It's Okay to Write on Break. Pick Up That Pen.

Image via WikipediaEveryone who gives writing advice in this crazy little world seems to have one piece of advice in common: Do it at the same time of day every day, and don't try to squeeze it in whenever you can find time in between the rest of the things populating your schedule.

A gigantic part of me wonders whether or not they live in the real world. Sure, published authors who already have money coming in from their books tend to have large chunks of time to set aside for writing, but what about the rest of us? What about the college student who's working part time at McDonald's and doing homework for their eight classes when they aren't at work? Is it impossible for them to write their novel if they have to do it during oh, say, eight ten minute sessions that they can manage to come up with if they move a thing or two around in their schedule?

There's the classic, "Your novel should be so important that you'll stay up late and lose sleep over it." argument, but what if you have children or a type of day job where you can't afford to lose that sleep? Or worse yet, what if you've already got items populating your schedule that you're losing sleep over?

I really don't have any advice on this other than that you should try to do it anyway, just as I am. Surely all of these writers were completely broke and constantly doing things to make ends meet before their 'big debut novel' that suddenly made them 'so rich' that they could afford to do nothing but write whenever they wanted.

 I don't see why it's not completely possible for you to write a novel using what little time you can find when you can find it. There are going to be days when you'll literally have all day to write, and you can use those to the fullest extent. This is also why it's good to have a word goal instead of a time goal, which I fully advocate one hundred percent. It's easy to waste time, but words are nothing but pure progress.

Also, remember that no time is ever wasted, even if someone accuses you of wasting your time or theirs. Everything is a learning experience. Love it and benefit from it.

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• Writing Schedules (kristinastanley.net)

Think of it as going on your own personal MapQuest.

It doesn't have to look like this ^^^

Today's post is about one of my favorite parts of the novel writing process: story world mapping.

If there's one thing that most writers of genres outside of fantasy tend to ignore, it's the importance of drawing up a map of your story world. Sure, it's important to form an image of the layout of your world if you literally have an entirely different world, but it's just as useful to draw a little map of all of the normal, everyday settings that show up in your novel.

You know, like a character's bedroom, or the diner where most of the scenes take place...you get the picture. Mapping can actually be a valuable part of your brainstorming process, even if you're a non-otherworldly writer. Just try it out and see whether or not it influences how you picture the scenes in your head and how vividly you write them.

Now, I'm not saying that you have to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. My mountains are, to this day, nothing but triangles, and my trees look like chicken feet. I'm a writer, definitely not an artist. It doesn't matter if your people are stick figures, or if your dragons look like squiggly lines with crudely drawn feet. It's still a perfectly respectable story world outline either way, and you should be pretty damn proud of it if you ask me.

When I was little I did nothing but draw maps of the places I wanted to write about sometime in the future, sometimes having them set up so that to see the whole thing you had to piece several notebook pages together. My mother thought I was insane, especially because I wrote in mostly first person back then. I actually believe that her reaction to finding my writing notebooks is just the reason I have such an aversion to first person writing: she accused me of being schizophrenic and threatened to commit me.

I would suggest carrying your writing notebooks around like they're a treasure box full of gems that everyone would rip away from  you and steal forever if you were to let a single person catch a glimpse of what's inside. Nobody likes to know you're writing something unless you've been published. Once you have, everyone wants to know, and I hear it gets pretty freaking annoying.

Try drawing a map your main character's bedroom. If nothing else, it'll at least be fun. Then, feel free to go map-crazy, even if they're all just simple aerial views.

Fiction Writing Books: The Only One You'll Ever Need

Image by The Shane H via Flickr

Anyone who's read some of the writing help books out there on the market knows that they're a slew of problems with nearly each and every one of them. It's actually quite a bit harder to find one that helps you than it is to find one that discourages you from writing ever again. Seriously, sometimes I think that the writers of the aforementioned books write them just to discourage new writers and eliminate the competition.

The two biggest problems with writing help books:

--The writer almost always pushes his process on you, telling you that the reason why you've failed is because you weren't doing it his way. Oh, please. A writer's process is like a fingerprint. A true writing HELP book (the key word being help) will aid you in figuring out what your own writing process is and using it to the best of your abilities.

--Work is being pushed and creativity is being ignored. I wouldn't be lying if I said that I had read books that actually discouraged you from being creative. One book even went as far to as say that it really was all work and no play. Well, all work and no play makes a novel dull as hell. I would know. I got as far as my outline before I read over it and had to admit that it was directing the writing of one of the most boring books in history. I shudder to think of what it would have been like had I actually written the thing.

You can only imagine how discouraging it was for me to fail this hard while reading a book that tried as hard as it could to convince the reader that if he or she couldn't make their novel come out in ninety days with the instruction they were given, they were just a terrible writer and not cut out for the buisness. It was literally impossible NOT to fail, however, when I remember how I felt about my writing during those few weeks.

The writer of the book seemed to think that you should hate writing and dread the time you set aside for it as if it were the worst part of the entire day. If you enjoyed it, well, you just weren't pushing yourself hard enough. Sometimes professionals get so caught up in making their job look hard and important that they actually end up stripping all the passion out of it.

So what is an aspiring writer who's having trouble mastering the novel to do?

Well, I'm absolutely thrilled to say that I've actually come across a book that's helped me tremendously. I've taken classes on creative writing and can honestly say that they weren't as good as Alan Watt's The 90 Day Novel: Unlocking the Story Within.

That's exactly what I did. I followed the advice within the pages, and I can't even explain how it worked, but it did. I seriously didn't know that all of that plot was sitting inside of me waiting to explode onto the page. The story is almost one hundred percent different than it was when I went through it the first time I had novel writing doubts, and it's almost that much more interesting. It's not just a story---it's a good one. When I read his book, I get the impression that he actually gives a crap, rare as that is in today's world of self help books.

So if you've been trying to write a novel for the longest time (in my case, bordering on four to five years) and just can't get it to work no matter how hard you try, I highly recommend this book. Translation: GET IT. GET IT. GET IT.

I'm beginning to see what my writing process is now, and it's working so much better than trying to roll with everyone else's.

This book is a must for aspiring writers. The reviews are not lying. It really is that helpful, and I will swear on a stack of whatever religious documents you wish that I am not being paid a cent to say any of this stuff.