The Best Advice: "Keep Writing!"

SpunkyBookworm left a lovely comment on my last article: "Thank you for your words. You are inspiring me to keep at my writing."

Reading that warmed my heart, because I firmly believe that the best advice any writer can get -- and give -- is to keep writing.

Writing is a journey, not a destination.I guarantee that the first time Mozart sat down at a piano, he didn't write a symphony. It's a life-long learning process, and if we're diligent at it and learn from our mistakes, we improve with practice. That's why fanfiction is such a wonderful place for new writers to work on their skills. You have an intimate connection with your audience and they don't hesitate to tell you where you've gone wrong. It stings, but criticism is valuable if there's something you can take from it that helps you to improve.

Experiment. During my time with the fandom, I have expanded and tried different styles of writing. I prefer writing in third-person, past tense but I tried writing a story in first-person, present tense, just to see how it would work for me. It's not a style I'd enjoy working in for a full-length fic or novel, but I learned some things from the experience. (I wrote a couple of articles about the experience, and how short story writing differs from full-length story writing.)
 
Someone once told me that the way they used to audition hosts for the Home Shopping Channel was to plunk a can of Coca-Cola on the table in front of the applicant and ask them to "sell" it for five minutes. I don't know if it's true, but I could see how it would be an extremely valuable exercise. Try the same thing as a writer: describe something mundane. Use all of your senses. Think of adjectives and synonyms for them. How does it make you feel? What are your memories of this item?

Challenge yourself. I'm a romance writer, but I wanted to get the experience of working in other genres. The experience of trying a new genre or story type will teach you about how to better craft a tale in your chosen style. As an example, short story writing taught me more about "info dumps" in a story and how to weave information in and out of other parts of the story.

Try some story prompts. Enter some contests. Try to write a story in exactly 100 words.  Try the NaNoWriMo challenge and write an entire novel in a month. It doesn't have to be good. No one is grading you, except yourself, and the goal is to learn, not to impress.

And never stop learning. Raum once asked me for an article what I had learned from bad writers and I thought it was an excellent question. What I learned from them was that I'll never be "good enough", at least, I hope I won't ever think that I am.

Some authors, after a measure of success, seem to go downhill. There's one author in particular -- who shall remain nameless -- that I think personifies this issue.

The author (I'll call them 'Pat', a nice, genderless name) who has a long series of novels which became very popular. But after a number of books in the series, Pat got away from what had made the series so loved by fans. The quality of the books themselves began to decline as the page count simultaneously increased. (Repetitive dialogue, unnecessary scenes ... Even improper punctuation.)
 
Sales of the series declined and fans began making some pretty harsh comments about the books. Pat responded to criticism from fans by getting angry and defensive, and made hostile comments online, which drove away some readers.
 
Pat forgot that writing  is a symbiotic relationship.  Artistic integrity is one thing, but refusing to listen to legitimate criticism is quite another. Pat also forgot that editors are necessary. We may like to believe that every word that pours from our keyboard is pure gold, but we sometimes need someone to ask us why a scene is in the novel and insist on proper grammar.

And now ...