The Value of Practicing in Public — Curiosity Never Killed the Writer:
And/or, as I said to myself: “Remember how, as a kid, you used to serialize all that fan-fiction on Prodigy? Wasn’t that silly?” Except for the part where people were actually reading the stories. And I actually finished them. And they actually got better as I went along.
Maybe I should give that another shot?
Oh by the way, I’ll be part of this reading on Saturday — 4pm at Quarterstaff Games in Burlington, VT. You should come!
Thomas McGuane with bits like:
People don’t really eat pizza in Montana. There are no secretaries here.
And:
I like writing that’s a bit more direct because I hope the subjects are difficult enough that they can supply all the indirection that I could possibly manage.
And also:
There comes a point where I have to declare a truce with the text or I’ll keep fooling with it forever.
Fascinating interview on NPR’s All Things Considered re: his new collection, Crow Fair. More than worth the 7 or so minutes. Go check it out.
The Only Writing Advice That Matters
“Creation requires influence.â€
Lessons From the Slushpile: Good vs. Great: At Inkpunks:
As writers we get so accustomed to identifying what’s wrong with things. We read and we pick out the things we don’t like about a story, what we think the author did wrong. Maybe it’s time…
stop remixing and make something new: The rhetoric about the legitimacy of “remixing as art†aside, we really do need to take a moment and admit that re-packaging something creatively (while fun and exciting and creative in its own right) is not ad…
Turning it in at 52,703 of 50,000 (105.41%).  Got… 70% of the way to a novel?  With a bunch of extraneous stuff there in the middle, most likely.  Unnecessary verbosity.  But it still feels good to hit >50,000 words in a month.
And yes, I “fini…
+1,767 = 52,146 of 50,000 (104.29%)
Skipped Thanksgiving; did a little today and tonight, trying to wrap up and round out the scene I’d been working on.  Even more convinced now that there’s a lot more than a month’s worth of writing to get me t…
+669 = 50,379 of 50,000 (100.76%)
Tipped up and over.  But the story is far from done.  (There’s just a lot of fluff in the early bits…)  Going to peck away at this until November is over—see how far I can take it—and stub out the rest of th…