Poetry can be intimidating.
Earlier this month I was talking to my sister who didn’t believe that she could write poetry.
She had received a few poetry books or Christmas and wanted help with interpretation. I hopped on a call and thought her how to read poetry, how to think about sounds and imagery. I basically covered the basics and how to pull meaning out from poems.
It was after that call that I found out she had written something she thought might have the potential to be a poem.
A giant lump of a paragraph that was filled with…
I’ve always been a pretty consistent writer. I’ve worked really hard on building a writing schedule that I can stick to.
I’m all about working smarter not harder, and I’ve spent a few years ironing out the writing process so that it goes as smoothly as possible.
If you want to start writing articles and have heard the advice to post every day, this article will help you nail down how exactly to do that without wasting your entire week.
My idea generation phase starts before the month begins, I block out some time on my calendar for creating article…
So… I didn’t add anything to my NaNoWriMo word count this week.
I am so embarrassed that I thought maybe I would just delete last weeks update and continue not writing updates throughout the month.
Then I realised that I’m probably not the only one. I also realised that I don’t feel guilty. I had very legitimate reasons to not work on my novel this month. The biggest one being university.
I also know that even though I still only have 4,000/20,000 words, I haven’t failed my challenge yet. …
For most writers, writing itself is not a full-time profession. That means that writing gets squeezed into the cracks and shoved into morning and nighttime routines.
I myself am currently in a window between university and job hunting where I get to write full-time. It is because of this window that I am painfully aware of the time I waste.
Wasted time potentially prevents me from having a future where I can do this beautiful job as my occupation.
I know that a lot of writers feel the same pressure I do.
We know that this is our job. I…
I want to clarify that this article is not for the part-time writers out there. I fully respect the hustle and the cramming of writing hours in between jobs, babies and general life expectations.
This article is calling out writers that aren’t kind to themselves or believe that writers need to write every single day to be worth the paper they publish on.
That kind of toxic mindset doesn’t belong in the writing community, and to be honest, I’m tired of it.
Not everyone writes the way you do, so let’s stop gatekeeping writing productivity.
The short answer is that…
It blows my mind when someone tells me that they have never had a writing partner.
I cannot for the life of me figure out how you can be a functioning writer without one.
This might just be a me thing but I rely on my partner so heavily that I’m not sure I would have begun writing my novel without him.
That’s right! I’ve had my writing partner since before I began writing.
My partner and I meet up once a week on a Monday. We have access to each other's manuscripts and we read the work each week…
There are as many ways to revise your book as there are to write it. That is to say that everybody does it a little bit differently.
I have some friends who print out their books and use an elaborate coloured highlighter system.
I have friends who go line by line revising every little thing.
I also have friends who revise in order of most important scene to least.
That is to say, there are a lot of methods out there and I absolutely will not be testing all of them to figure out which one works the best. …
I wrote an article last week to figure out whether or not I wanted to do Camp NaNoWriMo this year. Turns out I not only decided that I would, but I decided that I also wanted to document the process.
Thankfully I realised very quickly that I didn’t want to do daily updates, as was my original plan but that I instead wanted to do weekly check-ins.
Before I dive into stats, I want to first explain the parameters of my Camp challenge and how the whole month is going to work.
My goal for April is 20,000 words. A…
As a new writer, I struggled with all of the usual crutches. The hardest one to overcome was the simplest in theory. Sitting down in front of my word document long enough to actually write something. This simple action was one I could dodge like a professional, but eventually, my resolve to put off writing lessened, and I figured out how to put my butt in the chair.
Then I figured out that I had a new problem.
Once I learned to sit in my chair for long enough to start writing, I would open up another browser and watch…
I spent the last four years of my life getting a Bachelor’s Degree in English Literature and Creative Writing. I’m about to graduate in May, and at the time of writing, I have half of an essay left to write, and then I’ll be completely finished.
I’m trying not to think about how anxiety-inducing it is to graduate into a pandemic with an arts degree.
Instead, let's look at what my arts degree did for my writing ability.
During my course, I took two 60 credit modules on writing. The Open University does things a little bit differently, so these…