‘Be ruthless about protecting writing days’

Author C.C. Hunt on that devilish self-doubt-monster

"There’s a monster hiding under my desk. He lurks there, waiting for the right moment to attack. He’s an ugly little bastard, too. I have a lot of names for him, but for the sake of not overusing profanity in this blog, I’ll call him by his real name, Self-Doubt.

Most of you might think that after two decades in the business, after hitting list that I only dreamed about hitting, I’d have managed to kill the gremlin. But you’d be wrong. That sneaky little devil won’t die. He keeps popping back up.

I think self doubt is something most writers face throughout their careers. And by careers, I don’t mean from the point that you become a published author, I mean, from the point you start writing. I think the inability to fight the gremlin is one of the biggest things that prevent a writer from becoming published. And it’s probably one of the reasons published writers stop writing. That’s right, this monster doesn’t care what you’ve accomplished. All he wants is a big bite out of your confidence. He’ll tell you that whatever you’ve got on that computer screen is crap. That you just need to delete it.
He’ll convince you that no matter how good of an idea you may have, it’s probably already been done.
He’ll whisper in your ear that you’re wasting your time, that cleaning out your grout in your kitchen tile with a toothbrush is much more important. Sometimes he possesses your family and friends and they’ll say things like, “How long are you going to put yourself though all this pain before you find something else to do with your time?” He’ll stare you right in the eyes and tell you that your dreams are silly and you’ll never reach them. He’ll make you believe that the one negative review out of twenty good ones is the one you should listen to. If you let him, he not only can slow you down, he’ll rob you of the joy and passion you feel for writing.

Now, that gremlin is always close by, nipping at your toes, giving you moments of doubt. I think that’s somewhat normal. But let that creature scramble up your leg, hang out in your lap, or even worse, let him climb up on your shoulder, where you can listen to him all day long, and you’ll soon be playing Russian Roulette with your passion for writing. Because writing with a self-doubt gremlin sitting on your shoulder is about as easy as brushing your teeth with a brownie in your mouth."

Thanks C.C.! That's it. I am off to slay a monster and get back to writing right now!

C.C. Hunter, author of the New York Times
bestselling series, Shadow Falls. C.C. has had to slay a lot of
gremlins on her climb up on the publishing ladder. 

Reblogged from Writer's Digest 

Want to crush my creativity?!

Overcoming Self-Doubt as a Writer

Guess what? Other writers have self-doubt too!

But the difference is - they don't get crippled by it! I found this article by Author Matthew Kressel, and his words can get a struggling writer back on track. It helps to know we're not alone, right? ;)

It’s become a cliché, the tortured writer beset by periods of crippling self-doubt. But things become clichés simply because they have been true for so many. Writing, for most people I know, is an experience of few victories and many small defeats. The little victories can make all those defeats worthwhile, but when you’re in the writing mode, staring at the screen or paper, slogging away day after day, without feedback, you can often feel like you’ve wandered deep into the woods without a guide and now you’re lost and it’s getting dark and there are strange sounds coming from that grove of trees, and at this far out no one can hear you scream.

Eventually, though, you’ll find your way back to civilization. You send out that story that you worked on for months, only to get rejection after rejection. You submit your magnum opus to agents and editors expecting high praise only to be met with…crushing silence. The waiting sometimes can be the worst of all.

And it’s in these interstitial periods that the most crippling feelings of self-doubt can occur. We ask ourselves, Am I good enough? Am I smart enough? Did they like what I wrote? Does it suck? Am I a hack? What the hell am I doing all this for? All those things we do to escape our uncomfortable feelings become super tempting: binge television watching, drinking, drugs, sex, anything to escape the Great Uncertainty.

And then your story sells, maybe even to a pro market, and the reviews come in, and everyone loves it, and praises it. And people talk about how it moved them, some cried and read it to their grandmothers, and maybe your story even gets nominated for an award. Maybe you even win that award. And you feel like a million dollars, and you’ll never doubt yourself again.

