Design Your Writing Career in 2021

All writers make something out of nothing. 

Writers aren’t the only ones who do that, but it’s an exciting thought. Pretty daring stuff. And it’s well to protect your dreams and your writing time with a career plan.

“If you don’t design your own life plan, chances are you’ll fall into someone else’s plan. And guess what they’ve got planned for you? Not much.” –Jim Rohn

One way to design a writing career is to divide it into two areas -creating something new, and supporting that creativity. 

These require at least two sorts of thinking.

Creating something new in a writing career might include drafting chapters, outlining, goal setting, writing blogs, writing marketing plans, or developing any new skill or superpower, such as bookkeeping for your publications.

Support for creating something new can mean typing work up, revising your own and others’ work, reviewing the week’s progress, polishing, marketing, publishing, or bookkeeping for your publications.

Every profession claims lists like these. And it’s no wonder many professions come with assistants. But then, assistants might want to chat, and writers have to write. 

Here’s to another brilliant week in your writing career.

Cheers, Mel.

Mel Anastasiou is a founding editor at Pulp Literature Press.

Mel’s novel Stella Ryman and the Fairmount Manor Mysteries was long listed for the 2018 Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour. Thanks for that, lovely to hear.

Coming Soon from Pulp Literature Press, Mel Anastasiou’s The Extra, A Monument Studios Mystery. Frankie Ray… The Sleuth With Star Quality.

Mel Anastasiou writes The Fairmount Manor Mysteries series, starring Mrs Stella Ryman, The Hertfordshire Pub Mysteries series, starring Spencer Stevens, and The Monument Studios Mysteries, starring Frankie Ray and Connie Mooney.

Get Mel’s pocket-sized writing guide, The Writer’s Boon Companion: Thirty Days Towards an Extraordinary Volume, here.

How to Revive Writing Energy in 2021

“Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.”― Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky

Writing doldrums sometimes create unexpected good outcomes. It might be that you play with your writing schedule and find a block of time you didn’t know you had. And at the same time, ideas for new or half-forgotten projects might shake loose. 

As well, when energy for your work in progress flags, a different genre sometimes beckons. A literary author finds a gateway to speculative fiction. A mystery writer pens a thriller or a romantic comedy. An essayist writes a song, and maybe that’s the only song the essayist will ever write. Still, that song changes forever the way the writer approaches future essays.

One of our greatest statesmen has said that a change of work is the best rest. So it is.

-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four

Here’s to another brilliant week in your writing career.

Cheers, Mel.

Mel Anastasiou is a founding editor at Pulp Literature Press.

Mel’s novel Stella Ryman and the Fairmount Manor Mysteries was long listed for the 2018 Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour. Thanks for that, lovely to hear.

Coming Soon from Pulp Literature Press, Mel Anastasiou’s The Extra, A Monument Studios Mystery. Frankie Ray… The Sleuth With Star Quality.

Mel Anastasiou writes The Fairmount Manor Mysteries series, starring Mrs Stella Ryman, The Hertfordshire Pub Mysteries series, starring Spencer Stevens, and The Monument Studios Mysteries, starring Frankie Ray and Connie Mooney.

Get Mel’s pocket-sized writing guide, The Writer’s Boon Companion: Thirty Days Towards an Extraordinary Volume, here.

Time for Your Writing Career

Now and then, a moment arrives unexpectedly when nobody wants anything from you. You get a chance to draft, outline, or polish your work in progress.

You’d love more free moments like these, to help move your career forward.

To this end, you might ask:

1. What are you doing in your busy day that you don’t enjoy, and that doesn’t serve you or yours? What if you could quit doing it, either cold turkey or gradually? 
2. What area of your life is so crazy that it’s sucking your creative energy and decision-making ability? Is there any system, or habit, that you could set in place to make things less onerous for you? 

If you can find more time to write without sacrificing relationships or working yourself into poor health, you will very likely enjoy your career.

It is a universal truth that loving your career is a great indicator of success in your field. And it is another that there’s a time for everything, and if you can’t find any extra moments in your day at this stage of your life, then never fear, someday you will.

Here’s to another brilliant week in your writing career.

Cheers, Mel.

Mel Anastasiou is a founding editor at Pulp Literature Press.

Mel’s novel Stella Ryman and the Fairmount Manor Mysteries was long listed for the 2018 Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour. Thanks for that, lovely to hear.

