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| From Wikimedia Commons |
Being book pregnant and having another in the over leaves you with little time to focus on learning new craft techniques. Or so I told myself.’
The truth was, I was cheating myself out of a wellspring of motivation and cheating my manuscript out of shortcuts to becoming a better manuscript. Are you doing the same thing? Telling yourself you have no time to focus on writing because you’re writing?
On the surface, it sounds like a valid excuse. But when we break it down, there’s no excuse not to read a blog post or two a day, or a chapter or even a few pages of a craft post. We can all find the few minutes it takes to do that. We should do that. The moment I went back to doing that, my creativity and productivity exploded.
Reading about craft:
- Activates our inner editor. Both on a conscious and subconscious level, we compare the techniques discussed to our work, which allows us to find solutions to problems we hadn’t even identified yet.
- Forges new connections and primes the pump for new ideas. As we read, we are holding up our WIP as the test-case, and reading about generalities or reading examples from other work encourages our minds to find new possibilities in what we’ve written.
- Reminds us that the WIP is not the only Work-in-Progress. We are all still learning. But we don’t learn without examining what we’ve done and comparing it to what others have done or are doing. Reading about craft stretches our minds and our skills.
- Reinvigorates the enthusiasm for the current project. Because our minds are more likely to see the good in our WIP as we begin to compare and examine it, we have the opportunity to fall in love again and remember why we fell in love with the story and the characters. We start to look forward to working on the WIP instead of regarding it as a chore.
So what are you waiting for? Run, don’t walk, to dig out your favorite craft book for fifteen minutes a day, or find some great articles or blog posts and at least skim through them. Take a few moments to think about how you write in general.
Where can you find such blog posts or articles, you ask? Remember way back when I used to do a big round-up every Friday with all the best offerings I’d found that week? Then Google decided to eliminate Google Reader, and it became too time consuming to do that.
But . . .
Now I’ve found a way to hook Mr. Reader to Google+ via Bufferapp!
If you’re looking for cart articles, publishing news, inspiration, or current affairs of interest, check out my Google+ page:
Current Giveaway
My Unlock the Prize Vault Giveaway is still going on. Watch the Compulsion Book Trailer, then go to http://www.CompulsionToRead.com for all the interactions.
Here’s what’s in the current Prize Vault:
What About You?
How much time do you spend reading about craft? Reading in your genre?
