What's Not Good for You May Be Great for Your Writing
By Lon Prater

In a fairy tale world, we could wave a magic wand a few times and become Big Name Authors in one smoky poof of success. Too bad we're stuck in this world, where we'd be lucky to get a little upper body toning for our wand-waving efforts. I won't tell you not to try it. After all, who wouldn't benefit from a little more exercise? Wand-waving could be the next TaeBo, after all. 

But don't rush out to buy the video and accessories just yet. Let me fill you in on a little secret first. Applying the healthy body, healthy mind approach to your writing isn't going to make you a successful writer. In fact, the health-conscious approach is probably as bad for your writing as tobacco and sweets are for your body. Such old-fashioned concepts may even be stunting your development and creativity. 

So, what should you do instead? Try the path of least self-control. You know the one. It's paved with reckless self-indulgence and lined one either side with the cheerful abandonment of rationality. If you want to develop strong writing skills, try the two-pronged "unhealthy" approach below. With dedicated application, your flabby writing physique will become stronger and fitter than ever.

The First Step: "Eat" Every Word You See!

When you read, you are doing more than entertaining your imagination or gaining information. You're feeding the Inner Writer, aka IW. Your IW doesn't care about portion control or balanced meals. It just wants to chow down. You'll never find any self-respecting IW counting word-calories or pushing back from those oh-so-satisfying stories and articles. This character thrives on glorious, unbounded gluttony. 

Stuff your IW with lasagna-layered paragraphs every day. They should be oozing with spicy words and thick stringy sentences that hold the whole delicious thing together. But don't stop there. Feed it a little bit of everything you see. This should feel like a buffet, or better yet: a smorgasbord. Make sure fiction is on the menu-- plot and theme are the meat and potatoes of any good meal. Besides being delicious, fiction also smuggles in lots of good stuff like characterization, dialogue, setting, and mood. You can't have too much of something like fiction. 

But don't pass over the non-fiction! In fact, don't limit yourself in any way. Feed from a wide variety of both fiction and non-fiction: magazines, books, newsletters, webzines, etc. Taste some of everything: even if it doesn't look appetizing at first glance. Your IW will find something to savor in every written word on the menu: from Westerns, fantasies, classics, and romantic mysteries to philosophy, history, science, and true crime. You never know which particular oyster will turn out to have a pearl, or which paragraph will surprise you with the seed of a great story idea. It's best to try them all. 

While your Inner Writer is busy scraping every pan and licking the dishes clean, it is learning from those published writers. Make sure your IW chews every phrase completely before spooning in the next mouthful. Figure out what works and what doesn't. Why did the author string those particular words together like that? Try to reverse-engineer the recipe for every piece of published writing you read. 

One last note on IW table manners: Your IW may want to play with its food. This should be encouraged.

Step Two: Abandon Reason and Common Sense 

It's been said that psychotics build castles in the sky and neurotics live in them. Some folks define insanity as repeating the same actions but expecting different results. If these sayings are right, then ever successful writer out there must be absolutely bonkers. Look at what pro writers do. 

First, they wake up one day with the oddball notion that someone will pay them real money to publish a bunch of words they just thought up and put on paper. Then, as if that's not castle in the sky enough, fiction writers up the ante; they build a whole world out of thin air, making up the people who live in it as well. Some writers are hard cases. They've toyed with the idea of being published for so long that this departure from reality no longer sounds weird to them. If this is you, congratulations! You're almost crazy enough to succeed. Be careful though, the next part is a test passed by only the most irrational and obsessed. 

This is where the Psycho-Pro shifts into high gear, leaving the merely neurotic coughing in her dust. To make it to the finish line, you have to be able to blank out the obvious evidence of your senses. By sensory evidence, I mean the stack of form rejections taking up more space than the last seven years worth of income tax papers. I also mean the condescending smiles you must endure when friends and family ask about your writing. A writer who wants to succeed will ignore these intrusions of reality like the latest round of "Bill Gates will pay you" emails. 

The difference between writers who succeed and those who give up is that successful writers are much better at fooling themselves. Despite the rejection slips and smirks, the successful writer still believes that she can convince an editor not only to publish something she wrote, but to pay for it as well. 

Day after day, she'll trudge out to the mailbox, hoping to find an envelope she addressed to herself. Week after week, she'll put postage on countless self-addressed envelopes and ship them off with queries, cover letters, and manuscripts that may have already been rejected a dozen times. And so it goes. 

Long after the wanna-be has put away his thesaurus, the successful writer is still nose deep in blissful denial. Completely oblivious to the fact that no one wants to buy or print her writing, this intrepid lunatic will continue to repeat the same process month after month: writing and rewriting, mailing and remailing. 

Eventually the right piece lands in front of the right editor and something gets bought and published. The elation of that happy event sends her skipping gaily along the edge of mania. Her irrational faith has been vindicated, even if only by fluke. She tells herself that if this piece sold, the others may sell too. 

Abundant and unreasonable hope will sustain her through the next round of drafts, revisions, and trips to the mailbox and post office. She will keep on doing what clearly doesn't work, always expecting a different response, until she makes the next sale. And then the next. And the next after that. It amazes her that someone would be so foolish as to pay her to publish her writing. The only explanation she can come up with is that editors must be nuts!

Lon Prater lives on the Gulf Coast with his amazingly patient wife and their two delightful daughters. Between work and play, he writes obsessively about things that could never happen and edits Neverary.com, a webzine for other people with the same compulsion. His latest story "Midnight in New Promise" (the first of several in that setting) has just been released published by Scrybe Press. Other works of his have been printed in Borderlands 5 as well as online in Alien Skin, SDO Detective, Decompositions, and Rogue Worlds.

Sponsored links

Ring binders

 

Make a Real Living as a Freelance Writer!

How to find a book publisher

Home

Text on this site Copyright © 1998-2007 Absolute Write, all rights reserved.
Please contact the authors if you'd like to reprint articles on this site.  All copyrights are retained by original authors.  And plagiarizers will be rounded up, handcuffed, and stuck into a very small and humid room wherein they must listen to Barney sing the "I Love You, You Love Me" song over and over again.

writers writing software