Madeleine L’Engle

HT: Jeffrey Overstreet, amazing novelist

“The most valid form of censorship is that practiced by writers upon themselves. Scrupulously revising or destroying all writing that fails to let readers vanish into the life of their language is every author’s duty. What we are morally obligated to censor from our work…is our own incompetence.…”

David James Duncan

HT: Abraham Piper

“It is interesting to note how many artists have had physical problems to overcome, deformities, lameness, terrible loneliness. Could Beethoven have written that glorious paean of praise in the Ninth Symphony if he had not to endure the dark closing in of deafness? As I look through his work chronologically, there’s no denying that it deepens and strengthens along with the deafness.

“Could Milton have seen all that he sees in Paradise Lost if he had not been blind? It is chastening to realize that those who have no physical flaw, who move through life in step with their peers, who are bright and beautiful, seldom become artists. The unending paradox is that we do learn through pain.

“My mother’s long life had more than its fair share of pain and tragedy. One time, after something difficult had happened, one of her childhood friends came to give comfort and help. Instead of which, she burst into tears and sobbed out, ‘I envy you! I envy you! You’ve had a terrible life, but you’ve lived!’

“I look back at my mother’s life and I see suffering deepening and strengthening it. In some people I have also seen it destroy. Pain is not always creative; received wrongly, it can lead to alcoholism and madness and suicide. Nevertheless, without it we do not grow.”

Madeleine L’Engle

HT: Ron Block

Daniel Pink

Seven more Rules for Writing from Mr. Pink (if that’s his real name) here.

HT: Andrew “Red” Mackay

1. Know something about the world, and by this I mean the world outside of books.

2. Read. Read constantly. Read the kind of stuff you wish you could write.

3. Read mechanical helps. By this I mean dictionaries, etymological histories, books of anecdotes, dictionaries of foreign phrases, books of quotations, books on how to write dialog, and so on.

4. Stretch before your routines. If you want to write short stories, try to write Italian sonnets. If you want to write a novel, write a few essays.

5. Be at peace with being lousy for a while. Chesterton once said that anything worth doing was worth doing badly. He was right. Only an insufferable egoist expects to be brilliant first time out. (Emphasis mine -sds.)

6. Learn other languages, preferably languages that are upstream from ours. This would include Greek, Latin, and Anglo-Saxon.

7. Keep a commonplace book. Write down any notable phrases that occur to you, or that you have come across.

I just grabbed the beginning of each. The whole thing (which, as I said, is brief)  is useful.

My advice to add: Turn off the internet.

You should be following The Novel Doctor. Here —> https://twitter.com/noveldoctor

He has excellent advice for writers and potentially death-inducingly funny tweets. He also has a blog that is [positive adjective]. His last post was a collection of some of his tweets. Worth a read if you like to chuckle forth.

He also offers editorial services and I have thought very seriously about going in for that.

There are trazillions of “Writer Advice” websites, and most really stink or are boring (like I know what is good, I’m so successful). The Novel Doctor has a good bedside manner. His laughter is like unto good medicine. Check him out.

Any “Writer Advice” websites you guys like?

Here’s parts 2, 3 and 4.

HT: Brannon McAllister

I made it into the top 1,000,000,000,000 and am therefore pretty sure to win.

OK, really it’s only the top 1,000. It was based solely on the book pitch (short summary of the book). This is good. Next they narrow it down to the Top 250 (reading an excerpt from the book).

It’s like American Idol except with no idols or Americans and it’s non-sexy writers like me with pale skin and agoraphobia who only go out when the next Star Trek sequel is in theaters.

Here are the top 1,000 if anyone wants to scroll down and find my name (don’t really do that, Mom).

I’ll be sure to update everyone when I crash and burn in the next round.

Two friends made it into the second round as well: Robert Treskillard and Pete Peterson. Congratulations, fellows!

Thanks for all the nice remarks on Facebook yesterday!

Possible cover for my novel?

As a reader of books who also writes, I often feel a distinct, conflicting emotion when I read great books written by great writers. There is the delight, of course. Here is a person made by God doing something beautiful.

Then there is the (often very slight) tinge of despair as I recognize I could never do this. This is less pointed when the genre and style are out of my own vein of writing (such as Patrick O’Brian’s books, which are, for me, an unmixed joy I hardly experience in any other fiction).

I have written before on, and firmly believe in, the well-worn wisdom that it’s no use in copying others, or feeling bad about how you compare. It’s best to find your own voice and write what only you can.

But still that feeling comes. “Am I kidding myself? I can’t write like this. This is art. This is compelling.”

I guess part of it is simple envy, ordinary coveting. This of course, like all sin, must be rejected.

I want, rather, to be the kind of man who says in his heart, like Robin Hood to Little John in the Errol Flynn film, “I love a man who can better me.”

This runs quite counter to the self-important manure which passes for a philosophy of life for many in our envy-based culture.

May it not be so in us.

Jim Levine

This informed quote was snagged from Rachel Gardner’s post about how authors need a platform. I haven’t really talked about the idea of platform much here. But this blog is, in fact, part of my efforts to “build a platform” (among other things, of course).

A “platform,” for those who haven’t heard the term, is all the ways that an author has connected with an audience and stays connected with that audience. Literally, I guess it’s kind of like being in front of people, or before them, or visible in some way. Or it might be about forming plats. Not sure.

The relevant point being that the smaller your platform is the more risk the publisher has to take on you. The larger your platform the less risky it is for the publisher to publish your book. They see that there’s an audience there.

This is a big reason why authors maintain blogs, Facebook pages (fan or otherwise), Twitter accounts, send random people money, and connect with their audience in various other ways.

I used to view this kind of thinking as manipulative and vain. But I have changed my mind a lot on that front. I now see the value of being knowable, accessible, of serving your readers by helping them connect to you. Of course this is an enormous benefit for the author on many fronts.

I don’t know how a publisher would quantify the value of my own platform as an author. I would say that it has certainly grown considerably over the last year, or year and a half (corresponding to when I began to make efforts that direction). I have put some effort in on that front and have gone from being virtually unknown, to having a fairly good-sized group that I feel connected with (on various levels).

I have enjoyed connecting with so many people, from the Rabbit Roomers to old South African friends on Facebook.

It used to be that you were VERY limited on options for connecting to an audience. That has changed dramatically. I am thankful for these opportunities, and I hope to use them for good and not evil. Much like my use of that magic pot of beans I found in a unicorn’s cave.

Is this West Virginian in my audience? One hopes.