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    Improving Your Craft for the Professional Writer: Business for Breakfast, #18
    Improving Your Craft for the Professional Writer: Business for Breakfast, #18
    Improving Your Craft for the Professional Writer: Business for Breakfast, #18
    Ebook60 pages45 minutes

    Improving Your Craft for the Professional Writer: Business for Breakfast, #18

    By Leah Cutter

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    About this ebook

    Do you ever look at other writers who are further along the path and wonder how they got there? What they had to do to dig themselves out of the myths, get themselves unstuck, and moving forward?

     

    Writers aren't born with all that knowledge of craft and writing process. They figure it out and learn it the hard way.

     

    Fortunately, you don't have to start from scratch, though the journey is long and neverending.

     

    This book will give you clues: signposts to help you along your journey, on becoming a better writer, improving your craft, and getting out of your own way.

     

    You must still do the work. I cannot want it more than you do. But the sooner you start, the sooner you'll be on your way.

     

    The Business for Breakfast series contains bite-sized business advice. This is a 201 level book, with intermediate advice for the professional.

    Be sure to read all the books in this series!

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherKnotted Road Press
    Release dateApr 21, 2022
    ISBN9781644702680
    Improving Your Craft for the Professional Writer: Business for Breakfast, #18
    Author

    Leah Cutter

    Leah Cutter--a Crawford Award Finalist--writes page-turning fiction in exotic locations, such as New Orleans, ancient China, the Oregon coast, ancient Japan, rual Kentucky, Seattle, Minneapolis, Budapest, etc.  Find more fiction by Leah Cutter at www.KnottedRoadPress.com. Follow her blog at www.LeahCutter.com.

    Read more from Leah Cutter

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      Book preview

      Improving Your Craft for the Professional Writer - Leah Cutter

      Improving Your Craft for the Professional Writer

      IMPROVING YOUR CRAFT FOR THE PROFESSIONAL WRITER

      Business for Breakfast: Volume 18

      LEAH CUTTER

      Knotted Road Press

      Contents

      Introduction

      1. Becoming a Confident Gardener

      2. Writing a Clean First Draft

      3. Ignoring Critical Voice

      4. Learning to Listen to Creative Voice

      5. The Giggle Test (Writing is Hard!)

      6. Ideas are Cheap

      7. Gaining Speed

      8. Beyond Book One

      9. No Secret Handshake

      Afterword

      About the Author

      Also by Leah Cutter

      About Knotted Road Press

      For Sonia, who inspired me to write this book

      Introduction

      I talk writing with friends frequently. I mean, what else do you do when you get a bunch of writers together but talk craft and business? Anyway—some of them always seem to be amazed at how far along the path in terms of writing craft and process that I seem to be.

      However, I want to assure y’all that I didn’t spring forth from the brow of Zeus fully formed. I started off in the 1990s (and beyond) completely ensconced in the myths that writing is rewriting, that of course it took a full year to write a novel, and that by insisting that I get paid for my work was somehow cheapening it.

      I sold my first novel back in 2001, when the only real path to publication was through traditional publishers. I worked with a New York publisher for my first three novels.

      Then, my life imploded. I stopped writing. I still did art—I painted watercolors and I quilted. But there weren’t many words.

      Finally, after two years, I decided to get back to the writing. An idea grabbed me and just wouldn’t let go. So I took three years (because it took at least a year to write a novel, don’t you know) to write an unsellable trilogy.

      By the time I finished it, the world had changed. Indie publishing had started and was becoming a thing.

      I wouldn’t say that I jumped in with both feet, because it took me a while to warm to the notion.

      However, before I did that, I was lucky enough to shed a lot of the traditional publishing myths so I could move forward. This journey started when I ran into Dean Wesley Smith’s series on Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing.

      I was pointed to his site by other writers on a professional writer forum. They were making fun of what Dean was saying.

      Me, not feeling comfortable with what the other writers were saying, went to Dean’s site to see the original source material.

      I read through the myths that he was exposing. And I got really, really mad at myself for believing in them. (The chapter on agents was particularly damning. I mean, why exactly was I taking legal advice on a legal document from someone who didn’t practice law?)

      That was when I started to catch a clue that my methods in terms of writing and craft weren’t necessarily the way that all writers worked. That there was a different way, a different path, and that maybe that path would work for me.

      So this is that journey, working on improving my craft, from the starting point of being a traditionally published author to now being an independent publishing powerhouse.

      Though the steps of your individual journey will be different, I hope the signposts that I’m putting up will help you along the way.

      Are you ready?

      Let’s go.

      Leah Cutter

      Ravensdale, WA

      ONE

      Becoming a Confident Gardener

      So much of writing and craft is intertwined together. I am going to tease apart the elements that I can. However, I may send you back and forth between the chapters in this book, because the terminology and concepts are the same.

      Enjoying the preview?
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