So, it’s the holiday season and as winter pulls the frost up over your window, you might feel inclined to snuggle up with your pen, pad, or laptop (and a snack and a mug of eggnog of course), and start writing! Fiction writers, especially sci-fi and fantasy writers, need a lot of internal motivation to build their amazing worlds and characters. So let’s do it together with Colby’s Christmas Countdown! As you countdown to Christmas Day, here are 25 holiday writing tips to help you along in your fiction journey! You might want to grab a special writing notebook to keep all your exercises in one place, too. By the end, you’ll have months worth of material to launch you into writing your novel series! 🙂

Tip #1: BRAINSTORM WILDLY

This is the time to let all of your creativity, silliness, and fanciful ideas come out onto the page. Don’t edit yourself, don’t over think your ideas, don’t even critique your ideas! Just let them flow!

Activity of the (Holi)DAY: Sit down with a pen or pencil and for 20-30 minutes (use a timer) just write any cool or fantastical thoughts that come to mind. Start off your sentences or phrases with “what if”, and just keep going and going until you can go no more! If you find yourself still jotting ideas when the timer is done, keep going! Don’t stop the creativity.

How I Did It: My own ten-book novel series-in-progress, “The Books of Ezekiel” literally fell out of my pen one day. I was sitting at my kitchen table, and I asked myself: “Wouldn’t it be cool to train at an old fashioned guild? What if you could get your schooling literally through a series of secret societies and apothecaries? What if you had to train while on the road, making a trek to each guild to learn a new ability?” And then the ideas came, for 52 different guilds all across the globe! Some of the guilds were silly, some were serious, others were (and still are) literally OUT of this world. But it helped me build a great starting point for a series, for building a whole different WORLD even, where the arts of alchemy began to flourish!

See the image below for a sliver of the notes I took. Originally, they were written, but then I transcribed them into typed form.

Keep it indie!
<3 Colby