I love the series on Writer's Digest “7 Things I've Learned So Far,” where published authors share their best tips on writing, getting published, etc. All the authors have such unique experiences breaking into the industry and it's fascinating to see what stands out to them as must-hear tips.
But you don't have to be a published author to have valuable advice to give.
If there's one thing I've learned from participating in writing groups and from reading the comments on this blog, it's that there is something I can learn from every writer.
So I was thinking, maybe this week you can give me (and Joe and the other bloggers at The Write Practice) some advice about writing and publishing.
PRACTICE
Take fifteen minutes to write down what you've learned so far about writing or publishing. Be sure to share in the comments section!
Economy is huge. Don’t use twenty words where you can get by with seven. Don’t use two words when one will do as well. That said, don’t cut words just for the sake of brevity. If it adds something, leave it in. I learned this forcefully when writing stories for a 1,000 word limit contest, but I think it applies whether you’re writing a 1,000 words or 1,000 pages. Every word you add is an extra investment you’re asking your reader to make. Give them a payoff for it.
Couldn’t agree more! Less is more with words.
Exactly so! You have asked your readers to make an investment in reading your work. They have earned the right to a reward.
This is so true. If I struggle with anything, it’s using more words than I have to. I’ve always been guilty of over-explaining in my writing. Like you mentioned, I had to learn this when I was entering a contest with a word count limit. I couldn’t believe how tough it was to keep my word count down, but found that when I went through what I’d written, there were so many words I could cut that weren’t necessary.
Great advice. Thanks for sharing.
Here’s the list I give to students in my writing courses.
Publishing is a profession. Always act in a professional manner. This includes any situation where you are in public as a writer.
Spelling, grammar, and clarity are part of that professional manner. Don’t send emails/blogs/etc. filled with errors because it reflects back on your craft.
Your editor/publisher/agent may be your friend, but she is first and foremost a businessperson. If it is a choice between making money and being your friend, she will choose the money almost every time.
Learn the business so you will understand what is happening in your career. No one cares as much about it as you do.
Some publishers use the same kind of controlling behavior as abusive spouses. They convince you that you write crap and no one but them will want it, and they pay you accordingly. If you don’t escape this abusive cycle, you will either self-destruct as a writer, or other publishers in the know will not touch you because victims in this situation usually lose their confidence to push their writing to the next level.
Publishing is a small world. If you p*ss off one editor, every editor in the business will know about it. Editors also move from publisher to publisher. The editor you annoy today may be your new editor tomorrow.
Promote yourself, not your publisher, ebooks, or the type of books you write.
If you create bookmarks or any other expensive promotion, use them to promote yourself, not your current title because it won’t be your current title forever.
Brand yourself as a certain type of writer and produce all your books to reflect that brand. Make certain that the same readers will be as happy with your next book.
Strive to improve with each book. Strive to surprise with each book. Don’t write yourself into a rut.
If you don’t enjoy the writing, find another profession. The publishing business is brutal and often the only joy is in the writing.
No amount of promotion will make up for a lack of distribution.
It’s easy to be seduced away from the hard aspects of writing by other creative things. Working on your website and book trailers is much more fun because they aren’t part of that bottom line.
There is no such thing as privacy on the Internet and on group listservs. Be discrete. The comment you make today will come back to haunt you later.
If an agent or publisher lies about one thing, you shouldn’t believe anything they say.
The advantage of a small press/epublisher is personal attention. The disadvantage is the owner’s life crisis will shut down operations.
If the publisher believes that the contract terms only bind you, not him, run for your life.
If an agent or publisher says they are in the business to help writers, run for you life. They are almost always crooks.
Don’t be ditzy and proud of it. No publisher wants a business partner who is an idiot.
Writing is physically taxing. Take care of yourself by exercising and eating wisely. You may have an extra hour to write by avoiding the gym or that walk, but you’ll pay for it long term by having your body fail when you need it most.
Take care of your computer. Keep your virus software up to date and run repair utilities once a week.
Back up your hard drive! Back up on a regular schedule.
Back up your books and keep a copy or copies elsewhere. Most banks offer a free safety deposit box to regular customers. Keep a digital copy of your books there. A flash drive is perfect for this.