Yeah right.

A few weeks go by, maybe a few months, and the doubts creep back. We say to ourselves, Maybe I was lucky. Maybe the awards system is rigged. Maybe it was only a popularity contest. Maybe that’s the best I’ll ever do.

It’s a vicious cycle, this self-doubt, and it’s been my experience that most writers experience these crippling neuroses in one form or another. A few lucky people I know seem to lack all such self-doubts, but I suspect they’re well hidden, that under their confident exterior they too doubt themselves from time to time. Hell, even Stephen King has been known to express doubts about his work.

Whenever I get into an emotional funk, when the self-doubt niggles its way into my psyche, I find that there are some things I do that help brush it away.

Write. Yep, it seems ridiculous that the cure for self-doubt about your writing is to write more, but I’ve always doubted myself less after a morning where I’ve written 1,000 words than on mornings where I wrote none.

Remind yourself that your problems are First World problems. By this I mean that there are people in this world who survive by scavenging garbage dumps to get food for themselves and their children. There are people who live under threat of rape, war, terrorism every single day. Just by having the time to write, you are in an incredibly privileged position. This does not mean your feelings aren’t real or are worthless. It just means that you might put them in perspective.

Go do something good for someone else. Give some cash to that homeless guy on the corner. Help a friend move apartments. Call up that family member you haven’t spoken with in a while just to say hello and really listen to them You’d be surprised how liberating it can be to get out of your own head, even for a little while.

Remind yourself of all the things you have accomplished. Look at the short stories or novels you published and read the positive reviews. If you’re just starting out and don’t have this resource, remind yourself that all writers go through an early rejection phase. Stephen King said that he used to keep his rejection letters hung on a spike on the wall, and he had once accrued so many that the spike fell. Consider that next time you get a rejection.

Even veteran pro writers get rejections. I have the privilege to know several top editors in SF and I know for a fact that big names do occasionally receive rejections too. Yeah, maybe fewer than they did when they were starting out; they have honed their skills after all, but they still do get the splat from time to time.

Sublimate your doubt. Use it as a tool. Actors are taught to channel their stage fright into energy, to bring more life to their characters. Writers can do this too. All emotions, all experiences, are food for us writers. Explore that neurosis, go deep into it, and you just might find a well of ideas ready to spring forth. Any human emotion is a treasure chest waiting to be opened.

Talk to other writers. Writing can be an isolating experience. Just sharing your feelings with another human being who is going through the exact same thing can be a cathartic experience for all involved.

Reframe the metaphor. You’re writing a story, but what story are you telling yourself about your own life? That you’re not good enough? That you’re a failure? What if you reframe the narrative into something positive: This is just one step on my journey. All writers go through this. This is a learning experience. The author Tom Crosshill, a good friend of mine, has a TED talk on just this idea. I highly recommend it. 

Feed your inspiration engine. Ray Bradbury suggested that writers read poetry every day to whet their writing skills. For me, I find walks in the deep woods inspiring. Or listening to Bach or other music, or reading passages from my favorite books. Pour life into your soul, and you might find that life pours out of your fingers onto the page in equal abundance.

Meditate. This might be similar to number 9, but by taking aside a few minutes every day to breathe deeply, to calm those racing thoughts, to recenter and refocus, you may find that what seemed so burdensome before is now more manageable. I can attest to ridding myself of many small and large anxieties by simply meditating for twenty minutes each morning. I’m usually sharper, more relaxed, and more clear-headed afterward, a great mind space to be in before writing.

These are some of the methods I use to overcome my occasional feelings of self-doubt. While they may not be ideal for all, I hope that some will find them beneficial.

So what about you? Do you sometimes doubt yourself as a writer? What methods do you use to overcome these feelings?

“Behind Every Great Novelist” by Grant Snider.
First appeared in the NY Times Book Review.

