Writer, Are You Stuck?

I have no idea how many books Holly Lisle has written by now. I could go search out the answer, but since it is irrelevant to this article I won't.

My introduction to Holly's work was early in the 1990's when my attention was caught by an intriguing cover. An elf leaning against a stock car? I picked up the book and read the blurb on the back. It was a story about elves that raced cars and rescued abused children. That really caught my attention as I was volunteering with a family crisis center at the time. I bought the book, took it home and read it.

Naturally my next step was to do an online search, which in those days was much more difficult than it is now. I found that she had more books available and went looking. I've read as many of her books since then as I could find and enjoyed them even when they were far afield from elves and stockcars.

Sometime in the mid-nineties she started her own website and began paying forward. I'm not sure who coined the term paying it forward, but I first heard in connection with Andre Norton and Anne McCaffrey, two of my favorite fantasy and science fiction authors. It is the process whereby a published writer helps upcoming writers by teaching them the tricks of the trade.

The first non-fiction book of Holly Lisle's that I read was Mugging the Muse for Fun and Profit. It is still available at her website and just as good a reference today as it was back then.

Nowadays she has a whole stable of books to help the writer improve their skills. One of my favorites is her Create a Plot Clinic. A big problem I kept having was I'd get an idea for a story begin writing and, all too often, have it break down before I was finished. Now, breaking down at page 30 is aggravating, but when it happens 200 pages into the book it is "throw the computer out the window" aggravating.

Create a Plot Clinic taught me how to over come this by teaching me about laying out my story before ever writing the first word. This way I could discover, with minimal investment of my time, if I had a story or just a scene.

Here was my big discovery when I worked my way through the Create a Plot Clinic the first time. What I had been thinking of as stories were really only scenes, which may or may not be able to be part of a whole story. This one discovery alone made the price of $9.95 worth every cent.

Create a Plot Clinic is available at
Create A Plot Clinic, by Holly Lisle
You can also get Mugging the Muse for free with any order and it is still an excellent guide for the beginning writer.