It's My Story & I'm Stickin' With It - Holly Schindler

 

In the interest of pushing beyond limits, I recently took the plunge on something I've been thinking about for some times now. I launched a Substack newsletter:

 

The whole idea was born from my mystification that here, thirteen years after my first book released, the actual process of producing a book is no easier than it ever was. Traditional writing advice is basically just to white knuckle it. Persist! Keep going! You’ll get through it!

None of us got into writing because it was torture, though. It was a joy. It fueled something inside us. Storytelling fit. To be sure, anytime you take a love or hobby and spin it into a career, the grind starts wearing away at you. That’s just the nature of the beast.

I love writing no matter what. I love it every bit as much as I did when I was that little girl with her crayons and her ribbon. But I do wonder, at this point in my career:

What if it doesn’t have to be so hard?

Really. What if the elusive, messy process of getting that first draft down could be streamlined? What if writers could equip themselves with a step-by-step guide for revision, so that they wouldn’t have to dread the editorial letter? What if marketing didn’t have to be torture?

None of those above questions will be answered in the same way by every writer. That’s why everyone will tell you there are no hard and fast rules in writing. But too often, that leads writers to think they can find no rules for themselves. And maybe that only leads to grappling around in the dark every single time the writer sits down to write the next novel.

If a writer could stop fighting the process, wouldn’t that open up the writer to more creative play?

Come along on the journey with me--this new adventure, this jumping off point:

~ Holly Schindler is the award-winning author of The Junction of Sunshine and Lucky.