Two weeks ago I talked about the benefits of writing fanfiction, and this week I’m going to talk about how writing fanfiction compares to writing original fiction.
With fanfiction (classic fanfiction, in which you write in the existing world) you don’t have to develop a whole new world with functioning societies, cultures, wildlife, history, religions, etc. All you need Continue reading “Writing Fanfiction vs. Original Fiction”
Timelines are handy little tools. You often have to develop them in school (at least I have) with all the different birthdays of famous people and special events marked out and whatnot. But what use do they have in fiction? What can you do with writing timelines? Well, a couple things. (And that’s not counting historical fiction.) Continue reading “T: Timeline Uses in Fiction”
Many of us authors have way more ideas than we know what to do with, and not only that, but they tend to come at the most inopportune times. With so many ideas, how do we know which to follow and which to leave? Which idea is worth pursuing as your next project?
This will obviously affect how many ideas you can follow at once. I used to work on something like half a dozen projects at a time, until Continue reading “P: Potential Energy: Deciding Your Next Project”
Goal-setting can be both exciting and stressful. Often we make goals at the beginning of the year, promptly forgetting about them or going off the rails. We also make smaller-scale goals for smaller aspects of our life, and generally these are easier for us to reach, but we’re still not perfect. I’m largely talking in this post about the former type, but this also applies to the latter type for those of us who tend to go for overachieving at times or wrongly estimate how much time we’ll have to do things. First, how do we end up making over-ambitious goals? Well, we overestimate our abilities; we tell ourselves we have to get these things done; we decide this is the year we’ll actually do what we said we’d do five years ago… There are a lot of factors that go into making over-ambitious goals. Sometimes we don’t know we’re going to have trouble with a goal until we try, and we think it’s better to shoot too high than too low (which is probably true). But then what do you do when you realize your goal was over-ambitious? Continue reading “O: Over-Ambitious Goals”
When you become a writer, when you devote yourself to all the work it takes to produce a book (or quite a few books), your occupation and the rest of your life become inextricably linked. They feed into each other constantly, and there’s not really any way to stop it, nor do I think you necessarily should stop it. In this post, I’ll outline just a few ways being a writer can influence your “normal” life. Continue reading “I: The Influence of Writing On Life”