Nesting usually involves the spot where you find immediate (or first) success, but there will always be walls around you if you give in to staying in your first nest.
You'll grow until you fill up that specific nesting spot and no more, not unless you're willing to peek out of your particular niche and considering dashing into a spot you know nothing whatsoever about. Growth, change, learning, and challenge makes us better writers. Nesting holds us at whatever spot we've grown accustom.
Let's talk about getting out of our nests today and finding success in new writing areas.
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WHERE SHOULD YOU SPEND YOUR DOLLARS?
Last week we talked about classes, conferences, and critiques and self-publishing. Let’s get going with Part 2 with…agents and submission services and promotion services.
There are a lot of "services" that have grown up around writing. Some, like agents, are vital to working in specific areas of publishing. Some are simply good ways to extract the cash from your wallet. Let's look at agents.
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WHERE SHOULD YOUR MONEY GO?
Whenever you have a large group of people with a dream and a desperation to fulfill it, you're also going to see people quick to take advantage of that. Helpful writers (many of whom began their careers a while ago) say helpful things like, "The only place you should sign on a check is on the back" and "money flows toward the writer." And those truisms can be useful as long as you use them to make you pause and consider, rather than letting them slam the brakes on your choices.
Let's consider what kinds of things might a writer spend money on? Time to dig into the good, the bad, and the ugly.
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YOUR FIRST STEP TO FANTASTIC WRITING
"Wait ... what do you mean I'm not done?!"
It's a common refrain among new writers as they realize their first draft is only the beginning. In truth, revision is the step that takes your writing from so-so to sold.
So, revision is a necessary part of the writing process, but how do you go about doing it?
Different techniques work better for different stories and different authors. With the help of IFW contributor Rita Reali, we dig into a few examples.
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THE KEY TO REVISION
As most writers know, it's much easier to find the flaws in someone else's work than to find the flaws in your own. Part of the reason for this is distance. When you're reading work by another author, you aren't caught up in all the personal things that went into the creation of the story. You are actually judging the story based on the merits of what you read on the page. So to be able to revise your own work successfully, you need to get the same kind of distance that you have when you're reading someone else's work. That's not always easy, but there are some tips that can help.
START WRITING YOUR BOOK. Learn how to write publishable manuscripts with your own one-on-one mentor, an experienced professional author. Get started here!