Keep a paper copy of your book. If your computer crashes taking everything with it, the paper copy is the very best back up. Paper copies never become an outdated format.
Keep adequate business records. Save receipts for business supplies, etc., so you can use them as business expenses on your taxes.
Read as much as you can about the business. If you don’t understand something, ask questions.
The writing craft is like athletic skill. Even a natural talent needs practice to improve, and you are always learning something new about yourself and the craft.
A good teacher and a good critique partner are worth their weight in gold.
A writing career is a marathon, not a sprint. A winner keeps going for the long haul.
Writing is a hobby, an avocation, or a career, but it is not a life. Real life is what matters most. You will regret it if you look up from your keyboard one day to discover life has passed you by, and the writing wasn’t worth the cost.
This is a lot of really helpful advice. I especially appreciate the advice about promoting yourself.
Your first on the list is probably the most important, and not only when you are out as a writer, no matter what you write. If you want to get stupid drunk and insult everyone around you, do it at home. People will recognize you, even if you are not well known. It reflects badly on writers as it does other better known celebrities.
I saw a christian romance writer at a chain restaurant in south GA once, didn’t recognize her name at the time, drunk, obnoxious, insulting a wait person, cursing, etc. (She was throwing her name around like everyone should know her, like she was a major celebrity. ‘Do you know who I am? I could buy and sell everyone of you!) I no longer read her books, nor any others of her genre. Completely turned me off them.
I also like the first one, but for me it’s not only act professional as a writer, but for me as a volunteer. The places I volunteer at are places in the community where others come in for guidance, help, and understanding so when they meet me in that place of business that is their first impression of me. So when they see me in the community somewhere I still represent the place I volunteer at. Because they recognize me from that place…. “Oh you work at ….” It not only shows them who I am as a person but may also give them an impression of the place I work with /for.
So if I write something and they see the name they will remember back to when they met me and connect the two. That can either make me or break me.
(True story, when I was out in the community a person came up to me and we began talking and after hearing a bit of what she was dealing with I recommended she go to the organization I volunteered at and when she got there she told them where she had heard about them she told them. )
It just seems you carry many hats the one you wear in public should be the one you want to be remembered for- if that makes sense.)
Writing is hard and writing is easy…
So true.
Writers are the people who find writing difficult to do.
Originally a Thomas Mann sentiment, I believe. My favorite quote on writing of all time!
I’ve learned several things about writing, but not so much through writing per se as reading a lot.
One, I learned that “reading a lot” is quite beneficial for good writing, or at the very least being intimate with how a good piece of writing is created. When I first tried to plan a novel, I felt like I have done a poor job. However, after some good reading, I feel it’s a little bit easier to actually structure something and perhaps writing good prose.
Another, “purple” or excess prose is not a bad thing in and of itself. Yes, bad purple prose is awful and laughable, but great purple prose, like much of what appears in many 19th-century literary classics, is truly a sight to behold; in fact, as author Chigozie Obioma (author of the new acclaimed novel The Fishermen) once noted, the novels that become great are often the ones that are a bit excessive rather than the ones that are a bit too inadequate.
Thus, I don’t have much of an animosity towards overwritten literary novels such as The Goldfinch, and one of my favorite recent novels, All the Light We Cannot See, revels in poetic prose imagery, and it’s all the better for it. Perhaps these “overwritten” novels could use a bit more editing to make them a little better. However, perhaps the best “overwritten” novels carry an audacious and authentic voice that never really leaves the reader. The Goldfinch, which I’m currently reading and enjoying, indulges quite a bit in elaborated storytelling and descriptive prose, but I am all for what Donna Tartt does, because it’s beautiful and engrossing. Here’s an example from the opening page:
There are many more wonderful examples of this fine, elaborated excess written by Donna Tartt. Perhaps by Hemingway standards, it could be pared down a bit. But since Donna Tartt’s poetic ear lends an attractive quality to it, I don’t mind it, and I can definitely see why it may have been under-edited — because even if it is overwritten, perhaps it may be all the better for it, in part because the “overwriting” itself is quite beautiful and rich.
