Becky's Blogglings

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.

You can’t blame a writer for what the characters say.

1. First write for yourself, and then worry about the audience. When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story. When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story. 2. Don’t use passive voice. Timid writers like passive verbs for the same reason that timid lovers like passive partners. The passive voice is safe. 3. Avoid adverbs. The adverb is not your friend. 4. Avoid adverbs, especially after “he said” and “she said.” 5. But don’t obsess over perfect grammar. The object of fiction isn’t grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story. 6. The magic is in you. I’m convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing. 7. Read, read, read. If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. 8. Don’t worry about making other people happy. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway. 9. Turn off the TV. TV—while working out or anywhere else—really is about the last thing an aspiring writer needs. 10. You have three months. The first draft of a book—even a long one—should take no more than three months, the length of a season. 11. There are two secrets to success. I stayed physical healthy, and I stayed married. 12. Write one word at a time. Whether it’s a vignette of a single page or an epic trilogy like ‘The Lord of the Rings,’ the work is always accomplished one word at a time. 13. Eliminate distraction. There’s should be no telephone in your writing room, certainly no TV or videogames for you to fool around with. 14. Stick to your own style. One cannot imitate a writer’s approach to a particular genre, no matter how simple what that writer is doing may seem. 15. Dig. Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered pre-existing world. The writer’s job is to use the tools in his or her toolbox to get as much of each one out of the ground intact as possible. 16. Take a break. You’ll find reading your book over after a six-week layoff to be a strange, often exhilarating experience. 17. Leave out the boring parts and kill your darlings. (kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.) 18. The research shouldn’t overshadow the story. Remember that word back. That’s where the research belongs: as far in the background and the back story as you can get it. 19. You become a writer simply by reading and writing. You learn best by reading a lot and writing a lot, and the most valuable lessons of all are the ones you teach yourself. 20. Writing is about getting happy. Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid or making friends. Writing is magic, as much as the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink.

One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.

The thing is, I want to tear you to pieces. I want to be mad at you. You tore me apart without even realizing it. You shattered my hopes and dreams. You crushed my soul. But when I see that careless smile of yours, or hear your laugh, I can only remember the good times. The times when you cared about me and would do anything for me. The times when I was the only girl you thought about. It would be so much easier if I could be mad at you, and not myself.

Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.” - Stephen King

Freedom to me is a luxury of being able to follow the path of the heart, to keep the magic in your life. Freedom is necessary for me in order to create and if I cannot create, I don’t feel alive.

If editing is like tearing apart your soul, does that mean you make a horcrux every time you write?

I have written fiction all my life, and still have very little understanding of how the process works. Of course, I don’t understand how my liver works, either, but as long as it keeps doing its job, I’m good with that.

I dislike the word ‘perfect’. Such an unrealistic term, nothing in this world is perfect. And yet, with you, suddenly the word perfect made so much sense.

Creativity is like a game of chess, where the best players are those who can think several moves ahead without losing sight of the immediate situation.

Comics are a gateway drug to literacy.

That’s all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.