•••

Matthew Kressel is a Nebula Award-nominated writer and World Fantasy Award-nominated editor. His short stories have appeared in Lightspeed, Clarkesworld Magazine, io9.com, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Interzone, Electric Velocipede, Apex Magazine, and the anthologies Naked City, After, The People of the Book, and The Mammoth Book of Steampunk, as well as other markets. He ran Senses Five Press, which published the ‘zine Sybil’s Garage and the anthology Paper Cities, which won the World Fantasy Award. Matt was also nominated for a World Fantasy Award for his work with Sybil’s Garage. He currently co-hosts the Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series in Manhattan beside Ellen Datlow and is a long-time member of the Altered Fluid writing group. In his spare time he teaches himself Yiddish. His website is www.matthewkressel.net.

Do-I-Suck-O-Phobia?

 

... or what critters make you believe you are -

some might give good advice,

other's simply want to look better

or get rid of their own frustration.

Beware of falling in the trap

of trying to please everybody and losing yourself.

Writers and Self-Doubt

 Changed critter group. Didn't help against the virus I suffer from right now: Self-Doubt. A horrible thing that renders me absolutely useless with anything that has to do with writing. It's procrastinating times ten. So I did some searching to see if there is the tiny chance that others suffer(ed) from the same. Surprise, Surprise! I found everything from "Self-Doubt is the writers best friend" to "Self-Doubt is a writers worst enemy". The best of the latter is below - Enjoy!

designtaxi.com

Writers Must Kill Self-Doubt Before Self-Doubt Kills Them

Re-Blogged from Terribleminds by Chuck Wendig! 

It’s insidious, this thing called doubt.
You’re sitting there, chugging along, doing your little penmonkey dance with the squiggly shapes and silly stories and then, before you know it, a shadow falls over your shoulder. You turn around.
But it’s too late. There’s doubt. A gaunt and sallow thing. It’s starved itself. It’s all howling mouths and empty eyes. The only sustenance it receives is from a novelty beer hat placed upon its fragile eggshell head — except, instead of holding beer, the hat holds the blood-milked hearts of other writers, writers who have fallen to self-doubt’s enervating wails, writers who fell torpid, sung to sleep by sickening lullabies.
Suddenly Old Mister Doubt is jabbering in your ear.
You’re not good enough.
You’ll never make it, you know.
Everyone’s disappointed in you.
Where are your pants? Normal people wear pants.
You really thought you could do it, didn’t you? Silly, silly penmonkey.
And you crumple like an empty Chinese food container beneath a crushing tank tread.
Self-doubt is the enemy of the writer. It is one of many: laziness, fear, ego, porn, Doritos. But it is most certainly one of the worst, if not the worst, in the writer’s rogue gallery of nemeses.
You let self-doubt get a hold of you, it’ll kill your work dead. You’ll stop in the middle of a project, then print the manuscript out for the sole purpose of urinating on its pages before glumly eating them.
You mustn’t be seduced by the callous whispers of the doubting monster at your back. To survive as a writer you must wheel on the beast, your sharpened pen at hand. Then you must spear him to the earth.
Here, then, are some revelations that will help the everyday inkslinger slay the dread creature.

We’re All Part Of The Self-Hatred Quilt

Everybody suffers under the yoke of self-doubt. Everybody. Creatives especially. You really think that Neil Gaiman doesn’t find the gnomes of doubt nattering at his back? Or Stephen King? Or Steven Spielberg? Or Snooki? Self-doubt has the singular power to make you feel very alone indeed, as if you’re the only sad motherfucker in the universe feeling like he’s not worth a damn. It’s bullshit. A ruse.
Admiral Ackbar knows what it is: that shit’s a trap.
You’re not alone. We all get it. The difference is that some writers pull their boots out of the hungry mire and others sink deeper and deeper until they’re caught in an inescapable nest of old Druid bones.

