This year’s curriculum on the Writing Excuses felt custom tailored to the problems I’ve been experiencing in my writing lately.
I’ve been procrastinating badly: Emma Newman talked about Fear and Writing and how procrastination is generally underpinned by fear. I spent a lot of the cruise thinking about my fears and the forms they take and I think I learned a lot about my relationship with my writing. Many of these things I still need to process, but I’m sure I’ll be blogging a lot about fear and writing in the months to come.
My beta readers gave me feedback about how certain elements of my worldbuilding felt lacking: Alliette d’Bodard talked about the varying degrees of worldbuilding, from shallow to deep and I realized that I have a lot of deep worldbuilding elements, but not many of the day-to-day shallow elements that would be reflected in the daily lives of the people living in my constructed culture. Her talk helped me realize what direction I’ll need to take during my next round of revisions.
I’ve got one action scene that a couple people pinpointed as being off: Wesley Chu gave a lecture on writing effective action scenes and I realized it wasn’t the action itself that was the problem it was the fact that I’d cut the scene before the action scene. Now I know where to go in my revisions.
I’ve been having difficulty balancing my work life, my music life and my writing life: Thomas Olde Heuvelt gave a talk about maintaining the writer’s life. I will now be sitting down and writing out my goals. I’ve had them in my head for a while, but I’ve never written them down before, I’ve never broken them out before. Now I’ll be doing both. I’ll be examining my goals and why I’m acheiving them or failing to achieving them. I’m looking forward to organizing my writing life more.
I’ve been feeling uninspired: Jasper Fforde reminded us how to find inspiration in the everyday, how to be silly, how to bring that inspiration and silliness into our writing. I’ll be trying to embrace my silly side more. I think this means that I’ll also be slowing down, looking at the world, enjoying the world more. I haven’t been doing this lately and I think that’s because I’ve been depressed for several months now. I’ve been so dug into my own internal struggle that I’ve been forgetting about all the wonderful, day-to-day things that make me happy.
Within the next few months, I’ll begin the process of querrying: John Berlyne spoke about an agent’s role in the author’s career. I have a lot of work to do to prepare for the querrying process. I’m sure I’ll blog about it.
Ken Liu talked about the process of working with your translator and while I’m not anywhere near the place where I need to be thinking about that, his class gave a lot of insight into the process and made me excited about eventually having the opportunity to work with a translator.
In addition to all this wonderfully useful information, my critique group gave me very useful feedback on a short story I’ve been working on, I had some great conversations with some of the professionals attending the cruise in a non-instructor capacity, I got to hang out with some of my favorite people in the world and to discover new favorite people, and I finished writing a short story I’ve been haphazardly working on for over a year now (when I started it, I hadn’t realized it was a short story).
My brain is currently so full of information and ideas that it’ll probably take a while to sort it all out, but this year I feel like I’ve leveled up a little bit, I had more specific things I was looking to get out of the cruise and I feel as though I was able to acheive those goals. Now to get home and get back to writing (in between working and music and life).
Thank you for reading.
If you were on the retreat this year or last year, what were some of your biggest takeaways?
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