What's My Motivation?

I think my own personal motivation for writing isn't 100% clear. I sometimes feel like I don't know who I am or where I'm going, and this quickly translated into my characters. While this might have been cathartic for me, it left my characters as spectators in their own lives, unable to understand themselves and dragged along by forces beyond their control.

This Blog May be Edited for Content

I was going to write a post about character motivation today, but after a conversation with Tracy Baines, I realised that yesterday's post raised an intriguing question - is the way that Back from the Dead is now, the way it was always meant to be? Has being edited professionally finally released my inner muse and banished the shackles of convention that were holding me prisoner? Or has it watered down my artistic vision to feed a cookie-cutter industry that values quantity over quality?

The Rewritepercentagealiser

Ok, so it looks like I wasn't the only one who was surprised that I'd managed to rewrite 80% of the book between the first and second drafts. But how did it happen? Was it the right decision? Will the agent still like a book that's so fundamentally different from the one she read originally?

Revise. Rinse. Repeat.

With the second draft of Back from the Dead in the agent's inbox, I think it's time to catch my breath and share my experience of the revision process so far.

Bottling It

(or Does Self-doubt Make you a Better Writer or Just a More Miserable One?)

Before I start this post, I am aware that there are some of you who don't suffer from self-doubt. Impossible as this may seem, some view writing as a constant life-affirming joy.

How Can I Become a Proper Children's Writer?

I like to keep up with the latest trends in writing, and it seems to me that I am letting the side down in a number of areas. As a form of therapy, I'm posting my failings and perhaps you can offer your wisdom about how I can become one of these proper writers that I hear so much about.

1. I can only write one book at a time
   

Blood, Glorious Blood

I was writing another unspeakable scene in my zombie opus when it suddenly occurred to me what a gift blood is to writers. Everything about it is so dramatic - the colour, the taste, the sound it makes hissing from a severed artery - and active - it spurts, it drips, it gushes. We can easily imagine a character's life ebbing away as the blood leaves their body and forms a shallow pool on the coconut matting.

Would things be so exciting if our bodies were driven by clockwork and bulked out with sawdust, or if we were robots who could be incapacitated with a single bullet to the wrong circuit board? Blood provides a wonderful shorthand for the rushing vibrancy of life and the fragility of the human condition.