Plenary Lecture: How to Stay Sane and be a Writer
· Schedule time to write: keep that schedule sacred
· Have a ridiculously small goal for every day (1000 words)
· Keep a space just for writing, or a semantic space—a visualization of writing time
· Train your family
Use rituals to get into writing
· Turn off the internet. Freedom software—turns off the internet, have a separate writing day for research
· Social media is the evil comparison matrix
· Know what you can ignore, people are trying to buy my attention, don’t check email, or Facebook
· Be your own tough boss, everything else is more important that your writing according to everyone else
· Give yourself a break, take vacations from work and from writing,
more demanding than any other activity
· Be okay with not writing, but you have to write
· It is your job to sit down and start: not to write well, or to finish
the book
· Don’t get discouraged by the edits and the criticism
· By its very voicing it is evidence of respect, that means there is
something that you are doing right
· Everyone needs a therapist, especially creative people
· Why are we such neurotic people? It is irrational and antisocial
· I am a big believer in self medication
· If you take care of your body, it will take care of you
· Privacy: we are going to have to write a lot of crummy stuff in order to write good stuff
· Close the door to the inner agent
· Surround yourself with inspiration
· Cross pollinate: enjoy stuff from other genres, look into movies and
TV shows
· Abandon the idea of finishing. Work on your bit today.
· When you are feeling tortured, remember you might be writing your
best stuff
· Have a person to complain to, and make sure that they know that is
what they are there for
· Accept compliments
· Scribble or write for fun, write things that aren't part of your career,
free-write, have fun
· Envy is inevitable
· See it as your brain telling you what it wants
· Remember it is a process
· I’m a writer. I don’t cook. I don’t clean. ~Dorothy Parker
· You are deeply within in it; the conversation
· We don’t relate to generic characters, they come back when the
average person would not be able to
· Every moment should reveal character or advance plot
· Don’t set the stage in the book, that is what works in movies.
· You need to be able to jump right into the story
· Cut what is typical or make it part of the plot moving forward
What is commercial fiction? Think of it as a product for public production, you don’t want to put it down.