Two posts ago, I talked about how I evaluate my writing practice/journey/whatever you want to call it. I use a few different metrics to determine if I’m growing as a writer, satisfied with my growth trend, or feel like I’m floundering in some way or another. In a perfect world, I would always “pass” my…
Category: Craft
Lessons Learned from Dabbling in Other Genres: Creative Nonfiction
Elizabeth Upshur is a Black Southern storyteller and editor. She is the co-poetry editor at Okay Donkey Mag and is a contributing editor at The Seventh Wave. She is the cofounder of The Southern Esesu Endeavor, a virtual thirdspace for members of the Black Diaspora, and home of the annual 3 day SEE virtual retreat…
Self-Evaluation for Writers
If you want to progress, if you’re interested in seeing where your potential can take you, and if you want to build a successful writing practice, then sooner or later you’re going to need to perform some self-evaluation. No, I don’t mean giving yourself a pass or fail grade on the quality of your writing….
Lessons Learned from Dabbling in Other Genres: Translation
In my last blog post, I shared how playwriting has offered me a different perspective in my writing and helped mold my revision process. Today, I want to reach back even further into my writer’s toolkit to talk about what we can learn from translation as a practice and as an integral part of literary…
Just Be Curious
We live in an incredible, incredible world. There’s so much going on at all times: new things to learn, new things to try, new things to see. As a human being and especially as a writer, it’s pretty much your job to be interested. We write stories that portray facets of the world, whether through…
Be Kind to Yourself
I had a great lesson with one of my riding students today. I don’t know that she would call it great; she was having a rough ride with her horse. But she rode well and made several improvements, and I sent her home with some homework that I hope she follows through with. I told…
Lessons Learned from Dabbling in Other Genres with Elizabeth Upshur
Most of us have heard the saying, “A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.” What this quotation is getting at is that a person who has dabbled in several different fields hasn’t become renowned for their expertise in one particular skill, but instead understands…
Renew Your Enthusiasm
In a perfect world, we as writers would start new projects full of excitement, cruise through the writing process enjoying every second, and finish our first draft full of fire to begin the rewriting. But the world’s not perfect, and that’s almost never what the writing process looks like. In reality, we spend a fair…
Use Variety for Productivity
As a wise person once said, variety is the spice of life. If we woke up every day and did the same things, had the same experiences, and felt the same emotions, everything would get pretty dang boring, pretty dang quickly. When it comes to writing, the same principle holds true. You can’t do the…
My Revision Process
I’ve been using the same revision process for my books since I was around sixteen years old. It’s simple, straightforward, and always helps me feel in control of the project, no matter how long, short, simple, or complicated the book. I’ve used it successfully enough times that now, in the throes of revision, with no…