Advice For Writers

Writers are given lots of advice. Sometimes the advice is good, sometimes it’s not. And sometimes it can only be described as, ‘well-intentioned’.

The first piece of advice I ever got when I was first trying to spread my wings was that I should write every day. I admired my cousin Roy a great deal, and I really thought his writing style was great. But I never could manage to write the thousand words a day that he kept advising me to do.

Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t have to labor long and hard to get a thousand words written. Most days the words just flowed out of my pen and onto my tablet, and I might get 2 or 3 thousand words written in a day. But then something would happen. A bout of flu kept me down for a few days. I somehow wound up with a multitude of chores to do one weekend, or a big amount of homework to get done. Possibly the family decided to drive up into the mountains on Saturday. I was afraid of heights, so I was allowed to take books to read, but not books to write. Of course, my notebooks never stayed in good shape long enough to finish them, and I certainly didn’t want to lose any pages, so I didn’t think that was a big problem. Except I never seemed to get my thousand words written that day. I had failed!

But in hindsight, I had bigger problems than that. I would start a story and work on it for a few dozens or even hundreds of pages. Then I would lose interest in that story, hide it in a drawer, and start a new one. It wasn’t until I was in my 30s that I actually finished a few stories. And shortly after that, it occurred to me that SOMEbody needed to go through those stories and edit them. I started working with other authors to get some critical feedback.

Eventually, I arrived at the point where I could retire, and I did, anticipating that I would take the 8 hours a day I had spent working and use them to work on my writing. Somehow, that hasn’t happened. I am at my computer daily, working for at least 8 hours, but I am not necessarily working on a story for 1000 words. I have too many other things to do. I am head of a small press, and I am editor, layout person and publisher for my husband. Ditto with my own writing, and editing is much tougher when it’s your own work.

So if you ever see me at a convention, conference, or transportation hub, and I’m pounding away on a laptop, it’s only me, trying to get 1000 words written that day.