Jason L Blair’s Operation: Awesome
I’ve been horribly slack this week about visiting blogs, I know! I keep hoping to have time to catch up, but between having a sick teenager at the beginning of the week and making a major breakthrough on my storyline for Wildings, I really haven’t taken much time at all to socialise. (Ahh, Twitter… I miss you!) I do hope to get back on track with my bloggy friends very soon!
Today will be a major writing day for me. I hope to participate in the Write Your Ass Off day I blogged about yesterday. Hot irons bear striking and all that. But, I thought I’d take a moment and share something I found in the blogosphere earlier this week that was wonderfully motivating.
Jason L Blair, writer and game designer, started something called “Operation Awesome”:
Earlier this year, I kicked off Operation: Awesome, a multi-phase attempt to reprogram myself as a writer. I had spent far too much of my life under this delusion that the traditional rules of writing and story didn’t apply to me. I thought I could just riff and my stories would work. Most often, I didn’t finish the stories. My initial excitement and momentum ran out before I got the car down the road. A lot of the time, before I’d even left the garage. I didn’t understand how stories worked. I didn’t do the pre-production on my ideas to see if they were actually stories or just ideas or hooks with nowhere to go. I would talk a lot about a story I had when I actually had no such thing. I had a premise, maybe, but most often I had a character or a starting point or a scene. And those are not stories.
After a lifetime of saying I was a writer, I decided to actually do the legwork and become a writer.
Jason L Blair, Writer & Game Designer » Blog Archive » Operation: Awesome.
This is just a short excerpt of a much longer 5 phase plan. In this post, Jason goes through his process and talks about how he was able to turn his writing attitudes about around. I thought this was a great piece because he wasn’t complaining about the system or the process, but putting his butt in a chair and his hands on the keyboard.
So, I just wanted to wish Jason all the best, and thank him for sharing his writing journey with us! Awesome, indeed!
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Great reminder for myself as an aspiring scribe. I think part of the process is realising that you can’t go around in circles writing bits and pieces without drafting a proper plotline and adding structure to the entire process. Nice post! Thanks for sharing Jason with us!
[ Follow me on Twitter: coco_dubai ]
This was a lovely story, thanks for that!
[ Follow me on Twitter: SanguMandanna ]
Wow, that is a great way to look at it. I’ll go over to the link to check it out.
Good luck with your writing today!
Oh I hope the sick teenager is getting better now? I hope so!
And good luck with Wildings!! It’s very exciting to hear that it’s progressing brilliantly! Yay!
thanks for the link Jason L Blair! Will check it out now.
Take care
x
Thank you for the support, India, and for spreading the message. I hope other authors who were in my position find something of value in my post.
[ Follow me on Twitter: jasonlblair ]
Operation Awesome sounds like a great idea. And the legwork and sacrifice to become a writer is, well, serious stuff.
Great post! Thanks for the inspiration today.
Thanks for sharing Jason’s plan.
[ Follow me on Twitter: alexjcavanaugh ]
I am touched by the amount of self-discovery in his statements, especially the bit “riff off my stories” and how he discerns between a hook, an idea, a premise, and the story (We want it to be so easy.)
Good resource, girl fren. Wuvs.
[ Follow me on Twitter: girlfrenkate ]
This is great. Thanks for the link.
Hope the teenager’s better.
Just popped over to Jason’s blog to read. Thanks so much for sharing this! Hope your writing day is a smashing success!