Bethany Henry: Writing & Wellness

High five, writers! It’s time to celebrate your work! Celebrating our accomplishments as writers isn’t just fun, it’s vital. Celebrating Accomplishments as Writers Writing can often be a solitary and critique filled journey. It doesn’t always lend itself to praise from others, we do crazy things like specifically  ask others to criticize our work , and it is largely self-motivated which means we’re responsible for our own positive feedback. This can be hard at times! It can be hard to remember why we’re working so hard when the rewards are so few. It can be tricky to stay motivated and remember why we started. We aren’t always good at praising ourselves. But it’s important! Cultivating an attitude of joy and grace and remembering the passion and excitement we have for our writing is needed so we don’t burn out and give up. And really, we deserve recognition (even if just from ourselves) for our work. High Five to You! Whether you wrote a 50,000 word draft of a novel this past month...

Story structure is vital if we’re going to write strong novels that grab our readers’ attention and never lets it go. The midpoint of our stories often tests this structure. (Check out the earlier posts in the Story Structure series for a review of the hook, inciting incident, and key event.) The Midpoint Often called the “murky middle,” it is common to lose track of our plot and be thoroughly sick of our own story by this point. However, if we have a strong story structure roadmap to follow it can be much easier to keep our stories moving and grooving through the midpoint in order to build toward our climax. The middle of our story can be broken into three parts: pre-midpoint, the midpoint, and post-midpoint. Or call them whatever you want, I’m just trying to break it down a bit! This can be helpful so we don’t get too bogged down looking at act 2 as a whole and it can keep our story moving dynamic wise. The 3 Parts of Act 2 Part 1: Pre-midpoint, AKA Fun and Games As we enter...

Dear Overwhelmed Writer, I see the coffee you’re drinking just to make it through your day, a day that’s filled with more chores, bills, never-ending-laundry, and work than you know what to do with. I see you give all you have just to make it to your too-late bedtime. And I know you feel tired and that you’re not sure tomorrow’s going to be any different. I know it’s a struggle to even call yourself a writer because you aren’t sure you deserve the title. You think because you’re not writing daily or hitting word counts you somehow don’t measure up. Guilt grips tight because you haven’t met any of your writing goals and you aren’t sure you even want to make new ones.  Breath. It’s okay. You’re not alone. There are good days, good weeks, good months, and  then there are months when progress is minuscule . When we feel like we’re not enough. Times when our revisions show us how much needs to be deleted instead of how awesome we are. Times when the effort just doesn’t se...