The Write Focus

A funny thing happened on the way through entertainment this past weekend. I read Mary Stewart’s The Stormy Petrel. That’s not the funny thing.

Mary Stewart is my all-time favorite author. Wonderful character development, intriguing plots, lovely lyrical writing. She’s a guaranteed satisfying entertainment. My favorite novel of hers is My Brother Michael with The Moonspinners as a close second. (If you’ve seen the film, you haven’t...

When we’re browsing for information to help our own particular problems, we reach for the weighty titles, the ones that analyze to the nth degree and provide six or seven or thirteen examples. That kind of information scan would miss Judy Delton’s surprisingly valuable little guidebook The 29 Most Common Writing Mistakes and How to Avoid Them.

My own bookshelf, physical and electronic, is scant on information about Writer’s Block. ...

Writers read. In reading we are voracious consumers of anything that catches our eye.

We may also be hoarders, little dragons perched on a Keep-Forever Book Stack, surrounded by a myriad of smaller To-Be-Read stacks: This Stack First, This Stack Second, This Later, Helpful Stuff, I Wanna But Not Now, Maybe Later, I Dunno, and more. When we climb down from our hoard, we may stop and investigate those TBR stacks and do a little re-or...

Here we are with More Techniques from Erle Stanley Gardner. We’re tackling Gardner’s solutions for Writer’s Block.

Look to the Show Notes for information about the nonfiction book that is the source for this information.

TIMINGS

• 00:00 Welcome
• 00:40 Introduction
• 01:11 Unmentioned Unmentionable
• 01:54 Notes & Rules on Work
• 07:30 Plotting Machines
• 12:20 Gardner, THE Plotting Machine
• 15:16 Flying Buttresses against Writer’s Bloc...

• 66,000 words per week
• 140 titles published ~ novels and short stories.
  • Of that number, 100 of them sold over one million copies EACH.
• Translated into dozens of languages
• Used pen names because he was so prolific he had to disguise his output from editors

Who is this great Defeater of Writer’s Block? Let’s try one more clue.

• 271 TV episodes produced with his trademark character Perry Mason.

Have you gu...

We’re back with more advice from Pro Writers on Defeating Writer’s Block.

Let’s launch straight into business.

TIMINGS

• 00:00 Welcome
• 00:40 Introduction
• 00:48 Barbara Kingsolver
• 03:00 William Stafford (poet)
• 03:51 Scott McCormick
• 09:16 Philip Pullman
• 12:06 Charlaine Harris
• 14:34 Last Words / Closing

Total Run Time:: 16:40

Links

None. Quotations came from a variety of internet sites.

Thanks for listening to The Write Fo...

In the first part of this series, The Write Focus shared everything we had to say about Writer’s Block and how to defeat that three-headed monster.

When we research the topic, we find articles that claim 5 types or 10 types of Writer’s Block. Shudder. I don’t want even to contemplate 10 types. Yet I read the article—so you don’t have to. Guess what? Those 10 types are actually just an expansion of the 3 types we covered in our seri...

Writer’s Block looms like a sharp-clawed monster over every writer. A daily discipline—No Day without Lines—is extremely helpful, no matter how many you schedule for a particular day.

Nulla Dies Sine Linea is our mantra, right?

We can overcome a simple refusal to write by maintaining discipline and side projects and our escapes when we’re overwhelmed.

We can defeat Procrastination by overcoming the Twin Fears of Failure and of Judg...

Defeating Writer’s Block is easy to say, not so easy to do. We writers have to discover the problem we’re having with those pesky little words.

1st, we have to find them—and they do like to hide.

2nd, we have to write them down—whether in a notebook or straight to the keyboard. That’s a whole problem on its own. We can’t count the Block as a simple disruption, a wholesale explosion of our writing time.

It’s the Desire and the Initi...

Hey! Our claim is that Writer’s Block doesn’t exist? And you say, “I don’t believe it. I’m blocked. I’m suffering with Writer’s Block.”

Believe it or not, the truth is that Writer’s Block does NOT exist. Not. No way. Nope. We can write, but something keeps us from writing what we very well need to write.

At the end of our last episode, the introduction to this series on Defeating Writer’s Block, we classified 3 types. Knowing the t...

 Can you name a phrase that every writer fears? Try “Writer’s Block”.

We writers all have a deep-seated fear when we hear those two words side by side. Writer’s Block—those should be forbidden to speak together.

We have quite a number of pro writers who claim there’s no such things as Writer’s Block, and I’m one of them—but I will admit that I find myself refusing to write or avoiding my desk or just stuck on a story. Distractions ...

In the last episode, we began our look at a process method I call Plot 7. This week we finish the Plot 7 and our series on Discovering Plot. Coming up for February are four episodes on Overcoming Writer’s Block.

The Plot 7 is wonderful for sparking ideas for a new novel or novella. It’s too deep for a short story.

In the Plot 7 are the 7 most important scenes for the novel. We covered the Beginning, the Very End, and the Roughest M...

We’re winding up the Discovering Plot series with the Plot 7, a quick way to launch into story and to reach that story’s heart … and discover if it will fly—or crash like my feeble attempts at paper airplanes.

Plot 7 comes from the writer’s guidebook Think like a Pro, by M.A. Lee, designed to turn a hobby writer into a pro writer with the necessary mindset changes.

We’ll break the Plot 7 into 2 episodes.

TIMINGS

• 00:00 Welcome
• 0...

Welcome to our 200th episode of The Write Focus.

Yippee! We made it farther than I ever anticipated, 200 episodes and into Season 5, and we still have more episodes ahead. AND it’s all thanks to our listeners, who motivate us to keep offering more and more.

Over our 200 episodes, we’ve covered craft with plot and characters, process with sentence craft, productivity with challenges, and tools for writers.

This episode is an update ...

It’s the last official episode for Discovering Plot and the final 2 stages of the greatest plot structure for writers, the Archetypal Story Pattern.

While many of us have our favorite plot structure, all the ones that I’ve analyzed and taught cannot match the adaptability and flexibility of the ASP. Hopefully, with the variety of discussed plots, many writers will see the value of the ASP.

In this episode, we have Stages 11 and 12.

Welcome to the 5th season of The Write Focus, the podcast for writers of all types, newbies and veterans and everyone in-between. Our FOCUS is productivity, process, craft, and tools.

We are justifiably proud of achieving this 5th season. We started in 2020, that dreadful year, so good things do come from bad ones. Apart from our yearly hiatus in the hectic Decembers, we haven’t missed a weekly episode. This week, we officially ope...