So here I am again, I have never been so tired in all my life! I think I’ve been unwell with something over the past few weeks because all I have been able to do is sleep. This obviously isn’t helping me with my goal of writing a book in year. I’ll leave in here, some extra tips that I have picked out this week to keep me on it. So far I must admit I’m not listening to my own advice very well as, like I said, have been asleep for most of my free time; that isn’t an exaggeration.
Tip three:
Read, read and read.
I am honestly the worst at this, I have been stuck reading Battle Royale by Koushun Takami, for (embarrassingly) about 6 months, this awful, I know, I do pride myself on being a good reader, and I do love reading more than anything else sometimes; it’s such an amazing break slipping into a good book. For some reason I just can’t get through this book easily, whether it’s because I have too much to do or it’s just hard to read I’m not sure. I am enjoying reading it (although it doesn’t seem that way) It’s a book I’ve been wanting to read for so long and I’m not one of those people who can read two books at once, so I just seem to be stuck on it, feeling unable to commit to reading anything else and my to be read pile, is getting bigger and bigger (overwhelmingly so) So on top of writing a book I’m setting another goal to read this bloody book by the end of February (or I’m going to have to give up and I don’t want to)
So anyway this tip is here for a good reason, surprisingly the more you read the better of a writer you become! No it doesn’t help with progressing your word count, but if the word count was the only thing that mattered, you could easily write gibberish for 75,000 words, yes you could call it a book, but the story wouldn’t be there! I like to think that reading gives writing a soul and a heritage as all the experiences you read influence your writing, whether you knowingly let them influence you or you don’t, it will be evident in your writing somewhere.
Read everything too, comics, graphic novels, screenplays, manga, articles, books, short stories and anything else you can think of don’t just stick to one medium of storytelling; in fact attend story telling events if you want (they are such a fun experience).
Tip four:
Write a sentence a day.
This is such a good tip, one of my friends gave me this piece of advice and I may have mentioned it before here somewhere. I am just so bad at it. I am so bad at a lot of things, (well any motivational thing) it came from a story of a guy who wanted to become an artist so he drew one line every day, until he became a brilliant artist. There is a philosophy behind this idea, which once you have set up your working space and sat down and wrote the one sentence (or drawn on line) you may as well continue and do a bit more, and to be honest when I haven’t forgotten about this tip myself and followed it, I do write a lot in a short space of time because I’m always on it, for me it lasts about a week before I start forgetting but that’s not the problem with this, that’s the problem with my lack of motivation.
whilst doing Nanowrimo using this tip, I managed to write 10000 words in a week, which albeit isn’t amazing, especially as in Nanaowrimo you are to try and write 50000, however on the grand scheme of things this is pretty good, it impressed me anyway. I don’t count my blog word count as my started a sentence, because that’s not what I’m ‘trying to write’, well I am but not in the same way as my book.
Sometime the starting of said sentence is not as easy either as I have to remember where I was when I left writing before, this makes it harder to start if I haven’t been writing very much recently;. If I keep on top of it, it’s much easier to just get straight back in without having to read the whole chapter again/paragraph.
Extra motivational tip:
Join Nanaowrimo, seriously it runs every November; it is totally free as well. The best thing about it is the amount of support available for new writers, old writers and all the writers in-between, there are forums to discuss issues you are having and even motivational emails from famous writers to keep you going. The buzz of Nano really does keep you in the mood, even when your fellow writers have written 180,000 words I’m not kidding) and you have only written 18,000 by the end of the month. This if anything just keeps you more determined. One of the reasons it works so well for me is because it’s in a competition format (although it isn’t a competition, it is hard to explain it without having a go yourself) I’m a very competitive person, so any hint of a competition or a real deadline, and my motivation skyrockets. So if you are also a very competitive person, or get motivated by competitions, it’s a really fun way to get on it with writing. It supports any writing, so if it’s even just to get 50,000 words of you blog done, so you can have a break over Christmas it works.
Just on a side note again, I do realise I am still failing at being a regular blog updater (I’m a serial procrastinator) but I’m putting some out instead of giving up altogether so that’s a win to me, ill get there eventually I’m sure.
Thank you for reading, again I hope I’m being some sort of helpful to anyone one person.
Kate
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All photography by Victoria Langford (please check her out she is a great friend of mine)
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