For the Love of Critiques

Critiques are rarely welcomed with open arms. This seems especially true for writers—at least, it’s especially true for me. For many years I saw serious critiques about plot holes, characterization, and theme as signals that my stories were unlikable and uninteresting. It didn’t matter if a person told me the news in the kindest way possible or if they offered practical advice for how to solve the problem; all I heard when I came away from the conversation was “your story is broken,” which eventually devolved into “your ability to write well is broken.”

Using My Strengths: A Plot-First Writer’s Perspective on Character Development

This past spring, I conducted a survey that asked over 100 authors to answer common writing-related questions like their favorite genres to read and write, their writing process, their future goals, etc. What I secretly wanted to know most, however, was if my assumption that the world was full of character-first writers was correct. Most writers I knew considered themselves to be character-first—that is, that their stories began with their characters and everything else grew up around them (contrast with plot-first, where the concept or plot develops first and the characters come out of that). When I got the survey results, I learned that my assumption wasn’t true. Although character-first scored higher, it was only by a slight margin. The ratio of plot-first to character-first writers was nearly equal.

Branching Out: Strengthening My Creativity

When I was in elementary school, I took several art classes at a local museum. It was a time in my life where I preferred my marks on paper to be of pictures instead of words (although a quick trip through my old collections of notebooks will show that I was still a novelist in the making), and I came home with countless finished and unfinished projects. But what I remember most about those art classes was a drawing exercise that caused me a great deal of stress. The art teacher instructed the class to draw the still-life that was sitting in the middle of the table, but we could not take the pencil off the page once we put it down. We could not erase any of the lines we drew. We had one minute to create our drawing.

Proverbial Winters: When Busyness Takes Over

As is often said, there’s a season for everything. I’ve been pondering this not simply because I feel and see the first whispers of autumn when I step outside in the morning, but because my writing life has shifted yet again. The ease and free time of summer is giving way to the busyness and change of fall—which means less time to write.

Finding My Voice

The majority of my posts so far have been about things I know or have recently figured out—worldbuilding, book reviews, advice, etc. This is all well and good, but, I’m still young and still have a lot to learn when it comes to writing. It’s equally important to talk about those things.