(no subject)
I've picked up the bad habit of reading blogs targeted at beginning writers recently. The problem is, I'm not a beginning writer; I'm a wannabe writer. On a good day, I get a couple hundred words in, and good days are rare. One thing I've picked up from these blogs is that speed of writing is critical; you get better at the rate that you produce. The corollary is that things like research and revision, which might improve an individual story, hurt you as a beginning writer because they mean you aren't getting practice writing. If a story doesn't work, throw it away and start on the next one. But because I write so slowly, throwing away a story is very difficult, and I'm more likely to unproductively fuss and pick at it, which just makes me slower. I hear about an author having to throw away 20,000 words that weren't working in a draft of a novel, and think, well, that's a hundred rare good days, when to them it was ten average ones.
At the Patrick Rothfuss signing I went to, the pithy bit of writing advice he gave during the Q&A was "Just write!" Well, thank you Captain True But Unhelpful!
I suppose if writing is going to be just a a source of angst, the appropriate advice would be "OK just don't write then." But I have stories to tell.
At the Patrick Rothfuss signing I went to, the pithy bit of writing advice he gave during the Q&A was "Just write!" Well, thank you Captain True But Unhelpful!
I suppose if writing is going to be just a a source of angst, the appropriate advice would be "OK just don't write then." But I have stories to tell.