You Get Multiple Go-Rounds On This Carousel

Writers are afforded a gift few others have: the wondertastic, majestariffic, splendiferous do-over.
Self-doubt is handily eradicated when you give yourself permission to write badly. I mean, okay, this isn’t a permanent permission slip: it’s just a day-trip to the Shit Museum, a hall-pass to the Turd Closet, but you have to let yourself karate chop doubt in the neck and step over his twitching body as you step boldly into the breach to write some occasionally awful awfulness.
Because you are also afforded the chance to go back. And fix it. And rewrite it. And fix it some more.
It’s like the writer gets one giant infinite roll of duct tape.

Dude, Seriously, You’re Not Curing Cancer Over Here

Put differently, you’re not exactly saving lives. You’re not pulling children out of burning buildings or shooting Osama bin Laden or curing a global pandemic. You’re a writer. Self-doubt for those other guys is life-threatening. They fuck up, people die. You fuck up, the the ink on your manuscript bleeds from your blubbering tears and you put on a couple pounds from wolfing down three boxes of strawberry Pop-Tarts. (*chew chew chew* ARE YOU THERE GOD ITS ME DIABETES)
Doubt evaporates when you realize that what you’re doing isn’t some epic quest. I’m not saying storytelling isn’t important. It is. Real important. But lives don’t hang in the balance.
Calm down. Take the pressure off.
Breathe in.
Breathe out.
Put down the Pop-Tarts.

Failure Is The Snake That Bites His Own Tail (And His Tail Tastes Like Shit)

jomurphey.blogspot.com

There’s that whole Yoda saying: “Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate and hate leads to George Lucas endlessly tinkering with Star Wars where he makes Luke step in a squishy pile of Wampa waste, inserts a series of Darth Vader dance scenes, and ensures that the Tauntaun shoots first.”
I have my own version of that, which says:
“Self-doubt leads to failure, and failure in turns leads to self-doubt, and the two tango together, punching you in the butthole again and again until you can no longer defecate productively.”
That’s the horrible thing about self-doubt: it convinces us that our own failure is inevitable, an unavoidable recourse based on our own screaming lack of talent. But failure isn’t inevitable, and in fact failure is created by a fear of failure and by our certain uncertainty we possess about our own ability to succeed. Writers engineer their own failure with such grace and elegance it’s almost impressive.
Remember: failure is not a foregone conclusion.
Piss in the face of that sentiment.

Time And Practice Are Two Of Doubt’s Mightiest Foes

Sometimes self-doubt comes from a real place, a revelation that you’re just not ready. The problem isn’t this revelation but rather how writers react to it. The reaction is: OMG NOT GOOD ENOUGH MUST EJECT OR DIE. What a terribly unproductive reaction. Or, more accurately, over-reaction.
Can you imagine if that was our response to all the things in life? “I tried to bake my first cake and it turned out gluey and unpleasant, so I set fire to my kitchen and walked away as it exploded behind me.”
You can’t do that. That’s insane. You’re not going to be perfect right out of the gate. Time and practice will improve your mojo, and an improved sense of one’s mojo will go a long way toward mitigating doubt.
I mean, this doesn’t happen overnight. “I practiced for a week. WHERE IS MY CONFIDENCE COOKIE?” is not a useful question to ask. We’re talking years upon years of this: but the good news is, it’s not like a switch gets flipped. This is gradual: over time, the light of your increased abilities beats back the shadows of your own doubt. Time and practice are the medicine that heal the anal fistula of your raging insecurity.
I went too far with “anal fistula,” didn’t I?

Clear Your Head Of All Those Boggy Tampons

Sometimes you just need a short term solution. Take a walk. Have some tea. Read a book. Talk to a friend. Go jerk off. Eat a cookie. Run on the elliptical. Pet a dog. Go to the park. Give a sandwich to a homeless guy.
Get perspective. Sometimes doubt is just a tangle of vines and cobwebs and you need to chop through them and go to clear your head. Easy Peasy, George and Weezy.

