This week: Never Give Up Edited by: Lornda More Newsletters By This Editor
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Have you ever thought your writing is terrible? You might want to rethink it. Find out an interesting way to make your writing shine. |
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We’ve all been there with our writing. The words are flowing onto the page at a fast pace and without warning, it all comes to a sudden stop. You try to gather your thoughts on how to move forward but they’re non-existent. You might want to abandon the story idea, thinking it’s garbage.
You remember the expert’s advice to help shake it off. Take a break “they” say, skip a scene, or revisit your plot. What happens when you’ve tried all these tricks and still nothing hits you to start writing again?
First, it’s best not to think everything you’ve wrote is terrible. Try this interesting idea instead.
Alan Moore, a fiction and comics author, encourages writers not to read good books to help them write but to read bad ones instead. Why? Because you can learn a lot from a bad book and therefore, improve your writing. There’s nothing wrong with reading a good book. The problem is you will want to copy what they’ve done, and how exciting is it if you’re writing the same thing?
The bad books usually have flowery prose with too many details, adverbs in the dialog tags, passive characters, an uninteresting protagonist, or nothing happens with the plot.
What are some of the top bad books to get you started? Prepared to be surprised. Remember, these are the novels, not how they transpired into film:
Twilight – Stephanie Meyer
Fifty Shades of Grey – E. L. James
The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
If you still want to give up on your story after reading something bad, here’s one last piece of encouraging information to help.
Author Douglas Hall, wrote his first novel in 1968 on a dare from his wife. When he finished it, he thought it was awful. Did he give up? No. In this case, he did start over because he knew the characters were not believable and the plot was weak. His wife asked if he could do better and challenged him to rewrite it. She became his editor. On September 20th, 2023, he released his next book, Murder in Season. Guess how old he is? 94. He did not give up.
The next time you want to abandon a writing project, try reading something horrible. You'll come to the conclusion your writing isn't that bad. The best part? You’ve got until you're ninety odd years old and beyond to publish your masterpiece.
References:
Alan Moore's Advice
Douglas Hall Bio
Douglas Hall News Article with Latest Book Release
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