the writer's block |
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the writer's block |
The blog
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If you follow members of the writing community, odds are you’ve noticed #FollowFriday or #ff trending at the end of every workweek. The tradition started with a tweet from entrepreneur Micah Baldwin back in 2009 and, even though Twitter has grown exponentially and its landscape has changed dramatically over the last ten years, it’s still going strong.
In case you haven’t encountered it, #FollowFriday is precisely what it sounds like. Every Friday, individuals in the writing community (amongst others) tweet a list of people they think others should follow. It’s a good way to broaden your sense of the writing community and bring writers, readers, and publishers together. But #FollowFriday has become closely intertwined with #writerslift, which is dedicated to boosting writers with follower counts below a certain number. The combo is steering the community away from Baldwin’s founding intentions and putting an excessive amount of attention on a vanity metric that will have limited impact in the long-run. Read the full article at LitReactor. Writing can get pretty lonely. It’s just you, your imaginary friends, and a computer for hours on end. And no matter how often we talk about our WIPs over coffee or yell about them on Twitter, until we have something to show for all our blood, sweat, and tears the odds of us showing them to anyone are slim. So once we do finish a WIP it’s no surprise that we immediately want to show it to people and hear what they think. We want to know what they liked, where they were confused, and ultimately how we can improve this thing we’ve invested so much of our time and energy into.
In an ideal world we’d have a brain blast, pop a squat in front of our computers, and have the "right" words pouring out of us faster than peanut butter melting on hot toast. But let’s call a spade a spade, shall we? Writing a first draft is nothing short of a grind. And for most of us mere mortals life is rarely conducive to getting that first draft down. Between our job(s), kids, pets, skeleton clowns, bills, Netflix, #NotMyAriel trending on Twitter (-_-), global warming, Amazon, and the 99 other problems and obstacles weighing down on us there’s always some kind of noise working to derail our momentum. But there’s power in this noise. If you give yourself the space and time to wade through it.
Over the past six weeks, Game of Thrones fans have endured some of the most stressful 80-minute episodes of television ever created. Visually, the season was stunning, the acting was stellar, and once again Ramin Djawadi proved he’s an international treasure we don’t deserve. But despite the visual effects, performances, epic score, and heart-pounding action, the overall consensus—based on the slew of articles, petitions, memes, and tweets—is disappointment. These last six episodes should’ve been the show’s finest hours, and yet they seem to have fallen short. Why? If writers take nothing else away from this final season, they should realize that audiences don’t want shock and awe they want human stories.
Read the rest of the article on LitReactor. Although commuting into NYC every day was taxing and often frustrating it did have its benefits: I was able to read a ton of books. Between the NJ Metro North and the Path, I was averaging a book a week—sometimes more. But since leaving St. Martin’s Press, my reading rate has dropped quite a bit (I’m down to about a book every two and half weeks). And while I felt cool being able to boast a book per week reading rate, I have to say, I’m enjoying this slowed pace. Now that I'm commuting less I have way more flexibility and time to focus my energy into creating, rather than just consuming.
But this still raises an important—and I’m sure controversial—question: How much should you be reading? Yes! We are less than one week away from Barrelhouse magazine’s Conversations and Connections! While I’m not able to attend this spring, I’m planning to attend in the fall (fingers crossed). For those of you who find AWP intimidating, overwhelming, and/or too damn expensive, I would highly recommend checking out Conversations and Connections. It's a bi-annual, one-day writing conference that brings writers, editors, and publishers together. Barrelhouse has been hosting it in Arlington, VA during the spring for over ten years, and has been hosting it in Pittsburgh, PA during the fall for the past five years. As I type this, I’m two hours into my flight back to New York, and have about two and half more to go. I’m crammed between an older gentleman who is reading a book by Orhan Pamuk[1] and a Stony Brook professor who also attended AWP.[2] And I keep peeking up the aisle to see if the snack cart is coming by anytime soon because my stomach is aggressively growling. But, more importantly, this five hour flight has given me a serious span of time to reflect.
AWP 2019 is almost here and I could not be more pumped! Not only will I get to go to one of my favorite literary events of the year (with some of my favorite people), but I will also get to go to Portland for the first time (win-win!). Every year it seems someone writes a tip sheet about how to make the most out of you AWP experience. And while I certainly have my suggestions, the number one thing I would like to emphasize is do you because there is no one way to go about AWP. We are all attending with our own agendas in mind. Whether it be to go to as many panels as our schedules will allow, network at the book fair, sneak into the after-parties, or just trying to get your hands on as much swag as possible, do it.
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