Coming Soon from Pulp Literature Press, Mel Anastasiou’s The Extra, A Monument Studios Mystery. Frankie Ray… The Sleuth With Star Quality.

Mel Anastasiou writes The Fairmount Manor Mysteries series, starring Mrs Stella Ryman, The Hertfordshire Pub Mysteries series, starring Spencer Stevens, and The Monument Studios Mysteries, starring Frankie Ray and Connie Mooney.

Get Mel’s pocket-sized writing guide, The Writer’s Boon Companion: Thirty Days Towards an Extraordinary Volume, here.

Write With Virtuosos.

Working with great writers inspires growth in your career.

The trick is to set aside feelings of awe, and approach exceptional work with deep respect and a will to learn from the masters.

Read and ask questions. 

For example…

What is this author doing to shake up sentence structure?

This novelist wins awards, and almost all her work is dialogue, how does she do that?

How is this writer rocking short chapters?

How much figurative language is happening at this point in the narrative, and where is the author placing description?

Write with a Titan. 

How? Find a favourite writer. Write out a sentence, a paragraph, or more, and analyze the craft involved. The New York Times article This is Your Brain on Writing explains why spending time in a gifted writer’s mind this way is a worthwhile practice.

The best get even better. That’s a stimulating thought.

Here’s to another brilliant week in your writing career.

Cheers, Mel

Mel Anastasiou is a founding editor at Pulp Literature Press.

Mel’s novel Stella Ryman and the Fairmount Manor Mysteries was long listed for the 2018 Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour. Thanks for that, lovely to hear.

Coming Soon from Pulp Literature Press, Mel Anastasiou’s The Extra, A Monument Studios Mystery. Frankie Ray… The Sleuth With Star Quality.

Mel Anastasiou writes The Fairmount Manor Mysteries series, starring Mrs Stella Ryman, The Hertfordshire Pub Mysteries series, starring Spencer Stevens, and The Monument Studios Mysteries, starring Frankie Ray and Connie Mooney.

Get Mel’s pocket-sized writing guide, The Writer’s Boon Companion: Thirty Days Towards an Extraordinary Volume, here.

How to Create Suspense

If you can create suspense and sustain tension as you plot and draft, then you save a lot of time on revisions, as well. 

Here are tips gathered from successful submissions to our press, on creating and sustaining tension throughout your story.

• Keep the story goal front and centre, perhaps writing it out from time to time, so you remember what matters to your point of view character.
• Within the parameters of your genre, establish that anything can happen. For example, readers know a hopeful young character isn’t safe just because she’s young and hopeful.
• Try to think of more than two outcomes for choices your characters make.
• Remove tension killers. Capote said, “I believe more in the scissors than in the pen.” Check ends of scenes and chapters, make sure there’s no sentence that seems to finish things off. 
• Whether yours is 7-volume arc, a single novel, or a short piece, great stories have a rhythm that includes, as best-selling author Kathy Tyers puts it, moments of beauty. This beauty strengthens suspense by reminding us of what’s at stake.

Here’s to another brilliant week in your writing career.

Cheers, Mel

Mel Anastasiou is a founding editor at Pulp Literature Press.

Mel’s novel Stella Ryman and the Fairmount Manor Mysteries was long listed for the 2018 Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour. Thanks for that, so lovely to hear.

Coming Soon from Pulp Literature Press, Mel Anastasiou’s The Extra, A Monument Studios Mystery. Frankie Ray… The Sleuth With Star Quality.

Mel Anastasiou writes The Fairmount Manor Mysteries series, starring Mrs Stella Ryman, The Hertfordshire Pub Mysteries series, starring Spencer Stevens, and The Monument Studios Mysteries, starring Frankie Ray and Connie Mooney.

Get Mel’s pocket-sized writing guide, The Writer’s Boon Companion: Thirty Days Towards an Extraordinary Volume, here.

Outlining for Outstanding Productivity

If you feel your productivity is down, if you get stuck for ideas or direction, or if you’re bogged down with revisions, it might be worth trying different types of outlining for your Work-in-Progress.

I was lucky enough to hear prolific author Terry Brooks give a talk on his process:

 “Outline, outline, outline.” – Terry Brooks, author of The Sword of Shannara Trilogy.

