Believe in yourself and start achieving your dream. It waits for you on the other side of the publish button.
Honesty makes stories real and characters memorable. From there, taking them to where they need to go will be all the development they need.
You have to put yourself out there as a writer, you can’t play it safe.
Kids are flat-out freaking hilarious if you are paying attention. Not just my kid, but every kid.
Open your soul and put it out there and dare the world to read it, ready to have them stomp on you and laugh, but ready to do it again the next day.
The best part of being a writer is you get to tell people you’re a writer. That’s still considered cool.
Who do I think would appreciate my book?I’m surprised anybody does. Oops, did I say that out loud?
I wasn’t a class clown, because nuns have no sense of humor. They have rulers.
I come up with an idea and I’ll start throwing little suggestions for possible scenes into a folder, but before I seriously sit down to write Word One, they whole outline is finished. Sue me. It works.
It’s amazing how my mind opens up right when I have to run on the treadmill. I’ve finished three chapters rather than run a mile.
I usually end have one outrageous minor character. He or she says the stuff I wish I had said in real life. Readers will love that character.
Writers need to be open to trying new things. My first bestseller was a cookbook, and from that experience I learned things about marketing a book that benefitted me greatly.
Don’t have every dialog go in a straight line to solve the problem. Let your characters argue, be sarcastic, disagree or joke around.
I think if a writer is being honest they’d admit to a file full of a dozen or more stories that are all started to varying degrees. They’re like the kid who wants to be a firefighter and a police officer and an astronaut.
Not knowing stuff – like how your story ends before you start writing – is the seed of a lot of writer’s block.
The more time you can put between you and your manuscript, the more fresh your eyes become and the more mistakes you’ll catch.
What I can tell you is DO IT. Publish book one and get book two out as soon as possible. There are very few Harper Lee’s. Most of us are going to have to write a few books to get good at it.
Don’t polish it forever, put it out there. At some point the changes aren’t improvements, they’re just changes.
Writers get ideas all day every day. The FedEx guy delivers a package from Sears and the writer is thinking how it could actually be a ticking time bomb.
On working with other writers: You develop honesty and you can then ask the really embarrassing questions. I have learned so many things I didn’t want to know, and they were all a result of interesting interviews for background information.
People are suckers for the truth and they know it when they see it. Open your soul and they will stop and watch.
Dig deep and go where the pain and fear and joy are, and put it out there. The minute you shy away from pure honesty in your writing, you become a liar.