by TheHack on July 21, 2010
“I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble.” -Helen Keller
I have a full day of work followed by volunteer hours at the library followed by homework hours as I head into the final week of summer school. So my small goal today is to get started on a story that I outlined yesterday and just write about 250 words of the first scene.
What small tasks are you going to heroically attack today on the way to your larger goal?
by TheHack on July 20, 2010
I have a few writing articles that I like to re-read whenever I need a kick of inspiration. This is one of my favorites about how long it takes to learn to be a writer. One million words.
I would guess that I’m around 100,000 which means any day now…
One of my goals would be to get to around 200,000 in the next year.
How far along our you on your path of practicing writing fiction? What kind of schedule do you have yourself on to get through those million words?
by TheHack on July 19, 2010
Here is a photo prompt for you.
What are these guys up to?
Are they celebrating the birth of a new baby? Are they celebrating their city’s football team winning the championship? Are they plotting a bank robbery? Or did they just invent a new three person, every man for himself, thumb wrestling game?
by TheHack on July 1, 2010
I have a few ideas for stories that have been in my head for years. I have played with most of them off and on over that time frame and failed to finish the story. Normally it is because I like the idea and don’t want to “waste” it on a crappy story.
But right now I am a mostly crappy writer. A lot of that is because I don’t finish and edit very many stories. And a lot of that is because I am afraid of wasting good ideas….
Lame.
Especially since ideas are anywhere and everywhere.
Especially since it is stopping me from finishing stories.
The bigger question is how to fix it. I would imagine that I need to just write stories. Finish stories. Edit stories. And then submit stories to try to get them published.
Then the story will be done and I can work on the next idea.
So, let’s get started on a short story that I started a rough draft of about three years ago about a bunch of women gossiping at one of those Tupperware type of parties where the gossip turns to a bit of petty revenge at the end.
And let’s add some potential public shame to this. The story needs to be finished and submitted somewhere before October 20th. That’s an insanely long deadline for this story but the Writers’ Journal Write to Win! story prompt for October 20th is “Hey what are you…” which could absolutely work for my story.
So final draft due by October 20th. If it ends up being under 1500 words, submit it to this contest. If not, pick somewhere else and have it in the mail by October 20th.
by TheHack on June 23, 2010
I started a new story. I have recently placed a couple others on hold while I figure out what is going on with them so I jumped on another idea for a book that I have. It is geared toward the late grade school/middle school crowd.
So I decided to work through The Snowflake Method and actually follow the steps instead of just rushing into writing “One day some kids started doing something” and hoping it would all work out. I made it through steps 1-3 and was pretty happy. Happy enough to Twitter about it.
The bad character is a witch that I’ve had in mind as a bad character for a while except the idea I had for her originally was for an adult story…not a kid story. So, the bad thing she does is not appropriate for this book. I don’t really want to deal with poisoning a town especially when I would prefer for this book to be a bit on the funny/ridiculous side. But when I was working on her summary sheet for step 3, I wrote her pretty much as designed for that older age group. A couple hours later, I realized my problem. Interestingly enough, I must have had some idea of this problem because there is another part of her character summary that I wrote and then changed immediately to make it more young reader friendly.
And now I can fix it while I am just a couple hours into working on the story instead of two months from now when the whole tone of the book has been messed up from the start.
I wonder what other major problems I’ll find before I actually start writing as I work through the next steps of The Snowflake Method.
