Advice for writers: How to fill that blank page! Sally Jenkins offers excellent advice! @rararesources @sallyjenkinsuk #psychological #thrillers #writingtip #writerslife #mustread #fiction

                                         

Conquer Writer’s Angst 

by

Sally Jenkins

     

Being a writer is a scary business. It starts with a blank page and the fear of failing to fill it. It finishes with publication or submission for critique and the accompanying terror that readers will hate what we have written. 

Apart from popping pills and downing alcohol, how can we get control of this constant literary angst? 

Tips for Blank Page Trauma 

·       Write quickly. Pretend every month is November and NaNoWriMo.

·       Write the scene that’s buzzing in your head. Scenes don’t have to be written in the order they appear in the book.

·       Don’t read any of it back until you’ve reached the end of the story.

·       Banish that self-confidence seeping gremlin who whispers in your ear about how rubbish the writing is. The gremlin knows nothing!

·       Have an external deadline to aim for. Competitions are good for this – you don’t want to miss the closing date and the potential for prize money!

·       Accept that it’s OK to hate your first draft. It’s easier to improve a bad first draft than write perfect prose from the start.

·       Write because you love that afterglow feeling of ‘having written’. It’s the same high as ‘having exercised’. 

Tips for Accepting Criticism 

·       Understand that the adverse comments apply to one particular manuscript or book only. They are not personal or necessarily applicable to all your work.

·       You are always in control. Analyse the criticism and then decide whether or not to act on it. 

·       Taking criticism on board and giving it serious consideration shows maturity as a writer.

·       The only way to avoid criticism completely is to never show anyone your work. If you do that, what was the point in writing it? 

The Case Study 

My second psychological thriller, The Promise, was published on 28th January 2018. I banished the blank page blues by aiming to finish the novel by the closing date of a competition with a prize of publication and £1000. I kept myself buoyant mentally by imagining how I would feel when the novel was published and the prize money mine.  

I entered but didn’t win the competition. However I did now have the complete manuscript of a novel – a prize in itself! 

The next step was obtaining feedback on the novel. I sent The Promise for a critique. Two big ‘failures’ in the novel were highlighted: 

·       A romantic subplot didn’t work because there was no chemistry between the two characters supposed to be in love. The reader said, “You are much better at conjuring up a scene of horror. The psychological thriller is your genre.”

·       The structure could be improved. An inciting moment in the novel takes place thirty years ago in prison. I’d written the novel chronologically from this moment. The reader suggested the novel would be better starting in the present day with flashbacks to the past.

·       This criticism hurt and taking it on board would mean a major rewrite. But if I didn’t take action the money spent on the critique and all the time spent writing the novel would be wasted.  

I rewrote the novel. Then I used a beta reader. She came back to me with some minor changes, for example, too many names beginning with the same letter. In her summing up she described The Promise as ‘a fast- paced psychological thriller with stark, dark elements at play. The characters struggle with the central dilemma.’ 

Armed with confidence from my beta reader’s comments, I directly approached The Book Guild, the publisher involved in the competition that I hadn’t won. After a wait of several weeks they offered me a publishing deal.  

I did a happy dance and some alcohol was downed (!) but this time in literary celebration rather than to fight fear. Someday soon I hope to raise a glass to you, your writing success and banishment of writer’s angst!       

Facebook | Twitter | Website | Amazon

                                                    

Introducing...

The Promise

A man has been stabbed. A woman is bloodstained. The nightmares from her teenage years have begun again for Olivia Field – just as she is preparing to marry.

Amazon

Apple iBooks | Google Play | Nook 

Ex-convict, Tina is terminally ill. Before she dies, the care of her younger, psychologically unwell brother, Wayne must be ensured. So Tina calls in a promise made to her thirty years ago in a prison cell. A promise that was written down and placed with crucial evidence illustrating a miscarriage of justice in a murder case.

Tina believes Olivia is perfectly placed to provide the care Wayne needs, but to do so, Olivia must be forced to cancel her own wedding and wreck the lives of those close to her. Tina’s terrible blackmail demands put Olivia’s entire future and, ultimately, her freedom under threat.

The Promise is a fast-paced psychological thriller told from several third person viewpoints. The novel explores the lengths to which people are prepared go in order to protect those they love and the impossibility of ever fully escaping our past actions.

~

Sally Jenkins lives in the West Midlands. She is a member of a Speakers’ Club, a volunteer library reading group coordinator and a church bell ringer.

Sally's first psychological thriller, Bedsit Three won the Ian Govan Award.

NaNoWriMo - Mercedes Lackey

Article by Mercedes Lackey

I can't think of anything more intimidating than a blank page. Especially the first blank page of a new project. Now, after twenty-mumble years of writing, I have a lot of things to get me past that, one of which is to use the screenplay writing technique of the late Blake Snyder---you can find all of that in his book, Save the Cat! And on the website dedicated to his techniques.

And these things work really, really well if you already have the basic plot idea and the characters and world in your head.

But what if you don't? What if all you have is a plot?

This is where I am going to deviate from practically anyone you have ever heard from, and tell you this: try writing fanfiction.

For those of you who don't know what fanfiction is, it's pretty simple, and I would bet that you have vaguely thought about doing something like it without ever realizing it. It goes like this: you see a movie or read a book or even play a game, something you really love, but when you're done the first thing that pops into your head is "But what if they had done---" or "And then what happened?" or "Gee if there had been a character like this---"

Fanfiction is taking an existing world, and possibly even some of the characters, and writing your own stories in it. And it is a lot less intimidating than making everything else up for yourself (especially when you're talking about fantasy, science fiction, or horror). Now I am not advocating that you do this with the idea of selling the thing, (though more on that later), because that's called plagiarism and it's illegal. And there are writers and publishing companies that don't allow fanfiction to be published in any form, even on the web, so you have to be very careful about that.

But for purposes of practice? It's fun, it's going to give you a giant kick-start, and you would be surprised at how many professionals started out that way (and still do it!). Well just as an example, go have a look at all the Star Trek, Star Wars, and game-based books there are out there. If you reduce things to principles, most of those are fanfiction---fanfiction commissioned by and given the blessing of the publisher, and produced by professionals, yes, but still fanfiction.

And there are those of us professionals that still write fanfiction for fun (although I doubt there are very few who will be as up-front about it as I am). Sometimes it's because someone else's creation got us by the throat and our storytelling demon won't let us go until we get our version down on paper or in pixels. Sometimes it's because it's not the genre we make our bread and butter at. Me, for instance; I got involved with a small group of folks in the City of Heroes superhero MMORPG (http://www.cityofheroes.com/) and we were all driven to write fiction about the characters we played. I did that for a couple of years until an even smaller group of us decided to take those characters, create a new setting for them, and see if we could write some real books around them. That became The Secret World Chronicle, which is in podcast form at the website above, and will be a series of books coming from Baen starting in March. So you can see that what starts out as fanfiction can, once you get your practice in, turn into a real, marketable project!

But the point is you have to get that practice in first---and NaNoWriMo is one of the best forums for that, just as fanfiction can be one of many platforms for you to launch from. If that's the route you want to go, bravo! Let your fanfic flag fly! You’ll be following in the footsteps of a lot of greats, like Marion Zimmer Bradley (who wrote Tolkien fanfic)!

Now get out there and conquer that blank page!

Mercedes Lackey has over eighty books in print, with four being published in 2010 alone. You can learn more about her writing and other work at www.mercedeslackey.com and www.secretworldchronicle.com