Ten Things I Know About Writing

[jazzfish]

(via thanate; hers are "rules" but these are way too flexible to even be "guidelines.")

1) I don't know anything about writing. Rather, what I know about writing is on the level of freshman chemistry. Then you take O-chem and in the first week they say "Remember all that stuff you learned in freshman chemistry? Yeah, that was all lies we told you so you could grok some basic concepts. Here's how it really is." Then they do it again next year in P-chem.

2) "To be a writer, you must write. And no amount of prep-work is writing. Research is not writing. Taking notes about the world is not writing. Thinking about writing is not writing. Only writing is writing." --Gene Wolfe

3) Which is not to say that you don't need to do all those things. You might. You may also need to stare out the window for hours, play mindless video games, pet the cat, babble about how stuck you are, whatever. Not writing is part of the writing process. Just don't let it replace writing. (Hence why I tag these posts with "not writing.")

4) The way to get better at writing X is to write X. This is true for any value of X you can think of: "every day," "complete stories," "complex characters," anything. If you don't write X, you won't get any better at it.

5) Corollary: when you start writing X for the first time, you will be awful at it. This is normal. Do not give up. The second time it'll be a little less awful, and so on.

6) If you aren't having fun writing it, don't: no one else will have fun reading it. Shorten the boring transition, put a crisis in the middle of the expository dialogue, give the characters elaborately ridiculous hats. I have a sign (stolen from Steve Brust, who stole it from Gene Wolfe) that says "I am going to tell you something cool," so I can see it when I'm about to write something I think is dull, and write something awesome instead.

7) Say it with me: "I am a writer, and I will finish the shit that I started." Writing means finishing.

8) Which is not to say that finishing a draft is finishing a story. Writing also means revising.

9) Listen to your readers but don't take what they say as gospel. If only one person out of your group of eight has a problem with something, it may be just that reader. Or it may be a genuine problem that the other seven passed over for some reason. (PNH: "When someone tells you something is wrong in your story, they're usually right; when they tell you how to fix it, they're often wrong.")

10) Write the best damn thing you can, then send it out and start writing the next one. When it comes back, send it out again. After a certain point, whether a story gets bought is entirely up to whether it hits the right editor.

ETA: Ann (and from earlier). Alec. L. Blankenship. KLAGOR. Alena. Blair. Fran. LaShawn.

Comments

[jazzfish]

There's this thing that I've seen mentioned once or twice, where when you start trying to do something you're familiar with, you feel /awful/ about it. Because you know what it is you're supposed to be doing, and how it's supposed to be turning out, but you're just not good enough (don't have the practice, the instinctual knowledge / muscle memory) to do it yourself. I imagine the whole "learn how to do it wrong but for the right reasons" way of teaching is a way to sort of address that. To get the fundamentals in place in a way that's easy to learn, and tweak the ways it's wrong afterwards.

[lizthefair.livejournal.com]

Have you seen the Ira Glass meme going around about that phenomenon? You will love it. http://vimeo.com/24715531

Also this quotation is full of win, and not just as it pertains to writing: When someone tells you something is wrong in your story, they're usually right; when they tell you how to fix it, they're often wrong

[jazzfish]

Oh, /very/ nice. Thanks! (And, yeah, that's probably where it bubbled up into internet consciousness from.)

heh. Very true. I'm starting to think that all the best writing advice isn't just writing advice.

[blairmacg.livejournal.com]

Yup. I liken it to learning the alphabet before reading. The letter B has a name. When reading, though, we don't announce the letter's name. We make a sound that blends with other letters in context. It doesn't make BEE wrong. It is simply the most basic understanding of the letter.