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This is where I ramble about life, the internet, and creative writing.✍🏻 |
 Scribbles & Notions Welcome to my blog. This space exists mainly for me to keep myself focused and writing regularly. |
I'm back! Wow, it's been nearly two weeks since my last blog post—time flies! There's so much I want to share. First off, I wrote a new short story last night, and it's now up on my portfolio. It's called "Project Kaukauna"  , and if you're into sci-fi, you should definitely check it out! I wrote it as part of a challenge I'm doing with a friend, where we each write a short story every week. The challenge is heavily inspired by "The Bradbury" challenge here at WdC.After finishing our stories, we swap them and critique each other’s work. We just started a few nights ago, and honestly, his writing is definitely better than mine—but that’s okay! I’m improving little by little, and more than anything, I’m just grateful to have someone to trade stories with and discuss writing. Not everyone has a friend like that, and I really appreciate it. I'm half-way done with Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It's honestly been very good, and I recommend it to anyone who likes scifi (especially hard scifi). Apparently there's two other books in the series, so I might check them out when I'm done with the first one. I got so many books in my pile (like a literal physical pile). I always tell myself that I will get through them all before ordering a new book, but then I just end up buying a new one anyway. Has that ever happened to you? I need to prioritize what I read, I think. Anyway, there is a lot I have to read, and not enough time (as always). Reading makes me happy, and I find myself picking up something to read more often than not these days. This was not the case a few years ago, so I'm happy to say that I'm starting to become somewhat of a bookworm. How many books do you read during the week? Do you wait to finish one book before starting the next one? Or do you read multiple novels concurrently? I've been doing one novel at a time thus far, but that may change. I'm thirty percent done with Barbara Baig's How to be a Writer which honestly has been helping me a lot with getting used to just jumping in head first into a page and writing stuff down (if you've read my blog post on Writing Without Fear, you'll understand what I mean). Freewriting is a great tool for someone who just needs to jump into the actual work of writing. Sometimes we put so much weight on selecting the right words that we often become paralyzed and not write anything until we're absolutely sure how we're going to start something. That's not good! It's better to just write and let everything flow out of your head rather than judging each word before it even lands on the page. If you start judging the work as you are writing it, you'll just freeze! Barbara Baig calls this a "short-circuit" of the brain, since you are trying to use your creativity while at the same time criticizing everything you're writing. This is not good. You need to separate your creative mind from your critical mind. Most well-established authors write their first drafts with this in mind and so they often don't dwell too much on what words they put on the page as they are writing the original version of their story. They will simply pour out all of the content from their minds and then decide at the end what to keep and what to remove. I like the way that Jared Henderson puts it in this short YouTube video: "When you write without inhibition, the stuff you put on the page is not yet for public consumption. You shouldn't be thinking about your audience yet. You just need to write." We sometimes forget that when we're writing the first draft of anything, no one is going to read it immediately until we decide to share it. That first draft is our private space, so we can put as much down as we want (things that we won't even use perhaps) and just continue to get into that mind state where we are immersed in our writing. That's the most important part of being a writer in my opinion: getting out of your current moment and just getting into that flow state where you turn on the faucet in your head full of ideas and let it give you content, unfiltered, raw, without restrictions. Or as, Thomas Frank (another YouTuber) puts it: "Another metaphor that I like to use for writing is of mining for gold. If you never get down deep enough into the ground, you're never going to get the gold in the first place. You have to build enough momentum to excavate a bunch of dirt, a bunch of not useful stuff, to get to the point where the real good gems come out." Barbara Baig also mentions in her book that better writing comes from expanding what you read. The more things you read, the more you'll get a feeling of what kind of writer's voice you'd like to have. You'll understand what works and what doesn't work for you. As a result, I've made an effort to build a list of books from genres other than just scifi/fantasy. I want to explore how authors tackle topics that are not in my sphere of interests. I want to see their writer's voice and learn from it. Speaking of learning from other people, you may have noticed that this blog post is styled a little differently from the previous ones. Well, that's because I was reading some stories around WdC the other day and found one that had been styled very differently to what I was used to seeing. It looked much cleaner and nice-looking than the others. So I messaged the author who had written that story and asked them if they would be kind enough to let me in on their secret: how had they styled their writing in such a way to make it look so different? Thankfully, they replied with instructions! Turns out, it's not as hard as I originally thought. You just have to learn to use line-spacing and surround your written piece with the quote tag. My favorite font is Verdana at 3.5 font size for this style. I'm happy with the outcome. If you need additional instructions on how to achieve this or the steps to get this working on your own piece of writing, I'm always happy to help! Just shoot me a message here at WdC if you'd like. Anyway, that's it from me! See you in another week. |
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