Notes From the Author: Writing Obstacles I Face (and How I Overcome Them)
Hey y'all let's see what's up today! Today I wanted to share some of the struggles that I've faced as a writer and how I personally overcome them. There might be a few things in this list that don't work for everyone, but hopefully something will stand out and help you make some progress. As always it never hurts to experiment and find what works for you, and if you have any tips you'd like to share feel free to drop them in the comments!
What I've Had the Hardest Time With:
There are actually a lot of things that I struggle with as an author, and I think it's going to be easier if I just break them down so that we can keep track of things:
📕 1 Big Ideas: This has by far been the biggest thing that I've struggled with. I kind of describe my work as an overfilled cake pan. If you've ever filled a cake pan you know that as you bake the cake just keeps getting bigger and bigger and it'll eventually overflow in the pan and make a big mess in your oven. That's kind of what my brain did as soon as I got the idea for my first novel, it was like ideas just kept coming and at the time I had nowhere to really put them all so it was just making a big mess of my work.
📘 2 Vision to Paper: I can visualize what I want very clearly, being an artist for much longer than I've been an author has helped a lot with that. However, the act of getting what I'm seeing in my head onto paper clearly has always been a struggle for me and its something that I still struggle with to this day.
📕 3 Burn Out: We've all heard the fable of writer's block and how everyone gets it, and that was my biggest problem when I first started writing. I would just hit this road block and I wouldn't really know how to work around or work through it so I would just stop everything that I was doing and nothing would get done.
📘 4 Getting Overwhelmed: Writing your first book can be stressful, especially if you've never really been all that creative. Graciously, I grew up in a creative family and I grew up around all of these talented and animated story tellers that had a love for history and folklore which is what a lot of my novel foundation relies upon. However, even with my inspiration being all around me it can still be overwhelming to essentially create a whole universe by yourself!
📕 5 Finding Time: I started writing when I was a freshman in high-school, however I had a lot of extra curricular activities and I've seemingly gotten less and less free time as I've gotten older. I work full time, I do volunteer work, and I own my own business, not including the blog and everything. As you can imagine that can really put a strain on your free time. It becomes hard to write and world build when it feels like you are just ridiculously booked all the time. This is obviously still a struggle for me, as I have completely sacrificed my social life in favor of working toward my goals.
How Did I Fix It?
This is definitely going to be a little controversial but I think that this has helped me the most with just getting things done in regards to my novel and everything else:
📕 1 Organizing: When I first started writing, I organized by using 5 section notebooks, index cards, and sticky notes galore. I mean I honestly had about 15-20 binders that I was holding my work in a long with 9 million Google Documents. As I've gotten older I have clearly narrowed that down a little bit. I use Campfire primarily to stay organized, but I do keep physical copies of everything and I have a blast at creating tomes of information about my novel.
📘 2 Jot it Down: On days where I'm having a hard time articulating my thoughts, I just jot everything down as I think about it and go back later to edit it into full scenes and paragraphs. I stress keeping a pocket notebook because sometimes I can't access my phone and I don't want to lose any ideas so I write them all down in a notebook that I can reference later.
📕 3 Have Multiple Things Going: One of the best pieces of creative advice that I've ever gotten was to work on multiple projects at one time. I find that even if I get burnt out or frustrated with one thing, I can always switch to another and keep working. This has helped a lot with my Monsterverse because I'm making progress on all the stories that it features and not just one novel. I think that has helped a lot. However I also like to switch between manuscript writing, world building, character development, and even drawing my characters and the world they live in.
📘 4 Know When to Rest: While I know we are all excited to get our stories out into the world and reach the masses, knowing when to just take a break and rest your mind is really helpful. Sometimes I have to really force myself to take a break before my body does it on its own, but I think that is something that has greatly helped me stay calm even when I'm frustrated about something.
📕 5 Scary Hour: As I mentioned in tip 3 I bounce around in my work a lot, however I have a dedicated Scary Hour where I just do work I've been avoiding by jumping to other projects. I do this once every morning and at night and it has improved my writing progress a lot. Another thing that I feel has helped me is my Campfire app, while I don't like using it for world building I do like being able to work on my manuscript anywhere. I just wish they'd finally release a version of Campfire that I can download on my Chromebook here, I miss that offline workstation!
📘 6 Playlists: To help myself along I also think of the mood that I want to set for whatever I'm writing and I have playlists for them. I also have playlists for each of my characters, as I feel it helps me to channel their energy when I'm writing dialog. This is one of those tips that may not help everyone but I'm a maladaptive daydreamer so it literally helps me to get that mental picture of certain scenes and events.
📕 7 One Shots and Drabbles: You can't exactly add more time to your day, but something you can do to increase your ability to write more is to start with one shot stories, short stories, and even 500 word drabbles. Even if it's a story that you may want to come back and finish or add more to later you can at least lay the ground work in these little shorts.
Closing
As always, your creative process is something that is unique to you and your needs. I require a lot of organization and structure with my work even though I do bounce around a lot. I would love to know what obstacles you guys face with your writing and how you work through them, so if you would like to share feel free to leave a comment! Maybe we can connect with some other authors going through the same thing? If you want to see more from me feel free to click the link below where you can find my other socials. Y'all take care, and thanks for stopping by!
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