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This is a guest post from Harper Hodges. She writes at thecatwhowrites.com. Harper took over the cat who write’s blog when Pooh Hodges, a regular columnist for The Write Practice, died. Pamela Hodges, the regular writer today, is not a cat —so she asked Harper to help her write today’s post.
Let’s be honest. Plot development is not always fun. Sometimes it’s really hard.
Sometimes, your story gets stuck in a rut, backed into a corner, or just gets flat and boring.
But I’ve found that a single question is enough to get my creativity going again. This one question got my story back on track every single time.
I’ve read dozens of books and hundreds of blogs on writing advice over the years, and if I could distill just one piece of wisdom from all that effort studying, it’s that every writer has a unique process for putting words on the page. However, we all have room for growth, so, today, we’ll hear about how scrivener can help us improve our writing process.
We all know there is a difference between I and me. Simply put, “I” is a subject, “me” is an object. Generally speaking, there aren’t any issues when you’re only referring to yourself.
The confusion starts when your first person character is joined by third person companions.
I’m taking a really interesting class with a woman named Maxine Clair about how to be present in your life and writing about it.
This week we learned about narrative writing and how to start your story. We were taught five ways to begin a narrative story that I thought would be useful to the Write Practice community.
Use these ten short story ideas to write your first ten stories, one per week, over the next ten weeks. I promise you, you’re life will look totally different if you do it.
Several weeks ago I wrote a story for The Write Practice about the hidden value of a handwritten letter. In my file, labeled Letters, I found a thirty-year old letter from Tokyo. The letter was addressed to me, at The Tokyo Journal, the magazine where I worked as a photographer and graphic designer in Tokyo, Japan in 1985.
There’s no feeling quite like the moment you realized you’ve completely finished the rough draft of a work in progress. A mix of pride and accomplishment and utter dread at how bad it might be.
During moments when my natural enthusiasm for the craft of writing wanes, it’s useful to have a secret weapon to draw from my arsenal that reinvigorates my mind and makes me excited about working again.
That secret weapon is the certain knowledge that writers have superpowers.
You want to write, but the words don’t come.
You want to write, but you’re utterly blocked.
Writer’s block can occur because you let self-criticism obstruct the easy flow of thoughts from your brain to your writing fingers. It’s akin to hardening of the arteries.
