Coffee & Conversation: How to become a writer of habit?

22 Monday Nov 2021

Posted by Emmi Lawrence in Coffee & Conversation

Tags

advice, answer, author, essay, non-fiction, nonfiction, Novel, prose, question, reading, writer, Writing, writing advice, writing habits

How to become a writer of habit?

A lot of authors will give the advice, Write Every Day. No exceptions.

A lot of other authors will give the advice, OMG, you don’t have to write every day. I don’t. You don’t either. Don’t listen to that advice.

Neither of these are correct and neither of these are wrong.

What you must do as a writer is create a habit. A habit that will last you through shitty days. A habit that will last you through null motivation. A habit that will last you through depression and writer’s block and burnout.

For some people, this habit needs to be every single day. And this is great. Whatever time comes around each day and you sit yourself down at your computer or in front of a notebook because your brain says, “Hey, this is supposed to be writing time, remember?”

But many people have inflexible schedules where this isn’t possible. So to those people, I say this: find a special time that WILL work. Maybe it’s once a week, Saturday morning at 6 am for one hour. Maybe it’s Tues/Thurs nights from 8pm-10pm. Maybe it’s every other Friday from 6am-3pm because that’s your CWS Friday.

I don’t know when you have time. But YOU know.

Find that special time, whether it’s an hour or ten or twenty each week. Find it and make it sacrosanct. NO ONE, and I mean NO ONE, can interrupt this time. If it’s 30 minutes during baby nap time, then it’s 30 minutes during baby nap time. If it’s sitting down at the kitchen table with your morning coffee before work or on your commute with an audio recorder.

Once you find that time, craft whatever setup you need to make it easiest to keep doing it so it becomes a habit. Put the notebook exactly where you know you’re going to need it. Add extra batteries to your pocket when you go for that walk with your audio recorder. Make sure to make your computer and your working files as easy and as organized to get to as possible. Any obstacles you can remove, remove them. Any way to make things easier, do them.

Set up meeting schedules in your calendar if need be. Set up notifications. Reminders.

And then! (And this is the super hard part)

HIDE YOUR PHONE. DO NOT OPEN THE INTERNET. IGNORE ALL ELSE DURING YOUR WRITING TIME.

Seriously.

I, personally, have a small netbook that is for writing only. Can’t even get onto the internet or it’ll probably die some horrible, virus-ridden death. It’s great, because even if i wanted to get on the interest…I can’t.

But really. Hide your phone or get yourself an app like Forest in order to turn off access to it for your special writing time that you’ve carved out to form a habit that you want to keep you going through the years <3

~Emmi

Coffee & Conversation: Removing large-scale defaults in my work

31 Monday May 2021

Posted by Emmi Lawrence in Coffee & Conversation

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

answer, essay, FAQ, non-fiction, POV, question, reading, Setting, Short Fiction, writing advice, writing habits

Removing large-scale defaults in my work

I feel like who I am as a writer is always in flux. Which I think is a really good thing and I hope I always keep pushing myself. These are just a few ways that aspects of my writing have moved beyond a norm I’d instinctively set for myself.

Perspective

There was a time when every story I wrote was in third person perspective. Everything. I didn’t even consider writing in first person because I didn’t tend to like first person stories as much. You can get pretty close to a character even in third person, so I never thought much about it. There was even an interview I read by another author who said she only wrote in first person because she didn’t think she could get as close in third and I thought…”how silly” and “I would hate to only write in first.”

Slowly, I’ve gone beyond third person. I’ve written plenty of stories in first and even in second person (though I’m still iffy on doing whole novels in second because you need to have a really good reason for it). When I sit down to write a new story, I’m far more likely to truly consider perspective and decide which one will be best for the story I want to tell rather than default to the one I use the most often.

Setting

I also used to only write secondary world/high fantasy or distant science-fiction. I still default to distant time science-fiction if I write sci-fi because near future seems synonymous with hard science-fiction to a lot of people and I’m much more of a “hey, wouldn’t it be cool if…” and “who cares if it’s impossible” type of writer. Continue reading →

Coffee & Conversation: What was your last attempt to try something entirely new in your writing?

24 Monday May 2021

Posted by Emmi Lawrence in Coffee & Conversation

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

answer, essay, FAQ, non-fiction, nonfiction, Novel, question, short reads, writer, Writing, writing habits

What was your last attempt to try something entirely new in your writing?

Last year, wanting to try something I’m not skilled at, I decided to try writing a story in objective voice. Objective voice is essentially when you’re not allowed to see the world through any character eyes and instead are forced to view the story solely from an outside perspective. Basically, it’s like watching the events happen, but being unable to hop into anyone’s mind to get clarification on what they were thinking or feeling.

It’s HARD. OMG.

All the emotion a person feels, all the thoughts they have…GONE.

All you have is what they do, what they say. You’re basically trying to be as objective as possible in even the description of the setting. It felt like I was just saying “He went there. He did this.” over and over again. I kept wanting to sink into the character and give them a voice, an opportunity to say what they felt.

It was so awful.

I hated it.

I…don’t know if I’ll try it again. Continue reading →

Coffee & Conversation: What traits do you think lead to success?

03 Monday May 2021

Posted by Emmi Lawrence in Coffee & Conversation

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

answer, essay, FAQ, non-fiction, question, Short Fiction, writer, writing advice, writing habits

What traits do you think lead to success?

