What’s the worst advice you’ve ever gotten about your writing?

I think the worst advice I’ve heard has been “Why bother starting that now? Aren’t you a little old to try something new?”

I guess some people think you have to be young to be a writer, that you have to start when you’re in your twenties in order to really make it in the publishing world. Well, I know plenty of older writers who are quite happy with their lives as writers, even though they started late. It’s not your age, it’s your skill that defines whether or not you’ll sell books. Laura Ingalls Wilder was in her 60s when she wrote the “Little House” books, and look how popular those are!

Another good whopper is “You have to be a best-seller to matter.”

Sure, it’d be great to have a New York Times Best-seller and make a fortune, but you can certainly be happy with less. And any author will have their followers, so you don’t have to be a best-seller to be a success.

What’s your personal worst advice?

Here are some more gems of wisdom from the experts at the Writer’s Track.

Nancy Knight: Never start a sentence with a semicolon.

Georgia McBride: This business runs on new material – we need it and we want it – but the submission guidelines are there for a reason.

Claire Eddy: If you have five editors, you have seven opinions.

Anthony Francis: My first advice is to write. Don’t think about it, don’t look for a market or an agent – just keep writing until you’re finished.

John Hartness: The Book of Your Heart – that Great Project you’ve been working on since high school – finish the piece of shit and shove it into a drawer. This is a business.

Debra Dixon: You’ve got to get some rejections or you have nothing to talk about at the bar.

Nancy Knight: There are two things you need – storytelling and technical ability.

There are even more great panels scheduled for today, too!

Some really good advice from Kevin J. Anderson and his wife, Rebecca Moesta. The panel was entitled “Things I Wish Some Pro Had Told Me.”

Here are some of the highlights:

• Always be professional. Dress professionally whenever you appear as your author-self. Act in a professional manner at all times – especially when you are online. It’s easy to forget that “The internet is forever” and say or do something unprofessional. An author is a public persona, so prepare to be “on stage” at any time.
• Always be kind. There is nobody so unimportant that you can afford to be unkind to them. Everyone is a potential reader, a fellow author, an editor or agent or publisher – and you don’t know who is who most of the time, so treat everyone politely. That author you dissed in public or on Facebook might just end up editing an anthology you really want to be part of.
• Don’t whine. If someone else has better success than you, don’t act like a child and complain about how much better your work is – get back to writing and prove it. Don’t bitch and moan about that short story assignment – turn it in and be grateful you have the opportunity. Nobody likes a whiner.
• Always do your best. No matter what you write, it’s going to be somebody’s introduction to your work. Make sure it’s a good example.
• Get used to rejection. Kevin’s first writing award is a trophy he got for having the most rejection slips at a conference. Rejection doesn’t mean you’re a failure – it means that particular editor or agent or publisher, for whatever reason, doesn’t want that particular work at that particular time. You have to put your best work out there until it sells.
• Don’t quit your day job. Writing is a risky business. Kevin and Rebecca have to write one extra book each year just to pay for health insurance. If you’ve got a job, no matter how little you like it, keep it for the benefits. When you’re regularly making the best-seller lists and have a couple of years’ worth of expenses in the bank, you can think about writing full time. Until then, play it safe.

Kevin and Rebecca’s website is a great place to read more. It also has a link to their publishing house and the writing seminar they run, called Superstars.

HERE’S a great site for writing advice!

I thought you might like reading a few of the “Rules for Writing” by some of the great writers. I got a lot of these from various workshops I’ve attended through the years.

Robert Heinlein’s Rules for Writing:

• You must write.
• You must finish what you write.
• You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order.
• You must put the work on the market.
• You must keep the work on the market until it is sold

 

Mark Twain’s Rules for Writing:

• A tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere.
• The episodes of a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help develop it.
• The personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others.
•  The personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there.
• When the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances, and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject in hand, and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say.
• When the author describes the character of a personage in his tale, the conduct and conversation of that personage shall justify said description.
• When a personage talks like an illustrated, gilt-edged, tree-calf, hand-tooled, seven-dollar Friendship’s Offering in the beginning of a paragraph, he shall not talk like a Negro minstrel at the end of it.
• Crass stupidities shall not be played upon the reader by either the author or the people in the tale.
• Events shall be believable; the personages of a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausibly set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable.
• The author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and their fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones.
• The characters in tale be so clearly defined that the reader can tell beforehand what each will do in a given emergency.

 

Kevin’s Eleven: Rules for Writing from Kevin J. Anderson

1. Shut up and write!
Real writers don’t sit around for hours whining about how they’re going to write that
book once they get time
2. Defy the empty page.
Put something down … anything!
3. Dare to be bad.
Just put something on the page, darn it! Even if it’s “insert description here”!
4. Turn off the editor in your head.
Write the scene; edit it once the entire thing is done! If you can’t think of a
word, put “XXX” and fix it later!
5. Try working on different projects at the same time.
Not everyone can, but if you get stuck on one thing, sometimes it helps just to switch
over and do something else. This does NOT mean switching from writing to video games!
Go from writing to editing or proof-reading galley sheets or another project
6. Use every minute.
Write whenever you have a minute to spare; don’t whine that you don’t have the time.
Write on the underground, in the doctor’s office, or while waiting for the children to
finish their piano lessons.
7. Set realistic goals and stick to them.
Not “I am going to write 3 chapters a day” but “I am going to write X sentences or X
pages” — and then hold yourself to that promise before you go to bed!
8. Try different writing methods.
Pen and paper; talking into a recorder; computer; typewriter; whatever works!
9. Create a good writing environment.
This includes a desk/computer set-up that does NOT result in you hunching over and
getting carpel-tunnel syndrome from a poor physical design — in addition to whatever
you need in order to write (Kevin likes rock music; Rebecca likes total quiet).
10. Get inspired.
This does not mean “wait for your muse to smack you upside your head” but “go out and
learn things that will make you want to write.” The more you know about, the more you
can write about convincingly!
11. Know when to stop.
You can’t keep fiddling with the thing forever — send it out!