Tina Haapala, Excuse Editor

Let me tell you this: failure is normal. Especially when you are trying to be a writer. When you love something so much, you may think that success should come easily. But that is often far from the truth. There are countless people around the world who want to write, who want to tell their stories, but once they hit an obstacle, they wonder, “Is it worth it?” Rejections hurt; it doesn’t matter if they come from that Evil Editor in your head, or if it’s in an actual rejection in e-mail form.  You’ve heard the stories about the multiple rejections from those who would become successful authors, but what about in business (which is really what writing for publication is)?  If you ask any successful businessperson about the path that they took to become successful, you will likely be surprised to hear about the many pitfalls, obstacles, setbacks, and outright failures that they experienced before they finally achieved success. After all, there is a reason that they say that fo...

Filomena Scalise / FreeDigitalPhotos.net Fun Fact: The average person has over 1460 dreams a year, according to the backside of one of the pages in my page-a-day calendar. What does this mean for a writer? Morning Pages Many writers are familiar with Julia Cameron 's morning pages , usually a three page free-write to get the creative juices flowing before anything else in your day. When I am in the habit of morning pages, I have the notebook, a pen, and my glasses within stretching distance so I can start writing before I'm entirely awake. You can imagine, some interesting, albeit sloppy, writing finds its way to those college-ruled pages. More often than not, a shadow of a dream is still clouding my mind's eye, so I start to write about the dream. I may go into detail about the dream, telling it like a story. I may only remember fragments of the dream--who was in it, how I felt--so the writing may turn to wondering why that particular scene visited my early morning...

It's that time of year again, when thousands of wannabe novelists challenge themselves to write a whole book in 30 days. NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, started 11 years ago and now has a worldwide following. The general idea behind NaNoWriMo is to encourage writers to achieve a lofty word count goal: 50,000 words. The aspiring authors blow the dust off their calculators to forecast their daily targets. As they write, the NaNoWriMo site gives them a visual representation of their work: a bar graph showing them how close, or far away, they are to completing their "NaNoNovel". 50,000 words. If that goal is reached, you would have written a 200 page book! In one month! Sounds out of this world? Well, consider this: A journey of a thousand sentences begins with a single word. Any writing, whether it's War and Peace or a simple tweet , starts with a blank slate. The mystery and the joy of composition: pulling words out of the air, one by one, to give bi...