prowritingaid

Links List

~ Rose Sparrowking

Venting Doesn’t Reduce Anger, But Something Else Does, Study Finds. Smashing shit in a rage room isn’t going to help you to let it go.

ProWritingAid is offering a free Fantasy Writers’ Week Summit, April 22-26. I’m attending! “Discover the secrets for writing, editing, and publishing a spell-binding fantasy novel at this free online summit.” Yep, they’re going to try to sell you stuff but I always come away with some gold nuggets.

The 3 Best Writing Tips I’ve Gotten From Masters, and the 4 Best Writing Tips I’ve Given.

Links List: Romance Writers’ Week and Why Do We Even Read?

~ Rose Sparrowking

Prowritingaid is hosting Romance Writers’ Week starting February 12, 2024. I rarely watch the sessions live, but go through them quickly afterward. You’ve got like a week or so to review the sessions before access is cut off (unless, of course, you fork over more money!). There are usually some good tidbits along with the usual sales pitches. It’s free.

Why Do We Even Read?: “The purpose of literature is, of course, to open up new worlds and introduce information and experiences. This is what libraries do and why libraries are a monumental resource and a cornerstone of democracy. They offer a whole world to their communities that does not change based on an algorithm. It’s based on providing tools, skills, and resources that benefit as many people as possible outside capitalism, which drives data collection and the resulting feeds curated for a user rather than curated by a user.”

Science Fiction Writers’ Week with ProWritingAid

~ Rose Sparrowking

Sci-Fi Writers’ week was September 11-14 and while I watched many of the sessions, these were the only two that inspired me to take notes. There was another session that I wanted to watch, but there was a problem with the wrong video being posted and I never went back to see if they fixed it. And now I’ve lost the link, so that’s poor planning on my part.

I have signed up for another webinar, How to Structure Your Plot and Finally Start Your Novel with Katja Kaine, on September 26th and I’ve bookmarked the link this time. Live and learn! I’m looking forward to this because plotting is a struggle for me. I can develop characters and setting and dream up a few scenes but getting a well structured plot has eluded me so far. I usually end up pantsing it, which doesn’t lead to a cohesive plot and requires a lot of editing.

Onto the webinar session reviews:

The first session I watched was by Joe Nicoletti of AI for Authors, talking about how to use ChatGPT as a writer. I knew very little going in, so this one was very informative, even though he only scratched the surface of what’s out there. His main point was learning to develop the best prompt for AI to get the results you want. Think of what expert you need the AI to be, who the audience is, what tone of voice, what writing style and what the context is for your prompt. Get specific. Then ask follow up questions and drill down. Don’t know what to ask? Ask the AI what you should be asking. He got ChatGPT to generate some awesome ideas and characters, even an alien language with pronunciation, with his prompt and follow ups. He was so enthused by what he was demonstrating, that the ProWritingAid monitor had to cut in and tell him he only had 2 minutes left in his time slot. Haha! Definitely going to be playing with this and looking to learn more.

Next session I watched in replay was a talk by the author Lauren Buekes. Loved this one, as she’s very encouraging but also down to earth. She acknowledged that creating is hard, but it’s so worthwhile. “Art is the fire we light against the darkness.” And to just finish: “Finish the damn book. Nothing else matters. Stop second-guessing yourself and write through to the end. You don’t know what you have until you’ve finished it. You don’t know how to fix it until it’s all down on the page.” Also, something on AI: “There is a subconscious magic in process and I think this is what AI is never going to be able to do. There is the subconscious thing that happens as you’re typing and the words change and the characters run away with you and do something different and it’s not magic and you’re not possessed. It is your brain. It’s the wonder of your brain and it’s the wonder of thinking about things and actually writing it and the process is the writing and that’s why it’s so important to finish.” If you can hear her speak, I’d would encourage you to take advantage!

I’m looking forward to more webinars with ProWritingAid and let me know if there are other webinars (preferably free!) happening out there that you’d recommend.