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Keep The Fun…
Nothing Is Important In Writing Fiction… The moment you make something “important” you let in critical voice and since it is important, the critical voice will shut you down. That’s why so many of you can’t finish a story or a novel. It becomes important about halfway through, you become afraid to show it when you are done because it might be bad, and you stop. Critical Voice wins. (Critical voice only has one goal and that is to stop you.) But I have gotten a number of questions on how to focus on a challenge and not make what you are writing important? Well simply put, don’t make it…
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A Real Test…
For What Remains of My Critical Voice… Which is clearly nothing. Tonight I had to read a lot of assignments in the critical voice workshop. This assignment details out how each person makes projects important and thus allows critical voice in. Now in all those assignments there was an amazing amount of reasons, excuses, and just scary problems. I read them all tonight to get a basically form-letter response to everyone. Nothing I could really say. It was one of those awareness assignments. But tonight I also had a short-notice short story due that I had to finish by tomorrow. That kind of deadline can make a story “important” quickly…
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A Possible New Workshop Idea
Saturday Night Brainstorming… I figured I would run this out here, see if any response. Thinking about a full workshop on killing critical voice. So one of the things that would be in the workshop is this one method… ——– When writers are having issues with critical voice, stopping them, I sort of off-hand tell them to stop caring. Critical voice feeds on caring. But then in the same breath, I tell the writer to do the best they can. So one person today asked me how you do the best you can without caring? I realized I needed to do a lot more explanation. First off, what is the…
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Nothing’s Good Enough
A New Pop-Up… And also part of the first quarter of The Decade Ahead class. That’s right, there is a new Pop-Up with a story prompt and everything. If you are in The Decade Ahead class, either the entire year or the first quarter, this Pop-Up is now part of that class and the link to it is under the first video in February. Or you can just sign up for the Pop-Up directly. It is Pop-Up #18: Nothing’s Good Enough. And it is also in the Bundle Pop-Up #11-20 and is also in the Bundle Pop-Up 11–20. (The Pop-Ups are $150 and the bundles make it cheaper to get…
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Controlling Critical Voice
After Yesterday’s Post… I got a couple of questions about how I control my critical voice when I do so much teaching, which is automatically generated from critical voice. A couple things first. If I ever stopped writing for anything past a short life roll, I would stop teaching at that same moment. Sadly, a couple of my mentors became nothing but teachers and never really wrote again. I lost respect for them, to be honest. Second, I do the teaching to keep learning. When a workshop becomes boring to me, and I can’t learn from it, it goes to classic status or vanishes. Why Kris and I are always…
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Wrong Direction
Not One, Not Two, But Three Writers… Just today, when telling me for one reason or another about a project that they were working on said that they had gone in a wrong direction and had to toss out a bunch of writing. One person said almost a hundred pages. I seldom say anything when a beginning writer or early-stage writer says that to me. But I figured I could say something here. So if I did say something when someone made that “I went in the wrong direction on my novel…” comment, here is what it would be… First off, how do you know? Now every writer when asked…
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Critical Voice Kills Everything
Including Your Own Enjoyment of Reading (and Watching Movies)… For some reason, early on, writers think they must start being critical about all sorts of things. Books they don’t like because they are not to their taste, certain types of movies, the wrong use of one thing or another in a story by another author. This is the critical voice, the very thing that works to stop you from writing. And also makes you believe that everything you do must be perfect, therefore you must outline and rewrite and not put something out anywhere until it has been polished to a shine. The job of the critical voice is to…