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"Overpowering Your Writing Goal"--Todd Stone

Morning Folks,

Well, it's awfully yucky outside. Gray, dark, thunder, lightning and rain, rain, rain. Splat, splat, splat against the window panes (I suddenly feel very Dr. Seuss-ish LOL...Mr. Brown Can Moo Can You? anybody know that book?)

In any case, in the fine tradition of continuing a theme, I'm gonna give you some of the pointers I learned from the Todd Stone's Novelist Boot Camp.

Todd Stone told us "Never fight fair" (and re-emphasized this at different times in the workshop). What he means is, if your goals are 5-10 pages a day and you're struggling to get it out, don't tell yourself "I have to do this!" And get all frustrated, consider lowering your daily goal until you get your rhythm. (even if this means you're writing 1-3 SENTENCES per day).

His point? When you break your writing down to simpler goals, then your creativity has room to grow.

Who knows, you could be up to 5-10 pages before the end of 2 weeks!

Todd Stone calls this "overpowering your writing goal" (hence the name of this post).

He says when you're writing a draft "You can't write anything bad because you're going to make it better."

I don't know about you, but when I learned about lowering my personal goals for my writing I felt much better about the whole creativity process. It felt like, "Wow, I could really get a lot done." Finding a rhythm is something all writers have to do.

Todd Stone says: "Writing should be fun work."

There's way more information about all this on his site (in particularly in his book) so be sure to look that up (I provided the links in an earlier post, titled "Boot Camp Kicks Butt!").

Happy Writing!

Have A Marvelous Monday!



Comments

Regina Quentin said…
I actually just felt major relief while reading this. Some of my goals need to be lowered for a time and as you said, they may increase again. I was stressing myself out a little by trying to still meet goals that are unreasonable with what I'm going through right now (I'll explain more to you later when I e-mail back your chapter, which is what I'm looking at now).
Bethany said…
Regina,

Yeah, I felt a sense of relief knowing that until I'm published I can have smaller goals. That way I'm able to get my first novel in "ship-shape" before querying. This way I'll learn methods that can help me with the rest of my writing and other novels. Looking forward to hearing what you say about Chapter 1. I'm thinking I'll probably keep it at first person present tense unless you tell me it really doesn't work. When I make the 7 Revision Passes I'm sure I'll be able to make it even better :-)

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