The Reader Wants to Buy the Car! (A Writer's Pep Talk)
All right, I'm done editing a huge couple of 400 page projects (see the anthology zine "Brotherhood 7" and the Supernatural zine "Brotherhood 8", see [ Pyramids Press ], see trade paperbacks that ate my life for the past several months, see I'm way too addicted to caffeine now) and I was actually crunching down and writing again
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The Manifesto of Done
by Bre Pettis & Kio Stark
1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
3. There is no editing stage.
4. Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.
5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
7. Once you’re done you can throw it away.
8. Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.
9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
11. Destruction is a variant of done.
12. If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
13. Done is the engine of more.
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As long as the emotion is there and the author can show me something new about the characters, I'm pretty forgiving about all the niceties. And by something new, I don't mean you can't still use an old standby plot--every author brings a new slant towards even the old favorites.
All that being said, once you get your ideas and the plot down on paper, a good beta and/or editor can help to make things clearer, get rid of awkward phrasing, and lessen those pesky tipoes...er, typos.
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