Writing From the Trenches Surviving the Writing Journey even when you’re in the trenches.

With the New Year, many people are making resolutions to hopefully make improvements in their lives.  But I don’t like to make resolutions, because they are so easily broken and dismissed.  I like to set goals instead.  When you set a goal, your wishes and desires seem to be more concrete.  So I thought perhaps we should talk about setting goals when it comes to our writing.

The New Year brings so many possibilities to us.  It is in essence a fresh start and a time to dust off our aspirations and try to make them become a reality.  Many writers set goals for their business at this time.  However, how many actually write down those goals and then create an action plan to make them happen?  Setting goals by identifying them and then prioritizing them will help you to achieve a greater balance in your writing career.  Some of the main reasons that people fail to achieve their goals are a fear of commitment, the fear of setting goals which are too high and not knowing how to make those goals become a reality.

Over the next few weeks, I hope to help you to overcome these things so that you can find the writing success you desire and deserve.  We will work together on clearly defining our goals so that we have a clear picture of where we are headed and what we want to achieve.

The first thing that you will need to do is to decide what your goals and dreams are for the year.  Write these things down.  Do not worry for now if those goals are realistic.  We will work of goal modification and turning those goals into reality later.  Just make a list of things you would like to accomplish this year in your writing.  Of course, you can apply this to the other areas in your life as well.  But for our purposes here, we will be focusing on writing goals.  Work on creating this list over the next day or two.  Whenever you think of something, write it down.  I will tell you what we are going to do with this list later, in my next post.  That’s all I want you to do for now.  Just dream and write down those goals.  Just do it…aren’t you and your career worth it?  I thought so…

Posted under Rules for Writing

This is a previously published piece from my original blog on blogger.

Ok, I’ll admit it. I’m a sign reader. I am one of those people that as they drive around they find all of the grammatical and spelling mistakes on the business signs around town. I’ve done it for years and I don’t see an end to it anytime in the near future. I don’t get paid for this, but I can’t seem to stop myself from mentally correcting the offending mistakes that I see all around me everyday. Perhaps it is the editor in me.

I think that what really drives me crazy is when I see spelling and grammatical mistakes in published pieces. It is one thing to roll your eyes at a sign when you drive by, and an entirely different matter to find it done by another professional in your line of work. It makes me cringe. It is like fingernails scraping across a chalkboard. These are people who should know better.

When it comes to bad grammar, I’ve seen it all. And I don’t mean that I’ve seen it all because I’m a mom to an almost teenager. These are mistakes made by people I consider colleagues in the writing world. The incorrect uses of then and than or accept and except. The misuse of lose and loose. (C’mon people, it’s lose weight, not loose weight.) The incorrect use of edition for addition or affect for effect and vice versa. I could go on and on and on. And lest you think these are all by the same person, think again. There are several guilty offenders, although there are some who have made multiple offenses.

Now, while I am not meaning to be the grammar police, I do think that it would behoove us as writers to be very sure of what we publish. When we make mistakes such as the ones I have listed, we lose credibility. Once that is lost, it is difficult to get it back.

I know I am not perfect, nor do I pretend to be…except with my son. But this is an issue that we need to perhaps take just a little more seriously as professional writers.

Oh, my favorite mistake this past week? C’mon…laugh with me…Wendsday for Wednesday. What are some of your favorites?

Posted under Rules for Writing