Zen and the Art of Writing Maintenance

A writer, new in her quest to take on writing as a career, asked me to give her ten rules/wise things to remember for the next ten years, since I've been around, to her knowledge, for that long.  That gave me a few moments of heart palpitations.  Geez. It's been that long?  Oh yeah.

Actually, I've been around longer, way before one could actually trace one's roots on the Internetal Wayback Big Brother Machine, but why let people know about my antiquity? I'll just pretend to be one of those Immortals I love reading about, morphing from one identity into another, living lives with no real roots ;-).

Okay.  Ahem. Ten rules/pieces of advice, she asked. I'll oblige to share my wisdom, with one caveat. The rules aren't set in stone and they might, depending on the direction of your writing career, even cause you to ponder your sanity for actually thinking you could make it.

Here goes:

1) Action is better than perfection.

2) Break your best writing friend's heart. Don't edit her. Make suggestions, but don't edit.

3) Don't ask for quotes from very famous authors you don't know who have personal assistants.

4) Plot matters. But it must also make characters interesting. Boring plot = characters standing around making noises.

5) Trilogies are for the brave. And the very famous. Unless you wrote all three books first.

6) Make your bed EVERY morning. The temptation to crawl into bed and pull the covers over one's head is always present, especially around deadline time.

7) Remember the paralysis of analysis.  Every page you print out for research, someone has already written another page.  Knowing everything about your topic will drown your story and kill your interest.

8) Remember to read a book for fun. Every roofstory is different and you might learn something cool. Or not. I can stand on the ground and look at a roof and know it's mine, and why I did certain things that way, and that's from walking on other roofers' finished roofs.

9) Know your editor. Know your business. And even then, when you least expect it, you'll get the equivalent of a silent movie's piano falling on top of you. Worse, it's your piano, for which you're still paying.

10) Your readers are not your personal psychiatrist. Share discriminately on the Net. Rant discriminately.

11) I'll throw in a freebie ;-).  Your Muse is not your bitch either.

There. The above has moved my writing journey along.  It's not a terribly exciting or new list of observations, I'm afraid, and there are actually quite a bit of in-between stuff that are missing.  Actually, the more interesting wise sayings have been left unsaid because wise sayings become gossip when names are thrown in, yes? ;-).

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