Get out of your head and stop comparing! These two things alone, will kill your momentum, and keep you from writing.
1. When the muse isn’t flowing, just start putting words on a page - it doesn’t matter if it’s nonsense, it’s the act of writing that’s important. Eventually, words will start to organize and flow. It doesn’t matter how much you write as long as you get something on the page, and be certain to congratulate yourself for the effort - no matter how small.
2. Stop comparing your work to other authors. By all means, admire their style, aspire to be able to create worlds the way they do, but know that you are a different person. Your writing will be different, because your experiences are different, and the world is waiting to see what you bring to the party, not how well you imitate someone else.
3. Never delete! There is always some kernel of good in everything you write, whether it’s a simple phrase, or the beginnings of an idea. If you trash entire paragraphs because it’s not shaping up the way you intended, you lose the small moments of greatness hidden within. I drop stuff into an “ugly†file, and then bring them out periodically to review. I’m always amazed at what small pieces of goodness I find hidden within, whether it’s a description, or the turn of a phrase, just things that weren’t working for what I was writing at the time, but fit perfectly in my current story.
I’ve always been a voracious reader, but I never expected to be a writer. I like to say it was a crime of opportunity (something that dropped into my lap unexpectedly), the opportunity to co-write a story with another new author. It started as a joke, with very little expectation of any type of success. Once I started, I realized that this was something that I wanted to do - something I could do; and so far, I haven’t looked back. I’ve now started writing solo works, and I continue to plot and plan to see how far this journey will take me.
