Whats the best writing advice you've ever seen/heard?

[Atilium]

Mine would probably be "Write to please one person." What about you guys?

[Delightful]

"Don't write one story, teach yourself to be someone who writes stories". Working on that one

 

(suprise surprise, I'm fairly certain I heard that one from Brandon)

[Argent]

Write.

[Tempus]

Argent is correct, every writer will tell you that the most important thing is to write everyday. I don't think this counts as writing advice, though, so much as it is business advice. Any self-employed work from home person will tell you that the hardest thing about the work is keeping yourself motivated, dedicated, and producing habitually. As most writers are in this situation, that's pretty much where they're at, and why that advice crops up again and again.

 

As for actual writing advice, Cory (Doctorow) always talked about narrowing your focus. This applied to both the work environment and the narrative. When you're writing, write, when you're researching, research. Don't mix them together. He said once that he often leaves off in the middle of a sentence, so when he comes back he has no choice but to finish that one specific sentence in order to continue. Narrative too - each paragraph should be about one thing, each section about one thing, each chapter about one thing, etc.

 

Steven King is well know for his advice 'Kill your babies', which I like. The basic concept is that whatever part of the book you like the most is probably the part that's gratuitous self-indulgence, and should be cut because when you wrote it you weren't thinking about making a better story, but just pleasing yourself.

[king of nowhere]

that actually made me think of an article I read a few months ago, about a guy who went to a writing lecture that was apparently attended by some third-rate authors whose goal was not to teach people how to write, but to discourage a possibly future cuncurrence. It was titled "ten advices on writing you'd never want to receive", and while it is in italian, I'll do my best to translate it faithfully (unfortunately i can't really render all the style and the slang; my translation lacks the same verve and is not as funny as the original).
 

 

1) it would be better for you to abandon the insane proposition of writing

I know you'll find it hard to believe, but there isn's one school in the world that tries in every way to demoralize the students like a writing school. Maybe the thing will seem to you so retarded that you'll say no, that's an exaggeration, but instead it's just like that, like you went to the restaurant and the waiter went to you and gave you a head full saying no mister, listen to me, putting aside that you're already fat, you should know that when you eat you fight with death, and besides you have no idea what kind of filth they put into food nowadays. Here, the school is exactly like that. except, of course, they make you pay in advance.

 

2) Too many books are published in italy

You won't find one, just one, that after exactly then minutes won't bug you with that bs. It's only that they are the ones saying that, those who write and publish those books, and what one can say? Eh, too many books are published, and the problem is that most of them are yours.

 

3) But in italy everyone has a novel in the closet

Putting aside that I never understood what's worng with having a novel in the closet; I'd understand a loaded gun with the safe off when you have three kids at home, but a novel, and in the closet. and I also have to say that in the town i left behind I knew a big bunch of guys. Let's say that between long time friends, school mates, university mates, gym mates, acquaintances and got lost in one evening, girlfriends, ex-boyfriends of girlfriends, people you found out boned your girlfirends, the only one with some timid literary velleity was me. one, let's say, in three hundreds. Now, either there's a place with three hundreds friends all with a novel in their closet, or someone is  storming lieing.

 

4) Before writing you must read. But you don't read

Ok, I see, you have to say something, but. You take one like me, who did nothing but read in his life, and in the end after reading even the phone listings decided to spend a wagonload of money in a writing school to get some advice on writing and maybe a hint on publishing: one like me, let's say, goes there, of course after you got payed, and you tell him, blank-faced, eh but you don't read. what the hell you don't read? what do you know? I tell them, let's make a test, and interview, and they nil: you don't read. Or maybe you don't read enough. Or you read wrong. Or even (I swear I actually heard it) you read too much.

 

5) It's not like since you were good in literature in school you also can write

This, I confess, is my absolute favourite, because it approaches personal offence, mortifies those few and far-between satisfactions that you got after years of studies, and because it was absolutely gratuitous, in its abstruse pettyness. I mean, to say, I remember when after middle school we had to choose, who the lyceum, who the classic, who the scientific, who the professional school. And then, of those few left after the high schools, at the university who physics, who literature, who political sciences. And I won't say all, but most of those choices were based on some hint of passion, a shadow of inclination, and then you arrive here and they erase it. If you listen to them, you should have gone calling yoru friend who ended up doing the dentist and tell him, hey you, come here, in the end you and I have the same skills and the same chances at succeeding, even if you, never having read a book in your life, would contravene the previous rule, but who cares, this rule nullifies and substitutes the previous one when it comes to screw up with me. Who payed in advance.

