Word magic.
Do you find writing fiction challenging? First drafts can be chaotic. If you manage to find your way through your first draft, you need to organize your revision and edits, while maintaining your inspiration. Many authors fear chaos, including my writing students, until they become aware that chaos is inevitable when you’re writing a first draft. Your initial draft is … Read more
How’s your imagination? Everyone is creative and imaginative. However, writers tend to be more imaginative than most. As we discussed in this article on creative strategy, anxiety is a normal part of the creative process. Unfortunately, your imaginative faculties may make your anxiety worse: Here’s the thing about sudden unexplained anxiety: we tend to ascribe reasons to it to justify … Read more
Want to write so that readers “can’t put it down”? Sensory writing is a way to drag readers right into your novels and short stories. Moreover, sensory writing is a simple strategy; so simple that many new authors overlook it. In a recent fiction writing class, all the exercises I gave students focused on sensory writing. It came as a … Read more
What do you think about when you’re writing fiction? You may well think lots of things, but to write successful fiction, focus on feelings: both on emotion and on your senses. Thinking (logic) comes later. Here’s an excellent strategy for writing fiction, from Techniques of the Selling Writer, by Dwight V. Swain: “Where should you start, then? With feeling. Your … Read more
Is writing hard for you? If you want to make writing easy, you need to stop struggling. Seriously. Your brain will happily help you to write, because it naturally uses its Default Mode Network (DMN) whenever it can. You can leverage the DMN to make writing easy. So, what’s the brain’s Default Mode Network? Basically, it’s what your brain does … Read more