Camp Pep: The Key to Your Creative Heart
Camp NaNo is underway! You have a story to tell, a job to do. This story has been growing inside you, itching to make its way into your manuscript. But the words seem to be getting stuck in your throat. Why?! Today, Camp NaNoWriMo participant AJ Dodge offers some advice on staying true to your heart and keeping your story alive:
As writers, we get caught up in the minutiae of writing in an intimate way, and this can cause us to forget that we love what we’re doing.
Some complain about spending hours on a sentence. Others gripe about the difficulty of getting started. And still others discourage themselves by editing while they write, judging every letter they type or scrawl.
There are few who would refute that getting started is the hardest part—I, however, am one of those few.
There are a couple of keys to ‘getting started’ that have benefited me over the last few years of my writing life, and the first is to banish expectation. This requires some confidence in the self, and mustering that confidence is one of the most important aspects of getting started.