A Week in the Writing Life, 5 August 2023
Trying to write as the school year approaches for me and my daughter.
Hope everyone is doing well. From the photo, you can tell that we finally got some rain in Lucas County, Iowa, but we’ll need a bit more, I think. I’ll let you know how the week went, and we’ll likely get to some writing.
Home Front Stuff
We successfully moved our daughter Madeline out of her own apartment last weekend, so now we’ll take the stuff we moved out of there and put in storage and move it into the new place this weekend. The vagaries of leases in Iowa City meant we couldn’t complete this entire process in a single day, thus the storage locker. Both she and we are looking forward to getting the process completed, but one advantage is it gives us the opportunity for all of us to get together, which is rare since we all like in three separate cities. I’m looking forward to it.
School is again on my mind since my vacation can be measured in days rather than weeks, although no work was done this week and likely won’t be even started until next week. I’m not sure exactly what this will look like, since it will be the first time I’ll be doing all special education teaching through the year. We have many new teachers coming in after a number of departures, including our special education staff. One of the things I’ll need to remember to do is to make sure to welcome them and support them as I was when I first came to my district.
I stayed way too late up early Tuesday morning to watch the US Women’s National Team play the worst I’ve ever seen them in a match, 0-0 against Portugal. I’ve got a feeling the world is catching up to the American women, and I don’t think it’s guaranteed they win their third World Cup in a row (which no one, men or women, have done). Brazil, Germany, Italy, Canada, and Argentina also got knocked out, which is pretty wild.
What I’ve Been Writing
…a little more than last week.
I talked last week about my writing slumps, and some of the techniques I’ve used to break myself out of a slump. You can go back and look at those, but I actually ended up using a technique I didn’t mention here: try to write about something totally different, on a different project. I ended up doing some work on my fan fiction series and then wrote an entry for the story my writing group in Des Moines, the Iowa Writers’ Corner, is putting together this year. The latter was quite a challenge and I was happy with the result.
Of course, the main drawback of this particular technique is that it can delay you completing the work you set aside for the time being. However, sometimes it’s better to have a small delay on getting on with your project instead of just getting blocked on something for days, weeks, or months on end. Anyway, I’ll see how this works in the long term.
What I’ve Been Doing Having to do With Writing
This section I’m going to keep short this week - I mentioned last week a few places I’ll be making appearances this fall, but I’ll try not to do all promotion all the time, especially since some of these events won’t be for another month or two.
I’m continuing to hunt for some more opportunities to promote me and my work, as always, so I’m reaching out to radio and podcast people. If anyone is interested in having me appear, say the word and I’ll be there. Also, I just realized it might be good policy to keep up the promotional work, because if all goes well I’m going to have a second book in the series to sell next year.
As I get more events up on my calendar, I’ll let you know about them.
What I’ve Been Reading/General Recommendations
I am way overdue for a Substack Notes series of recommendations for reading. I’m getting too distracted or just flaking out this deep into my summer vacation.
But for now, congratulations are in order for
as they celebrate 2,000 subscribers. I love their work and I hope I manage to have that amount of success sometime soon.Writing Advice for This Week
Last week, I decided to try and change around how I do this writing advice, taking a look at some commonly repeated bits of writing advice and see how valid they were in all situations.
I ran across this article on Grammerly, where the author, Brittney Ross, seems to have had the same idea as me. I won’t go over the entire article here, but she makes the point that writing rules should be seen more as guidelines rather than hard or fast rules. For example, it’s best not to rely on adverbs to describe a scene, but they can sometimes be the best way to describe it.
Another example she gives is the “rule” that a paragraph has to be at least three sentences1. Of course, not every paragraph is going to be this length. Look at fiction, for one thing. Tolkien needed a bit more than three paragraphs in a sentences to properly describe the scenery around his character. Also, how many dialogue paragraphs end after a single sentence, or even a fragment?
In short, I think I like the idea of writing guidelines rather than writing rules.
Writing Quote of the Week
Once again, my man King gets to the point and tells you one more thing you should know about writing.
Amateurs2 sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Final Thoughts
If you have any questions, concerns, advice, let me know in the comments or email me. Any feedback you have would be valued, especially all of you fellow writers on Substack.
And that’s a wrap. As always, check the sidebar and author page links for my work, and I’d love you to leave a review of my books as well wherever you get them. Thanks.
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The question of “how many sentences does a paragraph have to be?” is the most frequent writing question among reluctant (and even not so reluctant) middle-school writers.
I hope I’m not putting words into King’s mouth here, but in this case he uses “amateur” to distinguish between people who just write for fun and those who take it seriously.