Successful writing requires The Write Focus. Hosted by M.A. Lee with occasional forays from Remi Black and Edie Roones, we focus on productivity / tools / craft / process for fiction and nonfiction, entertainment and academic writing.
Welcome to our 1st Check-in for this Summer Writing Challenge, tracking not only words but also other tasks that a writer needs to pursue success. We began tracking on June 1, and we’ll continue to July 31.
As part of my Master Plan, I have three projects.
All through June and July, The Write Focus turns its lens to the Summer Writing Challenge, 61 days of writing as well as presenting all the other tasks that writers should be doing in their writing business.
In addition to tracking our progress on writing projects, we’ll cover market copy, cover designers, promotional posts, and newsletters as well as audio projects. These are just a sample of the myriad additional tasks performed ...
This year and the next are celebratory years for me. I began publishing in 2015 and podcasting in 2020 (yes, that coronacoaster year). It’s time for a retrospective, totting up the gains, cringing at the worst failures (some of which will never see the light of day), and dwelling on the chief lessons. You know, what I do wish that I’d known before launching into the ocean realm of writing.
The ocean of writing is a great metaphor. ...
We don’t often take the time to look back, to do a retrospection. We track our accomplishments and diligently write down the small steps that take us to our short-term goals and on to our long-term ones.
If we’re good little bunnies, we check our Master Plan once a year and rewrite it every third or fifth or seventh year. I can’t imagine a 10-year Master Plan. I had to drop back from five to three because my plans change so much. I...
A handful of years ago, after I had started publishing, I stumbled across Phyllis A. Whitney’s Guide to Fiction Writing.
Originally published in 1982, that date was 6 years before the Mystery Writers of America gave her a Grand Master award for Lifetime Achievement and 8 years before a similar award came from the Romance Writers of America.
When she died in 2008, Whitney had published more than 70 novels, mostly for adults but a fe...
We’re approaching the finale of our examination of Writers Defeating Writer’s Block.
We’ve diagnosed the three major issues, how to recognize them, and how to resolve them to return to writing.
We’ve examined advice from 10 different writers, from Neil Gaiman to Barbara Kingsolver, Charlaine Harris to Philip Pullman.
We delved deeply into famous blockbuster Erle Stanley Gardner’s techniques as he dealt with the unmentioned unmentio...
Many writers—newbies, early wannabees, flash-ins before they flash out—many of these writers never reach the mature writer’s self-analysis stage.
Some mature writers don’t...
A funny thing happened on the way through entertainment this past weekend. I read Mary Stewart’s The Stormy Petrel. That’s not the funny thing.
Mary Stewart is my all-time favorite author. Wonderful character development, intriguing plots, lovely lyrical writing. She’s a guaranteed satisfying entertainment. My favorite novel of hers is My Brother Michael with The Moonspinners as a close second. (If you’ve seen the film, you haven’t...
When we’re browsing for information to help our own particular problems, we reach for the weighty titles, the ones that analyze to the nth degree and provide six or seven or thirteen examples. That kind of information scan would miss Judy Delton’s surprisingly valuable little guidebook The 29 Most Common Writing Mistakes and How to Avoid Them.
My own bookshelf, physical and electronic, is scant on information about Writer’s Block. ...
Writers read. In reading we are voracious consumers of anything that catches our eye.
We may also be hoarders, little dragons perched on a Keep-Forever Book Stack, surrounded by a myriad of smaller To-Be-Read stacks: This Stack First, This Stack Second, This Later, Helpful Stuff, I Wanna But Not Now, Maybe Later, I Dunno, and more. When we climb down from our hoard, we may stop and investigate those TBR stacks and do a little re-or...
Here we are with More Techniques from Erle Stanley Gardner. We’re tackling Gardner’s solutions for Writer’s Block.
Look to the Show Notes for information about the nonfiction book that is the source for this information.
TIMINGS
Who is this great Defeater of Writer’s Block? Let’s try one more clue.
Have you gu...
We’re back with more advice from Pro Writers on Defeating Writer’s Block.
Let’s launch straight into business.
TIMINGS
Total Run Time:: 16:40
Links
None. Quotations came from a variety of internet sites.
Thanks for listening to The Write Fo...
In the first part of this series, The Write Focus shared everything we had to say about Writer’s Block and how to defeat that three-headed monster.
When we research the topic, we find articles that claim 5 types or 10 types of Writer’s Block. Shudder. I don’t want even to contemplate 10 types. Yet I read the article—so you don’t have to. Guess what? Those 10 types are actually just an expansion of the 3 types we covered in our seri...
Writer’s Block looms like a sharp-clawed monster over every writer. A daily discipline—No Day without Lines—is extremely helpful, no matter how many you schedule for a particular day.
Nulla Dies Sine Linea is our mantra, right?
We can overcome a simple refusal to write by maintaining discipline and side projects and our escapes when we’re overwhelmed.
We can defeat Procrastination by overcoming the Twin Fears of Failure and of Judg...
Defeating Writer’s Block is easy to say, not so easy to do. We writers have to discover the problem we’re having with those pesky little words.
1st, we have to find them—and they do like to hide.
2nd, we have to write them down—whether in a notebook or straight to the keyboard. That’s a whole problem on its own. We can’t count the Block as a simple disruption, a wholesale explosion of our writing time.
It’s the Desire and the Initi...
Hey! Our claim is that Writer’s Block doesn’t exist? And you say, “I don’t believe it. I’m blocked. I’m suffering with Writer’s Block.”
Believe it or not, the truth is that Writer’s Block does NOT exist. Not. No way. Nope. We can write, but something keeps us from writing what we very well need to write.
At the end of our last episode, the introduction to this series on Defeating Writer’s Block, we classified 3 types. Knowing the t...
Can you name a phrase that every writer fears? Try “Writer’s Block”.
We writers all have a deep-seated fear when we hear those two words side by side. Writer’s Block—those should be forbidden to speak together.
We have quite a number of pro writers who claim there’s no such things as Writer’s Block, and I’m one of them—but I will admit that I find myself refusing to write or avoiding my desk or just stuck on a story. Distractions ...
In the last episode, we began our look at a process method I call Plot 7. This week we finish the Plot 7 and our series on Discovering Plot. Coming up for February are four episodes on Overcoming Writer’s Block.
The Plot 7 is wonderful for sparking ideas for a new novel or novella. It’s too deep for a short story.
In the Plot 7 are the 7 most important scenes for the novel. We covered the Beginning, the Very End, and the Roughest M...
We’re winding up the Discovering Plot series with the Plot 7, a quick way to launch into story and to reach that story’s heart … and discover if it will fly—or crash like my feeble attempts at paper airplanes.
Plot 7 comes from the writer’s guidebook Think like a Pro, by M.A. Lee, designed to turn a hobby writer into a pro writer with the necessary mindset changes.
We’ll break the Plot 7 into 2 episodes.
TIMINGS
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