If you're anything like me and you just dipped your toe into this pool we call being a writer, then you've been bombarded with terminology that sounds completely Greek to you. What does social platform mean? What's a genre? How do I know what genre my book is? What do people mean when they ask about your writing process? Amongst a million more that we'll cover at a later date.

Basically, your writing process is the process you go through to get from the beginning to the end of your story.  There's not really a wrong way to write. You have to use the process that works for you. You can try someone else's ideas but if it just adds more stress, it's just not worth it.

Which One Are You?

Each writer has their own process when it comes to getting their story out on paper. Some people call it ‘pantser, plotter or perculator’. A pantser writes by the seat of their pants. A plotter does some form of outline. A perculator simmers and stews on their story. But I’ve added a process of my own. I call it – Puker...I know, gross, right? I just kind of throw up scenes as they come to me, and string them all together later. I used to think this was a bizarre and unorganized way to write. But it’s just how I do things. I receive emails regularly from an indie author/blogger/editor by the name of Suzanne Lakin about grammar and writing. I highly recommend her site to all indie authors. The blog is called: Live. Write. Thrive. (An excellent resource for all thing 'writer'.) Anyway, in one of her posts she suggested starting your novel at the end. At first, I thought that was stranger than my puker technique, but then it made perfect sense. Start at the end and work backwards to figure out  the twisted ways you got there.

It doesn't matter which process you use, or combination of them, as long as you keep writing. The one piece of advice that other authors will tell you the most is...write, write, write.

Set Goals and Stick to Them

In my last article, I mentioned that my first book took me six years to write. True, I spent A  LOT of that time learning the craft, but part of the hold up was procrastination. "Oh, I'll write a little tomorrow"..."I've got too much to do today to write"...Sound familiar? It's easy to get stuck in the rut of "I'll do it tomorrow." If writing is truly a part of your dream for  yourself, like anything else, you have to commit  yourself to it. This is a lesson I wish I'd learned early on. Which is why I'm putting this article near the beginning of the series.

So ask yourself, 'how many words can I commit to write EVERYDAY?' Yes, everyday. (Oh, and that's another thing. In writing, quantity is measured in number of words rather than number of pages...and your word count can be found at the lower left corner of your MS Word document.) Or set an amount of time to write. Thirty minutes. An hour. Two hours. Whatever alotment of time you can spare. If you're just beginning, set the bar at an attainable height, otherwise, you'll get discouraged and quit. You may feel 500 words is a lot. So set your goal to 250. To get the final Dream Weaver book done, I set my goal at one thousand words per day. Some days I made and surpassed my goal, and others I came just shy of it. If I missed a day, I made up the word count for the previous day. Just be consistent. Make a deal with yourself, and when you attain your goal and that beautiful first draft is completed, you can pat yourself on the back and be proud of yourself.

Stretching Yourself

Each November, there’s a month long event called NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. By the end of the month, each participant, in order to win, must have completed fifty thousand words on their novel. It’s about 1667 words per day. But even without the NaNo event, writers should set a goal every day. It’s so easy to put a novel off for a day, or a week, or maybe you’ll get to it next month. And before you know it, you’ve bailed on the whole concept of writing that book.

Do You Believe In You?

So, here's another basic stepping stone in your journey to becoming a writer. Find out what kind of writer you are and what your personal writing process is. Maybe you'll do like I did and add a process to the list: Pantser, Plotter, Perculator, Puker and....Set goals and commit to attaining them. Believe in yourself and believe in the dream within you. And most of all...Dare to Dream!

Su