Category: Productivity

Just Start, Dammit!

Sure, planning is essential to creating your new life, business, screenplay, TV series. But when push comes to shove, actually doing it is the only way you’re gonna score! Don’t just stare at the blank page – fill the damn thing up with something!

blank pageby Jane Porter

For most of us, there is nothing more daunting than coming face-to-face with a blank page. Sure, a tabula rasa means you can take a project in any direction, but that boundlessness can quickly become overwhelming.

Sitting down to start a task that requires significant mental energy can often feel like the hardest part of the endeavor. But getting started is about understanding and overcoming the obstacles—be they mental, emotional, or physical—that hold us back from diving right in. read article

Shut Up, I’m Writing!

There we were the other day, surfing for new sources of info and tips on writing, and along came Jeff Goins, author of The Art of Work and a blog that we got a hell of a lot out of and think y’all will too.  Here, straight from the pages of Goins, Writer.Com is a sample of what we found:

by Josh Irby

insidevoicesMy life is noisy. With three small children and a fourth having just arrived, it’s hard to find a quiet place to think at home.

At work, I lead a team of 12 people. There are always questions to answer, teammates to encourage, problems to solve. Often, writing is drowned out by the noise. Sometimes I just want to shout, “Shut up! I’m writing!” read article

JK Rowling’s Success Tips

Yesterday we brought you 20 tips on successful writing courtesy of Stephen King. Today we’re going a bit further with a video of J.K. Rowling giving us her POV of success. (She is, after all, the writer of the best-selling series of books in history.)

John Ostrander: Through the Years

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by John Ostrander

I recently was talking to my friend and frequent (and upcoming) collaborator, Jan Duursema, about just the technological changes I’ve seen in comics over the course of my career. It must be getting close to thirty years since I began all this.

When I first started, I wrote my plots and scripts on a manual typewriter with a carbon copy for me. For you boys and girls who don’t know what a carbon was, it was a black inked piece of paper that you placed between the first and second pieces of paper. As the typewriter key struck the first page, the force of it would penetrate the carbon and leave an identical letter on the second page. If you hit it hard enough. In theory.

When I began, I wrote out my plots and scripts in longhand on yellow legal sized pads of paper from which I would then transcribe to the typewriter. It was easier to make corrections on the yellow pad than on the typed page. There, if you even made a spelling mistake, you had to haul out the Wite-Out (sic) or Liquid Paper. These were small round bottles of white paint with a cap with a small brush in it and it was a pain to use. If you didn’t seal it up properly, the liquid would dry out and become unusable. Some inkers who use it to this day either for corrections or to create effects. read article

“Am I really a Writer?”

Mindy Newell isn’t just a writer, she’s an all-round writing pro extraordinaire, with a resume to die for. And here she is asking herself the Writer’s Eternal Question, just like all the rest of us. What a world, what a world….

FreelanceWritersTips
by Mindy Newell

One of the doctors I’ve worked with once asked me “What’s it like to be a writer?”

I guarantee that every single one of the columnists here at ComicMix has been asked that question, or a form of it, quadrillions of times. read article