Sundog Rising!
Reflections on living the life literary by the Urban Sundog
Twenty-Eight Hot Tips of Practical Advice! From the Masters!
1. Virginia Woolf — Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.
2. G.K. Chesterton — I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
3. Neil Gaiman — 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.
4. Enid Bagnold — Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it’s the answer to everything. … It’s the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it’s a cactus.
5. William Stafford — Every day I get up and look out the window, and something occurs to me. Something always occurs to me. And if it doesn’t, I just lower my standards.
6. Ray Bradbury — Quantity produces quality. If you only write a few things, you’re doomed.
7. Margaret Atwood — If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word.
8. Octavia Butler — You don’t start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it’s good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That’s why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.
9. Rose Tremain — Learn from cinema. Be economic with descriptions. Sort out the telling detail from the lifeless one. Write dialogue that people would actually speak.
10. Anton Chekhov — Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.
11. Michael Moorcock — Carrot and stick – have protagonists pursued (by an obsession or a villain) and pursuing (idea, object, person, mystery).
12. Gore Vidal — Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players. … I have 10 or so, and that’s a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.
13. Rose Tremain — Respect the way characters may change once they’ve got 50 pages of life in them. Revisit your plan at this stage and see whether certain things have to be altered to take account of these changes.
14. Toni Morrison — You rely on a sentence to say more than the denotation and the connotation; you revel in the smoke that the words send up.
15. Saul Bellow — You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.
16. William Burroughs — Cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can’t fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.
17. Tom Clancy — I do not over-intellectualize the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.
18. James Patterson — I’m always pretending that I’m sitting across from somebody. I’m telling them a story, and I don’t want them to get up until it’s finished.
19. Ernest Hemingway — There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
20. Annie Dillard — spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place.
21. E.L. Doctorow — Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
22. John Steinbeck — Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day
23. T.S. Eliot — Immature poets imitate. Mature poets steal.
24. Doris Lessing — There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.
25. Gertrude Stein — To write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write.
26. Larry King — Write. Rewrite. When not writing or rewriting, read. I know of no shortcuts.
27. Annie Dillard — It is no less difficult to write sentences in a recipe than sentences in Moby-Dick. So you might as well write Moby-Dick.
28. Carl Sandburg — Beware of advice—even this.
Next Week: A Last Look at Rules
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REALITY FICTION AND BEYOND!
This week:
Theda Bara’s winning novelletta comes to life! Read Chapter One and Chapter Two of Thirty-One Across this Friday at:
http://realficone.blogspot.ca/
And just for the record, the Reality Fiction Too! finale drew the largest one week audience to the Reality Fiction blog in its year and a half history. Thank you to everyone who made it an actual event!
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