So, writers, do know how to self-edit, but when the time comes, feel free to be elaborate and to delve deep into the audacious world of poetic, elaborate, even “purple” prose. Many great masters did it before you, and such prose worked for Donna Tartt.
Well said. What makes one style work in one novel and not in another is often a total mystery. Speaking generally, I think one thing that sets good purple prose off from bad is a sense that the author is doing something more than just decoration. The style has to feel purposeful to the work and harmonious with the content (or at least dissonant in an interesting way). Tartt’s florid prose in this intro gives a sense of not just the room but also the character. The collision of defilement and fine feeling he sees in the room really conveys Theo’s psychology and history here. It manages to foreshadow both his time in Las Vegas and his work in the antique shop (because he sees so much in the decor). All I’ve read of Tartt is The Goldfinch (well, actually I lost my copy when I had about 30 pages left, arg!), but she is a marvelous writer. Her friend Brett Easton Ellis is spotty at times but also good. Sometimes the sheer wickedness and desolation in his works is exhilerating, and his trippy, dissociative style kind of carries those themes out to the level of the whole book, almost traps the reader in the weird hall of mirrors that his characters are in. It can be amazing. At other times, though, the currents of darkness feel a little more like posturing and the style just seems tedious. It feels like Ellis running the Ellis program and walking away. The last half of Glamorama was like that. Another intro that is amazing is the intro for McCarthy’s Suttree, a book I believe you might be familiar with from reading your comments elsewhere. That opening description of the trash floating in the river — wow, that really sets the scene for everything that follows, the way the narrative will drift in and out of the lives of the riff raff of Knoxville. And of course he has a precision and mastery of diction that just makes the head spin. Writers who don’t have such an audacious inner vision as these three, however, might be advised to play cautious with the purple ink.
Thanks.
As for Tartt, I really love her. She’s in love with her writing, and some have held that against her. But I don’t personally view it as a negative but rather as a positive. I love how Donna Tartt’s love of language plays beautifully in THE GOLDFINCH, and in some ways it helps me to appreciate the elaborate and the florid in a way I didn’t really do so before.
And Cormac McCarthy, I’ve been trying to read his entire library after doing BLOOD MERIDIAN, which is to this day my favorite novel of all time. In his first novel THE ORCHARD KEEPER, the prose style is a bit rough and flawed, but I love how McCarthy “overwrites” and captured his ambitious vision with ambitious language.
Now for the beginning writers, I can see the need to be acquainted with spare prose. However, I see the tendency to spare prose too often being used as a hatchet against more elaborate prose, which I think should be done at some time or another in one’s life. So I think there should be a place for the “purple” prose in both the beginning and the advanced writer’s lives.
Self-indulgence in art is often deplored but I find it to be a virtue if the writer has an interesting self. I read because I want to know people. I want to know what the person writing is really passionate about, see the world through their eyes, feel what is powerful and vivid to them.
You’ve got a treat ahead of you with Suttree. I might put it a bit ahead of Blood Meridian, though that’s a hard call. It is definitely between those two. Suttree isn’t so uncanny and otherworldy, but McCarthy’s descriptive powers are just on fire in that book, and you are allowed to approach the characters more than in BM.
Why do you both call them purple prose? I have an MFA in Creative Writing, yet never heard of this term. 😉 <3
Do you know a/b my debut novel “Secrets & Lies in El Salvador”? A young American woman goes to war-torn El Salvador:http://tinyurl.com/klxbt4y
My husband made a video for my novel. He wrote the song too:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P11Ch5chkAc
As an English professor once wrote on my paper, “you must harness your writing to a more ruthless discipline.
Don’t let writing become a job.
Granted, writing often and well takes hard work and discipline. But the minute I start thinking of writing as something I have to do and not something I want to do, I lose interest. At its core, writing should be fun.
Absolutely! Writing has to be fun!
I fully agree with you. Writing should be fun.
Take other people’s advice, well, those who know what they’re talking about. I’ve found they most likely hit it right on in some areas. I’ve learned that I should write every day because everything adds up and for me, writing is like exercise, if I miss one day I tend to let it throw me off completely until I finally plunge in again. When that’s the case, I look back with more regret and punish myself even more. Writing is teaching me about who I truly am. It’s revealing my weaknesses but it’s also revealing my strengths. It’s teaching me how set and strive to attain new goals and seek to find the best of my potential. It’s challenging my beliefs and morals and helping me understand the past so I can build a better future. Writing is teaching me who I really am.
