“My Writing Gets Better and Better.”

To defeat that Inner Critic bound to stop you from writing by making you believe your writing sucks, a good method is to ensure your writing is actually getting better. But how do you do that?

1. Write every day. If you feel bad about your WIP, just keep on writing. You learn writing by practicing writing.

• Read good how-to-write books by authors known for their fiction writing like Lawrence Block, James Scott Bell, and Dean Wesley Smith. Find an idea you can use in your writing today.

• Hang out with ‘real’ writers online or in real life.

• Start thinking of yourself as a writer, not a wannabe.

• Finish your writing projects. Projects you’ve given up on make your Inner Critic happy and you discouraged.

• Try shorter fiction. Fiction writers tend to write short fiction before they tackle novels or trilogies.

• Publish something, if only on Smashwords or online. Even if you have to go with a weak book cover. When you publish, you are telling yourself that you are a real writer.

Even if your writing is objectively not so great right now, if you work at it, you will get better. You ARE a writer— act like it. Believe in your writer persona. Because when you can start doing that, better writing will follow.

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I’m working to increase my number of followers on Gab, a free speech oriented social medium. I’m https://gab.com/nissalovescats

Please join me there, and become my follower— I follow back.

Creative Mode, Critical Mode, and PAC Psychology

Dean Wesley Smith strongly encourages writers to write in Creative mode, rather than switching to Critical mode, which he says exists to stop you from writing.

Creative mode comes from a child-like, free version of you that likes making up stories because it’s fun.

Critical mode is your Inner Editor, which speaks in the harsh voice of all the adult authority figures from your childhood. Critical mode wants to stop you from doing ‘wrong’ things like being original and not boring and conventional.

In Transactional Analysis, we are said to have three ego-states— Parent, Adult, and Child. The Parent is based on the things our parents and other adult authority figures said during our childhood. The Child ego-state is based on our earliest childhood memories. Our Adult is the name for the thinking, logical part of ourselves— which is confusing since even a nine-year-old has an Adult ego-state.

Creative mode clearly comes from the Child, since we are at our most creative when we are like free, uninhibited children, before we learned to follow all rules and fear every criticism.

Critical mode comes from the Parent, and often echoes the mean things parents and teachers said to us when they didn’t approve of our creative side. Critical mode can also be called the Inner Critic or Inner Editor. When we have low esteem about ourselves as writer, it can act like a bully or an emotional abuser.

The Adult is the part of you that learns things like the rules of grammar and the scores of writing rules you find in writers’ networking groups. Most of which won’t apply to you and your work.

Your Adult’s job is to let the Child be creative and free, while providing correct spellings and grammar, and to banish the Parent/Inner Critic from your writing session.

You know that Critical Mode is in the room by the way you feel about your work. If you become convinced your writing is dreck, or that every original thought you express in your work is shamefully bad and you must write more like other, duller people, that’s Critical Mode.

When the Child is in charge and you are in Creative Mode, writing is fun— it’s the Child’s playtime. Your subconsious mind will be tossing loads of cool stuff into the story that you may not realize until later.

Our mission as writers is to stay in Creative Mode, let your child run free, and become a better writer, naturally.

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I’m trying to connect with other people, especially writers, on Gab, since I want to build up more followers there before I’m banished from Facebook or driven crazy by the ‘fact checkers’ claiming people’s jokes are fake news. I’m Nissa Loves Cats there. A group I like on Gab is ‘Science Fiction and Fantasy’ and the group is a good way to connet with new people there. It could use a few new members.

https://gab.com/groups/307

Poetry Homeless Shelter: A Poem Sharing Event

I used to participate in a Sunday event called Poetry Pantry, which had its good points. But I thought it would be cool to have something more decentralized, free form, less intimidating, so I made a graphic and started this. Rules and details of the event below.

Forest Phases

the giants’ mothers

bomb

holes in the prairies

in iraq

not in iraq

the giants’ mothers

are

the bones of the forest

the pride

of the grass blades

the giants’ daughters

weep

far from their homes

far

from holes

the giants themselves

humiliate

the peaks of everest

in dreams

not in dreams

* * *

To Participate

If you are a poet, post a poem of yours as a comment to this post. Or post the poem on your own blog, post a few lines as a comment here with a link to your own blog post.

If you are not a poet, share a bit from a favorite poem—include poet’s name– in a comment, or post a poetry related post on your own blog, and a sample bit of the post with a link to a comment here.

