5 Tips to Getting Back to Writing

Okay, the summer is over if you count Labor Day as the Official End of The Vacation Season. It is now time to go back to the keyboard or pick up the writing tools and start working again. I am certain a huge sigh follows reading that line. I sighed heavily after writing it. Since Labor Day was always the holiday that signaled the start of the school season back when I was still in school, that is how I still view it. That means all those excuses for not writing on my manuscript must end. Time to edit, to write, to WORK!

 But how can we do that?  How can we get started again? I actually used to enjoy the beginning of the school year and the new school supplies and new clothes. I also liked the idea that I would be taking classes I hadn’t taken before and that I would be learning new things.

Let’s look at a few ideas for putting our now much older brain cells back into the writing harness.

1. Go back to your last manuscript. Open up that manuscript you were working on –whether that was a month ago or two months ago.  Start reading it, start editing it, but get busy with it. But don’t start from where you left off. Start from the very beginning. Re-read your work and see if it holds up from the beginning.

          2. Re-introduce yourself to your characters. See if you are introducing them properly. You probably know them a little better after spending that time with them earlier. Look over whether you really got some of who they are into those opening paragraphs.

         3. Check over your setting. Are you pulling readers into the setting at the beginning and making them feel the location, the time period or the time of year? Look for places you can edit or make notes on items you need to look up. 

      4. Focus on the Inciting Incident. Are you getting the start of the story in quickly enough or are you spending too many pages setting everything up? Those days of long involved openings no longer work. Readers want to get into the meat of the story as quickly as possible.

       5. Make necessary edits but don't bog down. While you want to fix the big problems, don’t get so engrossed with making it perfect that you forget to move on. The story needs to continue to move and you need to continue to write it and get the rest of the story out of your head.  

Mainly you want to start working with fresh ideas, a fresh outlook and fresh determination to finish. Set up some new writing rules for the rest of the year or set them up as though you were starting the next year of school. Try some new writing trick or lesson that you heard about over the summer. Maybe it’s time to try using a timer and attempting writing sprints. Or try using a new writing program. It’s a new year, why not try something new?

The long days of winter are ahead and there will be plenty of days where it makes sense not to go out, but to stay inside and WRITE!

5 Writing Tips from a Master

This past week I had the opportunity to hear the great David Morrell speak twice – first for the Rocky Mountain Mystery Writers and then at Genre Fest, which was sponsored by RMMWA, along with the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers and Colorado Authors League.

Both times he really blew me away with both his knowledge of the writing world and what it takes to become a bestselling author. He would know something about being a bestselling author as the father of Rambo. (he even told us the story of how he came up with that iconic came for his character in First Blood).

I’ve heard him speak before at the Tony Hillerman Writers Conference and this time was as great as the first time I listened to his ideas and thoughts on writing.

1.      Don’t chase the market – This makes sense because so many people today seem to think that it makes sense to go with what is already out there. But if you think about it, the most successful writers are the ones who find something new. Suddenly it hits and takes off and that first writer might become a bestseller. The imitators are seldom remembered and don’t make it big. Instead of aspiring to be the next J.K. Rowling, Stephanie Meyer or E. L. James, go after your own bestseller with your own original ideas.  By the time you try to catch up with whatever is hot today, the market will have moved on to the next big “thing” and that author will be famous

2.      Write for yourself – Write what you want to write and your own personality and style will come through. Just like following the market, you can’t make yourself into someone else. There are certain things you know, certain style that you bring to your writing that allows your work to be different. Pursue that and you will find you can become a better writer and you will also have an individual book you can be proud of.

3.      Write to your emotions – Morrell discussed his life and how his life journey has always dictated his writing.  As a child and young adult he was struck by the television program Route 66. His comments spoke to me because I not only recall that television program about two young men wandering through the country but I remember our first big family trip that made me want to travel more was along Route 66. To him, the fact they were both orphans spoke to him as an orphan who also wanted to get out and travel around. But those beginnings took him from Canada into studying to be a writer at Penn State. My own writing journey took me traveling to various cities around the western US to work. But as he said, his life and his emotions still play into his writing. And I find that mine do too. If I don’t cry over the happy ending to my romance novels I feel like I’ve let my readers down. I want them to leave the book with some sort of feeling and if I can’t feel it, then I’m not putting my all into my writing.

4.      Listen to your daydreams – He said that writers are notorious day dreamers and that is so true. When he said that, there were so many people nodding their heads in the room. We all knew what he meant. These stories come into our heads and they won’t go away. We have characters coming to us and asking to have their stories written. People who don’t relate to their characters or their stories don’t become writers. He says to listen to those daydreams, think about them and what they mean and then write, write write.

5.      Study the craft of writing – His final point was to study the craft of writing and to continue to study it. As a teacher he is always learning and he is also always teaching. He recommended we look for the books in our field and learn more about what we are writing. His enthusiasm had me wanting to re-read the work of Hemmingway as well as my old favorite mystery writers. 

The other thing I witnessed, though he didn’t say it, but I’ve seen it at other conferences and even in the time he took to talk with me, was his willingness to chat with the other writers and  to just talk the craft with them.  I remember the advice he gave to and other writer about writing short stories and using them to learn to hone the craft.

He also talked about research and how much time he devotes to it and he has done that with his latest books, Murder is a Fine Art and Inspector of the Dead. Both are obviously well researched and he discussed how he read so many books from the 1850s as well as studying that time period. But he not only read books, he used what he learned from those books to bring his own stories to life, using that information in his setting and bring it to life for his own readers.

What great information! As I have told others, I could just listen to his ideas and his knowledge over and over. By studying other writers and how they work, we can all become better writers. As David Morrell says, we must always be learning.