I’ve learned that the internal editor MUST be shut off. It’s a hindrance to ever completing anything.
I’ve learned that you need to read. And read. And read. You can never read too much. Fiction, nonfiction, writing books, anything. It shapes your words, your style, everything.
I’ve learned Grammar. More than I think anyone except a writer would care about.
I’ve learned you can never stop learning. There is always something you don’t know.
I’ve learned that writing is a way of life. It has to get inside of you, overtake you, and consume you. That’s the best kind of writing.
I’ve learned that writing is hard. It’s torture at some times, and there are more than enough moments I’ve hated it. But, as Tom Hanks said in ‘A League of Their Own’,
“Of course it’s hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone else would do it. The hard is what makes it great.”
And, most importantly, I’ve learned that ‘I can do ALL things through Christ who strengthens me’. Without Him, this would be impossible.
i’ve learned
– to write the rough draft without corrections, just let the story flow
-to edit first for stronger verbs
-to edit out adverbs and most adjetives, let the verbs do the heavy lifitng
– that my actual story usually starts after my first few paragraphs of exposition.
– that i have an avoidance complex for submitting for publication.
I like your point about writing a rough draft without corrections. I get too caught up in the corrections I find!
Write something every day. Read good authors every day. Seek and value critique from other writers. Open your eyes and heart to everyday stories around you, waiting to be written. Create a sense of place in your story. The power to write brings the power of responsibility. Seek to be the best as a writer: choose a worthy focus, technique, grammar, integrity. Write with your heart.
Seeking and valuing critique has been something I’ve really grown to appreciate lately. It’s one of the best ways to become a better writer.
Don’t edit, at least not right away and especially not while you’re writing. It’s exceptionally difficult to create the perfect words right off the bat. The biggest thing is to just write, and then you can edit to your heart’s content.
Once I learned this, I found that I enjoy the editing process because I’m getting to refine and improve what I’ve already written. It’s a hard habit to get into, but vital to being productive as a writer.
Establishing a daily writing habit is the foundation of being a writer. I’ve been writing all of my life, for too long hit or miss or just when I felt “inspired.” Since I succeeded in a personal eight week challenge to write 1,000 words a day to complete a manuscript, I write daily. The second thing I’ve learned about writing is that in this digital e-book, platform age – good writing is not enough to make a living as a writer. So, I’m wearing both hats, seeking help everywhere, and trusting in the process of writing and the need to develop an audience.
I’ve learned that the more writing you do, the better you become. I love writing fiction, but nonfiction is what makes money, but I find that the work of freelancing makes me a better writer because I’m writing so much.
Because I write so much and it’s not my full-time job, I’ve had to learn a lot about how to be productive as a writer, which comes down to planning, timing myself, and saving editing for later. If anyone is interested, I’ve written more fully about writing productivity here – https://medium.com/@farrtom/3-tips-to-increase-your-writing-productivity-af0a49195ee6.
Nice, Tom! I shared that on my FB page “A Page A Day.” 😉 <3
Hi my name is Veronica, I have been writing for about Four years on and off, more off than on really, but I decided a while ago I really had to get my bum on the seat and turn on the computer, that was the only way I would get something done. I knew it would not be easy this writing lark, anything I choose never is easy, I don’t like easy. But I have realized this writing thing is really hard especially when you are not sure what to write about, and that’s where I am stuck, I have no idea what my niche is, there are so many ideas out there I don’t know what to choose perhaps you could help, well this was going to be short but I have rambled on a bit. Hope to hear from you soon. Veronica.
Hi, Veronica. I went through the same thing several years ago – probably about four, too. I started by listening to conversations, sat at Wendy’s or other places like that and just listened to conversations and made up little, short stories about what I heard. Just let it flow.
I live in south GA, so my stories tend to be southern lit. I’m told they are easy reading, and that my best feature is dialogue, plots and themes. I’m working hard on getting settings, descriptions, etc.
