Welcome to the page that houses the 2019 #GBWritesWithOthers guest blogging initiative! Established in April 2019, it was created to help boost writers at all levels in their careers through pure community effort.
Views and topics are those of their authors.
Years ago, I saw a video of Damian Kulash from the band, OK Go, talking about why he makes ceramics as a hobby (I don’t know where the video is now, I would share it if I did). In the video, he said that the constant pressure to make the next record, or the next big video, caused him to feel burnout. He turned to a hobby that he never planned on selling to relieve his stress.
I could relate, even if it took me time to take this advice to heart.
The dreaded writers block!
One of the hardest things a writer has to do is to fill a blank page. To start a story and make it so believable that the reader feels they become a part of the novel, is a writer’s greatest challenge. There are so many websites out there with good advice on how to defeat writer’s block, but Robin and I wanted to share our technique for successfully getting our creative ideas on paper.
The antagonist for your story can be almost anything—a person, a force of nature, an animal or a creature (as in Jaws), an idea, or the main character's inner self. It's anything that stands in opposition to your main character and blocks the way to the goal he or she is trying to achieve.
But today I'm going to talk about actual villains, personified.
The writing community is as creatively diverse as communities come. We’re discovery writers and outliners who make flowery prose or sentences so sharp n’ short they’re daggers. That’s not even getting into genre, voice or audience. But if I were tasked to find one thing that connects us all, I’d point to the uncanny way writers struggle with rejection when really, we should love it. You might have noticed that this article is posted on April first, but I assure you it’s no joke. If you’re a writer, indie or traditional, I think you should want rejection too.
Let me tell you why.
