Don't force the shoes to fit.

It amazes me the amount of people willing to shove their foot into a smaller shoe just because they like the shoe or they are ashamed to admit their actual shoe size, or even worse, just because the shoe is on sale! I imagine that they must feel very uncomfortable walking around wearing a six and a half when they wear a size eight. The same goes for writing and character actions. If you make the characters do things that are out of character your readers will be uncomfortable.

Dialog

I took a college fiction writing class at a community college last semester. It was actually more like a fiction reading class with a splash of writing thrown in, since we only did three or four writing assignments and we read about twenty stories. I took this class because I believe you can learn something from everyone, but I learned nothing in this class. Well, nothing the teacher taught me. For our first writing assignment we were told to write a 300 word story that was character vs. nature, character vs. the world, or character vs. supernatural. I went against my better judgement and took the easy way out. I wrote a courtroom scene that was mostly dialog. I thought my teacher would run screaming away from anything I actually wanted to write. I had to filter my writing for fear of being feared. Even tame fiction can be twisted into something that it's not. What I mean is, because of all the violence, school shootings, etc., I was afraid to write a story that I might actually like. An innocent piece of werewolf fiction could be frowned upon in a school setting because of the violent content. When my teacher graded the paper she wrote, "Too much dialog, and it's boring." Maybe not in those words, but she wrote them. The next assignment I turned in had maybe two sentences of dialog, but I wrote more along the lines of what I wanted to write (well, the paper was based on a photograph the teacher had chosen for us). My teacher did enjoy that assignment more, but she didn't love it. For the last assignment we were given a 1000 word limit and no boundries, so I finally decided to write about something I actually wanted to write about. I picked a topic that was more tame than werewolves, but was still something that interested me. This time my teacher actually loved it. I wonder if I had just wrote what I wanted in the first place if I would have actually learned something else.

The struggle to keep characters fresh

I think one of the biggest struggles any author faces is keeping the characters fresh. In your head you think of all these actions you want your characters to carry out, but if your not careful you can make flat characters, or even worse, annoying ones. Today I feel like I need to take a look at my characters. I need to make sure that they are all speaking with their own voices and all have different personalities.

Some nights I don't feel like writing.

Some nights, mostly those that come after a long day at work, I don't feel like writing. By the time I get home I'm tired and I'm sick of people and I just want to take a nap, but sometimes I manage to force myself to write. On those nights I don't write anything profound, just a couple of words, but at least I've written something. Tonight is one of those nights, and I'm about to try to force myself to write a few words.

Could writing a book cause me to lose interest in reading?

In the past I couldn't wait to take a trip to Barnes and Noble. I loved browsing the shelves and looking for something new to read. Today I visited Barnes and Noble and walked away empty handed. It's not the first time that I've walked away from the bookstore, but it is the first time I didn't see anything that held my interest. I try to squeeze in writing time on a daily basis, but I have been neglecting my reading list. The only books I've even picked up in the past few months are Double Dexter and Angel Ink. I'm sure this is just a phase and it'll pass, but I hope it passes soon.

Blurbs and about me

As I prepare to write those two little words, the end, I realize that I'm missing something. I don't have a blurb for my soon to be released novel. What's even worse is whenever I sit down to write one I end up staring at a blank page for thirty minutes. How is it possible that I can't think of a summary? I know my novel better than anyone, and I work in sales, so it should be easy to type out a short summary. What's even worse is the about me section. Am I so dull that I can't think of a single thing to say about myself? Maybe. Maybe I just don't like talking about myself.