I’ll tell you the best conversation I ever overheard: I was going into a chicken salad restaurant one day last summer. A couple was coming out and the woman said, ‘It’s hotter’n hell out here.’ The man with her said, ‘I bet it ain’t.’ I went home and wrote a flash fiction story starting with that conversation. Could have written half a dozen – may yet. Barbara
What is a chicken salad restaurant?
It’s a local restaurant called the Chicken Salad Chic. They serve simply chicken salads, (some pretty fancy,) broccoli salad, and fruit salads. It’s really very good and stays busy with the working ladies going to lunch – nurses, secretaries (excuse me, administrative assistants,) sales folks who get a lunch hour, and us retired folks. It’s located near the ritzier part of town where the doctors, bankers, lawyers, etc. live, so their wives will be found there, too. Surprising numbers of men, too.
Veronica, I would say to look back on your own life and experiences. look back at the people you’ve known: relatives, friends, co-workers. What stands out to you as the most interesting?
My mom always asked why I was writing a “made up” story when there are so many interesting things to write about from my extended family. The good thing is that she and my dad gave me permission to write about the family. I hope to write about my mom and her family someday. Her grandmother who brought her up and her great aunt were amazing women who managed for themselves at a time when women were “supposed” to be dependent on men.
The funny thing though, is that one person was only a member of our family for a few years. That is the one who I want to write the story about. Even the parts that are true are unbelievable!
I’ve learned to work, with out fretting, whenever I have free time.
To write without heeding errors and edit when I’ve finished the story, article, etc: (I have a silly habit of going over the last two paragraphs, editing and losing time.)
I learned to cut out redundant and repetitive parts.
To keep my writing simple. (I have a print of the words Joe told us to avoid, right where I can see it.)
Most of all, I learned how important feedback is and in return to read member’s submissions and give feedback.
Now to add my own lesson as a writer now that I have commented on another post. In fact I learned this lesson this morning as a matter of fact. …
I have to actually tune everything out and calm
my mind to edit. Writing i can do any time it seems but editing comes
from about 11pm or midnight to whenever it is finished. when the place is quiet and there’s no
activity on the streets.
There are actually times I
don’t see where to make changes it all sounds good, but then that could
be a lesson that its not ready to be edited or I’m not ready and to just wait and it will come. In the mean time just write.
I haven’t tried to publish yet, but I’ve heard from others that finding a publisher is a job interview, in every respect: you’re going to get turned down a depressingly frustrating number of times. However, it’s not personal. They have a limited number of openings, and want to find the best person who is the best fit to fill each one.
I’ve learned that writing a good turn of phrase is easy: writing an engaging story is hard, and there are a lot more people willing to teach the former skills as opposed to the latter ones.
I’ve learned that the fact that I’m using colons, semi-colons, parentheses, em- and en-dashes, etc. in addition to commas does not prevent it from being a run-on sentence. I need to figure out where a thought ends, and create a new sentence, relating it to the previous one if necessary.
I’ve learned that reading action is boring. What is far more interesting is reading reaction, and therefore, that’s what you should write. Instead of “Person A said this, Person B replied that, Person A walked away,” it’s far better to show how what person A said affects Person B. If you can’t show that the characters care what is happening around them, why should the reader care?
From the last exercise (which I still have to complete properly), I’ve learned that writing truth is hard. It’s easy to write facts, but writing something from a place of truth requires you to be totally honest with yourself, and with the reader, and that’s insanely hard. I tried to write something for that exercise: when I read it back to myself, I saw that while the first half was truth, the second half was not, so I scrapped the whole thing. However, the effort drained me so much that I haven’t come back to it yet.
Finally, I’ve learned to close my door when writing, or my cat will do everything in his power to prevent me from doing so.
What have I learned about writing?
1. It’s not the romantic, idyllic occupation most readers think it is.
2. It’s not easy.
3. Forget the muse; be persistent.
4. No first draft is perfect.
5. Most first drafts aren’t as bad as I think they are.
6. Finishing a book is just the beginning.
7. Did I mention writing is hard work?
There’s a lot more where that came from, but you asked for seven! Grins!
