A short while ago I wrote a blog post called “Black Belt in Writing” (Sept 11, 2013) I won’t repost obviously since you can go back and read it yourselves, but I will reference it and I will remind you of the different belt levels as I perceive them:
Beginner:
White Belt= ideas bouncing around your head, what to do, what to do…
Yellow Belt=a notebook! write those ideas down girl or guy…
Orange Belt= These ideas are all over the place but at least they are in one book…
Intermediate:
Green Belt=We have a theme! Now to get these ideas sorted…
Purple Belt=I have the meat, but where are the potatoes?
Blue Belt=Slicing and dicing…these characters are starting to seem real…
Advanced
Red Belt=Backstory? What the heck is backstory?
Brown Belt=It has a flow! It actually makes sense as I read it…
Brown/Black or Red/Black=Review, edit, read…review, edit, read…
Black Belt=ready to publish! Self pub or not, either way you are ready…SUBMIT!
Higher Black Belt Degrees=ALL OF THE ABOVE, all the time…(King, Rowling, Patterson, Cornwell, you get the idea)
As I stated previously, If you are into martial arts at all, you can argue the belt colors but I don’t think you can argue the process too much As a writer have you gone through this? As a person have you jotted stories down, never realizing you were an orange belt in writing?
So what is the purpose of this blog post? Well, what happens when you are a beginner? A beginner in most disciplines is someone who is just starting to get a handle on the basics, the fundamentals. I would categorize those folks as White to Orange Belt. These are your beginners. Is one of them you?
Now my question to you is this: Do you start from the beginning when you change genres? I mean think about it. When you go from practicing Karate to practicing Jujitsu, you start as a white belt again. You may progress through the ranks more quickly than before but you still start from the beginning. Now using the jujitsu analogy is an interesting one. They generally have less belts though they do offer progress stripes as you unlock/master the next level in your training. The same is true with writing. The idea of writing is the same, but a different genre? How do you go from pure romance to science fiction, or from paranormal to crime drama? By going back to the beginning.
There are a ton of blogs out there offering writing advice, tips, tweaks, etc. Here I am just trying to get you to open your mind to the fact that even the best of us (writers/authors) revisit that beginner stage when trying something new. Sometimes you may realize that this new discipline/genre is easier. Other times you ask yourself what you were thinking when you started to fill another notebook with ideas that would have been foreign to you in the past.
I find myself back at the beginner stage with my new venture while simultaneously pursuing my second degree black belt in my original one. Yikes! Can we say schizophrenic? Yep, that’s how I feel. I have Leigh from my Fear series pulling me in one direction and my new heroine Ariana running circles around me. What started out as a small story has become a bit unwieldy. So yes, I am a beginner once again…so what are you?
L.E. Perez
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