Turn That Frown Upside Down Until It’s A Curved Blade With Which To Cut Doubt’s Throat, Then Watch That Doubting Asshole Bleed Out On Your Carpets

Turn self-doubt against itself. Don’t let it be a weapon against you: let it be a weapon against itself. Self-doubt can occasionally be clarifying: it might be a red flag that says, “Okay, you know what? Something just ain’t right. Is this the best character arc? Do I need to rejigger these scenes? Am I sure that a rock opera about Anton van Leeuwnhoek, the Father of Microbiology, is really the best move here?”
The key is to let doubt be clarifying rather than muddying. It’s important to know that the doubt isn’t yours to carry. It’s not about you. You needn’t doubt your own abilities but rather some aspect of your current work that feels like it’s not coming together. Here your self-doubt serves as the standard-bearer for those instincts rising up from your gutty-works. Follow your heart.
Thus, self-doubt helps you improve, which in turn helps you defeat self-doubt.
That’s some ninja shit. That’s like, reversing the energy of the attack. You are a goddamn self-doubt killing machine. You take self-doubt and evaginate that sumbitch.
And yes, “evaginate” means to “turn something inside out.” To turn it tubular.
In other words, to turn it into a vagina.
Be honest: it’s shit like this that keeps you coming back to terribleminds.

Validation Comes From Within

In the end, here may be the most important factor: don’t go looking for validation elsewhere. Don’t look for it from friends, loved ones, publishers, editors, agents, mailmen, or cats.
External validation isn’t a bad thing. It just isn’t what you need. Because it matters little that they believe in you if you don’t believe in yourself. Confidence must blossom from within, a corpse-flower redolent with your delightful stink, a stink you find captivating, enlightening, empowering. The confidence you find elsewhere is hollow, a ladder made of brittle twigs. At the end of the day you’ll never be sure if those around you are just wrong — or maybe they’re lying! — or maybe they’re suffering under the depredations of some wretched brain parasite that tricks them into liking mediocre things! — and that just means you’re opening yourself to other forms of doubt.
And doubt needs to go suck a pipe. Doubt needs to take a dirt-nap.
And the way you do that is by finding your own way. By fostering your own confidence.
Because just as doubt is one of the writer’s greatest enemies…
…confidence is one of the writer’s most powerful friends.
Your turn, word-nerds.
How do you defeat the doubt within?

Writer's sickness...

23 Heartbreaking Cartoons From Artists Responding To The Charlie Hebdo Shooting

“I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it.”
― Voltaire 

Jean Jullien

 visit Buzz-Feed-News for more...

There is no starting or stopping, just doing...

I've just finished reading a book that had characters who constantly began something, or stopped another. I learned early on that that is a no-go. Characters should always do something, draw the reader into action.
I don't know if this specif author/agent/editor trio did not believe in this, but I focused - just for fun (like hunting for adverbs - another sport while reading nowadays) - what it did to me as a reader.
It created the tiniest pause.
It was like suddenly (necessary adverb) being flipped out of the characters mind and life, watching from a distance. Only for the blink of an eye, but it's done.
And I also discovered that (and I didn't believe that in the beginning as I insisted myself that my characters had to begin and stop doing things) if you begin or stop doing something it is instantly replaced by new action. New action, that draws in again and creates atmosphere.
Consider:
She stopped running while the bustle around her charged on. (From the book)
and replace it with
She stood still, the waves of the bustle around her crushing past.
Better? Different!

I went over old scribblings and tried to replace a couple of began and stopped. The change in the scenes was tangible. Suddenly the characters moved from one thing to the next in a fluent motion.
I am sure I will come across a sentence where I will still insist that I need either, but I may try harder before I give in next time. It certainly is a nice exercise I recommend to try.
Wish someone would have suggested it to the author of my last past time
.

Writer & the Ghost of Christmas...

