Baeli - Dont Fall in Love With Your Words: Fall in Love With Your Craft and Giving it Away: Spoilers as Both Noun & Accusation (An Essay)

Don't Fall In Love With Your Words

Fall In Love With Your Craft

Copyright 1994 Kelli Jae Baeli

AuthorKJB@gmail.com

Twitter @JaeBaeli

Smashwords Edition

ISBN:

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Created in the United States of America

Where we can freely create and share things.

Summary:

The competition to be a published writer is fierce. The dream of getting published has been overly-romanticized in the media so that many beginning writers think not only that writing is easy, but that they have a good chance of getting a contract from a major house. The odds are, realistically, one in a million-maybe worse than that. We hear about the success stories, not the ones who spend their lives toiling for that dream, to the exclusion of everything else, only to wind up poor, alone, lacking in social skills, and profoundly jaded that life has passed them by. There are so many unpublished writers who pursue this dream, and publishers and agents have had to crack down on the criteria to even LOOK at work sent. And it is very expensive for a writer to submit manuscripts, as I mentioned, and it's time consuming as we have to do this repeatedly, if we ever hope to get traditionally published. You have to pour lots of money into the endeavor over a period of many years, sometimes. And more often than not, this investment does not return.

Often, then, self-publishing is the only option if a writer wants to get her work out there. There's little point in spending your entire life hoping, while your words stay in a drawer. I believe as writers we are meant to honor that talent, and share it, otherwise, what's the point of having it?

Don't Fall In Love With Your Words

Fall In Love With Your Craft

Indie Author of 26 books shares her insights on being a writer and doing the writing

Table of Contents

Author's Note

Part 1: Doing the Writing

Writing Words of Wisdom

Characters: Names & Numbers

Voice: First & Third Person

Style Editing: Word Choice & Attributions

Passive Voice

Adjective Abuse

Weak Attributions

I Heard You the First Time

The Koontz Dangle

The DNA of DNA

iGoogle for Ideas & Reference

My Beginnings....Opening Passages of my Books.

Critique of Bad Fiction

Usage

Setting & Atmosphere

Plot

Audience

Conflict

Characterization

Exposition

Romancing the Drone

Romancing the Blog: Purple Prose: A Bum Rap

Purple Prose & Metaphoric Misdemeanors

He Said/She Said- Attributions in Fiction

Mapping your Settings

Organic Doesn't Mean Clueless

Writer's Block UNblocked.

Research

Check Your Notes Collection.

Get Out Of The Way

Try Mind-Mapping Or Clustering

A Think-Through Before Sleep

Merging Ideas

Introduce A New Character

Talk to Other Writers

PART 2: Being a Writer

Veteran Aspiring Author

Moratorium on "i"

"Which One is Your Favorite?"

Jae, Singular, in Need of Plural

Insomnia, Sex, Guilt & Mahjongg

Space Invader

Jenfu

I Wish I Could Write

Genre Horizons: RAOB

Diction Deja Vu

Word of the Day: Scurf

Occupational Hazard

Drive-By Writing

Used by the Muse

Sex is Appalling, But Killing is Okay

Brothers & Sisters & Writing & Dating

"Blogs Aren't Legit Writing"

Send Matches or UPS

Mystery Post-it

Random Act of Fiction

Books By Kelli Jae Baeli

Coming In 2011

About the Author

Blurbs from the novels of Kelli Jae Baeli

Resurrection Sticks

Baggage

Armchair Detective

Also Known As DNA

Achilles Forjan

As You Were

Plethora

Random Act of Blindness

Novelist

Rain gently pats the roof

Offering wet perception

And the ink blots spread

Into blurred patterns

This is reality.

Keys,

the new paintbrush of linguistic imagination

Attuned to the heartbeat of silence,

The ecstasy of zero.

A thousand screams, a thousand pains

-for a moment, the horizon

lines with warriors for someone else's war.

The past is just the past

Forever with me

washed with the blue tint of winter.

Author's Note

Let me begin with a quote from yours truly, "I love writing and sometimes the feeling is mutual."

I had always been a writer, since I first discovered the feeling it gave me. That act of creation. I can even recall the first time that concept got rooted in my brain... I was a child of tender age, and had heard the poem,

"Fuzzy wuzzy was a bear.

Fuzzy wuzzy had no hair...

Fuzzy wuzzy wasn't fuzzy, was he?"

Well my child mind could not recall the ending of that poem. So I wrote one of my own.

"Fuzzy wuzzy was a bear.

Fuzzy wuzzy had no hair...

So I gave him a wig to wear."

Now I realize as an adult, that my creation of that last line wasn't going to change the orbit of the earth, but what was more important was the feeling it gave me. I had completed a piece of writing, using my own creativity, and I had this surge of creative hubris. I recognized that writing meant that I could make things up. I could create anything I wanted to create, and because it was made up, it didn't have to be the truth-which is why, I suppose I have such an affinity for writing fiction. Fiction writing is like playing god. You can create a whole human being, and then smite him. And more to the point, I discovered along the way, the incredible cathartic value of that. I could fictionalize the people who crossed my path, and if they had wronged me, I could get my revenge on the page.

But writing books is not something you do just for fun. You do it because you are compelled to do it. You are drawn to it like it has some inexplicable gravitational field.

One of the inherent problems with being a writer is it's so solitary. It was way different than my days in rock bands...I had two bands for about 7 years-and when you're performing on stage, you get immediate feedback. You get applause. When I finish a chapter of a book I'm writing, I have learned that there will be no applause. It has to be good enough that you applaud yourself. And sometimes, honestly, it isn't enough. So you have to be careful not to sink too far into that morass of self-pity. I once got so frustrated with the degree of commitment it takes to keep writing, that in a petulant fugue, I said "I'm not writing anymore!! This is too hard! It's never appreciated!" I stopped writing.

A week later, I was more miserable than I had been before. I realized I could not be content or feel any degree of personal satisfaction, unless I was writing. I had no choice but to honor the thing I felt I was meant to be doing. Whether it paid all the bills or not. That's why I advise writers to always have another sufficient source of income. It's really difficult to make a living as a writer.

Then, as you immerse yourself in the writing vocation, you come up against another obstacle (one of many). You realize, that ultimately, you have to make another choice, it seems; though that choice is unfortunate, it is more often than not, true. You have to choose between writing what you love to write and in just the way you want to write it on the one hand, or writing what is commercially viable. Every now and then a writer will have both those things at once, but it's not as often as you might think. It seems to be more often, because we hear about the successful writers who have huge contracts with major publishing houses; we don't hear about the ones who don't get that contract, even though they might be worthy of one. I'll cover that in more detail later.