^ Thread title Mine was, "Don't write xyz because someone could be looking over your shoulder and might get upset about it." Probably did a number on my creativity.
Adverbs are a sign of weakness. Cutting them out became a giant distraction. Now i put them in and cut them out afterwards if they don't add anything.
Not to use "JT Woody" as my writers name because it has sexual implications and people may get the wrong impression of me and my writing because of it (my 9th grade male english teacher) ....it did bother me for a while. I was embarrassed after he said that and stopped using it, even though it is, in fact, my name shortened (my name is 9 letters long). I stopped using it for a while but as you can see now, im still using it.
Meh, your teacher probably just had a dirty mind and didn't want to confess it. I've seen you around the forums for a long time and I've never thought of your name as a sexual thing.
If that were the case, imagine how Dean R. Koontz feels! Anyway, I'd say more cartoon woodpeckers than sexual connotations.
This is a huge problem for new writers and one I faced a lot in my early years. Be wary of people who "edit-on-the-fly." I'm talking about those beta readers or editors who literally stop at every other word or sentence and ask, "what's this," "who's this character," "you just name-dropped a location I've never heard of," etc, etc, etc. Well, if you had just finished the paragraph, you'd know! *sigh* I had a lot of readers who critiqued my work like that and it made me extremely anxious. I would agonize for days over the first words of every chapter, because I felt this immense pressure to get it right, as if I only get one shot and if I don't nail it, my readers are going to throw the book against the wall and never come back. In truth, most readers are more patient than you think and suspense and foreshadowing holds them better than playing your entire hand at once ever could. But that takes confidence I just didn't have at the time and no one was trying to cultivate. Once I learned to not give a fuck and let the story "breathe" for a moment instead of bending to the whims of people who think every word I write needs to make full, complete, sense the moment they read it, I became a much better writer. I think it has actually become part of my style now. I love to pull the curtain back slowly because, for years, I was (wrongly) told you gotta snatch it off at once. I was never bluntly told to do so, but it was heavily implied.
"You must write every day." No you don't need to do that. Obviously don't procrastinate, but if your writing isn't getting anywhere, best to take a break. Otherwise you'll end up with tons of crap you'll need to wade through and discard ...which can be VERY discouraging. When you hit a dry spell, don't just sit churning out words. See what you can do to regain your enthusiasm. Lots of people like to go for walks, to get ideas flowing. Whatever it takes. But don't just sit grimly churning out x number of words per day, if your heart isn't in it. Do what you can to rediscover where your heart is.
I'd give you two likes if I could because I agree with that 100%. Not everything needs to be explained immediately, and sometimes it doesn't get explained at all. Sometimes it's just the flavor of the words that's important. Some carry a mood and not a meaning. Sometimes they're explained later, indirectly, when their context becomes clear. I think some would-be-editors get too impatient. They feel the tension of a small mystery and think that's a bad thing. I mean, this isn't middle school history class. Not every term needs to be followed with an explanation. It's okay to get a little lost in the paragraph. (IMO, of course. haha)
Totally agree. Unless you're commissioned to write something because your 'name' already sells, I can't imagine why someone would 'write every day' or have a fixed quota of words to get down on the page every day. Surely that's like trying to eat sawdust, unless you're inspired? I once saw a form on a literary agent's website trying to quantify the writers' ideas and process - I was amazed that someone would try to impose an accounting model on creativity and inspiration - to compute how profitable a prospective author is likely to be on their books.
Mind you, I wasn't trying to say that you shouldn't write every day. Some writers prefer to do that, and find that the routine settles them. Whatever works for you. But I get very annoyed at the suggestion that if you don't write every day, you're not a real writer. There is more to writing than just getting words down there. Sometimes if you hit a dry spell it's because there is a problem with your story itself (plot or characters or POV isn't quite right) ...and that can take some insight and a bit of thought to get it going again. And then there is research time as well.
"Produce, produce, produce...." Just cause you can write the same story a billion ways to Sunday, doesn't mean much in terms of my writing habits and style. I mean it's great that you write a lot, but are you really telling a new story? Probably not, just the same one with a few minor tweaks to make it appear 'different'. Better to have one interesting story, than a 1000 copy/paste stories.
