Writing advice, and what needs to be done to get there...

I am back again with some tips, and as always I give them in threes. 

This week, because it's been a long time since I last posted some tips for the upcoming writer I am going back to the basics. As always I will break them down and also emphasize why they are important. 

1) Starting at the beginning, one of the best tips I ever received was this; writing is a practice. If you want to make a living at writing, you have to turn it into a study and a practice. Like so many other things in life, unless you are some sort of autistic savant, you need to practice to get good at something. A musician usually practices, an artist creates ten steaming piles of shit before they squeeze out something someone wants to look at. A home builder doesn't build a mansion first, they build a little bang-shack on the outskirts of town. It's the adage of Shit and diamonds (Thanks Struthless); the more you turn the crank the higher your chance of finding a diamond in that shit you keep churning our. I will post more on this later to avoid convoluting this message. The simple takeaway from this is as follows: practice, practice, practice.

2) You must read, or at the very least listen to other people's work. And not just one author, or a favorite genre. This boxes you in as a writer. Every single great work of literature stole something from previous works that were written by someone else. Hear me on this; there is nothing wrong with that! Those people read or listened to other greats and incorporated their love and admiration of those people into their own writing. Everyone does it. I am no different, and it seems the more I read other authors, the more ideas I get. Reading stretches the way in which we see the world of literature. The more we read the more versatile we get. After a while, we start to command the art and understand it more deeply. As a writer, a person must appreciate what it is like to read, after all, that's the whole point. How can we expect someone to read our work if we are not willing to read someone else's work? If you don't enjoy reading or storytelling it will reflect in the way you write. 

3) Paint what you feel, think, and want to convey with the skills you learned. This is the part where the previous two tips get implemented. Take that practice and use it, stretch the limits of your work. Sweat and pound that page with words you don't normally use, with stylistic choices that are outside the comfort zone, with imagery that makes you shiver, and with new zeal. After all, why practice if you don't plan on doing it better? Take what you learned from other authors and make it your own, use it in a new way and use it with a new style. Tribute them better than they could have hoped for. Lastly, make sure that you get up after that torrid affair, after the baby is born and crying and covered in after-birth, and have another baby. Bring more of them into the world. Crap out fifty or sixty, just to find that one perfect child. The more this process is completed, the better it will make you as a writer. 

Remember, have fun while you do this, or at the very least: "don't let the fires of your own hell burn you to a crisp." (J.B. Sommerset)

Cheers, and keep on creating.