TRACY Culleton is a professional writer of fiction and non-fiction and solely responsible for two absorbing websites, www.fiction-writers-mentor.com and www.daughtersofnarcissisticmothers. com. Being Arts page, we can only attend to the fiction writer’s website by the Tipp based Culleton and it is a most useful resource for novelists and short story writers looking to be published.
Scroll through www.fiction-writers-mentor.com for a wealth of guidance, introductions, back up strategies and when things are rotten, giddy-up tools to move on. Menu titles such as ‘Character Creation’, ‘Getting Published’ and ‘Catch Those Clichés’ speak to any writer in the making and to those who have stalled. Best of all, Tracy Culleton’s mentoring pages are written from the corner of experience and success.
“I wrote my first novel in 2003, ‘Looking Good’ and it was accepted, going to No. 4 in the Best Seller list in Ireland,” says this likeable, articulate woman. “Since then I’ve had novels published in 2004 and 2005 and a fifth was published in Italy”.
She has two primary advices for when pen-pushing is more shove than push:
* “Don’t give up. Apply bottom to chair and write” and
*”Don’t put pressure on yourself to write a good first draft. There’s rarely any such thing. Get it down on paper and it can all be fixed in rewrites”.
She runs courses and Creative Writing Workshops from time to time and is an advocate of EFT – Emotional Freedom Technique – in overcoming writer’s block. It also works to ease the pain of rejection from publishers. (See www.fiction-writers-mentor.com for detail on this and other tactics for coping).
“A number of writers will stall after rejection. It is a huge issue for people. I say keep going. One of my favourite philosophies is that of Jack Canfield who wrote the self-help book ‘Chicken Soup for the Soul’. He maintains that the goal of looking to make your first million is a good thing, not because of the money you stand to make but because of the person you need to become that make that goal. I feel like that about being a published writer, the personal growth that I have experienced en route”.
And a final, important point: “The physical act of writing is a solitary one, but being a writer is not. You need material to write about and only in getting out there and living do we acquire that”.
