Writing Advice - part 1
There's a lot of writing advice out there. How do you know who to listen to? Easy. You listen to me. As some of you know, I read scripts for a screenplay competition and write coverage.
Sometimes people come up to me on the street and they say "hey! how do you get your hair to be so shiny?" and I say "Hey! Nice try, but you're off topic". You see. That's how laser-focused I am. On writing. Let's begin. At the beginning of course.
(1) Quit your job.
To be a successful writer, you absolutely must quit your job. How else are you going to have time to write? Look, we hear a lot about writers who worked this or that crappy job, just enough to pay the bills, but at night they would really get passionate..with writing (get your mind out of the gutter), blah blah blah. But this is not true. Most writers are a bunch of rich people and trust fund babies. You need to emulate them. Check this out. "Hi, I work at the Gap but on my days off, I'm writing my novel". SNOOOZE. Compare - "Hi, I'm writing a novel". Zing! Now you're interesting. And when you get famous enough for people to ask, you tell them you did the whole worked at the copy center for 3 years for minimum wage bit too. Standard stuff.
(2) Be a hermit.
To be a good writer, you need to isolate yourself. If you can find a bubble, or a cave, perfect.
Log cabins, abandoned warehouses, or treehouses also work. You should cut off all communications. Don't read. Don't watch TV. Don't talk to anyone. They don't understand you anyway. You are a tortured artist. Why do you even bother to write for these despicable idiotic invisible people that make up your "audience" anyway? They hate genius when it smacks them in the face. But that is your job. To smack people in the face. One day, they will appreciate it, probably when you're dead. Secretly, people love a good smack.
(3) Network!
Get out there and socialize. You'll never make it on your own. You need to surround yourself with important people who like to talk about "fast-tracking", "the back end", and "fast tracking the back end". Drink a lot of Scotch so you seem normal. Own a blackberry. Figure out how to "Twitter" and Facebook your face off. Spend a few months looking for an assistant. Fire new assistant on first day. Spend next few months looking for another assistant. Repeat.
(4) Don't Write Every Day
If you start writing every day, you'll end up doing a lot of work for free. Working for free is not your goal. Your goal is to sell that ONE novel/script/pitch/young-adult-vampire-garbage for an assload of cash and retire in the south of France. How are you going to sell something for an airplane-hangar-full-of-coin if everyone knows you work for free? You've got to put in the least amount of time and effort so everyone knows what a gifted writer you are. "It just comes effertlessly to me", you'll say. "I don't need to rewrite myself. Every word is perfect the first time." Everyone will "ooh" and "ahh". They WISH they could be like you. You will send them into a jealous frenzy. Some poor shmuck will say to you "no one can do that! Everyone else has to write all the time, constantly trying to improve the craft. There are NO EXCEPTIONS." But you will say "how qaint. Now, who wants my autograph?"
(5) Don't Write What You Know
Everyone writes what they know. You need to be ahead of the game and outside of the box. You have to differentiate yourself from the pack of "write what you know" writers. Writing what you don't know is imaginative. It's creative. You can't do research. If you research something, now you know about it, duh. You should write about outer space molecular biological lifeforms in hell and invent new words like "cuboprety". Nonsense equals genius.
"Once upon a time" is for hacks.
posted by Elizabeth @ 2:36 PM
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