Interesting link

This is from a professional writer and it has some nice bits of advice.

http://www.authorspublish.com/10-things-i-wish-i-knew-as-a-beginning-writer/

Goodgulf

That's a good link with some sound advice. Thanks for sharing.

I have to agree. I made some of the same mistakes. I wish I had started writing earlier in life. However, I purchased over $300.00 in - self-help writing books and they were a great help. Great piece, Goodfulf.

The eleventh- thing- he- wished- he- knew- before- he- began is ignore all advice especially if the advice is costing me money!

PS This is free advice but should you wish to make a contribution to my expenses Her Pinkness will be round with the collecting box in the morning!

I agree that some books on how to write are unhelpful or worse than useless. Two examples (neither of which I actually bought): A book whose author seemed to be obsessed, not with the creative part of writing, but with typing - she encouraged writers to type out a first draft, correct it, then type it all out again, then repeat the process, then type out a new copy for each publisher they sent it to - for no apparent reason. The mystery was solved by a glance at the original publishing date, which revealed that, although the book had a fresh modern cover and advertised itself as up-to-date, it had actually been written some decades earlier, before the invention of word processors!

Another book was absolutely dictatorial in the routine it expected the budding author to follow - they were to spend at least two hours in the morning and two in the afternoon sitting at their desk writing whatever came into their heads. At the end of each week they were to read through what they had written, discard 90% and condense the remainder down into one or two pages. If they went anywhere they were to carry, at all times, three notebooks and three pens of different colours, one for writing down descriptions of people, scenery and objects, one for recording dialogue (eavesdropping on strangers' private conversations was another part of the prescribed daily routine), and one for noting any ideas the author might have. After five years of this (and presumably having reduced himself to penury - there was no time in the routine for distractions such as working for a living), the author would, it was claimed, have produced his first book. After giving standard advice on submitting his work to publishers, the writer of this helpful guide concluded that the greatest lesson the would-be author would learn from this experience was "...that first books never sell"! I suspect the author of that book of attempting to improve the chances of getting his own work published by discouraging competition from new writers!

Well you know I think there is much to be said for the "grind it out" approach to writing. If you are going to write professionally it is important to treat it as a profession.

What I think is also usual is to find a venue like this where you can get good feedback on your stories to see what is working and what isn't. I know I have learned a lot from both the discipline of sitting down with my laptop and writing away and from the feedback i have received from other writers and readers.

A couple of years ago I was at a Con and attended a couple of panels put on by the various guest authors. The most interesting one was a panel put on by a guest author at short notice - she didn't know she was doing a panel until she saw it in the schedule and then remembered saying something like "and I might have time to do a panel" when she was booked.

Working without notes she led the same panel discussion that she had given at a different Con two weekends before. Of course she didn't cover everything she usually did (she apologised for that) but this left lots of time for free discussion about various points about Urban Fantasy.

When talking about the teen market (which was a market all the publishers were trying to tap) she shared one of her techniques with us: to get the pattern of dialogue down just right she had spent weeks going to a food court and listening to the teenage girls hanging out there. Girls who would talk about anything because there wasn't anyone around to hear them... Make that anyone important (they mentally dismissed her because she wasn't authority figure so she was just some adult lingering over lunch and typing some report - which meant she was nobody). Because she had done that she was able to incorporate all of today's slang and speech patterns into her book, really nailing the dialogue.

When she talked about that part of her research, I knew that if I ever tried to a book I wouldn't be targeting it to the teen market. There's a huge difference between a female writer in her early 40s spying on girls in their mid teens and a male of nearly any age doing the same. One's a woman lingering over a meal while the other is a creepy guy that mall security should check out.

Which is a very long winded way of saying that just because a technique works for some writers it doesn't mean that it will work for all writers.

Goodgulf

True - I've heard a few stories about the techniques writers use - P G Wodehouse, for example, used to pin the pages of his work all around the room at different heights - the higher the page, the higher his opinion of it - and endeavour to get all the pages at least up to the picture-rail level before sending them for publication, and there's one author (I forget who) who always wears a red cap when writing, so his friends and family can tell whether he's staring blankly out of the window because he's bored and could use some company, or staring blankly out of the window because he's hard at work and doesn't want to be disturbed.

It used to be the case, and I suspect still is, that people working on anything in the SF/Fantasy/Horror genre could get some very good advice on the USENET group rec.arts.sf.composition. Tom the point of specific near-professional (or better) critiques of small excerpts of a work. However i doubt they would touch spanking erotica.