Wordless Wednesday: “My First Acceptance Letter”
30 Wednesday May 2012
Posted in Wordless Wednesday
Tag Archives: writing
Wordless Wednesday: “I want to be a writer”
23 Wednesday May 2012
Loving Writing as a Process
13 Monday Feb 2012
Posted in Behind the Scenes
Check out my new guest post, which continues my “Behind the Scenes” writing series.
Guest Blog: Writing What You DON’T Know
30 Monday Jan 2012
Posted in Behind the Scenes, Guest Blogging
If you have a minute, check out my “Behind the Scenes” post on “Writer, Writer, Pants on Fire” about writing beyond what you know. And unless you have been moonlighting as The Most Interesting Man in the World, it’s a problem that will hit sooner rather than the typical way this cliche ends.
Special thanks to YA author Mandy McGinnis for the opportunity!
On Writing Well
11 Friday Nov 2011
Posted in The Writing Life
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work.”
“Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
–Ira Glass
Jim Carrey’s Video to Emma Stone Teaches Writers Why Desperation is the World’s Worst Cologne
25 Thursday Aug 2011
Posted in The Writing Life
Tags
Emma Stone, Fiction, First drafts, jerry maguire, Jim Carrey, love video, trulife, writers, writing
After seeing Jim Carrey’s video love note to Emma Stone, either he’s channeling Charlie Sheen or he’s really, and I mean, really bad at asking a girl out.
Writers: Jim Carrey shows you how not to get published. (From TruLife)
It’s an eerie combination of overly earnest, creepy, and only vaguely funny. Sure, what 22-year-old woman doesn’t want to hear a guy who’s nearly 50 talk about their future of chubby, freckle-faced babies and how the ravages of time affect his bodily functions?
The answer: all of them.
Many younger writers, so full of the need to express themselves (they’re so deep!), pull a Jim Carrey. They pour out every emotion, every bit of angst. They’re frustrated and railing against something. They’re begging and screaming for attention, not caring that it’s attention for all the wrong reasons. It’s like Jerry MacGuire: “Sooth me. Save me! Love me!”
Editors and readers will be more than happy to ignore this self-centered, whining story. And if that doesn’t drive the message home then the stack of rejection letters will. Because what Jim Carrey dashed off was a terrible, clumsy attempt at courting — the equivalent to a horrible first draft.
Hey, we’ve all been there. I’ve deleted or tossed hundreds of stories. Thousands of pages. It’s the fawnlike steps toward becoming a confidant writer, one who can write about what he or she cares about while making it interesting to an audience. Simply put: Forget your ego. Realize you that it’s about them — their wants and needs.
But write your heart out. That’s what first drafts are for. Just make sure that you revise and edit until the story has that same effect on your audience, not just you.
If that seems like an alien concept, then watch this video and pretend you’re Emma Stone. That’s probably how your readers feel — they’re just too nice to tell you.
