path of the storyteller / blog

Remember the famous baby shampoo ad? No more tears!

That this sudsy slogan is what today’s topic makes me think of is reveals a lot. Getting feedback on our writing can be overwhelming in a way that feels disproportionate. Depending on what that feedback is, it can make our day or keep us up all night fretting.

Consider how often you’ve heard this bundle of advice: Because writers “lack objectivity,” you must share your work for feedback, be in a critique group, have beta readers pore over your final draft, and/or pay for a professional edit, and you must rewrite, rewrite, rewrite to "fix" all the flaws found by this ragtag army of critics. 

But when does all this input start to be counterproductive? What if the feedback is contradictory, or just feels off? How do we know which notes to take and which to ignore? 

To give feedback on other’s work is a delicate task; to receive feedback...

First, many thanks to the Path of the Storyteller Facebook group member who posed this question to me. It was a valuable nudge!

How did I learn to write? If you keep up with my livestreams and blog posts, you know I talk a great deal about the process of developing as an artist, the complexity of writing good fiction, how most writers start out “writing by ear” and then hit a wall of frustration when the writing that sounds good to them fails to gain traction with agents and editors. 

And there’s that other, equally painful source of frustration: When writers struggle to understand why best writing they feel capable of falls so palpably short of the books they admire most. 

They know what good writing sounds like, looks like, feels like—so why is it so hard to actually do?

Helping writers close that gap is what my commitment to teaching  and mentoring is all about. But how did I close that gap?...

I didn’t start writing fiction until I was in my forties. Did you know that?

I was a single mom with two kids at home. We homeschooled. In the middle of it all, my own mom was struck with a terminal illness and I became her chief caregiver until she passed away. 

I was lucky in that I didn’t also have a full-time job outside the home, but honestly, I could have used one. I taught part-time and wrote part-time and mothered part-time and was a caregiver part-time. There were more parts than time, that’s for sure! 

This is what my life was like while I wrote the early books in the Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place series. I share this with you not because I think it’s shocking or worthy of any special praise, but precisely because it’s so ordinary.

Writers are people. People have lives. Life is busy and full of challenges, and we all wear many, many hats. 

I often hear from writers (mostly women,...

Everyone’s heard of stage fright. Even Barbra Streisand has it! Imagine singing like Barbra and being afraid to perform! It’s not rational, but it’s real. 

Writers, too, can suffer from a bone-deep reluctance to share our work with the world. Call it “page fright.” And yet our readers are out there, waiting! What’s a nervous writer to do? 

In this livestream, I talk about why it’s so challenging to take that anxiety-ridden but necessary plunge and let others into our private writing worlds. 

My weekly livestream happens on Wednesdays at 1 PM Pacific. Come live and participate! Or catch the replays here on the blog. You can leave your questions and comments below.

To watch live and ask questions, subscribe to the YouTube channel here.  

And you can join the Path of the Storyteller Facebook group right here.

That first tender urge to write stirs from something quite personal and private. We have an idea, a feeling, a desire to capture in words something that moved or mystified us. 

And yet, to write well means charting a path from that most private beginning to a more reader-centric focus. How exposed do we need to be in our work? How thick of a skin must we cultivate to actually publish? What about privacy? Is there stuff we shouldn't write about? 

Writing advice is plentiful, and writing craft matters (a lot) — but your writing comes from YOU. How do we writers balance the deeply personal impulse to write with the external concerns of putting our work into the world? That’s the topic of this week’s livestream. 

My weekly livestream happens on Wednesdays at 1 PM Pacific. Come live and participate! Or catch the replays here on the blog.

To watch live and ask questions, you can join the Path of the...

I’m getting a wee jump on the holiday weekend. The first Wood family gathering in a long time has been planned in honor of my uncle’s 90th birthday. Flying on a plane will be involved! It’s all very exciting and heartfelt. 

So instead of my usual weekly livestream, I offer you a nice old-fashioned blog post. My inspiration? This quote, which I shared with the Storytellers’ Circle* membership last week. I think you’ll like it as much as they did:

“The best thing for disturbances of the spirit is to learn. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love and lose your moneys to a monster, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then—to learn. Learn why the world wags and what...

Think back twelve months and tell me the truth: Did your writing practice make the progress in 2020 that you promised yourself it would? 

The correct answer? I don’t care and neither should you. We can give 2020 a pass. You know what impact this year had on you. It was different for each of us, but if you’re reading this, YOU WON. You're here. You made it. I'm sending you a virtual hug. 

Now, a new year is upon us. There’s a whiff of hope in the air. And what we’ve been through does not alter the fact that many of us are all too familiar with the feeling of setting writing goals that do not fully come to pass.

Are we undisciplined? Unrealistic? Un-whatever your personal demon is?

The answer may be less mysterious, and less personal, than all that. In this livestream I serve up some goal-setting realness for 2021. No more writing goals that get buried in “life got...

[live broadcast starts at about 1:00. Feel free to zip to it by dragging the little dot on the video playbar!]

We writers tend to have a love-hate relationship with revision. We can fall down a deep rabbit hole of tinkering with our draft to the point where it turns into procrastination — or we judge ourselves harshly for writing drafts that are imperfect to begin with.

This livestream dives deep into why revision is so necessary and so challenging. Some takeaways: 

• where the secret wish to "get it right the first time" comes from
• why significant revision is inevitable
• how lucky we are to be writers, not sculptors!

In the follow-up questions, we talk further about the unrealistic beliefs that trip us up. Lots to ponder here! 

Remember: I’ll be broadcasting live on Facebook and YouTube every Wednesday at 1 PM Pacific. Tune in for frank talk about writing. If you can show up live, you can ask questions, too.  Links...

I’ve often said to my students: The biggest hurdle we writers face is not mastering the craft, or navigating the industry, or even finding the time and money to carry on writing.

Those are all real challenges, for sure. But they’re not the ones that threaten to scuttle the ship.

No. The biggest hurdle is managing our anxiety about the work. The inner monologue goes something like this:

Is it good? Am I good? Or at least, good enough? Will this be the book that gets finished? Will this be the one that lands me an agent? Will this be one that breaks out? Am I doing this writer thing right? Should I even be doing it at all?

The list goes on. Writers never seem to get writer’s block when it comes to penning words of self-doubt and second-guessing. 

Why so? It’s a big question. Here’s my short answer: The very nature of writing simulates consciousness. The voice in my head that feels like "me” finds expression in the words...