What profession requires you to waste millions to become competent? If you said politics, you wrong. Politicians are never competent. The answer: writing.
Every tome on writing riffs off the same basic premise. How do you learn to write? By Writing. A lot.
For some reason, I always resisted this. The pragmatist in me couldn't see how knowingly barging ahead in the wrong direction is a good idea. So, I would read and re-read Story by Robert McKee, the Writers Digest books on craft by Jack Bickham, online articles, etc. In short, anything I could get my hands on to learn the craft.
Funnily, conventional wisdom is right. After years of reading on writing more than actually writing, I have made little progress. You can't sell your reading notes to a publisher.
My professor, Deborah Chester, gave the same platitude in a way that finally seeped through my thick skull yesterday. "You have to wallow through a million words of junk, before you reach gold."
An image of a McDonald's-syle sign flashed in my head when I heard this. It looked something like this:
Prescott's
34,000 words wasted and counting...
Excuse me, I need to go add to my tally.
Every tome on writing riffs off the same basic premise. How do you learn to write? By Writing. A lot.
For some reason, I always resisted this. The pragmatist in me couldn't see how knowingly barging ahead in the wrong direction is a good idea. So, I would read and re-read Story by Robert McKee, the Writers Digest books on craft by Jack Bickham, online articles, etc. In short, anything I could get my hands on to learn the craft.
Funnily, conventional wisdom is right. After years of reading on writing more than actually writing, I have made little progress. You can't sell your reading notes to a publisher.
My professor, Deborah Chester, gave the same platitude in a way that finally seeped through my thick skull yesterday. "You have to wallow through a million words of junk, before you reach gold."
An image of a McDonald's-syle sign flashed in my head when I heard this. It looked something like this:
Prescott's
34,000 words wasted and counting...
Excuse me, I need to go add to my tally.
1 comments:
How many shots did you take at a basket before ever getting into a game? How many miles did you run getting into shape before the season began. You could just sit an read about how to shoot, how to run plays, how to run, but until you log the practise time not much will work. Writing requires the same discipline.
Harlan Ellison said a good writer needs to write a story every day. If the story's crap put it at the bottom of the pile, if it's pretty good expand and work on it. But if you're a writer that should be all you want to do, if that's not what you want to do its a hobby.
Look over the novels I've blogged, for every word up there I've tossed out at least a hundred and they're still not ready for publication, but working on the first two helped me get the one being published done.
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