Ten Things I Know About Writing
These are all things I have learned about my own writing, and are no reflection on anyone else's.
(Edited to add: it's a meme. All the cool kids are doing it!)
1. There is no magic token that will suddenly make it easy or instantaneous to go from "hey, I have this neat idea..." to "THE END."
2. Obsessively reading books about writing will not teach me the magic secret trick that makes it easy. It will, however, suck up lots of time that could have been spent writing.
3. The closest thing to The Magic Secret Trick, for me, is writing every single day without fail.
4. I cannot play role playing games if I want to be able to write at all. All my creative energy flows out of that outlet, instead, because it's a hell of a lot less work.
5. You know how in that Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy text-adventure game, you had to feed the cheese sandwich to the dog five minutes in, or else a loooooooooooong time later the dog would eat the space ship you were in? Writing is not like that. I may run out of steam on a story, or realize that I had a set up for a situation but no ideas for resolution, but despite my early fears, I have never written myself into a corner where I was simply doomed and the book was going to be a miserable failure because I needed to do some minor thing differently hundreds of pages earlier.
6. Coffee shops are actually a really good way to get away from my kids, but the ergonomics suck.
7. It's really amazing how often my subconscious knows what it's doing. There's nothing like getting to page 300 and realizing that the placeholder or throwaway or other random bit I put in for no real reason is the perfect setup for the major plot revelation I hadn't realized until now I was building up to.
8. Revision is key.
9. Insightful critique helps me a hell of a lot, both to fix the things that are broken, and to reassure me that the good parts really do work.
10. When I'm getting close to the end of a book, I nearly always start thinking that it is a terrible piece of miserable trash and I should probably just delete it, burn all paper copies, and start over. Apparently this is so common that a pair of editors listed it as one of the Common Forms of Authorial Insanity and put it on a t-shirt. And a tote bag.