The traits that I feel are most important to success in the writing industry are: social acuity, endurance, and thick-skin. Keep in mind that my own success is debatable, depending on your definition of success and that most of this is from what I’ve observed within the industry.

1) Thick-skin

There are a lot of rejections in this industry. Some of these rejections are impersonal, leading some people to feel downtrodden because they don’t feel like they’re being read or considered. They don’t feel like they’re even getting a person on the other end. So the rejections feel automated.

Some of the rejections are personal, which can feel even more personal depending on what’s said. Some point out flaws in a particular story, while others point out flaws in writing ability. While still others might even go as far as pointing out potential flaws in the author themselves. And these are all, generally, from strangers across the world, people who you have no idea whether they have the training to be saying what they say or even if they’re someone whose opinion should be taken.

Not only do you get told NO a lot, but we also get reviews. Reviews can be sweet and wonderful and the best things in the world. Or they can be downright cruel, some of them going as far as deriding the author instead of the work.

On top of rejections and reviews, many authors seek out critiques in order to try and improve. Some people can handle critiques. Some people can’t. [Also, some people give helpful critiques and some people…don’t.] Continue reading →

Coffee & Conversation: What are some of your good writing habits?

12 Monday Apr 2021

Posted by Emmi Lawrence in Coffee & Conversation

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

answer, essay, FAQ, prose, question, reading, writer, Writing, writing advice, writing habits

What are some of your good writing habits?

Because I discussed my bad writing habits a couple weeks ago, I thought it only fitting I also discuss some of my good writing habits as well.

1) Divide Stories Between Notebooks

Organizational-wise, coding each story by notebook allows an easy method of finding the information I need for any specific world or novel or even short story. This cuts down on how much time I need to search for what I need. Allows me to only have to carry around one notebook at a given time. Gives me a method to the madness that is all the stories I want to write or am in the middle of writing.

The only negative aspect of this method is that sometimes I might not have the appropriate notebook at hand and I desperately need to write something down so I won’t forget it. This means that bits of information would end up where they didn’t belong. But I counter this quite well with assigning a couple of specific notebooks to being “catch-all” notebooks, wherein I can cross out information once it’s been used or relayed to its proper place.

2) Work on Something Every Day

This is one that a lot of writers resist against and I’m never sure why. You can be a writer whether you write one day of the year or all 365. Doesn’t much matter. However, you’re not going to get much done if you only write one day a year, which is why I like the method of crafting a habit out of writing.

By crafting a habit, where my brain insists on needing to open certain documents, create new words or edit old ones every single day, I’ve made it almost impossible for me not to accomplish things. Stopping is far worse than slowing down. I must keep the wheels rolling if I want to remember what I was doing and why I was doing it that way. Otherwise, things start to disappear.

Thus, I get my butt in the chair in front of my computer every day. And if I can’t, then I wander with a notebook jotting down notes. And if can’t do that, I have a nifty writing app on my phone and a bunch of stories there as well. Doesn’t matter what is going on in my life, I always have a project at hand. And if I don’t, then I make one that fits that dead space.

3) Cycling

Not the bike cycling, the writing cycling. Every time I sit down to work on a project, I never start where I ended. I go back to the top. Maybe not the very top, as in a novel that would be impossible, but I’ll go back to the top of the chapter, top of the scene, top of whatever good breaking point there is from my last writing session.

Then I read from there, altering, editing, tweaking as I read, and then, by the time I get to where the words end, I’m immersed in the story enough that the new words begin to flow. This method of going over your work each time is called cycling, because you’re passing back over it again and again.

Some people don’t prefer this method because they see it as editing, which takes a different part of your brain. But to me, this is just me seeking flow, altering the course of the words so that flow isn’t disrupted.

This generally also means that by the time I’m done with a story, particularly a longer one, that I have a decently clean draft with which to work. And that’s something I love since when a story is done, I desperately want to move on to something else that requires creativity vs a critical eye.

~Emmi

Coffee & Conversation: What are some of your bad writing habits?

29 Monday Mar 2021

Posted by Emmi Lawrence in Coffee & Conversation

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

answer, FAQ, habits, prose, question, reading, Writing, writing advice, writing habits

What are some of your bad writing habits?

I have a couple of bad writing habits, a few of which are minorly problematic, and a few larger ones that I’m not entirely sure whether they give me more work, or less.

1) Not Writing Linearly

Most of the time I do write the beginning at the beginning, but often, once I get that first part down, I will jump ahead, write an emotional or exciting scene that I can’t stop thinking about. This means that I will have breaks throughout the draft, empty spaces where the words peter away. Normally, these breaks will slowly get filled in from the beginning going forward, slowly but surely soothing out the draft as I push toward the end. Sometimes there’s a specific scene that I’m dreading writing and so it sits like a gaping, festering wound. Usually those scenes are the ones I had to completely rip out of my WIP, which is the cause of my frustration.

In terms of the positives, this method means I’m getting a lot of words down on paper during the moments I’m most excited about it, adding to my motivation for the story, pushing it along.

In terms of the negatives, this means that I will be forced to do some major editing of those same scenes later one once I’ve completed every word that comes beforehand because there is inevitably wrong information because of changes I’ve made within previous scenes.

2) Not Outlining Before I Begin

Most of the time, I get an idea and I start writing. There’s a feeling involved when getting into a character that encompasses a style and voice and without that, it’s impossible to write the character. This means that oftentimes, I will set a character up with a problem, throwing them on the page and telling them to go-go-go, solve the issue! But without any clue as to how they’re going to do that. Continue reading →