting and cheap paper, and ignored by the reading public, who found Heathcliff—beyond reprehensible—downright disgusting. Emily Bronte was a bonafide literary genius whose greatest work, a saga in verse, was altered after her death against her passionately-clear wishes by busybody Charlotte and re-published in its mutilated form, although half the poems had vanished by then and have never been recovered. Emily Bronte died young, unloved, unhappy, unfulfilled. Undiscovered.

And the author of Edward can’t write for beans. She stumbled on a misogynist aspect of our culture she could exploit in impressionable kids, along with a really good marketer. That really good marketer is now busy with Twilight, and you are in their backwash.

via A. Victoria Mixon, Editor » Blog Archive » 6 Personality Types Who Will Fail as Writers.

This article is great, Ms. Mixon is better.  People who speak their minds and can back it up with facts–priceless.

Emotional sex. Note that I am NOT coining the “love scene” euphemism. I do this deliberately-for now-though by the end, I’m hoping that’s exactly what sex will be, making love: sweet, hot, emotive sex that is unforgettable. And this can be done.

This wonderful article discusses making your sex scenes emotional (and overcoming the fear of writing the dreaded sex scene).

Making sex emotional does NOT mean the characters have to be in love already. What it means is, they have to have inner conflict, tension, insecurities or physical or emotional limitations that add to the emotional wallop of the act itself, and add to tension later, if necessary.

Yes, exactly!  This is how I’ve always written sex scenes, because those are the sex scenes I want to read.  But I’ve never, ever seen anyone put this to words.  Every scene in your novel should have conflict and it should move the story forward.  A sex scene is absolutely no different.

Melissa James gives examples and dissects them to show why they work.  I highly recommend this article if you ever plan on writing a sex scene–romance or not.

via Wow! Women on Writing – An eZine for women writers, authors, editors, agents, publishers, and readers.

There are as many ways to plan out a novel as there are writers. Each writer goes about it a different way.

via Planning, Outlining, and Organizing Your Novel – Or Not! « Word Sharpeners.

This is an excellent article on the many ways to plot your novel, even if you write by the seat of your pants (pantser!).

A quick link to an article I found from twitter this morning (via VMGDesigns) on the Seven Bad Writing Habits You Learned in School.

No one but you is an authority on your writing.

Not me. Not your English teachers. Not Strunk and White and their highfalutin Elements of Style.

The longer you write, the more you’ll realize that other writers can’t tell you what to do. You should listen to more experienced writers, sure, but never more than you listen to yourself.

Good stuff.

Later (after work): A look at my two opposing views of NaNo writing from the beginning and the end.

Today is the last day to get in those 50k words.  As you can see by my word count meter (on the left) I’m not going to make it.  It’s not that I haven’t worked every day; it’s that 1700 words a day doesn’t work in my process.  I have to take notes, then write.  Sometimes I need to brainstorm.  Sometimes it’s a trickle, sometimes it’s a torrential downpour.

This blog post by Maggie Stiefvater is a Dear John letter to NaNo.  This is exactly how I feel:

You are not a bad concept. You’re a bad concept for me, NaNo. This is why: you make me write crap, NaNo. You make me make bad novel decisions. You take away my ability to brainstorm between chapters. You make me rush through characterization. You make me pack filler in that will only get ripped out later, having taught me nothing about my novel. You make me into a bad writer.

However, to everyone who completed NaNo, to everyone who participated–I applaud you.  You wrote and that’s damn fine.

As I spent seven hours a few days ago, reading weird websites and finding ways to waste my time, I realized that I was avoiding writing out of fear.  Fear of what?  That I’m just not good enough.  I’m not good enough to pull it off, my writing isn’t good enough to be published, I’ll ruin this awesome story just begging to get out.  I actually had to walk away from a WIP I had 1/4 of finished because I psyched myself out that bad.  I’ll go back to it later, but for now, we–the manuscript and I–need some distance.

But, I’m not the only writer to be afraid to write.  In fact, it’s so common, it’s nearly cliche.  Except that it’s a real problem, and cliche or not, we’ve all got to find a way to quiet those personal demons or, at least, tell them to shut up so we can move on.

Angela Booth suggests:

Get a writing buddy, or join a writing class, where the emphasis is on writing, rather than critiquing. When you’re writing in a group, there’s a group energy which makes it easier to write.

Join a group which doesn’t critique. Very few people know how to critique writing, and for a new writer, critiques aren’t helpful. In fact a critique may stop you writing for months or years when you’re suffering writing anxiety.

This actually happened to me, recently.  The critiques were great, and they did help.  But it got to a point, I guess, where I felt I *had* to make changes and then the changes became so huge and overwhelming that I just… became paralyzed.

Brian Clark wrote an excellent article about what it is we fear when we’re to afraid to write.  We’re all afraid of basically the same things–the trick is pushing past it.  I think I quoted here once something someone wrote on a forum:

Fear makes us life’s whiny little bitches.

That always gets me moving because, honestly?  I don’t want to be anyone’s bitch.  And I definitely don’t want to be a whiny bitch.

I’ll leave you with a link to the wonderful Cherry Forums.  An entire thread (8 pages) of some awesome writers talking about just this: What are you afraid of?

And, with that, I’ve procrastinated enough.  Time to go write.  Bite me, fear.