Today I'm hosting a guest post by Sasha Laurens, the author of A Wicked Magic which releases today! Happy publication day to Sasha!
Scroll down for Sasha's Top 5 Tips for Becoming a Better Writer and information on A Wicked Magic.
5 Tips for
Becoming a Better Writer
Read
critically: Everyone knows that reading is the number one way you
become a better writer, but it’s really more than just reading for
enjoyment—it’s reading critically.
That
means thinking about how a book works from a technical perspective.
If I fall in love with a certain character, get surprised by a twist
ending, or feel like a romantic paring was insta-love, I think about
the text again using my own knowledge of craft—including some
things you learn in high school English class!—to analyse the
choices the author made. I often find that things that seem
effortless or surprising are painstakingly planned from page 1. That
becomes a technical lesson that I can draw on when I sit down to
write.
Read
widely: For most of my life, I didn’t read genre fiction. YA wasn’t
so much a thing when I was in high school, but if it was, I didn’t
read it because I was interested in Important Books. In college, I
studied Russian Literature, and I only read literary fiction.
Everything I wrote had a lot of really fancy sounding language using
words like “fenestral,” but nothing ever had a plot, because plot
isn’t the focus in literary fiction. When I started reading YA,
romance, crime thrillers, SFF and other more plot-driven works, it
really opened a new world in my writing: characters could do
things!
Now that I read a lot more genre fiction, when I pick up a literary
novel it helps me think about really nuanced characterization and
complex themes. Reading widely helps you avoid getting so focused on
the genre you write in that you lose perspective.
Get
comfortable being uncomfortable: A universal experience among writers
is how terrible it is to actually write. Terribleness arises at many
points in the process: the anxiety of coming up with a whole new
project, the fear of being unable to do it justice, the pain of
writer’s block—but also the pain of actually writing!—and the
horror of letting someone else read words you wrote (even though that
was the point). If you get through all that, you’re rewarded with a
ride on the publishing rejection merry-go-round. Writing, like all
creative processes, requires that you make yourself uncomfortable.
Sometimes the discomfort will be intense, but that doesn’t mean
you’re doing it wrong—actually, you’re doing it right, because
that’s just how the process is. It’s only by pushing through that
discomfort, embarrassment and fear that that you get to enjoy
cracking that scene, or having a reader connecting to your work.
Plus, you’ve been embarrassed before and you were strong enough to
survive it, so you really have nothing to worry about!
Your
words are infinite: Do you ever stop to think about how during every
conscious moment, your brain produces an unceasing, unstoppable
stream of thoughts and it will do that until you die? Me neither,
because it’s kind of freaky! Imagine if you tried to hold on to
every single one of your thoughts because you were worried you had a
limited supply. You’d be in a bad way pretty quickly. Writing and
revising is like this. Sometimes we get so focused on making sure
every word we add to a story, or even write in our journals, is
perfect that we can’t write anything at all—a bad outcome. Then
when we revise we want to be precious with our treasured sentences,
because what if this was the best we could do? The reality is, you
only need to find the words that work for the task at hand. If that’s
writing “she smiled with her face” in your rough draft, so you
can move on, great! If that’s cutting the world’s most perfect
description of a sunset that’s slowing down the plot, sorry to this
sunset! They’re just words, they cost you nothing, and you have an
infinite supply of them.
Let
your freak flag fly: I was going to call this point, “Write like
yourself” but letting the freak flag captures the concept I’m
after much better. You are a person with specific way of seeing the
world. You express that in you the unique way you talk or text or
laugh, in your clothes and music and the podcasts you listen to. It’s
in where you’re from, where you live now, how you relate to your
parents and your friends and your crushes and society in general.
It’s your hard times and your victories. I am giving you permission
right now to put as much of that into your writing as you want. You
don’t need to sound like anything else you’ve read—or you can,
if you want! But that’s a choice that you get to make.
A
WICKED MAGIC is a deeply personal book for me. I’ll probably never
write another one like it. A lot of it’s based on the area where I
grew up, my own teenage years, people I’ve known, and the weird
things that fascinate me, like cults and caves and old ladies who run
tattoo shops. Basically, it’s just one long inside joke to myself!
But it’s not the first novel I’ve written. The novel I got my
agent on was very commercial. I thought I could write something that
was similar to other young adult novels I’d read and it would be
good enough sell. But it wasn’t, and that project was always a
struggle. When I started writing A WICKED MAGIC, my goal was
different: I wanted to write a book that I loved, that was authentic
to me, so it wouldn’t matter if it never got published. There is a
story that only you can tell. Embrace it!
Title: A Wicked Magic
Author: Sasha Laurens
Pages: 368
Publisher: Razorbill
Release Date: 28th July 2020
Blurb from Goodreads:
Dan and Liss are
witches. The Black Book granted them that power. Harnessing that power
feels good, especially when everything in their lives makes them feel
powerless.
During a spell gone wrong, Liss's boyfriend is
snatched away by an evil entity and presumed dead. Dan and Liss's
friendship dies that night, too. How can they practice magic after the
darkness that they conjured?
Months later, Liss discovers that
her boyfriend is alive, trapped underground in the grips of an ancient
force. She must save him, and she needs Dan and the power of The Black
Book to do so. Dan is quickly sucked back into Liss's orbit and pushes
away her best friend, Alexa. But Alexa has some big secrets she's hiding
and her own unique magical disaster to deal with.
When another
teenager disappears, the girls know it's no coincidence. What greedy
magic have they awakened? And what does it want with these teens it has
stolen?
Set in the atmospheric wilds of California's northern
coast, Sasha Laurens's thrilling debut novel is about the complications
of friendship, how to take back power, and how to embrace the darkness
that lives within us all.
Book Links:
If you've pre-ordered A Wicked Magic you can get a sticker through the pre-order campaign here.
About the Author
SASHA
LAURENS was raised in San Francisco and Northern California,
where she learned to drive on Highway 1’s switchback turns and got
accustomed to the best weather in the world. She started taking
writing classes at 826 Valencia in high school, and would have
minored in Creative Writing at Columbia University, if the minor
hadn't been eliminated. Instead, Sasha studied Russian Literature,
and graduated summa cum laude.
Upon
graduation she moved to St. Petersburg, Russia, and attempted to
write a literary novel, unsurprisingly about Americans living in St.
Petersburg, Russia. Returning to New York City, she earned an M.A. in
Russian Regional Studies from Columbia University while working at
the university. Since 2014, she been pursuing her PhD in political
science at the University Michigan, and currently resides in Ann
Arbor.
Writing
and political science take up almost all of her time, but when she
gets a break she loves boxing, watching bad reality tv, and
traveling.
A
Wicked Magic is
her first novel (Razorbill, July 2020).
Author links:
