WCMarchese

I was thinking the other day and came to a realization. 

Looking at writing a story head on is fine, for most, I suppose. 

But when you have a project you start with something. Then you add another aspect to that. Say an outline, then you add another dimension and keep adding until the original product is no longer discernible. 

Does that make sense? 

You see a finished product from someone you admire. But what had that product looked like in its infancy? What were its roots as the skeleton was being built as the skin formed on them? 

A formula. 

But the best formulas are those the readers can't see. 

Right? 

Do you have a formula when you do your thing? Is it something you try to stick to, or do you deviate from the path every now and again? 


Let me know in the comments below or on Twitter @WCMarchese.
Hope to see you there. 

WCM

Also, check out my YouTube channel with this link: www.youtube.com/Wcmarchese where you can listen to Gary Buller and my radio show where we talk about horror and o…

The state of things. There's a saying that goes something like "Jump off the cliff and build your wings on the way down." Basically saying, if you procrastinate you'll never know what you got going until you jump off and get going. 

I got to thinking about a lot of... well, things. 

As usual. 

And something I've been pondering upon has been where to go from this point. 

What direction. 

As it is, I am writing a blog and doing videos, for the most part, that attempt to help other writers in a way of seeing the path and what happens along that path. 

It may not be something all writers go through, but there can be quite a few similarities. 

If you can take away something that helps, then this post and other things I do in this vain have done their job. 

Then again, perhaps this info won't even be considered until I am "successful" at this--which of course can take on a whole bunch of different meanings to different people. 

And that's okay. 

I opened the do…

I know I've said this over and over. But it's something more important than you think. Your story has to feel real. 
If it doesn't, you run the risk of being cliché yeah, but also, far worse, you can be dismissed without even knowing you've been dismissed. 

Fellow writers, or frenamies, may say, hey, great job! Yet they know and see what happened and just want to keep you back in the dirt. 

Real friends might alert you, but some are so busy they can't read everything out there. 

Bottom line. One has to be careful.

Make sure your characters are likeable, lovable. The story is memorable. Etc. 

Real. 

Now i don't know the single formula for success, mostly because it's different for everyone. But you'll know when you find it. 

Hopefully. 

And I've read a quite a few times that talent isn't what makes the writer. 

But it's a pretty damn important part of it. Yes hard work goes without saying, but if you don't have the talent, or imagination, then how …

This past weekend some sort of destructive force wanted to do me in. 
But it didn't. 

A week prior I had a guest on Gary Buller and my show. This after a Microsoft update. 

The update must have done something to the sound settings, because all the sounds were wrong, and when I tried to fix it, I realized the sound wasn't even going to YouTube live. 

The guests in the chat room were saying they heard nothing. But at this point it was already almost half an hour into the interview. 

I was devastated. 

Embarrassed. 

After the show, I went to work trying to figure out what went wrong. I fixed what I did have of Gemma and Gary and started messing with settings. 

I had the program and my settings to a point where it worked, and even better. 

So I took a picture of the settings so I could have it for the future in case something like that happened again. 

All was well. 

Then I turned the computer on this past Friday to talk about the new Halloween movie and BAM. The BSOD (Blue Screen of Death.)…

Give your story life, otherwise it’s just a cliché. Thinking about this quite a lot lately as I restructure my style and add more to that toolbox Stephen King made famous in On Writing.
Writing is an ongoing learning experience. Even the greats can still learn. Yeah, all those clichés.
But you see, when you write about a guy who goes into a house and he sees ghosts. It turns out those ghosts may be something he’s dealing with internal.
Yada yada.
This can be altered in any multitude of ways, but it’s still a basic story. And I’ve seen many authors, myself included, mistakenly run down this path.
Grammar and other technicalities aside, this story needs personality.
This is where write-what-you-know comes into play. That guy could have lived in Florida. He’s moving to NY to take a house that was given to him by his mom, because the siblings were fighting and she wanted it to go to someone who hasn’t been around in a while. The sister warns him with a threat about coming to claim it, and …

So you sit before your laptop, or your cellphone, and you wonder if this will all pay off? 
Social media sites like Blogger and YouTube deal with constant posts and such to fans. 

I see decent views on my blog and YouTube channel, at this point they are not great. But things build. 

I have to keep pushing. 

I've been working on my blog longer than the YouTube channel, and that is going well. But not enough for me to not worry about if it's all worth anything. 

I can say this, if I had thousands of viewers, or thousands of listeners on YouTube, heck yeah I'd post more often. 

Probably even multiple times a day. 

Live stuff for YouTube, any thought that pops into my head for my site. 

But I guess it's easier to do that when you know people are waiting for your next post. 

It's hard when you don't know if anything you're doing will pay off. Is it just people you know, or are you getting out to new individuals? 

And is all this worth it? 

That's why I feel it's mo…