SETTING FREE THE SACRED COWS OF WRITING ADVICE – Chuck Wendig
#Cockygate
A good article about someone trying to trademark a common word.
Why Every Author—and Reader—Should Care about #Cockygate – Jami Gold
Would-be writer, beware.
Maggie Stiefvater – How I Write
i’ve mentioned before how much I admire Maggie Stiefvater’s writing. She is generous about sharing her experience, and you can find many of her posts at:
A step beyond
Talented writing makes things happen in the reader’s mind — vividly, forcefully — that good writing, which stops with clarity and logic, doesn’t.
~ SFWA Grand Master Samuel R. Delany
The secret locked within
The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them — words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they’re brought out. But it’s more than that, isn’t it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you’ve said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That’s the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.
~ Stephen King
How important is talent to writing?
How much of writing success is talent, and how much comes from experience, persistence, hard work?
https://themillions.com/2014/11/magical-thinking-talent-and-the-cult-of-craft.html
The horrors of “As”
“If you want a study of how to avoid those other prose crutches — though, but, however, yet, and even, too, just — read him line by line, then search those words in your own story files, then maybe ask yourself why you know his name, and nobody knows yours.”
Strangeness
Strangeness is the one quality in fiction that cannot be faked.
~ John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist
Write that first novel
“They say everybody has a novel inside them, and that’s usually the best place to keep it. Really.”
I think that’s snarky and facile and not helpful at all.
Keep that novel inside you, and you’ll never get to writing the second, third, or fourth book that hopefully will be better.
I, an unpublished nobody, say: write that first book. Just don’t expect too much of it, and don’t stop there.