This is a blog about writing from the words you can’t get out to the bits you polish and publish.
Welcome to the slush pile of my life…
Decade in Review or why lists are your best friend
In a few days, we’ll be celebrating New Year’s Eve 2019 which marks not just the end of the year but also the decade. Social media has been abuzz for weeks with the twin takes of “Make a list of what you accomplished in the last 10 years!” and “Listing your accomplishments is Bad, Actually, and will make you feel terrible so just be happy you’re alive.” And, on one hand, I can see how looking at a list of what someone else accomplished in the last ten years can make you feel terrible which is why I...
read moreMy Year in Writing 2019: a rebuilding year
My understanding of sports can be best summarized by the time I looked up at the TV and asked my husband if he was watching “Monday Monday Football Monday” and he just looked at me, looked at the TV, looked back at me and said… “It’s Tuesday? And this is hockey?” But despite my inability to tell a quarterback from a Zamboni, I am going to use a sports cliche because 2019? 2019 was a rebuilding year. See, at the start of this year, I realized I was looking at least at least four more years until I’d...
read moreWrite for the job you want
Write for the job you want, not the one you have There’s an expression that says, “Dress for the job you want, not the job you have,” and it applies well to your writing life. Even though you’re just starting out, you likely know where you ultimately want to be. You know the writing life you want to have, even though you’re not there yet. The key to getting there is to write for that life now. What is the writing life you want? Let’s say you want to be a bestselling author. You want to have dozens of books...
read moreNaNoWriMo Pep Talk: Winning Isn’t Everything
NaNoWriMo is nearly over. Only 8 days until this whole wild challenge is behind us and we’re swept up in the holiday chaos that accelerates us all into the end of the year. I know some of you have already reached or even surpassed 50,000 words and I want you to know that you are awesome and have accomplished something amazing here this month. I am so darn proud of you! For those of you still furiously racing to the finish line, I highly recommend getting yourself a word buffer as we head into Thanksgiving Week because the holiday can...
read moreWriters: Finish what you start
Consider yourself warned: There’s a point, usually around the halfway point of your story but not always, when you will hit a moment of crisis. This story is a mess, my writing is awful, the characters are flat and dull, and the whole thing is falling apart. Why am I even bothering to write this? This feeling will often coincide with the siren call of a shiny new idea that would be sooo much easier to write, and it’ll try to convince you that maybe you should just go write that and stop wasting your time with this disaster. When...
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Take failure off the table
It was summer. My daughter was five years old and just learning to go underwater. All-day long she’d done tentative little dips, dunking her face, sliding across the surface of the water. Then she dropped her goggles. She lunged for them, but it was too late. Down down down, they sank to the very bottom of the deep end of the pool. Over and over, she dipped under to get them, but she never even came close to where they were. With each dip, she got more frustrated. She was barely getting a foot under the water, how could she ever hope to...
read moreTurn your writing dreams into a writing goal
While people often use the terms interchangeably when talking about writing or anything creative, there’s a big difference between a dream and a goal. A dream is a fantasy, a mental picture of how we wish it could be. A goal is a tangible thing you can work toward in the real world. Goals vs Dreams Even the word goal itself changes how you think about it. A dream feels like an ethereal picture in the distance, but a goal is a finish line you can walk toward right now. What would it take to turn your writing dream into a writing goal?...
read moreWhy do you write?
Ask any writer why they write, and you’ll get dozens of different answers. Some use it for therapy or meditation. For others, it’s a job or side hustle to earn some extra income. Many writers write to share their story or to make sure the world has the stories they needed when they were young. Some writers can’t explain why they write, they only know that they must, or life feels wrong and hollow. I write because… Understanding why you write is essential to understand how you write. It defines your writing purpose and...
read moreWrite it first, then worry about what comes next.
Don’t get ahead of yourself In an old Garfield book we had growing up, there’s a week-long gag about him becoming a writer. In one comic, he says something like, “Lots of people say they want to write a book, but very few actually do something about it.” The punchline is him, still having written nothing, sitting in front of the mirror in a smoking jacket saying, “Yes, this is how I will be photographed for my book jacket.” I think of this comic often because getting ahead of myself is a trap I fall into...
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Hillary DePiano is a playwright, fiction and non-fiction writer who loves writing of all kinds except for writing bios like this.
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