I’ve been writing for a good, eight years now but it has only been in the last three years that I feel like I’ve grown as a writer. In particular the last two years and in the last year it has really hit me just how much I want the world to see what I write. Not because I want lots of people to tell me how great it is and then I may have lots of money (be nice though) but because these stories are fighting their way out of me any way that they can. Who am I to fight them? Who am I to say “nope you ain’t coming out.” What I need to do is get more self discipline, plan what I am writing a little better and have an overall game plan for my writing over the next couple of years. I briefly mentioned a rough plan in another post but I need to fine tune it. I also need to learn how to plot out a story. I consider myself a discovery writer but I find myself so often hitting roadblocks when I just start writing with little or no ending in mind. Sometimes I can pull this off, mainly in short stories but in longer fiction I crash and burn.

With Project Delphi I have a very good outline, although it has had a number of changes since Owen’s original concept for the story but hopefully the story is better for it now. I also have a very good outline of what will be my NaNoWriMo project this year. It’s a story that me and Owen have been playing with for a couple of years but we’ve never really been able to get it right but now I have a fairly decent idea of where to take the story, although I’m not sure how and where to end it at the moment. It is going to be a lot of fun starting this one with almost a clean slate. The story is generally planned out in my head (except how to end it) and I’m looking forward to getting my teeth stuck into it.

Every time that I sit down to write I seem to learn something new about my own skills. I used to think I was awful with dialogue but a lot of Project Delphi’s dialogue has been almost effortless (this is where our beta readers tear the dialogue apart lol) and I think that I have learnt a lot about developing characters in the last couple of years and with Delphi in particular there are little (and major) character traits that I have altered and spoken to with Owen about. This may sound daft but I always knew characters had to have certain driving forces etc. but now I seem to be so much more aware of these forces.

When we exercise we make our bodies stronger, the more writing we do we exercise our minds and that makes our creativity so much stronger for it.