This morning I came across a letter from a writers’ magazine to which I am subscribed. It suggested to take a look at ‘a special offer for readers’ from their trusted partner. As I have a habit to read every email I receive, I read it through. The announcement started with a massive energy injection in a form of a greeting:

“Fellow Writer,
What if I told you-”

The greeting was followed by a 1300-word-long biographical description of the author’s way to financial happiness, suggesting me to do the same and promising to tell me how to do it, for this price if I subscribe here, or for that price if I sign up there. In my case, the ‘energy injection’ stopped working after the first passage, so by the middle of the second passage I was beginning to regret loosing my precious morning time on reading something that I probably don’t need.

Still, my female curiosity took over, so I switched to speed-reading and finally, on the last passages of the email, I realized that the announcement was about membership in a writers club! Finally, the P.S. part of the email, which was two passages long itself, contained more practical information on the cost and free bonuses that the club membership offers.

All in all, I spent nearly quarter of an hour reading through and digesting the information; then I caught myself on thinking that, according to the length of the message, the membership might be so overwhelming that I would have no time left for doing my writer’s job in the end!

Again, I remembered the main requirement dictated to us by present time: brevity. Probably, I am giving it too much attention, but I really believe that today, brevity is a crucial requirement, even for such a specific business as self-promotion. If I were to write that announcement, I would cut it down to two hundred words, or even less. It is so easy today to simply provide links to pages with more detailed descriptions of any ideas or events!

In the end, self-promotion is all about attracting your audience by a few keywords. When you want to attract visitors to a pub, you only need to write a short sign: “BEER HERE”; it is the same with the virtual world we work in. Create a short slogan, give it a short description on your website, and discuss it in your blog, then, don’t forget to link all those pieces of information to each other! Doesn’t this look easier than writing miles of text trying to convince your audience? Not to mention that time is the most precious thing we have, so we should not steal each other’s time by writing lengthy announcements.

Please, tell me if you think this is not right. I will gladly discuss every opinion. In the end, we are all in the same boat: we need to know how to self-promote. Thank you!

Writer’s block is a condition, primarily associated with writing, in which an author loses the ability to produce new work, or experiences a creative slowdown. The condition ranges in difficulty from coming up with original ideas to being unable to produce a work for years. (Wikipedia)

It was a surprise for me to discover how much has been written about writer’s block in English. In my culture (Russian), the same thing is called творческий кризис (‘creative crisis’) or творческий затык (‘creative block’), and quite often, authors are shy to discuss this intimate state of mind, because it is associated, in the first place, with weakness of character. Russian authors usually suggest three steps of overcoming the block:

1. Push away your fear by allowing yourself to write bad. If you ignore others’ remarks about your bad writing and simply go forward, your writing will improve.
2. Your lack of ideas comes from the lack of knowledge. Learn more about the subject of your writing (the time which you are trying describe, the psychology of people, the place where you build your scenes, etc.) and creative ideas will pour into your head.
3. No procrastination! Do not allow yourself to think about doing it tomorrow. Sit down and write. Do it now.

These three simple rules really help. Why don’t you try them if you have a writer’s block?

“The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.” — Mark Twain

As a bonus, here is a link to a wonderful collection of quotes by worldly-known writers about overcoming writer’s block from Ken Miyamoto’s blog

“I don’t believe in writer’s block or waiting for inspiration. If you’re a writer, you sit down and write.” — Elmore Leonard

“One of the hardest things to do as a writer is to write someone who is not yourself.” – George R.R. Martin

Writing a whole book from the name of a particular person is always a challenging task, but choosing a protagonist of an opposite gender is a real test for every author. I am doing this for the first time now, so I have been trying to adjust to the funny sensation of having a whole new personality – a male one – living inside me. 

The first confirmations of his presence started coming when I was thinking over the plot, and since then my protagonist has been growing through me like a plant that breaks through layers of soil to see the sunlight. Wow, what an interesting sensation! My first thought was that I was going crazy, but then I found similar feedback in the blogs of many authors. I completely agree with this comment by Cristina Hartmann: “I string words together and hope for the best. All characters, regardless of gender, have a part of me in them. No matter how seemingly different a character may be from me, they all have something in common with me. I put a little of myself in every character I write. In that sense, gender is irrelevant.”

When I write a character, I cannot go only with his/her general gender characteristics: I must imagine and draw a whole colorful picture of the character’s personality traits. Besides this, I may give a character an atypical quality: a male character may love planting roses, while a female may entertain herself by solving math problems in evenings. These unusual qualities may look like pesky imperfections at first, but they often lead my character toward some significant and exciting events, and eventually, the character is supposed to win the readers’ sympathy.

It is important to pick out some easily recognizable, but still quite unique character traits, because this helps the reader find connection between their mental image of my character and someone who they already know from real life: such character can keep the reader excited and interested to read the story to the very end. Secondly, the character’s imperfection should be charming; it is always a good idea to turn it into the character’s power at some point in the story (a stutter that suddenly helps them meet their love, or disarming shyness, or clumsy forgetfulness – anything).

It seems to me that the most difficult thing is to do this with a novel protagonist, especially if this is a person of an opposite gender, and even more – if he/she is the narrator of the story.

Kristen Houghton in her article “Writing As Your Opposite Gender Can Be Successful” wrote: “There are some things to remember when writing in your opposite gender voice. Understand that your character is unique and not a metaphor for the entire gender. The same is true when writing about ethnicity, race, religion, or social classes. You’re not generalizing about entire segments of society, you’re being specific about one character. As far as characters go, it pays to remember that not all women think and behave alike, and neither do all men… If my goal as a writer is to help my readers expand their life experiences through my writing, then my success will depend mainly upon my talent and technique, not on my character’s gender.”

My biggest goal in writing is to draw my characters so realistically that every reader would recognize someone they know in them. I believe that the only right way to do this is to write my characters completely from my own experiences.

I found a similar opinion in an article by Avory Faucette: “…the difficulty comes when describing an experience I haven’t had, which is more about others’ perception of me than about my own gender… I feel comfortable writing characters with similar hopes and aspirations and experiences to my own, and that makes it difficult to write someone who is not college educated, who is much younger or older, who is an immigrant, who is a person of color, etc.”

Sheri Fresonke Harper: “I think people in general have a blend of both feminine and masculine traits and interests… Often we pick up voice, mannerisms, and other characteristics of character from our experience with the world so that when we write from the perspective of another sex, we’ve seen the world through the eyes of people of that gender that have said the same thing, thought the same thing, acted the same way.”

This is true. Men and women aren’t that different, but they face quite different social roles and as so, their behavior is not the same.” Even the very fact of choosing to write the protagonist of the opposite gender shows that the author has made a commitment to explore a new social role and is willing to share that new knowledge with others.

It was a surprise to see that some authors find the task quite entertaining. I loved this comment by Eli Havoc: “It’s really easy. I was told once, by a female friend “we think just like you do, except we’re constantly worrying about how we look.” And that piece of advice had worked very well for me. I wrote a book written in first-person, once, with a female main character, and have gotten several comments from readers that go something like “Jenna’s character is so real! How did you write a high-school girl so believably?”

With all this being said, everything still seems to boil down to the author’s talent and brilliance in writing technique. In fact, the protagonists’s gender becomes nothing more than a tool which the writer decides to use in order to deliver the main idea of the book. Well, let us proceed to writing then! In the end, if I am a good writer, I should feel comfortable writing characters of either gender. Do you agree with me?