Best Writing Advice Ever

Tsk, tsk. If actually selling the book is the kind of thing you care about ...

But seriously, some people do seem to do most of the writing and revising in their heads, then they write it up and have it polished and ready to go after a single draft. Not my way. (I like to obsess over every word, on and off the page.) But it works for them.
 
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The older I get, the more uncomfortable I am with giving prescriptive writing advice. So many people - many of them more successful than me - work in completely different ways. The two things I would recommend to everyone, however, are to keep writing and keep learning. I find it hard to be more specific than that (although I probably will try!).
 
The best writing advice for me was that all writing advice is opinion and should only be taken seriously if you have tested it.

I had been writing a few years when I became increasingly annoyed with all the books and articles telling what to do and, particularly, what not to do, so I started trying to prove the advice wrong. This took me down many blind and frustrating alleys, but I discovered the best - perhaps only - way to learn from mistakes is to make them.

I'm glad all this happened before the internet, as the temptation to take short cuts based on gratuitous writing 'advice' must be overwhelming for new writers these days.
 
Best advice I've heard, and wish in impart on aspiring speculative writers...

Do NOT take yourself and your work too seriously.

Sc-Fi, IMHO, is supposed to be absurd, far flung, and a satirical view of the world that is, not just the world that could be. Some of the best works in the genre come from lunatics with black, guillotine senses of humor. (You're talking to a guy who grew up being warped by guys like: Alan Moore, Douglas Adams, Harlan Ellison, etc...)

One cannot be too full of themselves to write ballads about aliens and dystopian societies. Leave that pretension to people who fashion themselves the next Lee Child.
 
Teresa Edgerton said:
But seriously, some people do seem to do most of the writing and revising in their heads, then they write it up and have it polished and ready to go after a single draft. Not my way. (I like to obsess over every word, on and off the page.) But it works for them.
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This is how I do it.
But it is a high risk strategy, and you do need a bit of experience to make it work.
 
I think the point is your work can take a light-hearted view of the world and you might need a light-hearted attitude to make that successful.

So one might be light-hearted in order to be serious about their light-hearted work.
 
The more absolutely sure someone is that their way is the right way, the less you should listen.
 
I keep hearing about letting the main character drive the story. As I understand it, if you know that the main character wants, why they can't have it, and how they are trying to get it, and then throw that character in a setting/world with an equally complex antagonist (and whatever messy plot twists you want = be as mean as you want to your main character), the story will practically write itself.

Gosh, doesn't that sound easy??:p

I am having fun trying it out, but it's messy, and I can't vouch for it's success, other than the fun aspect.
 
Cathbad said:
I always tell people my characters write my stories for me. Truth is, though, they usually seem to be conspiring against me!
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Too true! :)
I recently heard from an author that you can't control a character, you can only follow their journey...but I've heard other authors who get angry at that kind of thinking. Can't remember the writer, but she was very upset by that--she said something like, "You can too control your character--YOU'RE THE WRITER!"

Whatever advice you want, you can probably find it out there somewhere!
 
Ha, frustration and bad luck are key elements in the Sir Edric stories :p

But that's partly a different point, because comedy can sometimes have different rules. I'd argue you can put in a section that has zero relevance to the story (provided it doesn't contradict it) if it has comedic value.
 
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Stephen Palmer said:
Perhaps it'd be better to say; don't take yourself seriously, but take your work seriously?
(I think authors should...)
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Point. But, in my experience, some of my best works (i.e. ones that have actually gotten good reviews and made a little change) were ones I personally thought were throwaway pieces. Sometimes the stuff you think is brilliant is actually not so much, and sometimes the material you might think is crap actually clicks with readers.
 
MikeAnderson said:
Point. But, in my experience, some of my best works (i.e. ones that have actually gotten good reviews and made a little change) were ones I personally thought were throwaway pieces. Sometimes the stuff you think is brilliant is actually not so much, and sometimes the material you might think is crap actually clicks with readers.
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It's hard so second guess what people will like. I had a meeting with a movie producer ten years ago. He liked one of my scripts, but wanted to develop something new and asked me to give him 10 loglines (one-sentence story ideas). I had half a dozen solid ideas, but it took me weeks to think of another four, and the last one was agony. Eventually, feeling pressure to get back to him, I came up with an awful throw-away story to round out the list and, of course, that was the one he chose.

We spent a few months developing the idea into a screenplay, but then he lost interest. It was, after all, awful.
 
It's hard so second guess what people will like. I had a meeting with a movie producer ten years ago. He liked one of my scripts, but wanted to develop something new and asked me to give him 10 loglines (one-sentence story ideas). I had half a dozen solid ideas, but it took me weeks to think of another four, and the last one was agony. Eventually, feeling pressure to get back to him, I came up with an awful throw-away story to round out the list and, of course, that was the one he chose.

We spent a few months developing the idea into a screenplay, but then he lost interest. It was, after all, awful.
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That story could itself be the basis for a script :giggle:
 
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