Write Good or Die

You get your body used to running every day (with some rest days in there) and you get stronger and better and faster. Then you can try out a 5K race, and a 10K, and a half marathon, working your way up to the big race.
    (I am not a doctor or a personal trainer—take my running metaphor for what it is, and talk to a professional if you want to start running for real.)
    People think writing is easy. Of course they do—it’s just words, strung together, right? And we all use words, every day, usually speaking, but some of us write emails, or reports, or letters. Storytelling has to be easy, right? We relate our days to our spouses, we encapsulate last night’s TV to our coworkers. Language is a core facet of being human.
    But writing is a skill. The ability to use the right words to properly indicate what’s in your head is something you have to practice. So just as you know that right now you’re not an Olympic marathoner (unless you’re actually a marathoner, and then insert sport-you-don’t-play here), right now you’re likely not a novelist.
    It’s okay. Really. You will be.
    Most writers say that Rule 1 of writing has to be “write” or “put butt in chair.” I disagree. Before you can put your butt in that chair and start writing, you have to let go of the illusion of perfection. What you are writing might suck. The closer you are to your first day writing, the more likely you are to suck. But you can look at it the other way: the farther you move from square one, the less likely you are to suck. But it’s not time that takes you from square one; it’s writing those words.
    When I watch kids’ TV with my daughter, I find it amusing and sad that so many of those shows tried to teach us lessons that didn’t sink in. One of these lessons is that you’re not going to be perfect the minute you try something. You have to practice. I have to remind my daughter time and time again that she’s not going to be perfect when she tries something the first time. And then I have to remind myself that when I start something new, and I have to tell my listeners that when they tell me they’re discouraged.
    You will never be perfect. Never. You will eventually finish stories and novels and achieve a sense of accomplishment, of satisfaction, even. You’ll start to get confident in your work. But the story will never appear on the page the same way it did in your head. And that’s OK. It happens to all of us. Your job is to tell the story in the best way you can. When you’re done, put it down and write something else. You can edit later. Right now, just focus on letting go of the perfect shining image of the story in your head, sitting down, and writing it. And if it sucks, so what? Your next story will be better.
    I have faith in you. The day you accept that your writing is allowed to suck is your first day of being a writer—the day you set yourself free.

    Mur Lafferty— http://www.murverse.com
    ###

4. NURTURE YOUR INNER HACK
    By Scott Nicholson
    http://www.hauntedcomputer.com

    Most aspiring writers, and even all those millions who are going to get around to being writers someday, have the idea that the Great American Novel is sleeping in their brains and all they need to do is sit down and type. Or maybe they’ll wait for voice recognition software to advance far enough that they can babble it out while they drive to New York to pick up their checks. Even Europeans and South Americans want to write the Great American Novel, because nobody has a better chance to win the Nobel Prize for Literature than a foreigner who writes a Great American Novel. Hollywood might even buy it, sight unseen, if enough people who haven’t read the book start talking about it.
    The only fly in this ointment is all those people out there who could care less whether you win big literary prizes. For most readers, your being compared to Faulkner and Gunter Grass are actually turn-offs rather than selling points. As hard as it is to believe, not everybody analyzes the New York Times Book Review for hip clues about what to stick on the shelves. And the highbrow Fifth Avenue secret is not all that many people buy these intelligent books. The secret is now being exposed by BookScan, which reports the actual number of sales with the precision of a computer rather than with the exuberance of an in-house publicist.
    What does this mean to you as a writer? Or, for those few of us who still crack a book now and then rather than