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7 Writing Myths I Just Made Up So I Could Debunk Them
Yes, there are lots of actual writing and publishing myths out there worthy of review. But everyone else writes about those. Surely you’ve stumbled across a post or two debunking such common myths as “literary agents are out to kill your writing dreams” and “first-time novelists don’t have a chance in hell of getting published.” You don’t need yet another post about those myths, do you? No, you don’t. What you do need is this post in which I make up some writing and publishing myths of my own. Just so I can debunk them. Isn’t this more fun anyway? Oh, and I might have tried to stuff some actual…
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Writing Advice You Should Definitely Ignore
The title of this post is not some clever reverse psychology trick. You really shouldn’t listen to this advice. It’s bad for you and it goes against everything you’ve ever heard from all those lovely and wise literary agents out there. The Chips and Nathans and Janets and the rest. (I’m not being sarcastic here. All the agents I’m thinking of are completely lovely and incredibly competent and smell like cupcakes.) So why am I writing this post? Because sometimes advice that’s perfect for The Many is perfectly wrong for The Few. I’m not saying it’s bad to be among The Many. It’s actually a great place to be as…
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The Truth Below the True
I’m not going to tell you my true story. Not just because it’s decidedly uneventful for the first four decades or so (apart from the usual stuff – saying clever things as a toddler, enduring the “let’s get Steve and his older brother matching sailor suits, won’t that be cute?” miscues of otherwise wonderful parents, leaving home, getting married, having kids, taking the occasional vacation, discovering unique ways to incorporate bacon into daily life), but because some of the story, particularly the season that begins just after those first four decades, features choices and consequences and events that, if published, could end up hurting Real Life People. No matter how…
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The Voices In Your Head
I suppose it’s possible to be a writer and not suffer from some variation of multiple personality disorder, but I haven’t yet met one who isn’t at least circumstantially Sybilic. I’m not talking about the characters you create who take up temporary residence in your gray matter, I’m referring to the diverse and often contradictory voices that all claim ownership of your publishing success. There’s Clueless Cheerleader, for example. She’s always saying things like “You can do it!” and “Write, baby, write!” and “Every word you write is one word closer to ‘The End’!” Everything she says ends with an exclamation point and she doesn’t care what the other voices are…
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Good Agent, Bad Agent
Let’s pretend for a moment that you’re a really brilliant un-agented, unpublished writer and you’ve recently finished final edits on a truly brilliant novel. Yesterday you queried a bunch of agents and today you got five “The Call” calls. Don’t laugh. We’re playing “let’s pretend,” remember? How do you decide which agent will share 15 percent of your inevitable Very Nice Deal? By gleaning great wisdom from this handy-dandy agent guide, that’s how.* A Good Agent…will have some difficulty managing her excitement about representing you, occasionally letting slip words like “amazing” or “lyrical” or “compelling” in the course of her comments about your novel. She will talk about your novel’s…
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Publishing: 10 Years from Now
You’ve read everybody else’s predictions. You’ve heard from the experts. The insiders. The pundits. Well, goody for you. Those prognosticators may have knowledge. They may have expertise. They may even have credibility. But what they don’t have…is a really good imagination. So forget all those boring predictions and trust mine instead. They’re based on years of…okay, fine. They’re not based on anything at all. I just made ’em up this morning. In ten years… Those infinite monkeys with their ubiquitous typewriters will have successfully written Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and subsequently declared it “notably inferior to The Tempest.” Then they will throw feces at each other. 73 percent of people…