WIM Week 1: Meet the Players

Hi everyone, thanks so much for stopping by! For a quick bio, I’m Thuy—married to my high-school sweetheart and mother of 2 (plus a pup) with big love for travel, art, football, food, and words!

In case you couldn’t tell by all those exclamation points, I’m super stoked to kick off my journey with Writer-in-Motion, a fun little project hatched to show a writer’s step-by-step process for creating story. In a span of 6 weeks, I’ll be drafting an original short story from a given prompt, along with 11 other awesome writers—check them out via the sidebar links! Then, armed with feedback from two fellow critique partners and one of the amazing editors, I’ll revise the draft until it (hopefully) shines like a polished red apple. Meanwhile, my thought and writing process will be exposed in blog posts—complete with before-and-after’s for your peeping tom pleasure.

In general, particularly for shorts, I’m a pantser. I’ll start with the prompt, take a few moments to soak it in, decide what mood it brings, and then pants it. Let the fingers fly. But my brain will soon rein in my fingers, because misspellings and subject-verb disagreements make my eyes twitch and my skin hive. So I’ll stop and go back and reread each sentence, combing for offenders before moving on. Even when I know it’s only a first draft. I just can’t help it though, guys. It’s how I’m wired.

Same with revisions. I’ll happily take the feedback and assault each sentence, incorporating and rearranging until the words start to lose meaning. Then I consider myself done. For the day. Knowing I’ll come back the next to repeat the process like the masochist in every writer.

As I tend to be private about my writing, this is big for me. Very few people in my life know I write, let alone what I write. I find it so difficult to put a piece of myself out there for the world to judge. But I’ve learned that, as with other things in life, I need to let go a little if I ever hope to grow. So here I am, taking this tiny step, ready to open up and put it all out there. But having decided that, I’m so excited to start! So if you’re still reading along this far, please come the rest of the way with me behind the curtains for the next few weeks and witness the cray!

Then hopefully, you’ll enjoy it enough to stay. ♥