 For Authors: December 27, 2023 Issue [#12311] |
This week: The Best Writing Advice Edited by: Annette  
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The Best Writing Advice
“Show up, show up, show up, and after a while the muse shows up, too.” - Isabel Allende. With over 70 million books in print that were translated into 35 languages, Allende is miles ahead of many writers. Don't take it from me, take it from her that practice is the way to get good at writing. Join writing challenges, find contests to enter, or blogging groups that give you prompts. As long as it gets you to show up.
“This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until it’s done. It’s that easy, and that hard.” - Neil Gaiman. Again, the advice is the same. If you want to tell a story or write a poem, you will have to do just that. Nobody said it would be easy. Not even Gaiman thinks it's easy, although he has a talent to make it look easy.
“Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.” - Zadie Smith. Writing takes time. Good writing takes more time. It's okay to throw a first draft into an item here on Writing.Com. However, critical reviews can ruin your ride. Keep your story near and dear to your heart for a while. Give the story all that you have got. Then, let it rest for a few days before you go back in to edit and revise. Only when you think it has reached a good, solid shape that can hold its own, should you let others read and review your work.
“You can’t wait for inspiration, you have to go after it with a club.” - Jack London. Well traveled, London had a lot of real-life adventures to draw from. Maybe that's why his writing advice includes such hands-on advice as to grab a club. Even if you can't or don't want to travel to get ideas for your fiction, you have something he didn't have. The World Wide Web. Watch documentaries. Find travel blogs. If you can, ask friends who have traveled to tell you their stories.
Last but not least
"Quantity produces quality. If you only write a few things, you're doomed." - Ray Bradbury. Coming full circle to Allende's advice, Bradbury also thinks that there is no such thing as writing a little bit and have all of it be great. Write a lot. And when you don't like it, move on. For now. Never delete anything. You never know when a sentence, a phrase, even a single word that you typed up will be the missing piece to a great story that you're telling.
What bit of writing advice that you got has stayed with you and helped you? |
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Replies to my last For Authors newsletter ""A Certain Dreadful Fascination"" that asked Is it really surprising that Stephen King is not terrified by AI?
Damon Nomad  wrote: Thoughtful newsletter on AI in writing. Think back just five years ago, there was no conversation about AI in writing. There were other worries about it, like taking over defense systems. I don't think most writers saw it coming. Imagine where it might be in another five years. If we carbon-based life forms are still here. 
You are so right. Five years ago, AI was mostly a rudimentary program that was helping with small coding tasks here and there. I think the defense systems takeover could be a possibility, but I think they would disable weapons rather than misfire them.
Quick-Quill  wrote: I forgot to cancel the free AI trial for a year (grrrr) now I'm such with something I don't understand and tried once. The AI couldn't write anything I wanted. I put in the perimeters, and it still tried to give me something I couldn't use. I don't get how this thing works. How would it produce a story you would write?
What a bummer! I have not (yet, I guess) been trapped having to pay for something after a "free" trial expires. I can feel your frustration with the payment and with the system ... that doesn't even work.  |
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