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C.S.I - Critique Support Improve

C.S.I - Critique Support Improve

For all aspiring writers that want to get better! Need a second pair of eyes and/or some encouragement? You're in luck.

102 members
Posted byYuuin/c_s_i_critique-Oct 02, 2016 at 1:37 PMΔ

Hardest Piece of Writing Advice You've Ever Received?

  • discussion
  • hints and tips

Writing advice is a dime a dozen and sometimes, you can take just as long finding out which advice works as you do practicing your writing skills.

So, the purpose of this discussion is to share some tips and links! What's the hardest, but best writing advice you've ever received?

For me, it was eliminating the verb to be.

Comments3
  • Dr_PlonkOct 04, 2016 at 2:23 PM

    Advice by Chuck Wendig:

    You want to be Hercules, Boudicca, Annie Oakley, and Einstein right out of the gate. You want a perfect novel to pop out of your head fully formed like an adult-grown chicken right from the egg. Won’t happen. You’re gonna suck first. You’re gonna suck for a while. Even when you’re awesome you’re still gonna suck a little bit. This is how you get better. Wade through your own word-waste. I wrote a bunch of assy novels before I wrote one that wasn’t assy. The less you write, the more you suck. You write a lot so you can suck only a little.

    It is very, very, very hard for me to continue on a project when I look at my first draft and see only a sea of badly formed sentences and a structure that obviously is not well and should see a doctor and will probably infect everything else I ever do.

    • YuuOct 04, 2016 at 4:16 PM

      Agreed completely ; A ; Chuck Wendig is the master of tough love, it seems.

  • Anne_TilneyOct 04, 2016 at 5:09 PMΔ

    Here are some of my favorite writing advice:

    "The first draft of anything is shit." - Earnest Hemingway

    "A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public eye with his pants down." -Edna St. Vincent Millay

    "A writer should create living people; people, not characters. A character is a caricature." -Earnest Hemingway

    "The test of any good fiction is that you should care something for the characters; the good to succeed, the bad to fail. The trouble with most fiction is that you want them all to land in hell together, as quickly as possible.” -Mark Twain

    “To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself…Anybody can have ideas–the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.” -Mark Twain

    “Don’t say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream.” -Mark Twain

    “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.” -Mark Twain

    “Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.” -Mark Twain

C.S.I - Critique Support Improve

C.S.I - Critique Support Improve

For all aspiring writers that want to get better! Need a second pair of eyes and/or some encouragement? You're in luck.

102 members
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