WRITING The only thing you need to do to be a writer is write. It can be hard for most people to fit writing time in, though, especially if you’re a parent or have a busy day job. Most writing advice focuses on getting up early in the morning to write before your kids are awake or closing your office door to write during your lunch hour. Depending on what stage your manuscript is in, the work of writing can change. When you’re sketching out your ideas, writing might look like free association scribbling as you hash out plot ideas and characters. When you’re deep in the drafting mines, writing looks like cramming in as many words per day as you can manage. When you’re editing, writing looks more like, well, editing. But is there ever a time when a writer should stop writing? You Just Finished a Manuscript You did it! You climbed the mountain, completed the marathon, crossed the finish line—you wrote a book. But not just that. You wrote, rewrote, edited, rewrote and edited again, got notes from test readers, and edited one more time. Now you’ve made the call that it’s time to put your pencil down. What to do next? Take a break! Finishing a big project is an important time to take a break. Even top-tier athletes take some time to rest after the Olympics, and giving your mind time to recover will help your creativity in the long run. Take that writing time and use it to work on sending your book out to agents, or think in very vague terms about what you might like to work on next. For bonus points, take a few books off of that TBR pile. You’re at an Editing Crossroads The whole point of sending your work out to multiple readers is to get multiple perspectives. But sometimes those perspectives are so different that they’re leading you to write two different books. Maybe one reader thinks that if you fleshed out the romance a bit more, then you’d have a compelling romantasy story on your […]
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Aisha Abdel Gawad (inset) was named the inaugural Cornerstone Writer in Residence by the Wilton Library in August 2024.. Credit:
Close to the beginning of Katherine Packert Burke’s novel Still Life , its protagonist, Edith McAllister, a twenty-nine-year-old trans writer,
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