How to Steal
There’s nothing original in the world. Good writers are always stealing ideas from each other and recycling stories. It’s expected. And it’s natural.
Six Ways to Make Your Readers Hate You
As an author, you want to make your readers happy, right? You want to have outstanding writing that not only makes you feel good, but makes others feel good. You want people to read your work and say, “Hey, this person really knows how to write. I like their stuff.”
You don’t want to make your readers hate you and your work. Well, if you want your readers to like you, here are six things not to do.
No Writing Allowed
STOP!
Put your pencil down.
Step away from the computer. (But not so far away that you can’t read this).
There will be no word-crafting today. I repeat: there will be no word-crafting today!
Sorry.
C.S. Lewis on the Dirty Secret of Language
There’s a type of question I get every once in a while that always surprises me. Here are a few:
- My teachers in school told me you should never begin a sentence with “and.”
- Isn’t that incorrect?
- Isn’t that a run-on sentence?
- My teachers in school told me you should never begin a sentence with “and.”
- Isn’t that a fragment of a sentence?
- Isn’t that breaking the rules?
- Shouldn’t you fix your contractions? You don’t want to sound so informal, do you?
These questions surprised me because early on I learned that the best writers regularly break the rules. In fact, in every art form, from painting to sculpture to writing, one of the rules is to break the rules.
However, there is one dirty secret about breaking rules. I think it’s this secret that enables us to chide Stephenie Meyer and our eighth graders for not following the rules all while celebrating James Joyce for basically writing the book on rule breaking.
