Writing

Should You Be Writing Right Now?

Nanowrimo

Neil Gaiman’s 8 Rules of Writing

“Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.”

BY MARIA POPOVA

In the winter of 2010, inspired by Elmore Leonard’s 10 rules of writingpublished in The New York Times nearly a decade earlier, The Guardianreached out to some of today’s most celebrated authors and asked them to each offer his or her commandments. After Zadie Smith’s 10 rules of writing, here come 8 from the one and only Neil Gaiman:

1. Write
2. Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.
3. Finish what you’re writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.
4. Put it aside. Read it pretending you’ve never read it before. Show it to friends whose opinion you respect and who like the kind of thing that this is.
5. Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.
6. Fix it. Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.
7. Laugh at your own jokes.
8. The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it ­honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.

from https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/09/28/neil-gaiman-8-rules-of-writing/

Westminster Bridge

Ten Reasons to be a Writer

Top 10 Reasons to be a Writer

   1. Librarians think you're cool.

   2. You have an excuse to be cluttered: you have no time for cleaning; you're creating ART.

   3. You get a collection of stories you'll always enjoy reading because you wrote them.

   4. If you publish, you don't have to think about what you'll get your friends and family for Christmas—they're all getting your book!

   5. You can name your characters all the things your husband wouldn't let you name your children.

   6. You can work in your pajamas.

   7. You get to network with other writers.

   8. Money and fame. Ha! Ha! But I just had to throw that one in.

   9. You can pattern your villains after the guys who dumped you in high school, and

  10. You don't have bad days; you just have more writing material to draw from!

-- from JanetteRallison’s Web Page

More Prompts

  

If you could select another name, assuming you had to, what would you call yourself?  Explain why.

Best of the Worst -- Bad Writing Contest

Gorge your eyes on best of the worst

By Ann Cannon

Published: Monday, Oct. 29, 2007 12:22 a.m. MST

    * Even more of ... 'The Best of the Worst'

I'm overwhelmed. You guys sent me nearly 500 sentences this year! Way to go! I love you! So here it is, kids —The Best of the Worst (your Official 2007 Edition)!

Dark and stormy night

It was a dark and stormy night, but Alicia was learning to her great distress that it's going to be that way when you spend the winter in Anchorage and forget to pay your power bill. — Pam Williams

Science Fiction

The spaceship descended slowly, looking like a giant submarine sandwich — except it was made of metal, not bread, and was actually more circular and not so much oblong, and most importantly, the green things inside were sentient alien beings capable of interstellar travel, instead of pickles. — Mike Middleton

Horror

When the young count was suspended from school yet again for biting, Nosferatu's parents began to suspect there was something different about their boy. — Sean Johnson

Talking Unicorn

Her eyes were numinous, her voice mellifluous, her thighs voluminous, and her demeanor opprobrious — indeed, she was the best bouncer the Talking Unicorn had ever had. — David Alvin Edwards

Romance

John first saw the next "love of his life" when he exited the whole foods grocery store and knocked the overly ripe melons she was returning from her large shapely hands — showering both of them with sweet warm fruit. — MacKay Jones

Romance Gone Really Wrong

She stood mesmerized as the figure emerged from the shadow and she could clearly see a tall, manly form, glistening black hair, penetrating dark eyes, a half-smile on soft, kissable lips, brawny shoulders narrowing toward a slim waist, and the firm muscled legs ending in cloven feet. — Nora Sampson

Words to Live By

When we are most concerned about others, we'll forget ourselves as if we were a rotting sack of potatoes thrown out with the trash. — Erin Hallmark

Power of Positive Thinking

Looking back at the past year — the kidnapping, the landslide, the dog attack, the tree falling on her car, along with her brother's inexplicable habit of showing up at every family party with a different girlfriend — Kim decided that it hadn't been so bad after all and wondered what on earth could happen next as she peered out the airplane door, waiting for the instructor to tell her when to jump. — Natalie Carbone

Sweepstakes Winner

If ever there were two people who desperately wanted to kiss each other at this exact moment, they were Jim and Betty, but since, at this exact moment, Betty was chained in the dungeon of a backwater prison in Argentina, and since Jim was currently plummeting toward the ground in Montana after a freak hang-glider failure, it wasn't very likely to happen. — David Goddard

Writer's Block?

“Sit in a chair and write,” [Brandon] Sanderson says. “Ignore this thing they call writer’s block. Doctors don’t get doctor’s block; your mechanic doesn’t get mechanic’s block. If you want to write great stories, learn to write when you don’t feel like it. You have to write it poorly before you can write it well. So just be willing to write bad stories in order to learn to become better.”