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If there's one piece of advice that all established authors give to newbies, it's this:
Read as much as you can.
Reading books helps you develop an ear for language and shows you the possibilities of new techniques. Finding an author that inspires you is like crack for writers: every time you read their work, you just want to grab a pen or a keyboard and hammer out your own magnum opus.
But there's one B-I-G problem with following this piece of advice...
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I recently read the autobiography of Australian Cosmo's most famous editor, Mia Freedman. In it, Freedman noted that all great editors have one thing in common:
They edit their magazine from their audience's perspective, not their own.
We writers hear, over and over again, the advice: "Write for your audience."
Make your topic relevant to your reader's life. Use words and examples your audience will understand. Understand that most of us are bombarded by demands on our attention from the moment we wake up, so your piece of writing must catch your reader's attention from the get-go and prove itself worthy of a few precious minutes/hours of your reader's life.
But if you stop there, you're stopping too soon.
Don't just write for your audience. Edit for your audience.
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Every writer has a handful of books that have helped him or her along the tough journey to becoming a writer.
I can still remember my battered red Roget's Thesaurus that sat on my shelf alongside my stereo, back when I was a teenager. I'd had the misfortune of an early writing teacher who told me that there was no point in using the adjective "blue" when something more precise, like "cerulean," would do. Luckily, a professor in college set me straight with a denunciation of multi-syllabic Latinate words. I was cowed. "Blue" returned to my lexicon.
Once I'd graduated from English grammar books, which trained me in the correct way to construct a sentence, I was away and running. Books on the writing life flooded my shelves. Annie Dillard's The Writing Life, Terry Brooks' Sometimes the Magic Works (yes, I confess to an early love of fantasy), even Piers Anthony's hilarious book (the name escapes me now) that consisted of an early manuscript he submitted to publishers and the various critical notes editors had scribbled in the margins.
But there are three books that have stood way above the rest. They're not about the publishing process or about the right way to write a sentence. They're short on Latinate words and long on Anglo-Saxon. And they're books that need to be on every serious or budding writer's bookshelf, because they're just plain great
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It's not easy to put your thoughts down on paper in the hope that someone will want to read them.
The world is flush with words already. A cursory scan of the millions of personal blogs online reveals that everyone has the same hope as you, e.g., that their thoughts and experiences and opinions are worthy of an audience. Then there are the newspapers, magazines and books published every day. What do YOU have to say that's any different or better than what's already being published?
Thoughts like those are what kept me silenced for a decade of my writing life. Don't let them silence you.
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I'll never forget the former sailor who told me that he only wrote at night, with a whiskey in hand and his stereo rocking the house down. Certain songs inspired him, and he reckoned you could hear them in the cadence of his writing. For him, music was essential to set a mood and unleash his imagination.
Then there was the young writer who sought silence and an absence of distraction for her work. She hated interruptions, and any sound at all jolted her attention away from her task. For her to do her best work, she needed to focus utterly on the words on the screen. She discovered that wearing headphones helped muffle the sound of a noisy environment.
If you haven't yet experimented with the effect sound has on your writing, you should.
Having music playing in the background can help evoke certain emotions, focus your mind, or distract you entirely. Because the way we react to sound is personal, you won't know whether background music can help you or hurt you until you try.
The next time you sit down to write, try one of these five suggestions.
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I'm in the process of editing some old story material to whip it into shape for submitting to literary magazines.
The editing process, for me, is a lot like sewing a quilt. I start out with a whole bunch of different fabrics ("scenes"), and I have to figure out which order they go in. I rearrange, take some out, gaze at the whole with a critical eye, add in others, reassess, and so forth until I have a beautiful pattern that tells a story.
Once I've got my scenes in order, it's time to sew them together. I find "threads" that link the disparate elements of the story into a satisfying whole. Those threads may involve imagery, characters, or themes. It's especially important to sew consecutive scenes together, so that they flow naturally from one to the other.
But there's one tool that I couldn't be without in this entire process. In fact, I'd go so far as to say it's my #1 most essential editing tool.
Want to know what it is?
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As a writer, your greatest asset is your mind. A mind brimming with ideas can make writing a joy; while a grumpy, sleepy, or otherwise balking mind can wreck your day.
If you're a commercial writer, you can't wait for inspiration. You have to be able to write well day after day, whether you feel like it or not, whether you're hungover or not, whether you have any ideas or not. Few bosses will allow you to take a day off just because your brain is foggy or otherwise indisposed.
Unfortunately, many beginning writers assume that their talents are at the mercy of the Muse. If she smiles on them with an image or a memorable line, they scribble furiously, confident in their talent. But when the Muse goes quiet, their brain goes silent as well.
You cannot afford to think this way if you want to be a commercial writer. You can't just write when you feel like it. You don't have the time to wait until an idea comes to you. You've got to teach yourself to write even if your mind is somewhere else.
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