Keeping At It

Advice for New Writers, Information Center, Keeping At It, The Craft of Writing, The SFWA Blog, Tips for Beginners

Guest Post: Set Powerful Deadlines

by Leo Babauta

I’m not always a fan of deadlines and goals, but it’s good to be able to use whatever works best for you. If you’re working great without deadlines and goals, then by all means, keep going. But if you’re struggling to push a project forward (or a learning project like language lessons), then you might try a self-imposed deadline.

Advice for New Writers, Building a Career, Keeping At It, The Craft of Writing, The SFWA Blog, Tips for Beginners

Guest Post: The Work of Writing

by Theodora Goss

I keep reading blog posts that basically all make the same point: anyone can find time to write. You’ve probably read them too. The message is, if you want to be a writer, you can find the time. Get up early and write before work. Write on your lunch break. Write on your commute home. Write after everyone else is asleep. If you can write even a hundred words a day, eventually you’ll have a novel.

It’s not a bad message, but it’s aimed toward aspiring writers. And aspiring writers, I would argue, are very different from working writers, who are different, again, from professional writers.

Advice for New Writers, Information Center, Keeping At It, The Craft of Writing, The SFWA Blog

Taking the Long View

Come the beginning of my pro career, in the early Eighties, women were discouraged from writing science fiction. (Hard, muscular SF was for boys.) Fantasy was deemed more appropriate, being so much softer and “easier,” or so one was told, and frankly it sold better. And here I had this monster of a thing that could best be called science fantasy—mages with space ships. And empire, of course. Must have empire.

Keeping At It, The Craft of Writing, The SFWA Blog

Seven Days on Skokholm

by Sylvia Spruck Wrigley

If I had a week with nothing to do, I would write amazing words. I would write a book. I would write a million words and then dream the story while I slept under the stars and then I would write another million words and the faeries would come out and dance around me and I would make novels like the miller’s daughter spinning gold out of straw.

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