How Sharing Stories Can Help You Connect

As an artist, I always tend to be my harshest critic, my biggest bully. No story is good enough. No turn of phrase impactful enough. No word just right. It has taken me quite a few years to feel confident enough to share work. I recently joined the fold on Wattpad--a story sharing site hosting a spectrum of tales from tween fan faction to highly renowned authors like Paulo Coelho.

Wattpad is fun. It is first and foremost a community of story lovers; readers and writers alike. You can post short or long stories, serials that you update weekly, or novel-length work. There are groups to join and loads of inspiring and fun stories to discover. You can "vote" on any work simply by clicking the star icon on the page to show you liked it. You can also comment on any section of work and converse with the authors. All in all, it is a great platform to connect with an audience.

I invite you all to join in.  Read my work. Post your own work. Or simply connect with others who love stories as much as you do. Hope to see you there!

Why You Shouldn't Fear The Process

It has been nearly a year since my last post and the completion of my novel. Through careful editing, tweaking characters, and a lot of cutting, my shitty first draft has transformed into an exciting tale with compelling characters. At least in my humble opinion.

The manuscript is now in the hands of a select few "beta-readers" who will collectively provide me with my first taste of scrutiny. As long as I've been writing, I've never been this excited about a piece of work or this confident in my creation. Will my readers' reactions meet my expectations? Or have I been so completely wrapped up in my own mind that I can't see the forest for the trees?  I will soon find out.

I thought this part of the process would be easy. The work is complete. It is out of my hands. Instead, I find myself anxious and worried which is no way to live. To combat my discomfort I've taken to channeling it into new and old projects. I currently have a slew of unfinished or unpolished stories. I am a chronic "starter." As it stands, I have three incomplete short stories, three incomplete novellas, and five incomplete novels that are part of the same series. To put it bluntly, I have plenty of ideas and very little discipline. That is all beginning to change.

Process. The writing lifestyle is all one big process. There isn't a definitive line between published and unpublished. There isn't a box I can check off that shows I've succeeded. You work, you research, you dream, you pour your heart onto the page. Yes, there are beginnings and endings, but really, it is just the ebb and flow of creativity.

The one thing I have learned through this process, as hundreds of other writers have stated before me and will long after me, is you have to write. Don't judge yourself too harshly. Choose work that you're passionate about and see it through to the end.

I'll leave you with this quote from the legendary Andy Warhol:

The End

Fifteen years after a horrifying dream left its imprint on my psyche, 9 years after I used that dream for a short story assignment in college, and 4 years after my attempts to edit that story ballooned into a novel of proportions beyond my skill set, I have completed the first draft of The Bloodsong Swords.

It is gloriously flawed and virtually unreadable. It is wrought with redundancies, with instances told rather than shown, with cliché turns of phrase, and info dumps. But within that are magical moments. Characters with yearning. Unique settings. There is a story that wants, indeed demands, to be told. 

My goal is to weed out all of the mundane and amateur and present to the world a version of this story worth telling. I feel obligated to do justice to the people and places that have lived in my unconscious mind for all these years. There is a lot of work left to do and I will admit that I am dreading the mountain of rewrites. There are points of view to eliminate, scene after scene in need of fresh envisioning, an entire restructuring.

Typing "The End" is only the beginning. I am up to the task even if I do feel like I'm in over my head. I've come to enjoy the writing process that once terrified and frustrated me. I can finally call myself a novelist. Up next: published novelist.