Open Thread: Oracle Hotline
Dec. 13th, 2019 09:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mithen posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
superhero_muses--What advice would you give a new writer, someone just starting out?
I know each of us comes from really different places so we'd have really different kinds of advice! And all of us have been writing for quite a while at this point...
I'm a big fan of Ray Bradbury's advice to value quantity over quality, because it's through practice that you get better, and if you try to write 1000 words of perfect prose, you're just going to freeze up. Better to write tons and tons of imperfect prose, have fun doing it, and count on editing and learning over time to get more and more quality out of your writing. "The perfect is the enemy of the good" is a phrase I always try to keep in mind.
I posted a big long essay this week and am pleased with it! It was to a fairly specialized audience, so didn't get a BIG reception, but it was very positive within that target range, so that's reassuring. How about you? What advice did you need to hear when you started writing?
I know each of us comes from really different places so we'd have really different kinds of advice! And all of us have been writing for quite a while at this point...
I'm a big fan of Ray Bradbury's advice to value quantity over quality, because it's through practice that you get better, and if you try to write 1000 words of perfect prose, you're just going to freeze up. Better to write tons and tons of imperfect prose, have fun doing it, and count on editing and learning over time to get more and more quality out of your writing. "The perfect is the enemy of the good" is a phrase I always try to keep in mind.
I posted a big long essay this week and am pleased with it! It was to a fairly specialized audience, so didn't get a BIG reception, but it was very positive within that target range, so that's reassuring. How about you? What advice did you need to hear when you started writing?
