History: Shooting for the Stars and Falling Short (Temporarily) Years ago, after being let go of from AOL, Andy used the money he earned from selling off his AOL stock options to take 3 years off to write. He wrote two books, the second of which he attempted to get published but was unsuccessful. Normally seen…
Top 10 Insights to Help Set Up a Writing Habit
The secret to success is in the habits you possess. One vital thing that sets successful writers apart from the ones that never make it are their habits. Their ability to come back to their work day after day, regardless of zombie apocalypses and new episodes of Orange is the New Black. Chris Fox correctly identifies…
How to Realign Yourself When You’ve Lost Your Way
I’ve been running on a high recently. I have managed to maintain a positive attitude despite not having a job, not knowing whether I was on the right career path and wrestling with the decision of whether or not I should go back to school to obtain a designation for said career I am on…
Writing Method: Making a Mess by Me :)
The writing methods summarized in this series were actually in preparation for this entry. Since my method is a concoction of the methods previously mentioned, you might find it useful to refer to them first: Part 1: Writing Method: Snowflake by Randy Ingermanson (Printable Summaries) Part 2: Writing Method: 7-Point System by Dan Wells (Printable Summaries) Part 3: Writing Method: Writing…
Words of a Recovering Perfectionist
I’ve always been the one to hustle, thinking if I worked hard enough I would never be for lack of options. And I never was. But then I became someone with too MANY options along with a curse of indecisiveness.To top it off, I was stressed out all the time. I didn’t think life could be led a different way….
Writing Method: Writing into the Dark (Pantsers) by Dean Wesley Smith
This entry has now been transferred to Medium View at Medium.com posts in series: Part 1: Writing Method: Snowflake by Randy Ingermanson (Printable Summaries) Part 2: Writing Method: 7-Point System by Dan Wells (Printable Summaries) Part 3: Writing Method: Writing into the Dark (Pantsers) by Dean Wesley Smith Part 4: Writing Method: Making a Mess by Me 🙂
Writing Method: 7-Point System by Dan Wells (Printable Summaries)
Last year, Dan Wells, author of “I Am Not A Serial Killer” went over a story structure he found in the “Star Trek Narrator’s Guide: Roleplaying Game“, which he renamed as the 7-Point System. He generously shared his PowerPoint presentation which can be found here, but as usual, I felt having a summarized version would help: Description of…
Cause & Effect
Do you ever feel like there’s words floating around your head and you need to just get them out, no editing, no thinking, nothing. Just blurt out everything in your head? Well that’s how I feel today, so I’m sorry for the grossly unedited piece of work below. (Though I did go back after the fact…
Mini Habits – Breaking it Down
Stephen Guise is the founder of Deep Existence, a blog about self-development, and the writer of Mini Habits, a book about his personal philosophy on how to get things done (with research that backs up some of his arguments). I found the book to be a pretty good starting point for personal development and so without…
How and Why You Should Face Your Fears
Perfectionism, insecurities, failures and success. It’s at the core of everything. It’s something that you can’t ever look fully in the face because that’s when it knows you’ll win and it won’t let that happen. So fear will do everything in its power to keep you down on the ground or facing away from it. Sometimes this…
Writing Method: Snowflake by Randy Ingermanson (Printable Summaries)
Randy Ingermanson is a theoretical-physicist-turned-author who uses the same left-brain logic from his first career to organize his right-brain’s creativity when writing a novel. He is famously known for his novel structuring process called the Snowflake Method. I find the method to be interesting and helpful, but the actual article expounding it a bit long-winded (approx. 3,500 words in…
An Argument for Focused Work
Cal Newport recently released his new book, “Deep Work”, which posits that our ability to engage in concentrated efforts on meaningful work will set us apart in today’s marketplace. I decided to read it based on all the glowing reviews on Amazon at the time of its release. Unfortunately, I was more than a little disappointed. I felt…