I’ve learned that as a writer you also need to be a really good reader so that when you are presenting pieces to an audience in person, your volume, diction, eye contact, metaphysical connection and so on are on point. 🙂
Writing was easy until I began to think about.
You can read however much you want about writing- know the process, the nuts and bolts, where you are going wrong, how a writing table may just coax you into writing. But the bottom line is writing it down and organizing it into a draft. Once you do that, I think you get the courage to do the rest.
I have
learned not to keep my writing a secret. Sharing what I have written has
given me great insights from my target audiences. Writing blogs are
filled with helpful advice, but the best I received was to share my unpublished
book with a group of children. You should have heard their great ideas
which will aid me in finishing my book for them. My bucket is overflowing
with the kindnesses they shared and the feelings I now have to share with
others. Put your writing out for critiques on writing blogs and at
events, and you will be amazed at how your writing can improve!
I agree with you, Beth.
Children are honest and amazing critiques.
Beth, Isabel wrote three books for preteens with the help of her grandchildren. Not only are the books loved by children but she loved every minute of experiencing and then writing with these much-loved children.
I’ve learned the most from tearing everything apart. When you learn the rules, most people have this tendency to think “well, hey, I know the rules, this is the last stop,” and then they kind of stay in this one place forever because it’s very comfortable. And I can understand that, it is comfortable. I like being comfortable, but you never get any better that way. I’ve seen writers say that you can’t break the rules until you know the rules, but that’s not quite true; you can’t break the rules until you know *why* they’re rules in the first place, and the only way to do that is, and please excuse the graphic metaphor here, the only way is to rape the language.
I have three types of practice: warming up (I practice at five o’ clock in the morning, so this is usually a written equivalent of that horrible grumbling and squinting you do standing by the coffee machine), ripping somebody off (in the good way, but that’s another post), and then breaking the language to pieces. Breaking the language to pieces consists of tinkering with a rule—or worse, a staggeringly obvious conception—to figure out why it’s there and what happens when you break it. So you can take a full-size paragraph and put a comma between every word, and try to read it, and it’ll feel like driving through one of those god-awful parking lots where they’ve got a speed bump like every 2 feet, and you really wonder if they protect *anyone*, because it seems as if they’d just make it harder for ambulances to get in there and rescue fat old people, so these stupid speed bumps probably have a net negative saved-life score. Or you can take the same paragraph and eliminate all the periods and try to string it together into one huge, gigantic sentence, which is a lot of fun—there’s very little as gratifying as creating a massive, thousand-word sentence with like two dozen different clauses and somehow manage to avoid fatiguing or confusing the reader. I can’t do it often but when I do, I feel like one of the masters, and that’s a very reassuring feeling.
You try this stuff, and 99.9% of the time what you create is junk, but every now and then you find a real gem. I’ve always believed that you don’t just “come up with” your best writing, I think you find your best writing amidst the wreckage of your worst. That, along with the disinhibition, is why Hemingway says to write drunk and edit sober (I tried to get an IV drip of ethanol attached to my desk, but I couldn’t find a nurse who’d do it—maybe nursing and carpentry don’t overlap much, I don’t know).
Here are some more fun exercises for the entrepreneuring young writer[2]: replace “ands” with ampersands and see what happens. Get rid of commas and use periods instead. Get rid of periods and use commas instead. Replace all the commons with semicolons; see what breaks. Change the way you use your parenthetical punctuation; the parentheses, em dash, comma, and footnote are not interchangeable. Mess with conjunctions, try using the wrong one (for, and, but, so, etc).
I got an e-mail this morning pointing me to this article, and it pointed me to an article about splicing commas, too. I made it a point to splice commas in some of this post, tried to show off a little. All the rules—do you understand me? *All* the rules—are subordinate to this one: “the reader must know what you are saying.” Okay, and maybe this one: “the reader has to finish.” Note that this does not include “the reader must not want to strangle you,” or even “the reader must come away having enjoyed the experience;” I confess I think most readers have sinned and ought to be punished, and you can really make them suffer as much as you want as long as you get your point across and drag them over the finish line.
