June 2013
15 posts
“If you’re feeling lost, bone-sad or heartbroken or hopeless or astray, get up. We cannot move forward until we stand up.”
—Victoria Schwab, “A message to the lost (myself included)”, on her blog
HOW TO FINISH A BOOK
I answered this question yesterday, and have been asked to make it rebloggable. SO HERE IT IS:
I write a lot, I’ve been told by a lot of people that i’m good, some say i’m even good enough to get published. My only problem is that i reach about half way into the book, or long story and i start thinking to myself, Why am i doing this? Will it be good enough for people to read? then i delete the file or throw away the pages i was working on so i never actually finish it. Is this something all writers must face? and do you have any advice on how to push past it?
createyourlifeaway
It happens to me. It happens to pretty much everyone I know. Any writers who DO NOT go through this…they keep quiet about it.
Many people labor under the illusion that, for some reason, all your writing should be awesome right away or you should give up. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The trick to finishing a book? Is finishing it.
The trick to getting through the middle? Is working through to the end.
The trick to pushing past that point? Is to abandon ALL FEAR of being bad. Wrap your arms around the idea of being bad.
MOST THINGS are bad when you are first learning or doing them.
DARE TO SUCK at it. The world will not explode if your draft is bad. Or even if the book is bad when it’s totally rewritten and done. You need to be really bad for a long time, so GET COMFORTABLE WITH IT. Seriously. Not a word of a joke or a lie.
Think about it. If you were, say, playing the violin, would you expect to pick it up and INSTANTLY BE GREAT AT IT? No. You will suck at it until you learn how to do it, and you learn how to do it by sucking at it for a long time and practicing. The same with sports, and dancing, and other instruments, and really many, many things in life.
Many people who are FAMOUS FOR WRITING write terrible things EVERY DAY. They do not worry. Writing a thing badly is often a critical step on the path to writing it well.
If you give up, it does not get finished.
So do not give up. Keep going, even through fear and the annoyance and the boredom and the blocks and the crisis of talent and all of those things. They are ghosts in the mist. Just walk right through them. It sounds both hard and simple, I know, but that is the way.
“Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.”
—Stephen King (via resurrectionofannabellee)
“When drafting a book, one of the first things I write is the last page. Not the last chapter or scene. The last moment. It’s my lighthouse.”
—Victoria Schwab, on twitter
“Fiction is one of the best educators you can ever have about how to live a meaningful life, how to relate to people, how to grow, how to find your place in the world.”
—Justine Musk, “how reading can help you through your life crisis”, on her blog (via Stephanie Burgis)
“You don’t really understand an antagonist until you understand why he’s a protagonist in his own version of the world.”
—John Rogers (via thedavidkane)
“After a while, the characters I’m writing begin to feel real to me. That’s when I know I’m heading in the right direction.”
—Alice Hoffman (via booklust)
“Fans of the first film really wanted to find out what happened to Peggy afterwards, so Marvel are also making a short film, which is basically ‘What Peggy Did Next’, which will be shown at Comic-Con and be on the DVD extras of the second film (Captain America: The Winter Soldier). So as well as doing a bit in the new film, I’ve got a whole new spin-off short film. It has been great to be back in training with the stunt coordinators, kicking some butt again.”
—
Hayley Atwell (via fyeahlilbit2point0)
A chorus of angels just began singing….
(via therearecertainshadesoflimelight)
I gotta just stop for a second and read this again and have a big dopey grin on my face because, goddamn, Marvel, you are doing it RIGHT. Ten years ago, no studio would have done SHIT for Peggy Carter post-movie, but Marvel’s going, “What’s that? You liked her lots and thought she was interesting? Here, HAVE A TINY MOVIE.”
Plus, you seem to be continuing making efforts to diversify your casting by bringing in characters like Sam, and bringing back Heimdall and Rhodey (in the biggest role he’s had in an Iron Man film with 3), and you’re courting Zoe Saldana for Guardians and continue to take original character back stories that have a bit of a sexist tinge to them now (a bunch of your females were models or actresses or nurses, and Betty Ross was just the general’s daughter) and making them scientists (Sue, Betty, Jane, and Jean Gray) while still keeping some characters with their original back stories (Mary Jane is still an actress) because you seem to get that women can have ALL KINDS OF CAREERS.
You not only handed Pepper Potts Stark Enterprises, but you never, ever played the “the business is failing and Pepper is blamed” card. In fact, you have always played, “Pepper is fucking awesome at business and life card.”
You also cast Sitwell with a Latino actor without making some big thing of it (same as you cast Hemidall), and you went with Ult!Fury and Samuel L. Jackson and every time you’ve put a woman in a dangerous situation, she’s gotten to save herself in one way or another (and sometimes just straight up completely).
You all don’t always bat 1000, but you seem to be aiming for it like crazy, and I really appreciate the hell out of that.
(via sweaterkittensahoy)
WANT.
“Cut like crazy. Less is more. I’ve often read manuscripts–including my own–where I’ve got to the beginning of, say, chapter two and have thought: ‘This is where the novel should actually start.’ A huge amount of information about character and backstory can be conveyed through small detail. The emotional attachment you feel to a scene or a chapter will fade as you move on to other stories. Be business-like about it.”
—Sarah Waters (via octemberfirst)
May 2013
26 posts
“A novel must show how the world truly is, how characters genuinely think, how events actually occur. A novel should somehow reveal the true source of our actions.”
—Jane Austen, Becoming Jane (via theinvisibletruth)
A True-To-Life Tale Of Bonafide Darling-Killing →
terribleminds.com
On the killing of one’s literary darlings:
Comes a time in every writer’s life that he’s gotta look at the work in front of him and he’s got to say, “This thing is thick with peacocks…”
“Read. Read anything. Read the things they say are good for you, and the things they claim are junk. You’ll find what you need to find. Just read.”
—Neil Gaiman (via thatkindofwoman)
“Why did they train Luke up and not Princess Leia who was cooler, and had more to fight for, and was less screwed up? Patriarchy!”
—John Green in his newest Crash Course video (via kinuimani)
