Thirty-two weeks after the first day of the second new year

Let’s go back to writing this week. As you know, Author is working on her next book for you, and other than that the only additional thing she’s been doing is write this blog, which is about writing, and post an Author Terminology tweet every week. But you’ve probably seen here that she has begun to write also another type of posts, under A Word by Claire, and that some of the Author Terminology tweets in her Twitter account have also been replaced to reflect that. Have, and will continue to.

Author is going to explain this, but not this week. This week she wants to talk about you. Here’s the thing: if your work has been organized from the start, and if you’ve taken care to learn on the way and recalibrate your work process as you learned, then by the time you’ve started your third or fourth, perhaps fifth book, you’ve found that you instinctively know how things need to be done. By now experience has kicked in, and it will play an increasing role with each book you write. Along the way you need to keep learning, and you need to keep improving—that’s true for your entire life as a writer—but the experience you’ve gained so far writing and publishing books allows you to do what you do more efficiently. Every step of the way, as you work on a story, review it, perfect it, and prepare it for publication, your mind knows what to do. It has embedded in it the blueprint created by your work on your previous books. You know where your weaknesses lie and automatically compensate for them. You know where your strengths are and take care to fine-tune them to become even better. Already in the initial stages of your work on your draft you recognize where there’s something you won’t want to keep at a later stage, a word or a description that don’t click, that won’t click no matter what you do, and you replace them. You see things earlier, you see more things at once, and you fix them better. You know what to do, you have that feel for your work and for how you do it, you within the work process.

This increased efficiency just might do to you something interesting: it will free some of your gray cells to do something new. To think up new ideas, not only for more stories but also for other things you might have interest in. That’s good, you need to evolve. Yes, you’re a writer, and writing is what you love to do. And if all you want to do is write books, do that. Enjoy that. But if on the way you find something else you want to talk to people about, don’t hesitate, use you words in that additional way. You can write about the genre you’re writing or about the niche your books fit in. About something specific in your books that you might want to turn attention to, elaborate about, say anything you want about. You can talk to your readers. You can join forums that speak about anything you’re interested in, anything at all. Provide your view on anything you want to in an article. Or start a blog. Think about it: our work tends to be isolated. We tend to be isolated when we write. It’s us and our words and the computer we write them on. By speaking, communicating, you open up your world to new ideas, new people, new opportunities. Life. And that’s a good thing. And who knows, maybe, just maybe, you’ll find yourself contributing to someone, something, to the life of others around you. You have the words, use them.

Author’s tip for this week: don’t stand in the way of your mind, don’t limit yourself. If there’s something you take interest in, go for it. Just take care not to run in too many directions at once, spreading yourself around too much so that you might end up doing nothing. Or doing nothing well. And remember, you’re an author first, so while you’re at it, at whatever ‘it’ is, get on with your next book and make sure it gets the attention it needs. As for those of you who are just starting, who have perhaps only written their first book or maybe not even that: keep going, you have a lot to look forward to. You will evolve, improve. Change. Who knows what you will discover about yourself on the way.