Melissa Maygrove

A few weeks ago, I tried something new, and it really sped up my drafting.  After reading about how--doing basically the same thing--Ava Jae over at Writability Won NaNoWriMo In 9 Days , I thought I'd post this for my writer friends who are struggling to make their word count. I typically write very clean, meaning I'm a picky polisher in my initial draft. It's closer to publish-ready than most, but it takes me forever. Besides research, the main thing that slows me down is coming up with fresh ways to describe emotion, movement, facial expression, etc.  I decided to try something different if I found myself really stuck. ( You know....when you sit there for twenty minutes , debating about a single phrase or word, and draw nothing but an icky cliche or a total mental blank. :P )   I started putting a note-to-self ( e.g. Show Harrison's outrage. ) or a cliched/bad version of what I was aiming for in brackets, and then letting go and moving on. I've left...

Happy New Year!  My writing resolution is to finish my current WIP and get it polished (maybe even published?) in 2013. So, for my January Insecure Writer's Support Group post, I decided to list some ways we can motivate ourselves to write.  This is by no means an exhaustive list, and I don’t have room to tell you every detail. My goal is to give you a taste of what’s out there and enough information about each item so you can decide which ones are worth the click-through for you .  If you're already familiar with any of these, please feel free to skip it and move on. (I promise my IWSG posts won't all be this long.) Let’s start with the biggie.