I’m a pretty high-strung guy. I get stressed out easy and if my little routines get out of whack, I think the world is coming to an end. I also worry about things that I probably don’t need to worry about. But that’s just me.

Regardless if you’re high-strung or not, chances are that if you’re a writer, then there are times when you get stressed out. Deadlines are approaching too fast. The creativity isn’t flowing like it used to. You’re laptop fell down the stairs and you lost that 1000-page novel you’ve been slaving over for the last five years (and you didn’t even back your work up).

Writers face a lot of stress, which can start to hurt your writing if you’re not careful. With this in mind, I thought I’d write a post about easy ways a writer can relax. None of these methods take a lot of time or cost money you don’t have. Actually, these relaxation methods can be done just about anywhere!

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If you’re a writer, you might be gripping the edge of your desk in anger, thinking I finally cracked. Or, maybe you’re checking the news to see if hell has finally froze over. After all, it’s not every day that a blog about literature and writing blatantly says that spelling is not important – right in the title!

You can take a deep breath and relax because I think good spelling is important in any piece of writing. However, if you’re spending a large amount of time looking up large words in the dictionary while writing a rough draft for that new short story, you’re probably not making good use of valuable writing time.

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Okay, maybe not stellar, but definitely better…

Like most writers, I’m not just limited to fiction. In fact, doing so would probably do more harm than good and I don’t see the logic behind such limitations. Thus, I often finding myself writing copious amounts of non-fiction in the form of these blog posts, various articles, varying online content, letters and so forth.

Writing non-fiction can be very challenging, especially since there must be a good amount of truthfulness to your words. I’m sure you remember the trouble James Frey got into when it was revealed his book A Million Little Pieces turned out to be more fiction than fact. More than that, however, you still must engage your readers when writing a non-fiction piece, especially if the facts are widely known.

Writing an article or even a blog post can be daunting. Getting it wrong can mean everything to shame, embarrassment, and in very extreme cases a lawsuit or two. So, I thought it might be good to post a few "pointers" I have picked up over the years that have helped me overcome many obstacles in writing non-fiction.

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Warning: Grammar content ahead!

I used to think the English language was clean and family-oriented.  But it turns out she has a dirty side. You probably figured this out from the title. Lurking beneath the clean, polished exterior of English is a sub-culture of dangling modifiers, dipthongs (not really a grammar problem, it just sounds funny), and even those stinky colons!

It’s rare that I forge into the world of grammar on this blog. Why? Because the internet is loaded with information about grammar and book stores/libraries are stacked to the ceiling with books about how to improve your grammar.

From time to time, however, I’ll notice a problem either in my own writing or other people’s writing and decide it’s worth mentioning here on Brad’s Reader. Dangling modifiers is one of those mistakes that is easy to make. The good news is that this pesky problem is also very easy to catch and fix – if you know what to look for.

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One thing I like about ringing in the New Year is the feeling that I’m somehow starting over. I know it sounds absurd, as the difference between December 31 and January 1 isn’t all that great – life still goes on. But psychologically, it’s a powerful idea to think that you can, in a sense, start over in your life and fix all those ugly mistakes you’ve made in the past.

Writing offers you that same opportunity. For example, you’re working on a piece of short fiction and you’re not at all happy with how things are turning out. It’s very easy to just start over with a clean page (or computer screen) and write the story like you imagined it.

Isn’t that like giving up?
Not exactly. If you give up, it means that you threw the unfinished story into a file with no plans of ever working on it again. I’m talking about starting over. Sometimes a story (or even a novel, poem, article, whatever the case might be) is beyond just a little editing and re-writing a few paragraphs. I’ve done this many times with my own short fiction and even my blog posts.

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Writing fiction is hard. Any serious writer would probably agree with that statement. Even when you’re writing a short story, you still have to consider setting, plot, character development, voice, tense, narrative structure…and the list goes on. And each of those items have many subsets – like a tree branching out. As many of you know, keeping track of all this can get really complicated really fast.

