Book Review: The Kick-Ass Writer

The Kick-Ass Writer

By: Chuck Wendig

4 STARS

The journey to become a successful writer is long, fraught with peril, and filled with difficult questions: How do I write dialogue? How do I build suspense? What should I know about query letters? How do I start?

The best way to answer these questions is to ditch your uncertainty and transform yourself into a KICK-ASS writer. This new book from award-winning author Chuck Wendig combines the best of his eye-opening writing instruction--previously available in e-book form only--with all-new insights into writing and publishing. It's an explosive broadside of gritty advice that will destroy your fears, clear the path, and help you find your voice, your story, and your audience.

You'll explore the fundamentals of writing, learn how to obtain publication, and master the skills you need to build an army of dedicated fans. No task is too large or small for the kick-ass writer. With his trademark acerbic wit and gut-punch humor, Wendig will explain:

How to build suspense, craft characters, and defeat writer's block.
How to write a scene, an ending--even a sentence.
Blogging techniques, social media skills, and crowdfunding.
How to write a query letter, talk to agents, and deal with failure--and success!

Whether you're just starting out or you need one more push to get you over the top, two things are for certain--a kick-ass writer never quits, and chuck Wendig won't let you down in this high-octane guide to becoming the writer you were born to be.

This was the first book I read this year and I'm glad I did. I love Wendig's style when giving advice. He's not one to sugar coat things and I think that's an important quality when talking about writing.

This book is broken up into three parts and every chapter has 25 pieces of advice about a topic. And those topics range from being a writer, to tips about creating characters, to getting published. It's pretty thorough.

The only reason that I didn't give this book 5 stars is because it's a little bit repetitive (although some things do bear repeating) and there's a whole section about writing horror that I kind of skipped. But it makes sense, he writes horror, I don't.

So, if you don't mind a realistic, rough around the edges, approach to talking about writing, I highly suggest you pick this book up.   

What writing book have you read recently? Tell me in the comments!

Have a great day and Go Write Something!

The First Draft: It Sucks

Now that's we've talked about some of the pre-writing basics, discovering why and what you write, figuring out where and when you'll write, as well as setting achievable writing goals. We can now move on to the actual writing.

Everything starts with the first draft. I don't care if you outline or not. If you meticulously plan every moment of your story/essay/whatever you write or if you just pull crap out of your head and throw it on the page. No matter what you do, your first draft is going to be god awful. A poopy diaper is going to look better than your first draft. This is a proven fact. I have seen many poopy diapers and many first drafts. The diapers caused me less pain.

As a writer, you need to accept this. Embrace the fact that the first draft is going to be terrible. Seriously, give it a hug.* You'll feel better. The sooner you acknowledge that your initial word vomit is going to be that, word vomit, the sooner you can move on to finishing the first draft and then going back and fixing it.

Because the second most important thing about first drafts is that you have to finish it. No matter how horrid it is and how much you hate it by the end, you have to finish that thing. If you never finish that first draft you'll never know how awesome it could be. And you'll also never learn.

You'll learn more about writing by completing the first draft than you can learn in every creative writing class on the planet. You can read every text book, study every grammar manual and you'll still learn the most by writing and finishing what you write.

So go forth dear Reader/Writer and pour your soul on to the page. Crack open your head and just plop your brain down on your project like an egg onto a skillet. Because until you write those first words down, you can't really call your self a Writer, now can you?

Thanks for reading! Please comment and/or share this if you liked it. And Happy New Year, may it bring you awesome plot bunnies and lots of writing motivation.

Part One: Writing Mojo

Part Two: Your Routine

Part Three: Goals
Part Five: Writer's Block

*I feel I should note that I got Chuck Wendig's new book The Kick Ass Writer, for Christmas, so if my writing style seems to emulate his today, I'm sorry. BTW, it's an awesome book and he's smarter than me, so you should read it too.

What's Up Wednesday? Not Much

Well I'm late, but that's okay. I honestly don't have much to say. I've been very productive this week, but I'm still working with the note cards. I'm almost done outlining the 70,000+ words I have so far and I've come up with 12 new scenes to be inserted into those 70K words. I'm rough guesstimating (that's an actual word?) that those 12 scenes will get me about 16,000 more words. This story is definitely going to be 90K, if not 100K, words long. *passes out* That's a lot of words.

