Stuck for what to write?  Wondering where to get a new idea?  I was looking at this website earlier: http://languageisavirus.com/ and I wanted to pass it on to you.  Sometimes just roaming around on the internet can be inspiring!

I’ve just read and loved YA novel If I Stay by Gayle Forman.  Simple and clear, sad and compelling.  Just the sort of novel I enjoy reading.  I’m in a writing phase where I’m reading everything I can, getting ideas and inspiration from books around me.  I finished Sarah Dessen’s Just Listen the other day and am starting Alice Hoffman’s The Story Sisters now.  Books are the galleries of the mind – and for a writer thinking about what to work on next they are like visiting rooms full of paintings.

Gayle Forman says: Such is the wonderous magic of writing.  There’s a wall.  And then, suddenly, there’s a door.

I like that.

At some point you’ll be ready to send your work out to be read by an editor – maybe at a magazine or maybe, if you’ve completed a novel, at a publishing house.  Or perhaps you’re sending work to an agent.  Make sure every single thing you can do to make your piece as strong as possible is done.  Don’t think an editor is going to do that for you: their job is to help you improve what you can’t on your own, not to correct typos and come up with suggestions you’ve already thought of.

Make sure you have a perfect cover letter.  Have a look in my tips section for my ideas on cover letters.  And then send the work out according to the editor’s submission guidelines which you’ve read.  You read those, right?

Then comes the hardest bit.  Waiting.  Swinging wildly from thinking you’ve just written then best thing ever to knowing it’s the worst piece of writing in the world.  Ever.  All writers feel like this.  It’s part of the job.  And then waiting a little longer.  Publishers and editors and agents receive a huge amount of stuff to read.  They need time. 

If you haven’t heard back within three months, you could always drop a polite email to them.  But other than that you have to wait.  You have to let go. 

And write something new.