One flexible outlining method is The Snowflake, for which there are several online guides, easily Google-able. As well, I recommend Blake Snyder’s beat sheet in Save the Cat, his guide to writing screenplays that works very well for longer prose works, and Karen Wiesner’s Story Evolution in First Draft in 30 Days.

It takes only a few minutes to noodle an outline now and then, in your busy week.

For those who are fans of the process, powerful planning can help you to advance, boldly and productively, into your drafting hours. 

Here’s to another brilliant week in your writing career.

Cheers, Mel.

Mel Anastasiou is a founding editor with Pulp Literature Press.

Mel’s novel Stella Ryman and the Fairmount Manor Mysteries was long listed for the 2018 Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour. Thanks for that, so lovely to hear.

Coming Soon from Pulp Literature Press, Mel Anastasiou’s The Extra, A Monument Studios Mystery. “Runaway schoolmarm Frankie Ray tracks a killer as Silver Screen Hollywood’s Sleuth with Star Quality.”

Mel Anastasiou writes The Fairmount Manor Mysteries series, starring Mrs Stella Ryman, The Hertfordshire Pub Mysteries series, starring Spencer Stevens, and The Monument Studios Mysteries, starring Frankie Ray and Connie Mooney.

If you enjoy reading Mel Anastasiou’s writing tips, get her pocket-sized writing guide, The Writer’s Boon Companion: Thirty Days Towards an Extraordinary Volume, here. Motivates, entertains, organizes, encourages, inspires.

Your Standout Elevator Pitch.

Lift your writing career to greater heights with a single superb sentence.

One of the finest ways to use 10 minutes you’ve carved out of your busy week, is to noodle at a great elevator pitch. That is, one sentence that encapsulates your story and intrigues the listener. You can’t figure this one out too soon. (For a gripping pitch, begin with your protagonist, and use active verbs for the fictional struggle ahead.)

 Even if you’re just beginning your story, and you don’t plan to pitch it to an agent or submit queries for another six months, your elevator pitch will be as useful to you in your growing career, as a quality pocket knife, on a wilderness camping trip.

For example,

• You’ll be ready with your elevator pitch when friends and colleagues ask you exactly what an agent, editor, or marketing expert will someday ask… “What’s your book about?”
• You will need your elevator pitch to put on your author page, and for your blurb if you decide to go with indie publishing.
• You will need an excellent elevator pitch for your query letter if you decide to go the traditional publishing route.

However, the person who most needs to hear your elevator pitch while you’re still drafting your story… is you. If you’ve got that gripping sentence in mind, you’ll stay on track, and that can save you precious time in planning and revisions.

Here’s to another brilliant week in your writing career.

Cheers, Mel

Mel Anastasiou is a founding editor with Pulp Literature Press.

Mel’s novel Stella Ryman and the Fairmount Manor Mysteries was long listed for the 2018 Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour. Thanks for that, so lovely to hear.

Coming Soon from Pulp Literature Press, Mel Anastastiou’s The Extra, A Monument Studios Mystery. Silver screen Hollywood is packed with hopeful stars like runaway schoolmarm Frankie Ray, but the plot twists when murder steals the scene.

Mel Anastasiou writes The Fairmount Manor Mysteries series, starring Mrs Stella Ryman, The Hertfordshire Pub Mysteries series, starring Spencer Stevens, and The Monument Studios Mysteries, starring Frankie Ray and Connie Mooney.

If you enjoy reading Mel Anastasiou’s writing tips, get her pocket-sized writing guide, The Writer’s Boon Companion: Thirty Days Towards an Extraordinary Volume, here. Motivates, entertains, organizes, encourages, inspires.

Developing Strong Protagonists.

The Key to Character Development in Narrative Structure.

As your story moves along, your protagonist will choose to do what she or he would never have done earlier in the book. And, you’ll need to make these choices believable.

Supporting characters and antagonists go through this process, too, but their real job is to force the protagonist to make tough, even impossible, choices.

Hard Choices Drive Your Story

1. Consider a number of things that are wrong in a protagonist’s inner and outer life at the start of the story
2. List them, and you’ll find you have a sort of template for character development

Robert McKee writes in Story that many writers confuse character building (creating an interesting character, including reveals) with character development (characters making tough choices they would not earlier have made.) 

