Write What You Love and Love What You Write

Otherwise known as: Finding my joy in writing again via romance.

So a few months ago, I decided to try something completely different - to write a romance novel. Years back I'd made some attempts, but hadn't managed to finish one (other than a Historical Undone that got a form R). I'd spent the past year writing novels that I really enjoyed writing and were structurally sound but kept getting rejected, and I was frustrated with myself. The idea of trying out romance again had been niggling in the back of my mind, so I figured what the heck? You only live once. Might as well give it a go.

Writing Just One Week was a bit of a revelation for me. I'd forgotten that sometimes, writing can be easy. Obviously there's always work involved, but the words really flowed for me on this project in a way they hadn't in a long time.

And the end result really helped restore my flagging confidence as a writer. For the first time ever my mom (yeah yeah I know what they say about family but listen guys my parents are the harshest critics EVER. Trust me, handing my stuff off to them is like borrowing Lady Gaga's meat dress and diving headfirst into a pit of wolves) actually blazed through the chapters I sent and demanded more. That's an amazing feeling. Not only that, she forwarded it on to other friends and family who ALSO wanted more.

When I was writing just for myself, I came up with screwball comedies about physics and the nature of reality. But life isn't all about me. When I wrote Just One Week, I wrote it with the fond wish that it would make somebody else happy, and it did. And I think it's a better book - and I'm a better writer - for it.

So what I'm getting at here is: Even if nobody  gives my novel a second glance (though I'd prefer they did, plz and thx universe are you listening), this will have been so completely worth it, even more so than any other novel I've finished.

The Written Language Was Probably Invented to Torture You

Lately, I've found myself writing an awful lot. And not on my WIP, ifyannowhatimsayin.

Essay tests, essay answers, all hail our new essay overlords. Seriously, I've written so many of these that I've started having dreams about formatting Microsoft Word into 1.357" margins so that I hit seven pages.

And I have to say, the more essays I've written, the more I've noticed how similar they are to writing a story.

Seriously! So, you start out with this plan, and you should probably write down the plan and add footnotes and jenk, but of course you don't. You start writing, and you get totally lost, and you hit one page and look around like "dude why am i still writing".

Then you go through and re-read, and you see something that actually resembles a sentence a chimpanzee would not write by accident, and you capitalize on that. (Then you remember that you meant to capitalize, not make it all capitals. You ctrl-Z.)

Eventually you hit four pages and you're like man, I'm a freaking genius. Maybe I should go into this professionally. Be a teacher. I could churn out research papers like Shakespeare, and with way less plagiarism.

Then you hit page six.

NOOOOO you have one more page to go and the written language was invented solely to torture you. Why is this happening? Why did you go to college/high school/pre-k? Why did your parents have you in this time period? What was wrong with the Cretaceous period? Grunts and sighs are totally acceptable forms of communication.

No. Wait. You think you might... no, you definitely found a thread there that you can grab onto. You write and then... HOCRAP YOU HAVE AN ESSAY.



...




What, you don't write like that?

The Writing Process

Here is a sampling of a day in the life.

6:00pm - Realize I've written nothing all day.
6:05pm - Find Cinderella II A Stitch in Time on youtube.
6:15pm - Get tired of hearing Cinderelly sing about how awesome her life is and write 200 words.
6:30 - Watch Evil Stepmother get the magic wand and think that if Cinderella had just gotten the bluebirds to pluck her eyes out this never would have happened.
6:34 - Get embarrassed that I'm watching Cinderella II and pound out another 500 words.
6:50 - Recover from embarrassment. See Cinderella sneak off to the palace and think that this never would've happened in the original because it requires doing something. Decide I like Disney sequels.
6:55 - Hear another song composed by rabid squirrels and an organ monkey and decide otherwise.
6:57 - Write 1,000 words to avoid thinking about how my life has come to this.

So there you have it. That's my writing process (sub in other Disney sequels, the Twilight movies, L.A. Ink, or anything else bad/dramatic). What's yours?

Happy Valentine's Day! I Love You Absolute Write

Alright well, the best plans of well, me, were thwarted. Blogger hates me and the video didn't work. So!

Since it is Valentine's Day... I thought I'd do a post about how much I love writing. And a certain site that has helped me along the way.

Ever since I was a little kid, I loved to write. In fact, I can't remember a time when I didn't write (and I'm sure most of you are the same way). Of course there's the born-again writers, who discover it in teenagehood or adulthood, but I'm one of the unlucky schlubs who's been doing it forever.

When I got to middle school, I started writing more seriously. I finished my first novel when I was 13, and throughout high school I worked religiously. All crap, of course, but I was getting closer and closer to something actually readable.

Then, at the very beginning of college, I started going to a certain site. A site where a lot of really great writers - even real ones, published ones! - congregated and talked about not just the art of writing but the business.

I was totally enthralled.

I stalked the site every day; I read all the links that people recommended, I went to forums like "Bewares and Background Checks" (even though I wasn't really sure what that was all about).

Eventually, I actually started talking from time to time. I'm much more of a lurker, but I put myself out there and actually met some fabulous writers online. Now I can't imagine what I did without a place to whine about queries and ask for encouragement.

So - here's to you, Absolute Write, for teaching me 90% of what I needed to know (and telling me to trust in myself for the other 10%). May many more young writers be as lucky as I was to discover you.