New Year resolutions for writers...

reblogged from Keith Cronin (written by Keith Cronin on Dec 09 2014)

1. Stop comparing your achievements with others.

There’s a popular quote floating around the interwebs, which maintains that “comparison is the thief of joy.” Some people think Theodore Roosevelt said this, while others attribute it to numerous different sources. Regardless of who said it first, it’s a worthwhile statement to ponder.
It’s all too easy in life to focus on what we have in comparison to what other people have, whether it’s money, fame, success, power (or in my case, stunning good looks and abs of steel). And it’s always pretty easy to find somebody who seems more fortunate than us. Having found that lucky bastard – er, I mean that more fortunate person – it’s easy to envy their success, and to bemoan our own lack of the same. And that just never leads to warm and fuzzy feelings.
Artists are among the most susceptible to this kind of thinking, and it can really work against us if we dwell on these comparisons too much. On one hand, it can make us doubt our own chances at success, eroding our confidence and planting the idea in our minds that we are NEVER going to make it – a prophecy that can quickly become self-fulfilling.
On the other hand, it can make us bitter and envious of others’ success, to the point where we disparage these people as simply being lucky, or talentless hacks who had some insider connection, or cheaters who somehow gamed the system, or any other number of ways to diminish their accomplishments and rationalize why they are further along in the publication journey than we are. We ask ourselves why did they get all the luck? How come their book sold and mine didn’t? How did they get invited to be a panelist at that cool literary conference, when nobody invited me?
Folks, try not to go down this path, because as my good buddy Billy Shakespeare once said, that way madness lies. Yes, it makes sense to pay attention to what’s going on in the marketplace, but if your happiness and self-worth is based on how many Amazon reviews you have in comparison to some other author, you’re always going to find a way to be disappointed.
When I was developing this post, I found a great observation on a site called TinyBuddha.com. While I’m not endorsing that site or any specific philosophy, I really liked the following passage I found in this blog post:

The thing about comparison is that there is never a win. How often do we compare ourselves with someone less fortunate than us and consider ourselves blessed? More often, we compare ourselves with someone who we perceive as being, having, or doing more.
And this just leaves us coming up short.

I think there’s a lot of truth in that observation. There’s also a whole apples-to-oranges thing that comes into play. Writing – and any art – is incredibly individualistic. Everybody comes from someplace different, and has their own set of gifts – and obstacles. All we can do is make the best of what we’ve got, and stop comparing our achievements so directly to those of others. After all, you can’t control how successful your book will be. All you can control is the actual writing. Which leads to my next resolution.

2. Start comparing your abilities with others.

I suspect this notion will not sit well with some of you. It’s quite popular – at least publicly – for writers to adopt a very democratic view of their literary colleagues: sort of an “all writers are created equal” philosophy. You see this in conventional publishing, when one writer’s work is rejected by an agent or editor, and his or her literary circle of friends immediately forms a sympathetic mob, condemning that poopy-headed agent or editor for not recognizing literary greatness. You also see this in self-publishing, where writers will vehemently defend the right of absolutely anyone to call themselves a writer and publish their own work, all while gleefully thumbing their noses at the “evil gatekeepers” who can no longer keep them down.
Look, I get that it’s nice to be supportive of other writers, and I’m a firm believer in the “writers helping writers” mindset. But to suggest that every writer out there is equally skilled or talented is something I just cannot buy. I mean, I think most of us can agree that good writing stands out when we read it. But what does it stand out from? Not-so-good writing. And I think it’s our responsibility to learn how to tell the difference.

What does good writing stand out from? Not-so-good writing.

