This is not going to be a happy post. I’m not sure if this is really the kind of thing the Insecure Writer’s Support Group is meant to address. But I feel I need to do this in order for my healing process to begin.

In the stories I write, characters die.  Sometimes people are massacred in great numbers.  Other times, characters get killed off individually for dramatic effect. It’s all done in service to the plot.

I’ve heard writers joke about how often they “murder” characters in their stories.  I’ve joked about it myself.  I don’t think I’ll ever find those kinds of jokes funny again.  Not after the experience I had late last week.

It would be inappropriate to discuss the details of what happened in a blog post, so I’ll only say this much: a gun was involved. At one point, I thought I was going to die.  One person did die. I knew the victim, and I knew the shooter, though I can’t say I knew either of them particularly well.

Friends tell me I’m handling all this remarkably well. But of course I’m not.  Not at all.  I’m never going to forget the things I saw and heard.  I’ll never forget the fear I felt.  My healing process is going to be long and arduous.  I know part of that process will involve returning to my writing routine, because writing is so central to who I am.

Except given the subject matter I tend to write about, how the hell am I supposed to go back to doing that?  Right now, I can’t bring myself to look at my manuscript. I can’t even think about it without reliving what I’ve just been through.  Nor can I work on something new and different—something fun and lighthearted—without constantly reminding myself that there’s this thing I’m trying really hard to avoid thinking about.

But I can write this blog post.  Maybe that’s enough for now.  At the very least, I hope it’s a place for my own healing process to start.

Today’s post is part of the Insecure Writer’s Support Group, a blog hop where insecure writers like myself can share our worries and offer advice and encouragement.  Click here to find out more about IWSG and see a list of participating blogs.

The month of May brought me one of the highest highs I’ve ever experienced: I finished a certain long anticipated manuscript.  May also brought me one of my lowest lows.  Two close friends agreed to look over the manuscript, and… well, let’s just say they didn’t think it was very good.

After a heartbreaking week and a half of going over my friends’ feedback, I’ve realized that I made two fundamental mistakes.

• First off, I’d been playing with a new writing style. It was very flowery. Very fancy.  I thought it sounded awesome, until I tried to read it out loud.
• And secondly, I tried to cram as much science into the story as I could. I thought I was making my Sci-Fi universe more believable, but all I was doing was adding info dumps.  Very flowery info dumps.

When I started this blog, part of my intention was to force myself to do the kind of research that I, as an aspiring science fiction author, thought I ought to be doing.  But in one of my earliest posts, or maybe it was an early tweet, I wrote that I’d never let a scientific fact get in the way of a good story.

This blog really has served its purpose.  I’ve done a lot of research over the last eight years.  Can you blame me for wanting to show off everything I’ve learned?  But, of course, I let all that science get in the way of good storytelling, and now I need to fix it.

For a start, I’m breaking up some of those long, flowery sentences.  And as for the science, I’m not going to remove it entirely, because I still believe good science is crucial for good science fiction.  But maybe I don’t need to spend so much time explaining everything.

So now, back to writing.  Or rather re-writing.

Today’s post is part of the Insecure Writer’s Support Group, a blog hop where insecure writers like myself can share our worries and offer advice and encouragement.  Click here to find out more about IWSG and see a list of participating blogs.

Over the last few months of Insecure Writer’s Support Group posts, I’ve been telling you that I’m struggling with certain real life problems (without going into any specific personal details, of course, because this is still the Internet).

In January’s post, my muse came up with an interesting solution to this: use writing as an excuse to just not deal with real life stuff. And that worked, sort of, for a while.  But you know how real life problems are.  They don’t just wander off and bother somebody else when you ignore them. They nag you… and nag you.  And in turn, that makes writing harder.

After March’s post, I started doing better, thanks in large part to all the encouragement I got from IWSG members and all my regular readers. By April, I was starting to worry less about real life and more about writing, and for the first time since I’ve known her, my muse had something insightful to say about the business side of writing (and also art) rather than just about the craft of writing itself.

So now it’s the beginning of May.  I suppose I could tell you how I’m doing right now, how well writing is going, and how optimistic I feel.  But you know what?  I think I’ll just let this drawing speak for itself.

Not my finest work of art, I admit, but that may have been the most satisfying, most therapeutic drawing I’ve ever done.

Today’s post is part of the Insecure Writer’s Support Group, a blog hop where insecure writers like myself can share our worries and offer advice and encouragement. Click here to find out more about IWSG and to see a list of participating blogs.

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I own an imaginary spaceship. It’s a pretty useful thing for a science fiction writer to have. It allows me to travel all over the universe, visiting all the moons and planets and nebulae I want to write about. I’ve been to Titan, I’ve seen the alien megastructure at Tabby’s Star, and soon I’ll be going to Mars to look for Martians.

Turns out my imaginary spaceship can also take me to fictional planets, so today I’m visiting the planet Dagobah from the Star Wars universe and getting some surprisingly useful writing advice from Master Yoda.

Friends have told me this before. My muse has told me this, and so have fellow writers at all stages of their careers. Writing rules should really be called writing guidelines or writing suggestions, and some of them are really stupid suggestions too.

And yet many of these so-called rules have stuck with me, and I’ve had a tough time dislodging them from my brain. Right now, the “rule” I need to unlearn is this: when editing, cut down your word count by 15%. Or sometimes it’s stated as 10%, or 25%, or whatever. The point is cutting down your word count will make your story better.

This should really be called a writing exercise. It’s meant to teach you how to write tighter prose, and at some point I really needed to be taught that. But this simple writing exercise has transformed into an absolute rule, or a inviolable commandment, and it’s time for me to let it go.

So what writing rules have you had to unlearn?