“True character is revealed in the choices a human being makes under pressure – the greater the pressure, the deeper the revelation, the truer the choice to the character’s essential nature.”

― Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting

Here’s to another brilliant week in your writing career.

Cheers, Mel

Mel Anastasiou is a founding editor with Pulp Literature Press.

Coming Soon from Pulp Literature Press Mel Anastastiou’s The Extra, A Monument Studios Mystery. Silver screen Hollywood is packed with hopeful stars like runaway schoolmarm Frankie Ray, but the plot twists when murder steals the scene.

Stella Ryman and the Fairmount Manor Mysteries was long listed for the 2018 Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour. Thanks for that, so lovely to hear.

Mel Anastasiou writes The Fairmount Manor Mysteries series, starring Mrs Stella Ryman, The Hertfordshire Pub Mysteries series, starring Spencer Stevens, and The Extra: A Monument Studios Mystery, coming Autumn of 2020.

If you enjoy reading Mel Anastasiou’s writing tips, get her pocket-sized writing guide, The Writer’s Boon Companion: Thirty Days Towards an Extraordinary Volume, here. Motivates, entertains, organizes, encourages, inspires.

Your Writing Productivity.

How strange, that when you finally get several hours a week to draft, after never having enough, you emerge with less pages than you’d expected. After all, in an hour, a writer with a good plan or an energetic muse can draft a thousand words. 

We all wonder where the time goes. 

Of course, sometimes laundry or some other suddenly attractive chore sings its siren song. But more often still, drafting time is eaten up while you think about what to write. Which you need to do, as yours is a reflective profession. 

But, if you do some thinking ahead of time, in 5 to 10 minute slots over the course of your week, you can, for example… 

• Outline the next scene, or character arcs
• Write taglines and elevator pitches for the book as a whole
• List 10 ways the next turning point might occur
• Create in imagination a central image for the next scene

When your writing mind has a bit of scaffolding to start with, that peaceful drafting hour can really get you somewhere fantastic.

And if it doesn’t, be kind to yourself, as you would be to any writing colleague. Your time will come. 

Here’s to another brilliant week in your writing career.

Cheers, Mel

Mel Anastasiou is a founding editor with Pulp Literature Press.

Coming Soon from Pulp Literature Press Mel Anastastiou’s The Extra, A Monument Studios Mystery. Silver screen Hollywood is packed with hopeful stars like runaway schoolmarm Frankie Ray, but the plot twists when murder steals the scene.

Stella Ryman and the Fairmount Manor Mysteries was long listed for the 2018 Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour. Thanks for that, so lovely to hear.

Mel Anastasiou writes The Fairmount Manor Mysteries series, starring Mrs Stella Ryman, The Hertfordshire Pub Mysteries series, starring Spencer Stevens, and The Extra: A Monument Studios Mystery, coming Autumn of 2020.

If you enjoy reading Mel Anastasiou’s writing tips, get her pocket-sized writing guide, The Writer’s Boon Companion: Thirty Days Towards an Extraordinary Volume, here. Motivates, entertains, organizes, encourages, inspires.

Your Writing Talent.

You come to the writing table equipped with certain skills that come naturally to you. There may be some skills that you’ll need to sweat to develop. But that doesn’t matter, because all craft may be learned if the interest is there.

Interest – a love of the work and the learning that goes with it – is one of the most reliable indicators of a writer’s talent.

Determination and a deep interest in the work are talent indicators for every profession. We’ve all met great teachers, superb doctors, top notch lawyers, and successful authors. The best keep their perspective and their humour. They tend to love their work and take pleasure in learning more about it as a lifelong process.

 I hope you’ll have another brilliant week in your writing career.

Cheers, Mel

Mel Anastasiou is a founding editor with Pulp Literature Press.

Stella Ryman and the Fairmount Manor Mysteries was long listed for the 2018 Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour. Thanks for that, so lovely to hear.

Mel Anastasiou writes The Fairmount Manor Mysteries series, starring Mrs Stella Ryman, The Hertfordshire Pub Mysteries series, starring Spencer Stevens, and The Extra: A Monument Studios Mystery, coming Autumn of 2020.

If you enjoy reading Mel Anastasiou’s writing tips, get her pocket-sized writing guide, The Writer’s Boon Companion: Thirty Days Towards an Extraordinary Volume, here. Motivates, entertains, organizes, encourages, inspires.