[1]: Or, at least, confusing myself; my reading comprehension is stratospheric and so I have to show everything to my family to make sure they don’t get their head twisted in knots …
[2]: I froze for about ten minutes here trying to figure out if I should capitalize the first item in the list so it would match, or leave it minor so it wouldn’t break the flow. It’s stuff like this you want to explore.
[3]: There is no footnote 3.
[4]: I’m bad at the second one. I have a sort of charming loquaciousness[a] and a tendency not to break paragraphs (to me, it’s all one chain of thought and therefore shouldn’t be broken) for a long time, which makes me … hmm … how did my editor put it? Oh, “impossible to publish on the internet,” that was it.
[a]: Some would say obnoxious logorrhea.
What I have learned over the past year and a half is that in order to create a book that will be read by more than relatives and friends means immersing yourself into each project. You cannot take anything lightly.
Here are some of my favorite pieces of writing advice that I’ve received:
“Write fiercely.” – Meg Rosoff. I heard these two words of advice at an SCBWI conference years ago and have never forgotten them. Whatever story you need to tell, whatever events or world you need to explore, embrace it head on. Don’t shrink back, don’t hold back, don’t be afraid to write about the topics that others may avoid and that might even scare you. If there’s a story burning in you to be told, then write it.
The second is a bit related. My first writing teacher in college to stop worrying whether our stories were “good enough.” She said that we should ask ourselves instead if our writing was true. Are we being true to the the characters in our stories? Are we exploring their depths deeply enough? Are we portraying them in all their complexity? Are we keeping them in character? Are we being true to the themes, the events, the real-life emotions that our stories tap into? If we’re keeping our stories absolutely true, then they will be high quality.
–Sam Taylor, AYAP Intern
Hi Monica. Pauly here. Just from reading the “write” information from this website I have been (quietly been writing my novel, chapter by chapter for 1 month now. I can honestly say “I don’t have time for procrastination. I like what was written about “Practice”. Performing in our band Hot & Cool I know something about that. Also I also believe.in: “PROPER PRACTICE PREVENTS POOR PERFORMANCE, especially in writing. PAULYS COPY WRITING STRTEGY. “I’ll right for you”. Pauly
I’ve learned about Beat Sheets. I found author Jami Gold through a blog post and have since become a blog subscriber. As a writer resource, she’s created very helpful Beat Sheets. I’ll be writing my first adult romance novel during Camp NaNoWriMo next month and she has a Beat Sheet for Romance Authors, which I thought was pretty cool. I write my novels by hand, but plan to use Scrivener when I type it up and I suggested she create a Scrivener template for the romance author beat sheet (since she made one for her Story Structure beat sheet). And she did!! I plan to use it next month.
The things I have learned are many. About publishing, there
is one important issue I have realized: Africans are left out when it comes to
self-publishing. The foreign currencies preferred in the purchase of ebooks
stand as a barrier for most African readers. As a result, African authors don’t sell much, or not at
all. Writers as well as readers will do well if there are outlets that retail
ebooks in African local currencies.
My biggest lesson was to keep editing, ONE MORE TIME. My editor caught a lot of mistakes/typos and names spelled more than one way, but when I sent it to the formatter, I thought I was going to be able to edit my ms one more time. I found about 10 problems so I e-mailed her the changes that needed to be made. She was not happy! She told me she had already uploaded the formats and I would have to pay extra for her to remove them and make the changes. Of course, there is no way I could let it go out like that so I paid the extra to make the changes. I have found 3 small mistakes since then. No one seem to have noticed it, but I know they are there.
Joyce Carol Oates says 7 edits need to be done. I agree. When you think it is perfect, read it out loud one more time. You may get horse (is that the right spelling?) but you will be glad you did it later.
My husband made a video for my novel. He wrote the song too:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P11Ch5chkAc
I have learned to “walk away” for a few days after that first draft. Just to give my mind a break from the work, and come back to start the agonizing process of editing over, and over, again. I have a love/hate relationship with the process, so to walk away before I start helps a lot with giving me some distance and a more critical eye. I’ll cry about it later into my coffee. Ha!
Hi Svford,
I have also learnt to ‘walk away’. It helps to ease the mind and to return to writng with more enthusiasm. The critical is sharpened, meanwhile.
I meant critical eye, but saw no means of editing.