 

6) Eh, but you got your friends to read your stuff

Here, this is also something they had to say, I don't know, at school: boys, I recommend, put the condom if you go with ladies of negotiable affection, don't blow up the firecrackers in your hand, and especially, if ever on a remote day you'll decide to write something, lock yourself up in a loft Anna Frank-style, and never say anything to anyone or the nazis will come and shoot you. Basically, the idea is that having your friends reading your stuff puts you with a too well predisposed public. Except that they apparently grew up in the town of teletubbies and don't know my friends, that if you used a conditional [a seldom-used italian verbal tense that most italian don't know how to use properly. you can be point4ed as a snobbish intellectual if you use it in the wrong company] too much they would go on calling you [a long string of epitets for gay, which the automatic censor would never let me use], it's also obvious that if you write, and you have friends, those friends sooner or later will figure out the terirble secret you hide in your attic. Except that instead of proposing you for the Nobel, they get pissed off after reading seven lines, and they ask you to play football, even if they now think you effeminated. It's not much, I realize, but it's still better than stopping a total stranger on the road and asking him, sorry sir, would you mind reading this novelette of mine? He may be less biased, but the risk that he will take it the wrong way and spit in your face is high.

 

7) Never, never, never and never write on a blog

If there's something writing schools hate wholeheartedly, along with their students and other writing schools, (generally called them) it's internet, the place where the evildoers of the world go to write evilness, and especially blogs, the place where everyone can write what he wants. You can say that if you have a shitty blog you'll get two viewers per year, but they are experts and know that even if you're awful you can get to two hundred thousands, and anyway internet is that horrible place where you can find the recensions to their books that weren't written by their friends, their girlfriends, those boning their girlfriends, and their publishers. and all that free circulation of thoughts, all that freedom, according to them, is detrimental to freedom and is detrimental to thinking.

 

8) You need a massive work of editing

Everything you write, it needs editing. Everything. Even a note like GERARDO, BUY THE MILK OR WE HAVE NOTHING FOR TOMORROW MORNING needs, or better necessitates, a massive work of editing. Editors ar something that was invented to give a job to people who wouldn't have known what to storming do otherwise, but they had to be employied anyways, because either they were unlukcy and thus they benefit from special protections from tthe law, or are sons of rich people and are the equivalent of business consultants. Think about it: once established the tax percentages, the exemptions and detraction, the business consultant pulls a number out of his arse and make you sign a declaration that then the tax agency will dispute (rightly) because, the consultant will say, we made a mistake.

And with that we he intends that he made a mistake and you are going to pay for it. He made a mistake by choosing a job that in advanced countries is done by a free app for android. So are the editors. Since, poor fellows, they have to work, if you go and write something that don't need to be fixed they take and fix your work prejudicially, just like those thieving mechanics that for a dirty spark plug forces you to rebuy your car one piece at a time, and in the end the machine go crappy anyway. Just like everything that passed through the hands of an editor.

 

9) You have to take away, you don't have to add

Writing is subtraction. That, I must admit, is the rule that really gives me envy, lots of it. Not for the rule per se, who cares about it, but it's exactly the same as when politicians increase their wages, just regardless, because more money are better to them than less money. I mean, those of writing schools, stitic writers without ideas, look at each other in the face, and say: oh boys, I can't write more then then fascicles in one year. And all, yes me too, me too! I can't even get to seven! I get stuck at three! And so they came up with the idea that writing is subtraction. In the face of the two volumes and three kilos of the Pickwick Club I have on the bedside table. When one has such a brass-face, I feel some respect, I have to say.

 

10) Only a writer can tell you if you can become a writer

It does not bat an eyelid if the writer in question is stephen king, or, I don't know, J.K. Rowling, people who sold twenty thousands millions bajillions books and have a bank account that even the mexican drug lords envy. I am almost certain they could keep the distance between their judgments and their small miseries and personal envies. The problem arise when to judge a newcomer, and a paying newcomer as that (because paying is the problem here), is called a writer with 600/1000 copies sold, but with friends in the right places. So one feel threatened even by those three pages handwritten during the condominium meeting, and putting him to judge one whom, within a few days, could become his direct rival, how to say, don't seem the brightest of the ideas. Like having the competitors of a beauty contest being judged by the other competitors. We have no idea who'll won, but I'm betting a testicle it will never be the prettiest one.

 

So, you guys are pretty lucky to have brandon and his writing excuses.

 

It's funny, but most of those advices are also given, in some way, by brandon himself. For the little i follow, they are the same advice, and yet they are radically different at the same time. It shows how a little difference in the spirit of the thing can make all the difference.

[Shivertongue]

Every time I get a book signed, I asked the author to include the most valuable piece of writing advice that they never got, or that they ignored. This is what I currently have:

 

 

"Sit your butt down and WRITE." - Pat Rothfuss, signed in Wise Man's Fear

 

"If it's not fun, you're doing it wrong." - Cherie Priest, signed in Dreadnaught

 

"The best writers are better revisers." - Brandon Sanderson, signed in Alloy of Law

 

"Try something different! You never know which genre fits your voice." - Gail Carriger, signed in Soulless

 

"Just make sure you're always having fun." - George Mann, signed in Ghosts of Manhattan

 

 

...I actually have more, but there were the ones that were easiest to reach.

[shortycake]

Write.

I've heard this advice over and over and I think it's the best. Write every day. Even if you don't feel like it. You can't improve if you never practice.

 

Also, if you're stuck or feeling like your writing has become a bit stale, I've heard that leaving your work for a few weeks or a month and then going back to it with a fresh mindset can work wonders.