Does Your Writing Toolkit Reflect Your Writing Goals?

Lindsay Ellis recently published a video about the gauntlet of finishing a book, finding representation, and finally a publishing deal for her upcoming book Axiom’s End. The whole process only took ten years! I found Ellis’ honesty refreshing. At the same time, it was a discouraging reminder that so many of our projects take convoluted creative journeys before they ever see the light of day. Your book idea may have germinated ten years before you had the creative means to bring it to the page. It may be another ten years before your story reaches its target audience. If you’re willing to do that much unpaid work, suffer that much rejection, and all without the guarantee of being published, then you may have that special brand of masochism called ‘the drive to be a published writer.’

There are very lonely, discouraging valleys in every author’s saga. Your grit can help you through these valleys. A writing community is even better, and when you’re working on a specific project, you’ll need a specific set of tools. In the digital age, there are so many tools that you’ll be overwhelmed if you’re not extremely intentional about what your writing goals are. Which tools best serve each step of the journey?

Part of the work of writing is learning which tools work best in the researching, drafting, editing, pre-publishing, and post-publishing stages. In the research and editing stages, developmental editors used to be one of the only options available to authors. To be frank, many developmental editors are only available to writers with a decent amount of money to spend. We didn’t use to have blogs, YouTube tutorials, Reddit, Google, and Facebook communities, all for free. Now, we have all of these things, plus book coaches and systematic audience demographic testing like ours.

Last week, Jennie Nash and I gave a webinar about the difference between book coaches and beta readers. I loved what Jennie said about our guest author Samantha Specks’s intentionality. Samantha is a historical fiction author who used both Author Accelerator and The Spun Yarn’s beta readers as tools in different parts of her process. You can tell just by listening to her talk about the research stage of her novel that Samantha is a very methodical, measured writer. You don’t have to have that personality, but it behooves you to employ that mindset if you want to make sure your manuscript is ready before you blow your shot with your dream agent.

I defy you to find two identical creative processes in the Paris Review’s volumes of interviews with famous authors, but you do have to define A Process that works for you. That’s the beauty and the overwhelming nature of being a writer today. Your potential toolkit is bigger than it’s ever been, and so is your responsibility to be intentional about filling it with the right tools. If you think of your creative journey as the sum of its discrete stages, which tools serve you best in each? If beta readers are part of your process, add them to your toolkit.

—Sarah Beaudette, Spun Yarn Editor-in-Chief

Overcome Writer's Block With These 7 Situational Writer Prompts

Writer’s block: the dreaded enemy of writers everywhere.

Knowing that “it happens to everyone” and “you’ll get over it” is well and good (and true), but it doesn’t make you feel any better as a writer when you’re struggling to traverse the creative desert of a bad case of writer’s block.

Just like a slumping Major League Baseball player, the only real way out of a slump is to keep hitting (or in your case, writing). Write anything. Write at different times of the day or night. Write in different locations. Write stuff that will never see the light of day. Just. Keep. Writing.

That’s where this article comes in.

In order to keep you writing and to get those creative juices flowing again, here are 7 situational writing prompts to help you break that writer’s block.

Simply read these prompts, pick one that speaks to you, and finish the scene or story with your own words. It doesn’t matter if it’s very long or any good, it just matters that you’re continuing the practice of writing so you can get back to your normal self: a writer brimming with creativity!

And, hey, if you write something you DO like, send it to us via email, Twitter, or Facebook. We’d love to celebrate the end of your writer’s block with you!

You got this!

Writer’s block writing prompt #1:

Sherry was ill. She’d been ill for months now and wasn’t sure how much longer she could take the constant feeling of dread that she would never feel like her old self again. Sitting in an antique rocker, her lap covered with the hand-knitted shawl from her grandmother that she’d kept with her for as long as she could remember, Sherry couldn’t hide her surprise when the door opened and in walked the last person she expected to see on this cold, wintry Iowa day…

Writer’s block writing prompt #2:

I’ve never been one for parties. Lavish events, surrounded by people (well-wishers or otherwise) looking to make small talk sounds more like a nightmare than a reason to get dressed up and put on uncomfortable shoes. So when I found myself at the White House for their annual December Gala, I was less than thrilled. That is, until I read the name on the table card at the seat next to me…

Writer’s block writing prompt #3:

It was the kind of morning that made you feel a certain way. And that certain way was nauseous. To be clear, this feeling in the pit of my stomach wasn’t unique to this morning. It had been growing for days. Weeks even. But this morning, as I stared out the frost-edged windows of my parents’ living room, I knew this would be the day that would change everything, for better or worse, forever. One hour from now, just as the sun peeked over the horizon, I would step out the front door and…

Writer’s block writing prompt #4:

Call me Ishmael. No, wait, that’s already taken. Call me Blake. Yeah, that’s a believable name. No, I’m not a grifter. Why would you ask? I’ve never made my living conning people out of their money. It’s just a hobby. That is, until Lynn walked into the Tipton Diner just before noon one day last July. To my surprise, she sat down on the stool next to me and proceeded to order more food than a single human could possibly eat. Then, as the waitress incredulously turned to fill her order, she looked me straight in the eye and said, “...

