Long holiday weekends are not for making plans to go out with friends or family or for trips to the beach or a barbecue. Long holiday weekends are for catching up on all the writing and critiques I promised to get to but neglected to do this summer because I was out doing all the things I wanted to do instead of writing and reading works in progress, knowing that I’ll do none of those things and will end up in a panic on Monday because I have missed yet another opportunity to get shit done. Just me?
For those of you in the U.S. and Canada, happy long Labor/Labour Day weekend. See you here next week.
- There’s no one way to get started (or get going after a long pause) on your novel. Try one of these 15 Ways to Write a Novel.
- Does your work in progress resemble the bottom of a shoe after walking through the hot streets of New York on garbage day? Don’t worry about it, honey. You’re Doing It Right.
-
You don’t need a degree in Literature. These 8 Famous Authors had degrees (or no degree) in topics unrelated to writing. The thing they have in common is that they wrote and finished novels. Like you will do, amirite?
-
If the words won’t come, you could read these 10 Books That Have Defined [one author’s] Life (So Far) and consider how your own book might someday define a reader’s life.
- You know what? Fuhgeddaboudit! You don’t have to do anything this long holiday weekend. “We writers can so easily get stuck in our heads, our pages, our computer screens. We can so easily guilt ourselves into thinking we have to record every moment, or turn every experience and thought into art, or produce pages in all our spare time. And sometime when we’re so stuck in our pages, we forget there’s a world out there – and that’s where our raw material is.”