Dry spells are a good time to go back and edit your stuff. I take the chapter I'm stuck on and edit it over and over until the words start flowing out again.
"Get rid of this part because it makes the character look childish." The character is childish. The entire point of the story is to show how competent they are at fantasy and yet also incompetent at real life. "What? I'd like your character better if she tried to escape." My character was in a building surrounded by aliens who are all taller and stronger than her. This building is on an alien planet. All the other humans present (less than ten) are unconscious and hooked into machines that the MC does not know how to operate. It would be literally the most stupid thing she could do to fight the aliens. Basically I guess this boils down to a reader expecting my character to follow her ideas. Reading/writing is about communicating one's own views, not repeating tropes ad nauseum. As far as generic writing advice goes, I'd say "you don't need to outline, improvisation is best" is really one of the worst ideas. There's always an aspect of improvisation to writing, but writing your story out into a plan while your inspiration is fresh means that you have a starting point once you hit the hard work part of the process.
If what the critic or reader says makes sense to you, it's a good idea to think about what they said. If, for example, you DIDN'T want your character to appear childish, then you might want to figure out why a reader thought they were. Or if the childishness annoys the reader, and you didn't intend it to have that effect, maybe see if you can find a way to make their childishness less annoying. These are all good feedback tips. But if the person is trying to get you to write a different story or character, then at some point you just thank them for their input and move on. The trick is in your last sentence: If you have actually communicated what you intended, and your readers have picked it up correctly, you're okay. They don't have to like what they've picked up! But there is often a large gap between what you intended to say, and what the reader 'gets.' Try to bridge that gap whenever possible.
I think that's a very good idea. Not only does it get you back into your style flow, but you might actually discover where things went wrong, and get an idea of how to fix it. I'd caution writers to beware of non-stop premature tinkering though. Everything has to be perfect before carrying on? That's the quickest way to a dead end I can conceive of ...because writing will never be perfect! And you can certainly screw up while editing, same as while doing the first draft. I know, I know ...bummer....
Trust me, I'm aware. This beta reader....well, she had her own ideas. We did a swap, and well, I guess I should be gracious. Let's just say she had too much emphasis on wordcount and not nearly enough on things making sense. She also got on my case for describing a dragon as puppy-like. This, despite the fact that dragons aren't real, there's variation enough in the types of dragon, and even in the context of my story the dragon was imaginary.
"A romantic story must have a happy ending". The main example being "Romeo and Juliet". Because it ends in tragedy and death. Yeah, well, unless it's a story about Vampires (or other immortals), EVERY story revolving around romance has the same endgame - death. "Romeo and Juliet", in my opinion, is a tragic-romance. Or a tramance... Which I've just coined.
You nailed it here. I concur with everything you said. I detest these self-appointed 'statesmen' judges of one's work who 'dispense from on high' their (usually inaccurate, uninspired) input. It reminds me of my golf days when in every group there was a 'teacher guy' who craved to spend the whole time on the course correcting others' swings. It was all about inflating his own ego by punishing a captive audience too polite to object.
Mine was 'make every page absolutely perfect before you proceed to write the next page.' This nearly derailed me altogether. I slugged through for years and years, quitting and resuming over and over. The main damage it did was to my mindset (and confidence). ...which is why I am not a little bit skeptical today when it comes to fielding feedback. The person who gave me this advice was a nationally known published author who at that point had had 85 books published (now his number is above 125, I think). Also, when he referenced perfect he was ONLY talking about grammar/style, not content at all. So my young innocent self was left with the impression that grammar was what really counts in writing a story. Total hogwash, which I soon learned on my own. Yep. Barely averted tragedy there, lol.
You can't imagine how often I heard the same from people I trusted editing my writing. I like not to be obvious and develop and share some info about characters step-by-step. I don't like to explain everything too quickly, and I love when there is some intrigue. And at the beginning, when I was told that readers won't understand something or won't understand characters without explanation, I was not upset but maybe unmotivated. Unmotivated because I thought that I was not good. But in time, I understood that it's part of my style, and I won't change it. There will always be some people, who will not understand you as a writer, and who may not like your story, but it's how everything works in our live. Some people will like you and your writing, and someone won't.