Share a link to this post on your social media accounts. You may copy my graphic from this post to put on your own post.

I am not the boss of how you do this event, any more than I am in charge of how people write limericks on bathroom walls.

Does your poetry suck? Post it anyway. Do most people not get your work? Post it anyway. Did your English teacher tell you your poetry is an atrocity against the English language? Oh, you have definitely got to post that!

Read a few of the poems by other people, or not. Comment, or not. Try not to be a critic but a magical silver unicorn munching on bacon.

Note: on my particular blog I don’t want to see poems full of raunchy language or eroticism, or any links that lead to porno sites, but that doesn’t mean you can’t participate in this event with risque poetry. Just don’t post your naughty bits here.

Blue Book Mornings for Writers: Stay Inspired

To become a REAL writer, pretend to be one until it comes true. That is, learn what published authors do, and do that until you get good at it. The hard part is learning these things, and motivating yourself to keep doing them daily.

I learned one way to do this from the Blue Book of Alcoholics Anonymous. People trying to recover from a drinking habit often read from this book every day, sort of a way to learn what being a recovering alcoholic is like.

We are trying to teach ourselves to become recovering non-writers. We do that, first, by getting books by known writers and reading them.

There is a rash of ‘spam’ nonfiction books these days, because a lot of people are lying to folks and telling them they can become rich writing nonfiction ebooks even if they don’t know anything and have no writing skills. You don’t want to waste your time on those.

The very first how-to-write book I ever owned was written by Laurence Block. I was already familiar with Block’s fiction from his many short stories in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

Currently I am reading some books by Dean Wesley Smith, a multi-published author. I actually had a fiction book of his in my book collection before I bought the first how-to-write book of his I read, Writing Into the Dark.

I prefer books by fiction authors I’ve heard of, who can both share part of their working methods and writing life, and who can also inspire me to keep on writing.

What I do is this: I pick out one book like this, and before I start my morning writing session, I read part of the book. It helps me get into real-writer mode— and then I do my writing stint.

Both the reading and the writing help me pretend to be a writer— and doing it for real helps me add to the reality of my writing pose. No matter how insecure I feel about my writing identity, finishing actual writing makes it harder to feel like a writing wannabe.

Now, every writer and prospective writer out there. The book that has the stuff you need to learn, and that inspires you, might be a book I wouldn’t find inspiring or educational. Read what inspires you.

Living In An Age of Horribly Bad Indie Fiction

Not so long ago, there was no internet and the only way to get a book published so the public could find it was to go through a traditional publisher who thought the book might sell. Some of those books didn’t, but they at least had sentences in readable English and some hint of a story.

Now with NaNoWriMo and eBook publishing, people who have never even read a book even when ordered to do so in school can participate in NaNo, throw enough word-shaped letter combos on a page to complete a word count goal, and run the result through Kindle Direct Publishing and have it appear as a book for sale without anyone having to read it first.

And that’s what the more competent Indie authors have to compete with. Scads of not-really-novels that make our potential readers wary of any fiction not vetted by a publishing house.

At the same time, traditionally published fiction is going down the crapper of wokeness/political correctness. I read one novel in which a male character who didn’t even need to exist for story reasons was given a ‘husband’ for non-virtue signalling reasons, and another in which a woman-of-action sci-fi character is fretting about what pronoun to use when thinking about (non-telepathic) asexual aliens, and decides to go with made up fake pronouns. Nonsense like this weakens stories, but major publishers seem to care less about that than they care about Leftist conformity.

The challenge for Indie authors today is to find a way to show potential readers that our works are actual, readable fiction with stories in them, not just word salad. It’s hard work. We have to learn about real book marketing methods from good sources, not just imitate a hopeless book spammer and hope for the best. You need to have samples of your work available to the questioning would-be reader. I have seen Indie authors of nonfiction use up the whole book sample on Amazon with a long intro telling what the book is about, so no one can check out any actual content for free. I never buy books like that.

You might post a short story or flash fiction piece on your author blog or elsewhere just to show evidence of your ability to actually write something a reader might enjoy. Or submit short stories to anthologies. Some writers who do novels in series like to make the first novel in a series available as a free eBook.

This is necessary, because people will not just trust you because you say you can write. You have to ‘audition’ for the role of author these days.

But the good news is that if you learn to tell an interesting story, even if you make mistakes along the way, you will start finding people who enjoy the kind of stories you want to tell.