If you note, I dropped “Weekly” from this email’s subject line. It’s clear as of late, my prompts are not necessarily weekly. But, I’m trying my best, and I hope you all forgive me for my less-than-weekly nudge to you to pay attention to your writing life. Maybe if they aren’t weekly they’ll have more influence? I don’t know. We’ll see. I have no reason for my absence save that I’m trying very hard to push through that wall known as traditional publishing. They haven’t killed my spirit yet, so there’s that victory. Couple that with #LifewithAutism and sometimes my Wednesday mornings go awry and sending this becomes forgotten or low priority. For that I ask that you grant me understanding and forgiveness. As I hinted at earlier, perhaps this way some absence will make the heart grow fonder for my correspondences in regards to your writing/creative life.

At any rate, this process I’m in of getting an agent and maybe selling my book renewed for me the interest in killing your darlings. What’s that? It’s where you drag your beloved characters ala George R.R. Martin through awful, awful things, including killing them off. None of us get out of this life alive — and neither, often, should our characters. I’m not saying that they must die, however (fear not, Vicky). But, sometimes a death or something near death must occur so that your character has the motivation or the space to do the thing that forces them out of their comfort zone and into the battle they are suppose to fight. Case in point, Harry Potter could never ever finish his fight against He Who Must Not Be Named, if Dumbledore had remained alive. So even though the readers love the kooky ol’ wizard and headmaster of Hogwarts, he had to go.

Therefore today’s prompt is to examine your darlings — meaning your story and its characters. Who is being blocked by who to fulfill their destiny in the story? Are you really pushing your character out of their comfort zone to move the story forward? Or, is he/she wallowing in mediocrity? Clearly the latter is a death sentence for any novel. Maybe you have a good arc, but it’s just not compelling enough because you were afraid for your protagonist to have a broken heart, or break a leg, or gasp, have a loved one die. Harry lost Dumbledore and he was a real jerk during his grieving process, but it allowed him to see the path to defeat Voldemort (that along with massive support and cheerleading from Herimone and Ron — especially Herimone). Examine your stories, really look at what difficulties you’re presenting to your characters. Does it really work. Think like a reader not a writer while you’re doing it. Make a list of what’s good, what’s bad in your story as you see it from the outside looking in. Then go fix it.

That should keep you busy until I recognize it’s Wednesday again and I’m not just lost in the spreadsheet of sent queries and received rejections.

And now your moment of Writing Zen:  “When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest.”

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