Hey, y’all. I come before you today, standing at the precipice of possibility. The place where inertia becomes action. The moment where I engage in the act of sitting down and actually writing. This winter, I invested in a masterclass program that walked me through the process of taking an idea, creating a high-level outline,… Read more »
Hello, beautiful people on the internet! Welcome back to Worldly Wise, where together we’re going to take the reins of your speculative fiction story and see it to the finishing line. Last time, we debunked some myths circling the “super genre” that stop writers from diving into the world of speculative fiction and tried a… Read more »
According to Ron Burgundy, played by Will Ferrell in the 2004 comedy Anchorman, “diversity is an old, old wooden ship that was used during the Civil War era.” Of course, this is both hilariously false and maybe the perfect metaphor for understanding the struggle around answering the call for diversity within the publishing world. Answering… Read more »
As an author of color, I often hear from writers like me that they think their main characters need to be white in order to be widely read. I’ve been a Pitch Wars mentor twice (a mentoring program where an agented/published writer or industry professional picks one writer to work on their manuscript for three… Read more »
However ambitious your literary dreams, achieving them relies on an essential step, one that is solely within your control. You must write. You must do so consistently. Establishing a disciplined writing practice is the most important thing you can do and this post will help you do just that. Landing on a bestseller list, earning… Read more »
Are you struggling to form a writing habit? Do you find yourself saying “I should be writing regularly” but never doing anything about it? You know what? That kind of resistance is totally normal. Resistance invades the artistic process at every level. In fact, resistance is so pervasive that Steven Pressfield wrote a book about… Read more »
Perfectionism is not about being perfect. We tend to think that perfectionists obsess over word choice or comma placement simply because of incredibly high standards, but it goes deeper than that. In her book, The Gifts of Imperfection, Brené Brown explains, “There’s a significant difference between perfectionism and healthy striving or striving for excellence. Perfectionism… Read more »
The summer after my first book deal, I really struggled with inspiration. I did not struggle with word count. I wrote something like six novels that summer but my then-agent rejected every single one. My books just weren’t resonating, so I decided to try a new approach. A friend of mine recommended The Artist’s Way… Read more »
Genre hopping is a great way to introduce yourself and your writing style to a new audience. If it is done incorrectly, it is a lot like a bad first impression. It will taint your future ventures and efforts with the audience. I would know. When I first tried genre-hopping, I made a big mistake…. Read more »
We’ve all heard that old advice, show, don’t tell. It is often repeated like a complete thought. It encapsulates the idea that showing the reader what’s important through the events of the story is a far more engaging method of storytelling than telling the reader what’s essential. In a work written for commercial markets, the… Read more »
