July 30, 2014

How to keep writing if you think your writing is shit?

Niko Staten asked: “I read other writers' work and mine is just...such shit. Publishing a book seems more like a dream than ever before. How do you keep...going even when it seems pointless? Advice please, O' Wisest of Ones.”

To start off with something shocking in response...are you ready?

YOU KEEP GOING.

That is the secret to everything, writing included. You keep going even when you don't feel like it. You keep going when the wrinkles of your heart go stale and all the snowflakes of the world can't cheer you up. You keep going when it seems to you like all you're doing is treading water in a rusty bucket and upon looking closer see that it is liquid shit and it stinks and your feet are something of an alien nature and your conscience is nibbling on the edges of your brain and you think you forgot to send a Christmas card to your grandmother who for some reason decided to die on you before you did that and this blog post is being written by a half-delirious writer who hasn't been sleeping much so forgive me the imagery and let's return to the very important topic of our discussion, namely, how do you keep going when you think your writing is total and utter shit?

June 21, 2014

Vary the rhythm of your sentences

by Ksenia Anske

Rhythm. We all love rhythm. Music. Beat. Songs. Speech. I guess it comes from the womb. From the heart. The heartbeat we've heard, before born, it was rhythmic, is rhythmic. Comfortable. Soothing. Or exciting. Or maybe it's the sound of life itself, and we love listening to it, to know that we're alive. I'm not the first one to say it, and you've probably heard it a lot. Have read about it, thought about it, seen it in books, in your own writing. There is a certain rhythm to every piece of writing. Think poetry. Poetry is where its loudest. But in prose it's there, too. Think about your favorite book, open it, look at the sentences. Don't read them, simply look at them. At their length. At their structure. Every comma is a beat, every segment of a sentence is saying something, sounding something out. Every period is a louder beat, a stop, a pause. I'm not a musician, so I don't know proper terms. You know what I mean, though. See how no one sentence is alike? See how each new sentence picks up the rhythm and changes it into something new? See how when there is repetition, it only goes on for 2, 3, 4 beats, rarely more, because otherwise you will get tired as a reader and start perceiving it as a list?

It struck me this week (yeah, yeah, I know, things tend to strike me, laugh now.)

April 26, 2014

Writing exactly what you want to write

by Ksenia Anske

You want to write. You have an impulse, an idea, a story. You sit down. You start. It feels marvelous. It's pouring out of you! You're so happy. You can't stop. You let it out, all of it. You're in the middle of a glorious flow, inspiration, whatever. You keep going. Then it gets slower. Hey, no biggie, you're a trooper, you will work through it. It gets slower still. You start chewing on your pen (or chewing on your fingers, or on you cat's tail, or on a bottle of vodka). You sort of forgot how your story started, so you go back and reread the beginning. Or you organize it on cards, or on cats, or you use Scrivener or sticky Post-It notes or whatever method, but the problem now is that you want to change things. You're tempted to edit. However your writing process looks, you get to that fenland point. That sticky sucky place where someone poured molasses over your machinery and you shake a fist at the sky and wonder where the hell your inspiration went and what the hell you're supposed to do now. We've all been there. I've been there.

OH MY GOD, AM I BLOCKED???

Well, yes and no.

April 19, 2014

Unknow what you know, to write YOUR OWN WAY

by Ksenia Anske

So. There are things you know. There are things I know. We all know some things. Some, we don't. We write by pulling stuff out of those things we know. Because we think, since we know, this is how it's supposed to be done. But it isn't. The more I read, the more it gets under my skin. It's not about knowing, it's about not knowing. UNKNOWING. There are no rules. Rules stem out of fear. We see a book. We see it sells well. We buy it. We read it. We try to learn from it. We think, hey, if this sells, if this writer wrote it like this, I will try the same. It's safe, to try it. Like that. Isn't it? If someone with a big name did it, I can do it too, right? Well, that's where trouble starts. You begin your writing career by mistrusting yourself, by ignoring your instincts. Because someone big out there, someone famous and important, did it the other way. Or someone not necessarily big and important, but whose book you liked. Doesn't matter. What matters is, you get locked into this pattern of self-hate. Why? Because of course you can't write like that someone.

You're NOT THAT SOMEONE. You're YOU. And you start rejecting everything you ARE, for everything you want to BE, while who you are, suffers. Bleeds. Big time. It can't create. You won't let it.