Writer’s block writing prompt #5:

Ruth never knew the truth. In fact, there was a lot Ruth never knew about her parents. Growing up in a hyper-religious community, removed from most of the world by miles, forests, culture, and so much more, she had assumed that the world she could see around her was the only world that existed. She never questioned that her parents may have had a life before joining the remote religious sect in which she grew up. That is, until she looked behind the old dresser in her parents’ bedroom and discovered…

Writer’s block writing prompt #6:

Lightning was a harbinger of doom. Or so Amy Stenta, who lived on a quiet street in Rahway, NJ, thought as she huddled under the overhang of her porch, eyes fixed on the end of her short driveway. The rain was falling in sheets, and had been for hours now, but the streaks of lightning illluninating the sky at regular intervals was something new. And it scared her. She knew that the last time the lightning came, it brought with it…

Writer’s block writing prompt #7:

The tapping was incessant. Lloyd Moody was nearly going out of his skull from the obnoxious sound of Tom Kehl’s cheap, blue, medium tip, Papermate pen rapidly hitting the conference room table. Walter fixated on it. He’d known Tom for years. He’d endured Tom’s constant pen tapping for nearly as long. Walter knew Tom’s history and that he was fragile, but this was the last straw. Walter stood up and approached Tom. The words that would come out of Walter’s mouth in the next second would change both of their lives in ways neither of them could have guessed. “Tom,...”

Hopefully these writing prompts and story-starters can get you back on track with your writing.

Another thing that can help with writer’s block is to get solid feedback on your writing or manuscript. Good news: that’s what we do! Check out our feedback report options to get the feedback you need.

The Moment that Matters in Novel Writing

“Most writers spend 100 hours alone with their manuscripts for every one hour of feedback.”

You probably couldn't be a writer if you didn't enjoy the solitary process of novel writing. My own writing ritual starts early in the morning with a dirty laptop keyboard and a cup of steaming coffee. Particularly with longer manuscripts, these solitary hours quickly add up to days and weeks or even years, alone with those words on the screen.

It's the moments when you aren't alone with your words--moments when you’re receiving feedback on your work--that are actually pretty unusual. I've never seen the calculation, but I bet it's safe to say that most writers spend 100 hours alone with their manuscripts for every one hour of feedback. Maybe it's closer to 1,000. Whatever the number, one thing is certain. These moments of feedback have a disproportionate impact on your creative process as a writer. In IDEO designer language, we would call them "moments that matter.” Even if a manuscript took 1,000 hours to write and revise, that one hour of feedback has a disproportionate impact, on the manuscript itself, but also on the author's emotional well-being.

Let's face it. Writing a novel is a highly emotional experience. There is the honeymoon phase when the words are flowing. There's the "like the dentist phase" when a writer ploughs through revision after revision. Then there’s the ‘walking on eggshells’ trepidation as query letters or contest submissions get sent. And then of course, there are the crushing rejections or often worse for me, the roaring silence of just being ignored. So many manuscripts never actually get any attention at all. They don't get any real feedback. Instead, they suffer a slow ignominious death in a solitary confinement of endless unexamined slush piles before eventually being ushered into top drawer purgatory, never to be heard from again.

True, lots of manuscripts aren't great. But so many other manuscripts with fantastic potential never actually reach this potential, not because the book is bad, but because the feedback system is broken. That feedback "moment that matters" doesn't happen correctly or occur at all. Many a jaded literary agent will tell you that there is a serious supply and demand problem in the industry. There are WAY TOO MANY authors who have written manuscripts and FAR TOO FEW actual publishers with actual budgets extending actual publishing contracts to actual writers. I totally get this state of affairs. But that's just an explanation for why that “moment that matters” is missing in so many cases. It’s certainly not how feedback needs to work in the future.

With The Spun Yarn, we've created a new way to get feedback on a manuscript in a format that is enormously useful for the author AND which doesn't cost an arm and a leg (right now, it's about $300). Put differently, we've redesigned that feedback "moment that matters" to be as useful as possible. It's worked for me personally.

I have one YA novel in particular that I've been working on for years and years. It's the writing project I always come back to. Except, I stopped coming back. I'd finally gotten the manuscript to a place where I thought it was really strong. I'd revised and revised and then I put it out into my agent network. Based upon connections with agents I'd made over the years, I was actually quite optimistic. I got crickets. And rejections. After a couple of months of query gymnastics, I packed it in. The feedback I was getting from this process seemed to be telling me that the manuscript wasn't any good. I put it in the top drawer. I moved on with life. In fact I got really distracted by starting and launching the Spun Yarn.

Fast forward about a year, and our Chief Operating Officer (Sarah) talked me into putting The Clocktower through our own Spun Yarn process. I pulled the manuscript out of the drawer, dusted it off, and nervously sent it along to Sarah’s team. We matched it up with three readers (two teenagers and an adult who likes YA). About three weeks later, the results were in. I had my feedback report, thirty pages of in-depth feedback from people who care and who had read every single word I wrote. And you know what? They didn't hate it! In fact, all three of them seemed to really enjoy the read. I definitely didn't get perfect scores and there was a lot that needed to be fixed in the next revision. But it felt so darn good to know that my novel didn't suck. Real readers had read it and real readers had given me feedback and real readers wanted to see that book out on the shelves of a bookstore some day.

This was the sort of feedback that I needed. This was a feedback moment that mattered. Over the next six months, I found time to dive back into that manuscript. And I used a lot of the suggestions and feedback from the Spun Yarn feedback report to make my book better. Even more importantly, I was emotionally reinvigorated. I'd fallen back in love with the manuscript. I had the energy to soldier through all of those solitary hours of creativity, with my coffee and my dirty laptop keyboard and those little words marching across the screen. Some moments really matter. Thanks to the Spun Yarn, I'd bought myself at least another 1,000 solitary hours to push my manuscript to the next level. And now I’m confident that when my book is ready to go back out into the world for its next “moment that matters”, that it's actually a damn good book.

--Sean Hewens, Co-Founder of the Spun Yarn

Also by Sean: Five Things I've Learned From My Novel Feedback and Harness the Power of Design Thinking, and other musings on IDEO's The Octopus Blog, which provides a designer's view on the universe.