Your Inner Writer

This post is all about positivity, and reminding yourself that a first draft is not a code word for final draft. It is literally a really detailed outline of your story. I just finished the first draft of Believe, and let me tell you, if that was the final draft I'd be out of business as a writer (then again I'm not even in print yet, but that is beside the point). What I'm getting at is, lots of people get caught up in writing the first draft, wanting everything to turn out perfect, or at least really good. But when it doesn't, they get discouraged, and in my case just start over. I hope I'm not the only one who's done this.

One of my favorite forms of writing encouragement is going on Pinterest (though beware, it's a black hole that cause writers to lose focus). Since I like to pin inspiring pictures for future stories, or specific stories I'm working on, it's just fun to go through and see all the ideas I have swirling in my head. If that isn't enough, there's the series called Writer Positivity. They're just little notes saying things such as, you're going to write someone's favorite character. Or that you are going to be someones favorite author someday. That alone just gets me excited and wanting to write like there's no tomorrow!

Something that I as a writer has struggled with is plotting. Everything you read and hear says to plot it out before writing, that it's so important for you to do this. But as I like to say about many writing rules, "They're more like guidelines anyway." -Hector Barbossa. I quote that quite often actually. Now I try to sit down and write what will happen in my novel. But most of the time my ideas are only partial, and I simply don't know what's going to happen yet. It may not be this way for everyone, but that held me back. I thought that I had to plot. But of course those wonderful words, "it's just a first draft" come to mind. I've discovered that plotting before writing the first draft just doesn't work for me that well. Sometimes you just need to pull off that first draft before you can get anywhere.

A lot of times I see articles about how to improve my writing, and my inner writer gets discouraged because I'm not paying attention to all these rules while writing. As I will repeat so much that you'll come to hate this sentence: it's just a first draft. I forget that all too often. It's just a first draft. I struggled to remember that each writer is completely different, and have their own way of pulling off a bestseller.