However, for today I’m just going to focus on a small part of character development: your character’s thoughts. Surely your character thinks, right? Often what a character says and does is only part of the story (no pun intended). For example, on the outside, a character can appear confident and strong because of what they say and the actions they take. But on the inside, they can be in complete turmoil.

Showing your character’s thoughts can be tricky. At the very best, your character’s "inner life" will be just as interesting as his/her "outer life". At the very worst, your character’s thoughts will be boring and turn the reader off to your entire story. Here’s a tip I learned about many years ago. It works well, just don’t overdo it:

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Last week I did a series of posts about being a more prolific writer. I didn’t plan on writing any more posts on the subject for now, but I came across another blog posting on Copyblogger today that really gets to the heart of why many writers aren’t more productive: fear!

The first example of fear given is the fear of failure. This rings most true with me. For example, when I’m writing a rough draft of a short story, I’m already starting to fear what others will think of it. Even when I’m just writing the first paragraph I start to catch myself thinking "This opening is no good, no one will like it."  I’ll then proceed to keep starting over until I’m satisfied with the first paragraph – all the while forgetting it’s just a rough draft.

Only when I make a conscious effort to block out that fear of failure and just write do I really become productive, and the quality of my writing starts to improve as well. When you finish the rough draft and start the editing process, then you can fret over each word (there are limits to editing too, of course, but that’s for another post).

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This post will wrap up my series on being a more prolific writer. I meant to have this up by Friday, or Saturday at the very latest, but other things distracted me. So I apologize for those of you waiting in suspense for the final post in the series.

Being a prolific writer means writing large quantities of material. To do that, one must be productive. To be productive as a writer, one must spend a consistent amount of time writing (notice I didn’t say "a large amount of time" or even "a lot of time", consistency is key). But as the week wore on, I began thinking "Does being a prolific writer really matter?" Then I narrowed it down to a matter of Quality Vs. Quantity.

During my last semester at college, one of my English professors told us that he would much rather have us write a killer essay that might be a page or so under the minimum requirement, then write a 30-page essay that is filled with fluff and constantly repeating the same points over and over again. This is a prime example of quality ruling over quantity. This isn’t to say, however, that you can’t start out with a 30-page essay and then cut it down to a focused and crisp piece of writing through editing and lots of hard work.

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This week is all about being a more productive writer! I started off with a brief post about a little known writing disorder called hypergraphia, then moved onto a more traditional post about being more prolific.

Today I’m going to continue with this theme, but in a slightly different way. Rather than talk about ways to make time for writing or writing more during each session (both great topics), I’m going to talk about avoiding burnout as a writer. Actually, there are two separate issues here: burnout and boredom. They’re very different, but still somewhat related in their causes and cures.

When writing becomes boring
Yes, even writers can get bored with writing. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad writer or that you’ve used up all your creativity. When you think about writing on a very literal level, it is just marking down seemingly random symbols that have a very arbitrary relationship with anything in real life. There’s an entire theory that goes along with this very idea called deconstruction, something I’ve taken entire classes on and still have a hard time understanding.

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Just about every writer wants to become more prolific. If many of us had the choice, we’d quite are day jobs and lock ourselves in our rooms for the better part of the day to devote to writing. Sadly, this remains just a fantasy. We have other responsibilities that include family, jobs, social engagements, errands to run and the many other mundane details that fill our lives.

Just your imagination
But being a prolific writer doesn’t have to be a dream, nor do you have to suffer from hypergraphia to write large quantities of material. Having an active imagination helps, although it’s not a direct requirement. How can this be? Isn’t writing fiction and poetry fully dependent on imagination? Well, yes and no. It takes imagination to come up with story ideas and work out character and plot details. There’s no doubt about that. But actual writing is more of a matter of discipline and perspiration (ie. hard work).

The process of writing is creative one. When you physically start to put words onto paper to create sentences, and those sentences then create paragraphs and so on, until you have a completed manuscript, you are performing a creative act. Creativity begets creativity. So even if you are not, or don’t think you are, creative enough to be a writer, you will start to become more creative as you write more. In other words, creativity can be gained and is not inherent in finite quantities in our brains.

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