The first Wednesday of the month is IWSG. This month mine will be on Monday, instead of Wednesday as I have Holly Jacobs visiting.Holly’s topic will be on writing category romance. Category writing sounds easy to break into but ask any successful author and they’ll tell you a different truth. Stay tuned for her visit Wednesday and Joanne Kennedy and her cowboys on Friday.
IWSG:
I have great
story ideas and a lot fun ideas of what if...? I’ve played around with different genres to
stretch and learn. I’ve also been challenged by writing friends to write in a
different genre. The ideas are there. I don’t have a problem with that. I don’t
even have a problem verbalizing the story outline including characters. But
recently, somewhere between orally sharing a couple scenes that have been
living in my head as well as the general outline of that story and putting them
in words on the page… I run into a problem.
I didn’t
used to have this problem. I just told the story. It was like my fingers took
dictation from the scenes in my head and I’d surface several hours later
thinking, wow, what a ride! It wasn’t ever perfect, but who cared? I was
totally involved in the story and having fun.
Most of my
life writing has taken place in solitary. No writing buddies or writing
conferences just me and the story. Professionally,
I’ve written for radio, newspapers, and magazines and had no problem with
editors slashing my copy and no problem coming up with something good in a
short period of time to meet a deadline. Meeting other professionals and pitching
ideas or marketing a company? No problem. Then I decided to go back to college. This was
only exception to not being around other fiction writers. I had a solid English
background (previous college) but needed current credits so I took various
writing classes as electives for my English core. Writing has always been fun
and easy for me, so why not?
I don’t say
this as a pat on my back and oh, look how good I am. It’s a matter of knowing your strengths and recognizing your weaknesses. Some
of this is reflective thinking on what happened.
What changed?
How did that dam get
between my fingers and the scenes in my head and getting it on the paper? How
did I lose that flow?
I have a
good friend who tends to tell it like it is and doesn’t pull any punches. She’s
writing professional and published. We go back a lot of years. She’s seen quite
a few of my stories (and has harangued me for not going for publication). We
were talking about my problem and I asked for her input. She’s one of those
types you don’t ask unless you really want hear truth. What she told me was
this.
You’re getting too bogged down with the rules of today’s
fiction writing. It stifles you and you’ve lost your relaxed writing zone. The
joy of the story. I actually want to strangle you because you aren’t writing
how you talk it or like you wrote in story [A or B]. I loved your proposal which
had zing and your rich voice was so clearly present. You're pushing too hard to
make [your writing] fit into a nice little mold. Let it flow out naturally. I know if you
wrote this story the same way you explained it to me, when you weren’t concerned about rules, it would
be very powerful. I think the worst
thing you did, for your writing, was entering contests with all these wanna be
writers critiquing and judging it. These
people have you writing like you're writing a textbook.
Sia, just tell the story and forget about the rules and making it perfect on the first draft. If
you beat yourself up over every sentence you will never get the story out. It
makes you stiff. Mistakes in grammar can be fixed later but you can’t fix stiff
and boring. I want you to write this story without filters. Write it like you
were telling me the story. Show me what
you see in your head.
That’s a lot
to think about. She made sense and I understand where she’s coming from. God
knows, she’s seen a enough of my writing over the years to see the difference. Now, all I have to do is
figure out how to turn off my inner critic and connect again with the flow of
my characters and my story.
Sure. Got
it. Simple, right? (Cue maniacal laughter).
