I’ve long been frustrated at how much pressure there is in the writing community to be a plotter. To counteract that, I wrote a post for WriterUnboxed.com about what it’s like to be a pantser, how to figure out your own writing process, and why you should trust yourself. I’ll hope you’ll check it out
If you missed my appearance on John Hruby’s Author To Author Convo live last month, the replay is now available on YouTube. It was a fun (and rare) opportunity for me to talk about writing separate from Scrivener (though we did touch on Scrivener a bit too, of course). One of my favorite things was
I’m all for the idea that failure is merely figuring out what doesn’t work, finding out where you need to focus your energy, and that it’s an important part of the learning process that we often stigmatize to our detriment. However, I really wish my method for producing a novel didn’t resemble Edison’s light
I’ve always thought of myself as a pantser, despite the fact that my left brain generally rules all other areas of my life. So I was surprised to find potential scene lists for my first two manuscripts while flipping through old notebooks the other day. Apparently I did more planning in the early days than
Every time I talk about my evolving writing process, I’m sure my long-time blog followers just roll their eyes and think, “Again?” Watching me over the last two years has been like the proverbial tennis match where I’m the ball bouncing between Plotting and Pantsing. My first three books—and two in there that went unfinished—were
I’m starting a new manuscript. I love the feeling of having a new story rolling around in my brain. Usually, it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while. And after two years of working at this, I’m starting to learn how my creative half works. It starts with the spark, whatever that is and
Were you a fan of outlines in school? I know I wasn’t. Unfortunately, they’re a necessity in a writer’s life. If you don’t outline the book beforehand, you still have to do it later on some level in order to create a book blurb, pitch, synopsis, and query letter. If you’re a plotter or a