A few words of advice. 500 words. Or 475 to be exact.
Advice is flung from all directions when you’re a writer.
Some is good. Most mediocre. Vaster amounts are bad. Here goes my twisted version
of it.
Gentle Reader, (that’s how one of my rejection letters started),
to be a writer, you must read. As much as you can. Get into a book. Read
classics. Read graphic novels. Re-read the books you should have read in high
school. Read new books. Read old. Read crappy books (up to page 100 and if it
still sucks toss it. That’s what Oscar Wilde told me.)
Second: Blog. Personally I have a love/hate thing with
blogging. My life is not that exciting to relay on a regular basis. Friends
plead for a blog about my job but I still need the money so I’m not doing that
today. Blogs should be short and full of content, if not for you, Gentle
Reader, than for me. The practice of blogging regularly puts you out there.
Hell, you might get discovered by an agent via blog, just like I thought I
might get noticed by a French modeling agency strolling the Santa Anita mall as
a zitty teenager, but it could happen.
Thirdly: Get into a writer’s group. Groups shatter the
bubbles you ensconce in while writing but it needs to be an arena of support
and a safe dry run for your work. If you don’t experience this then find
another group. There is nothing worse than writer’s groups where one jerk
usurps all the time with their hideous prose and talks smack about other
peoples. It took time to find my current cadre and I’ve been with them over 4
years now. Yeah, I felt weird joining a group called Moms Write because my kids
are the hairy 4-legged variety. But we meet on days I don’t work, at human
hours in the morning and seriously, all the women in Moms Write completely rock.
I am never bored with their readings. And maybe because my ego’s a bit on the
tender side, they like my work too, enough to tell me when to tweak it or toss
something out.
Fourth: Send your darlings to slaughter, a.k.a. submit. This
advice I received from an author as she signed her book for me; ‘the difference
between a writer and published writer is persistence.’ So since I am wrapping
up a novel, it might be nice to have some work published. Or I can wait for a
bored literary agent to troll this blog and believe me worthy of ink and paper.
Those first stings of rejection suck but that doesn’t mean your work does.
So there you have it. We’ll depart on this last bit of very
useful advice and I will leave you alone.
Gentle Reader: Go write.
