In a perfect world, writing what you love would be easy. You’d dig deep into your heartsong and out on the page would come, you know, your heartsong—the most passionate, authentic literary expression you could muster. But we don’t live in that perfect world, and when…
Writing is, in particular, a difficult art form. Unlike physical arts such as drawing, painting, or crochet, you cannot just flash your product (draft or finished) in front of just any bystander’s face and hope for external validation. I know this from experience…
So I’m currently reading River Quest. It’s a chapter book from the Dinotopia universe and WOW does it jump on the plot horse…
Hello gentle reader. It is I—Chelsea Counsell. Long time no talk. I, like you, have been trying to survive during corona, which generally means dragging myself out of bed like a rotting mollusk and continuing to labor under the yoke of capitalism even though I feel… like a rotting mollusk. In November, I began actually […]
When I wrote my post on making decisions, I described how a writer must decide things about the characters, plot, and world of their book rather than leaving them up in the air. It’s important to know what you’re trying to accomplish in order to compare that blueprint against the understanding your beta readers receive. […]
In the last fifteen years, one of the most important lessons I’ve learned is that you have to make decisions while writing. Setting a character’s motives, scars, and hobbies in stone can feel confining because, what if you decide you don’t like what you picked and then you have to change them? WORK, UGH. But […]
Everyone I know who is a writer seems to think writing is really hard. And maybe parts of it are. You basically are building a simulacrum of the world, filtering signal from the noise so that your storytelling focuses on specific things that create the idea of a story or the idea of a world, […]
It’s 2020 and I am 28. I don’t know what exactly happened, but I’ve gotten much better at narrowing down the type of books I want to read. Spoiler: they involve animals and girl power. When I was a teenager, I had a collection of like 800+ unread books stacked all over my room that […]
