Stories About Writing Advice

Stories about Writing Advice

1. When Zoe edited half of my stupid book, they were like “Yeah, I hate (all the pretentious literary devices). But I love (the parts with feelings) — you should put more emphasis on those.” And I was like “Wait. But the parts you like… those parts are based on real feelings, ones that make me feel uncomfortable to share with others.” And Zoe was like “Yeah. Well those are the best parts. Sucks to be you.”

2. One time someone asked Studs Terkel about how Mike Royoko was able to write so much and Studs was like “Oh jeez. Well, he’s possessed by a demon. I would not want to be him.”

3. There was this interview with Aubrey Plaza where she was like “Trauma and pain and suffering is not mandatory to make good art. You can be happy and have a great day and meditate and still create a masterpiece. I personally haven’t figured out how to do that yet, but it’s probably still true.”

4. Sometimes grief makes your writing better. Sometimes grief makes your writing worse. Sometimes grief has absolutely no impact on the quality of your writing and you have to deal with it anyway.

5. Sometimes when you hit a wall you just have to keep punching through until you start writing. Other times, you just end up with a hole in your wall. This is not a metaphor.

6. If you think about how your grandma might read what you write you’re never going to write anything so try not to think about that.

7. Everything I’ve ever stopped myself from doing because “real writers don’t do that” wasted a huge waste of time.

8. Learning to write under different circumstances has been way better for my brain than clearing lots of space in my life to write.

9. Mary Sues are a better starting point for a story than “Beat up a guy that’s you but only the parts of you that you don’t like”

10. I feel a lot more inspired by stories I hate than stories I love.

11. All of my writing jealousy is immediately cured when I read whatever the person I’m jealous of wrote —it either rocks and it made my life better to read or I hate it and I’m not jealous anymore.

12. No one is going throw blue paint on you for writing about them like they did in Harriet the Spy. Especially if you’re writing about how you admire them. They might do a lot of other things, but they’re definitely not going to throw blue paint on you.

13. It is way more common to write 500,000 words about a topic and have only 500 of those be usable than I ever could’ve imagined.

14. Spite, attention seeking, and “the group chat is bored of this topic but I can’t stop thinking about it” are all valid reasons to write.

15. Things can be emotionally true without being literally true. But you should probably be clear about which one it is if you’re going to write it down.

16. Most people with insight are just yelling the thing they need to yell at themselves in order to function.

17. Anyone who you think is doing something cool is consumed by self doubt at least 70% of the time.

18. The difference between DBT workbooks and “art” is editing.

19. Charlie Jane Anders says in “Never Say You Can’t Survive” trying to choose a single idea to put your energy into is a lot like going on first dates — it’s important to take your time, meet a lot of different people, not move in together after the first 20 minutes. If you’re really bad at going on first dates, consider how this may be related to why you can’t write anything.

20. Organize your notes and review them as often as you can. But not right after you’ve taken Adderall.

21. Writing is subjective AF — external markers of success don’t matter unless they are aligned with your goals. So, it’s important to find external markers that align with your goals. Otherwise you might start to go insane or devote yourself to writing niche fanfiction on AO3 for six months for the dopamine hit.

22. “Just because someone likes the stuff you do doesn’t mean that you have to do it.” — Lizzie McGuire

23. Brene Brown has a rule that she doesn’t write for public consumption about anything in her life that she hasn’t fully processed or been dealing with for at least a year. That’s great for Brene Brown.

24. Toni Morrison said writing is most pure when the characters she’s describing have no resemblance to people she knows in real life — “When they live and breathe in their own separate world as their own separate people.” That’s great for Toni Morrison.

25. When I saw my stepmom Mary last, I I got really anxious and started ranting about all the different projects I couldn’t make progress on, how I  needed to find some sort of standard for writing, word counts, metrics and organization for everything I was doing. Mary listened intently and then said “Oh, I don’t think that’s right at all. Writing, art like that... it’s like they’re children. Each one needs a something different.”