So, yeah, I'm still plugging away. I'd really like to have this whole story plotted out and begin working on the real first draft by the end of July. It would be kind of nice to have the first draft finished and resting by November so that I can do NaNoWriMo this year. But we'll see. My writing plans and deadlines almost never work out. :)

And of course, before I go, I'll share some more Chuck Wendig gold. If you're not following his blog already then you need to fix that. 50 RANTYPANTS SNIDBITS OF RANDOM WRITING & STORYTELLING ADVICE  My favorites are #1, 3, 6, 10, 14, 16, 34, 45, 49 & 50. So, like, all of them. :D

WUW: Organic Outlining

Outlining my story onto note cards is going really well. I'm coming up with new scenes, filling in plot holes, finding and fixing little inconsistencies, and diving deeper into my characters. I'm anxious to get back to actual writing and have a complete first draft.

While doing all of this I think I've come up with a term for my writing process. I'm an Organic Outliner. I come up with a story idea and then I'll start writing it. That goes for a while until I realize how shallow and weak the story is. Then I'll stop and do some world building and outlining until I'm ready to go back to writing. This spurt of writing goes longer, but it too will eventually grind to a halt and that's when I get out the note cards and break the story down scene by scene. Once I have all the scenes plotted out, I rearrange them and modify them and make sure everything flows well. Then I can get down to actually writing a first draft.

So, see, there's a lot of outlining and planning involved, but I can't really get to know my story, it's characters and the world until I'm writing it. So many awesome things have come up while writing that I could have never thought of while outlining. Most of it is character stuff. I don't get to know them until I have to write as them.

And once that first draft is complete, with Once Upon A Time..... Awesomely Cool Stuff Happens... The End, then I can start the editing process. But we'll save that for another post, *coughbecauseI'mnotreallysurehowthatworksyetcough*.

In the mean time, I have some stuff to share. :)

• Chuck Wendig is kind of a genius and always has awesome writing advice. So here's Ten Stupid Writer Tricks (That Might Actually Work) 
• This one is for my fellow writing moms. How Do You Find Time To Write? 6 Tips for Moms (And Everyone Else, Too)
• And even though I talked a lot about outlining today, I know there's a lot of people who just can't do it. So this one is for you, On Writing Despair (Juicebox Mix)

People like using parentheses in their titles don't they?

Anyway, where do you fall in the outlining vs. pantsing debate? Leave a comment down below and let's have a conversation!

Happy Wednesday!

Snoopy is wise, listen to him.

What's Up Wednesday #1

So I've seen a few other writing blogs that do a Writing Wednesday or a WIP Wednesday and I wanted to do something similar but different. So here you have the first What's Up Wednesday!

And what will I talk about in What's Up Wednesday. What's up with my writing of course. This is a writing blog after all. ;)

Well, I've given my current WIP a new working title of Moon Dragons. Sounds a lot better than Dragons in Space space space space! And I'm currently up to over 30,000 words out of about 70,000. I really have no clue how long this is going to be but I'm pretty sure I'm not quiet half way through the story yet.

I was hoping to get a lot more words on the page the last few days but I got caught up in the beginning stages of developing two of my main alien characters. At first I wanted to make them "simply evil" but after reading that character book I reviewed last post I realized that would not be a good idea. So I had to come up with some basic motivations and reasons for why they do what they will eventually do, which I'm not 100% sure of yet. :D

And now for a few lines from Moon Dragons:

Sonya looked over her shoulder at her teacher Master Abdul... “I don’t think I can do it, sir.”

“And why not?”

She swallowed the lump in her throat. “I’m afraid of heights, sir,” she whispered.

Master Abdul let out a belly laugh. “You want to fly in space but you’re afraid of heights?”

Sonya shrugged. “There’s no gravity in space, sir. No falling down.”

Also, some links about writing awesomeness I'd like to share.

First, Chuck Wendig dispenses awesome writing advice. The first I'd like to share is this: 

HOW TO PUSH PAST THE BULLSHIT AND WRITE THAT GODDAMN NOVEL: A VERY SIMPLE NO-FUCKERY WRITING PLAN TO GET SHIT DONE (his title, not mine)

And this: 

25 WAYS TO BE A HAPPY WRITER (OR, AT LEAST, HAPPIER)

He's a smart man and he writes good books. I just reviewed one this week in fact. :)

And that is all for now friends! Have a Happy Writer's Wednesday!