I've got a good idea?
There's a "Ten Things I knew about writing" meme going around, that I find very interesting. I found it so interesting I went to ljseek, entered "ten things writing" and nosed around.
Some people have said things that struck me as true, interesting, or just well said. Here's some of the ones that caught my attention.
to_cry_about, here: 2. Advice from my English teacher grandmother: "Don't use a thesaurus. The word you come up with organically is usually the right one." (ed.-- Word)
7. Don't write what you know. Write what you love. We've all read those smug asshole literary novels with the matte covers and the massive paragraphs of sneering description, in which it's obvious that the writer has observed his characters very closely and hated them. (In this, fans are way ahead of most students in a creative writing class.) Don't be a condescending shit. Write what you love, even if you're angry at it or afraid for it.
8. I buy a lot of books, more than I should. I'll be tempted by the pretty cover, sure. A good blurb might sucker me in. And yes, if I open it up and find a flood of beautifully-turned sentences inside, I'll probably buy it. And then when I get it home and crack that mofo open, it's usually stagnant and dull, in spite of the fabulous imagery and perfectly balanced paragraphs. I don't finish the book. The moral is that YOU ARE THE STORY'S BITCH and shit had better HAPPEN and people better be FUNNY. The only authors who I forgive for not being funny are Russians, and even then, Nabokov was hilarious. If you think your story's too fucking serious to give the reader a break, you read Hamlet and get back to me.
Fabu in this post:
2. Your problem as a writer is the characters' (or a character's) problem, and the way to resolve it is to deal with it within the story. Over and over again I find that I'm blocked, that I can't figure out how to resolve a plot point, and when I simply write that confusion and uncertainty into the story, it begins to come untangled. Often the difficulty is that I'm trying to leapfrog over the part where the characters figure out how to solve the problem and present it as a deus ex machina, or I'm not realizing that the lack of a neat and tidy answer is the really important thing about the story. Either way, by trying to deal with it externally to the story, I'm not allowing things to progress organically and honestly, and that's impeding my forward progress.
3. Writers are often poor judges of what their general strengths and weaknesses are. Something I've noticed in many live journal discussions is that someone will rant about X (say poorly written, unrealistic sex scenes or awful dialect) and the people who are actually guilty of X will blithely carry on, oblivious to the insult. The writers who take it to heart and are convinced that it was all a veiled attack on them are the ones who don't have that problem at all! Often the things that people compliment about my writing are the very things that I think are my weaknesses. I don't know if it's because we all have our pet issues that we obsess and worry about, and so those things tend to be very polished in our finished work (and also the things that we're most sensitive about when we hear people ranting), or what, but I've come to believe that it's a rare writer who can readily identify her/his own problem areas.
I agree with almost all of gvwilson's ten things, here. 2. It's never going to be perfect, so learn to be satisfied with "damn good".
3. Only a supreme egotist writes purely for himself.
4. If you can't accept praise gracefully, you probably can't accept criticism either.
6. You can have an Internet connection or five hundred words an hour, but not both. (ed.-- Tragically true)
7. If you didn't enjoy writing it, no one will enjoy reading it.
8. (Fiction) A sequence of events is not a story. (Non-fiction) A sequence of facts teaches nothing.
9. The world is full of intriguing oddities; good books should be too.
Matmatociquala's ten things I've learned by hanging around with Elizabethan poets is worth reading, too.
misia, in a post here.
5. Writing is not romantic. If you wait for inspiration to come and whisper sultry nothings in your ear, you'll be waiting for a long long time. Incidentally, neither booze nor other drugs help. They just make you write a lot of shit that looks good at the time and awfully embarrassing later on.
6. Having a dog is a big help to the working writer. Having a dog means that you will take breaks a few times a day to walk your dog. Just as we have to get up and go to work like everyone else, we also have to learn how to take breaks, which can be difficult when you don't have co-workers or a working schedule that is built in by the work environment.
6a. If you are stuck on something, go walk the dog. Chances are good that by the time you've put a mile or two between you and the stuff you're working on, it'll sort itself out.
6b. When you are in the middle of a flow and things are coming beautifully and it's all just pouring out of you, go walk the dog. On the off chance that what's pouring out is completely wrong in some way that you can't see because you're too enchanted by the delicious feeling of being caught up in midstream, walking the dog will give you time to realize what's not working and maybe how to fix it. And if it all truly is working as well as it feels like it is, walking the dog will give you a chance to think through what's coming and beyond, which gives you the opportunity to perhaps extend the flow even further than it would otherwise go.
(ed.-- Have I ever mentioned I came up with the whole of "Able to Succeed" while walking a dog I like to refer to sarcastically and with contempt as "Pretty Princess?" If you don't have a story idea by the end of the walk, you've probably straightened out one you already had.)
Betty's writing things
- Sometimes it's easy. Sometimes there is blood. My readers don't seem to be able to tell which are which.
- When I think I can't write anything, I unplug my internet for ten minutes, and it turns out I can.
- When I'm stalled, writing is the only cure. Write the part I fear, skip all the intervening bits and write the ending, just write something.
- Plot isn't enough to move the story forward. I have to need something from the characters: a moment of realization, growth, porn, something. The plot is how I get them there. (If I bother with plot at all, that is.)
- My writing process is unaccountably more interesting to me than it is to other people.
- Dishonesty with myself in a story just doesn't work. Ever.
- These things feel like cheating: writing death-fic, writing fluff, writing cuddles, writing domestic scenes. I cheat all the time.