neil-gaiman:

I read a sad case today of a young writer who had had her story rewritten into illiteracy by a so-called publisher, who then abused her in email when she wrote to complain. She wsn’t getting paid for her story — instead she was actually buying copies of the anthology to show…

(Source: howpublishingreallyworks.blogspot.com)

dduane:

Read this. Go forth and do likewise. Special attention to numbers 10, 11 and 12. Also #25.

My biggest issues are probably 12 and all the stuff about publishing/what sells.

(Source: whiteraven93)

writeworld:

The Internet is full of bad advice for creative writers. Here’s just a small sampling of the nonsense you can find if you look for it.

• “Show, don’t tell.” News flash: writing is telling. It’s a completely linguistic art form. There’s no showing involved, unless you’re writing illustrated books like Dr. Seuss or graphic novels like Neil Gaiman. The real distinction to be made here is between writing descriptive language (e.g. when your character is drinking whiskey from a canteen around a campfire) and dynamic language (e.g. when your character is fleeing from rampaging cannibals through the underbrush). Both forms have their time and place.
• “Stay away from synonyms for the word said.” This is just plain creative fascism. People don’t just say things, sometimes they exclaim, declare, thunder, growl, rage, ejaculate, expostulate, or enumerate. A novel is not a play. There are no actors to give expression to your dialogue, so it’s your job as the author to describe your character’s emotional state when speaking her lines.
• “Simplify your language.” Many people these days mistake novels for Hollywood screenplays. Hollywood screenplays are very much concerned with plot and keeping an audience’s attention. Screenplay writers like to condense things down to the smallest nugget possible to keep the film’s running time to a profitable 90 minutes rather than a money-losing 180. If you’re a novelist, you’ve got plenty of room to play with. Stretch out, relax, take your time, don’t rush things for someone else’s arbitrary notion of pacing.
• “Don’t be too wordy.” Telling a writer that she’s using too many words is like telling an artist she’s using too much paint.
• “Don’t use words in your writing that people don’t use in real life.” While it’s true that you shouldn’t pull out a thesaurus any old time and start plugging in multisyllabic words just for the hell of it, it’s pointless to confine yourself to the small subset of the English language that’s used in conversation. Novels are a stylized art form that aren’t necessarily supposed to reflect real life. They’re meant to be read, not spoken.
• “Don’t be pretentious.” Writing is pretentious. Fiction writing doubly so. In fact, one of the definitions of the word pretense (according to my MS Encarta) is “make-believe or things imagined.” If you don’t believe that your imaginings are of great import to the world, then we won’t care to read them. If you don’t act like your imaginings are of great import to the world, then we won’t give any significance to them. (You should, however, recognize when seriousness about your work gives way to smugness or condescension.)
• “Read your writing aloud.” I will admit that this tip can be helpful in many situations, especially when writing dialogue. But once again, remember that a novel is not a film. It’s not a radio play or a speech (or a blog post, for that matter). Some of our best living prose stylists (Richard Powers, Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth) write in sentences that are difficult to read aloud. Take the first sentence of Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, one of the twentieth century’s great novels: “One summer afternoon, Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary.”)
• “Use the active voice instead of the passive voice.” Okay, this one is actually probably true. (Passive voice: “It was decided by the Democrats that John Kerry would be the nominee for President.” Active voice: “The Democrats nominated Howard Dean for President instead.”)

Is this sarcastic? Tell me this is sarcastic, because this is some godawful advice to give to writers. It shows an extreme lack of understanding of the phrase “show, don’t tell”, and if you want advice on using the word “said”, sci fi author Diane Duane has some that’s a whole lot more believable than the idea that using words like “ejaculated” outside of a bizarrely clinical sex scene is all right by the general public.

I looked at the source of this Bad Advice on “Bad” Advice, and it’s apparently an award-winning writer. Is he trying to clear out the field of writing? Is this some writerly form of forced Darwinism? If people are stupid enough to use the words “expostulated” and “enumerated” in place of “said” and ten dollar words where two cent words would do, well, I suppose the fewer authors flooding the market, the better.

(via fuckyeahcharacterdevelopment)