Author Topic: advice to a young/new writer  (Read 2100 times)

cenwolfgirl

  • Guest
advice to a young/new writer
« on: May 04, 2012, 04:07:08 PM »
okay i have been writing for nearly five years but my aim is to colect all the advice and helpful sights you have found that you would recomend or give to some one just starting out

my reasons
i have a friend who is about my age who has just started writing and i am not the mest person to ask for giving advice its not rely a strong point of mine but i rely want to help her and i think it might help others on the forum as well
so please help if you can, most of you have more exspirence with this then me  ;D

CWG
« Last Edit: May 04, 2012, 04:34:39 PM by cenwolfgirl »

Offline the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh

  • O. M. G.
  • ***
  • Posts: 39098
  • Riding eternal, shiny and Firefox
    • View Profile
Re: advice to a young/new writer
« Reply #1 on: May 04, 2012, 06:23:41 PM »
Hrrm.  Trying to boil it down to what would be most useful to someone only just starting is not easy.

I think the first thing, would be; find a working habit that reliably generates the actual words.  Some people strongly advocate writing every day; if that works for you, fine, but you can still be a real writer if it doesn't.  (Extreme example for a real and successful genre writer's habits is that I've heard Iain Banks say that his process is to write a novel in six weeks of panic and spend the rest of the year goofing off.)  My own practise is to write one night a week, usually Friday, and catch up in advance if I am going to be away, and that has been pretty reliable in terms of generating a novel's worth of words a year.

Second; it's going to take a while.  There's a lot to learn, and it takes a lot of actual writing to learn it.  The chances of any individual new writer both being a once-in-a-generation brilliant genius from the get go and being recognised as such and picked up from the start are negligible; but becoming a better writer than you are is possible and worth doing.

Third; good beta-readers are more valuable than plutonium dust.  Good readers should ideally; understand and sympathise with what you are trying to achieve; be entirely willing to tell you what sucks about your work, no matter how hard it was to achieve it, and equally be able to see and reinforce what's good in it; and absolutely ideally, should be moderately better writers than you are. (Writers less good than you aren't helpful sources of advice for obvious reasons; writers much better than you are likely to have points to make you basically won't really get, until you have got closer to their level.)  It helps to learn not to take "this book is not doing a thing i am interested in" as "this book sucks", too.

Fourth, be familiar with your genre.  If you're writing a book set on Mars, get some handle on what the classic Mars novels are - because whether you want to be like them or not, people are going to compare your work to them.

Fifth, don't only read genre.  The failure mode of doing that is writing books that read as bad rip-offs of bad rip-offs of bad rip-offs of Tolkien.  besides, the more widely you read, the more cool stuff you find that you can use. (As William Goldman says, everything is research; you just have to figure out what it's research for.)

Oh, and number six; it's perfectly fine to start with exercises in learning how to do a certain thing.  To write stories where you're trying to get a plot to hold together and will worry about making the characters emotionally real later, and so on.  Keep track of what you're trying to learn when you're writing something.  It's also perfectly fine to have a great story idea and realise you're not up to it yet, and work on something else first.
« Last Edit: May 04, 2012, 06:28:15 PM by the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh »
Mildly OCD. Please do not troll.

"What do you mean, Lawful Silly isn't a valid alignment?"

kittensgame, Sandcastle Builder, Homestuck, Welcome to Night Vale, Civ III, lots of print genre SF, and old-school SATT gaming if I had the time.  Also Pandemic Legacy is the best game ever.

cenwolfgirl

  • Guest
Re: advice to a young/new writer
« Reply #2 on: May 04, 2012, 06:27:49 PM »
wow thank you that rely helps  ;D

Offline The Deposed King

  • Posty McPostington
  • ***
  • Posts: 2347
  • Persuasion is the key to success.
    • View Profile
    • Luke Sky Wachter Blog
Re: advice to a young/new writer
« Reply #3 on: May 05, 2012, 09:36:59 PM »
okay i have been writing for nearly five years but my aim is to colect all the advice and helpful sights you have found that you would recomend or give to some one just starting out

my reasons
i have a friend who is about my age who has just started writing and i am not the mest person to ask for giving advice its not rely a strong point of mine but i rely want to help her and i think it might help others on the forum as well
so please help if you can, most of you have more exspirence with this then me  ;D

CWG

My advice surround yourself with what you want to do.  When I wanted to become a writer I found sights like, jim buter and bar.baen.com.  I went on line to baen's bar and bummed around in the slush pile, critiqueing, seeing what others did and what others said about it.  Then I posted a couple starter chapters.

Once you have a start you are proud of, I would not post chapter by chapter.  Everyone's got an opinion and often they diverge.  Find someone you can trust, or a couple someones.  Write your book, have them help you and then throw it out for the wolves.

I've heard people say write short stories, as a way to learn what you're doing.  Others suggest fan-fic, because everyone in this genre knows star trek or whatever you already know the characters.  I don't like either option as a personal preference.  But you have to go for it however works.  Just give it a go and try try try.  Get enough outside support to keep on keeping on.  Find someone who can help ra ra team for you if you need that.  Anyway just keep trying.  It took me about 8 years from the first time I tried to write a story to the point I did my first and so far only novel.


The Deposed King


Proverbs 22:7, "The rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is slave of the lender"

The Deposed King (a member of baen's bar)