Is this subjective as hell? Absolutely. But deep inside, I think most of us can tell when another writer has us outgunned. I’m just suggesting that we should embrace the fact that some people write better than us, and then try to learn everything we can from those writers.
I’m also a professional drummer, and when I was starting out, I hungrily sought out drummers who were better than me, because they were the people I could learn the most from. That approach served me well, so I’ve adopted it as a writer as well. For me, the fastest way to improve my writing has been to identify who is doing it better than me, and then soak up as much knowledge as I can from studying their work.
To make this a more manageable task, I recommend focusing on the specific aspects of a writer’s work that appeal to you the most – the stuff that makes you slap your forehead and say, “Damn, I wish *I* had written that!” Maybe it’s their ability to write gripping action that gets your heart pounding, or incredibly compelling characters who become utterly real to you, or emotional scenes that bring you to tears, or hilarious plot twists that make you snort your coffee all over your Kindle. Pay close attention to the reactions they elicit in you as a reader, and then dig deep to figure out how they did it. And then…

3. Steal something.

Continuing my tradition of using foggily attributed quotations, some famous artist (I’ve seen it ascribed to a range of people from T.S. Eliot to Stravinsky) once said, “Good artists borrow; great artists steal.”

“Good artists borrow; great artists steal.” ~ some famous art dude or dudette

Sure, that’s pithy and clever-sounding, but what does it mean? Here’s my take: when you borrow, you’re using something that does not belong to you. When you steal, you take over ownership of the object (rightfully or not). Applying that metaphor to art, a borrowed idea might not ring true to your own artistic voice, but a stolen idea is something you have taken and made your own – ideally to the extent that it is no longer recognizable as the other artist’s idea.
As ironic as it seems, it’s the “making it your own” part that I believe makes this stealing justifiable, because you’re inspired by the work of another, and you’ve internalized the concept and done the work needed to make it fit into your own writing.
I hasten to add, I am NOT talking about plagiarism. Actually copying the prose of another writer is unconscionable, immoral, and just plain lazy. But taking a concept or technique you admire in another author’s work and applying it to your own can really help you step up your game.
For example, I’ve been studying the work of Jonathan Tropper, an author whose work I enjoy. Tropper is particularly good at creating big “cinematic” moments, something my own work could use an injection of far more frequently. And he’s willing to really milk those scenes, sometimes to the point where it can become an almost-too-perfect “Hollywood moment.” But then he redeems himself, by having the narrator or one of the other characters make some snide/self-aware observation about how Hollywood-like that moment seems. In doing so, Tropper beats us to the punch, negating any “oh, that’s too unbelievable and movie-like to be plausible” criticisms we readers might have – but he still gets away with inserting that Big Movie Moment. This is a brilliant technique, and I am SO going to steal it.
Another opportunity to steal is in taking a high-level story concept and recasting that story through a new lens. This is a time-honored tradition. Look at how many ways we’ve seen classic stories reimagined in other books and movies. Without these “thefts,” we would never have Bridget Jones’s Diary, Clueless, Apocalypse Now, Wicked, A Thousand Acres, 10 Things I Hate About You, Ulysses, West Side Story, Shakespeare in Love, and O Brother Where Art Thou? – not to mention all the Frankenstein and Dracula offshoots that are perpetually sprouting up.

4. Give something away.

Okay, if you’re feeling guilty about the idea of stealing, here’s your chance to make up for it. How? Take something that has been of value to you as a writer, and give it to somebody else.
This might be a book on the craft that you’ve found particularly helpful, or simply a copy of a novel you love. Or you could dig even deeper, and give somebody your old Kindle, smartphone or tablet when you upgrade your own. Or you could simply share a piece of insight that has helped you as a writer – either one-on-one with another writer friend, or publicly through a blog, discussion forum, or other social media vehicle.

We are ALL capable of helping another writer in some way, regardless of how far along we are in our own writing journey.

The bottom line is that we writers all need help in some form or another, and – this is something many people don’t seem to realize – we are ALL capable of helping another writer in some way, regardless of how far along we are in our own writing journey. We just need to look for that way, and then find the gifts we can give.

5. Back up your computer.

What’s on YOUR list?