5 Pieces of Terrible Writing Advice You Should Totally Ignore
nofilmschool.com – Thursday November 16, 2023
We've all heard some terrible writing advice in our lives. It might have been from so-called "experts," professors, or even in an unhelpful YouTube tutorial, but there are good writing lessons at the heart of every bad note. Let's look at a few together to see what you can glean.
Tell me if this rings a bell, you're attending a screenwriting seminar, listening to a lecture, or getting notes from someone, and they lean in and tell you they have a piece of advice. After hearing it, you shake your head. You feel a little worse off than you started, and you're not sure what to do next.
Terrible writing advice is all around us. Bad writing advice comes from many sources. We hear it in blogs, podcasts, and all over Social Media.
Today I want to go over the 5 biggest pieces of terrible screenwriting advice I've heard, debunk each of them, and give you the proper lessons to take away from each of them.
Ready? Let's go...
My First Thriller: Joseph Finder
crimereads.com – Thursday November 16, 2023
Joe Finder must have thought he knew the secrets to selling a book. His first, a work of nonfiction, Red Carpet: The Connection Between the Kremlin and America’s Most Powerful Businessmen, had a hardcover run of 10,000.
It sold out.
Sounds like an early and smooth ride into the literary sunset. But there’s a catch. (There’s always something in book publishing.)
Finder, a Harvard graduate student in Russian Studies at the time, managed to anger one of the richest and most powerful men in America while writing Red Carpet. The man was so mad he approached Finder’s academic advisor with a proposal: kick Finder out of school and he’d write Harvard a check so big they’d have to use a wheelbarrow to deliver it. He also tempted the university with a trove of personal papers for its archives.
New Publishing Imprint Listing: Gold SF
firstwriter.com – Thursday November 16, 2023
Dedicated to discovering and publishing new intersectional feminist science fiction, promoting voices that answer to the unprecedented times in which we find ourselves, and orientated towards to social, economic, and environmental justice.
Big Publishing Killed the Author
newrepublic.com – Wednesday November 15, 2023
The suggestion that Beloved, Toni Morrison’s acclaimed novel about slavery and its afterlives, is also a parable about the publishing industry would be bizarre, even offensive—if, that is, Morrison herself hadn’t explicitly suggested it. For years, Morrison had felt not merely penned in by her career as an editor at the publishing giant Random House; she had felt indentured, “held in contempt—to be played with when our masters are pleased, to be dismissed when they are not,” as she declared in a speech six years before publishing Beloved. Upon leaving her job at Random House to focus on writing full-time, she felt “free in a way I had never been, ever.… Enter Beloved.” It was, she continued in the novel’s preface, “the shock of liberation”—liberation from the world of corporate publishing—“that drew my thoughts to what ‘free’ could mean.” In the novel itself, Morrison has Baby Suggs, the protagonist’s mother, describe freedom from slavery in strikingly similar terms.
How To Write A Query Letter That Makes Literary Agents Take Notice
livinggossip.com – Tuesday November 14, 2023
Writing a query letter is a crucial step in the journey of getting your manuscript published. Literary agents receive countless submissions daily, and your query letter is your first chance to make a lasting impression. To ensure that your work gets the attention it deserves, you need to craft a compelling query letter that stands out from the rest. In this guide, we will provide you with a step-by-step process on how to write a query letter that literary agents will find irresistible. Let’s get started!
How to Become a Short Storyist
By G. Miki Hayden
Instructor at Writer's Digest University online and private writing coach
firstwriter.com – Tuesday November 14, 2023
I wanted to become a novelist, but a friend of mine gave me a tip: “Write short stories as credentials you can mention in query letters for your novels.” I decided to follow her advice, plus I could write a short story in a couple of weeks for some quick satisfaction.
Since then, I’ve written and published generous handfuls of short stories, won a couple of short story awards, and made a little money at the game—mostly very little—but all coinage counts.
I want to herein present some revelations as to “how I do it.” But in addition to my having short stories published many times, I also have many worthy pieces not yet published, so don’t follow me there.
I don’t concentrate on just one element in the story when I write and then layer in other aspects—though you can do that. I also rarely restructure. I write and then polish. However, while I certainly think that writing everything at the same time produces a more cohesive piece, I also will suggest that my students (at Writers Digest’s Writers Online Workshops) can deposit in elements later on if they aren’t able to provide them in the initial draft.
The most common essentials that students will miss in their short story writing are emotion, setting, and point-of-view character internals.
The eliciting of emotion is definitely an important fundamental of fiction, but that’s probably the hardest thing for writers to do. So I don’t really mean that exactly, as creating suspense, tension, the onset of romance, or even reader sorrow is extremely difficult. If writers can actually trigger reader feelings—wonderful—they may make a lot of money selling their manuscripts. But if they can’t, then they can at least include the mechanical representation of these sensations. We are always able to write “His heart thudded in his chest, and he thought he would faint.” That will substitute for the real thing in many instances, and a writer does need to have at least elements of emotion to round out any story.
Indie Press Network launches to connect small indie publishers
thebookseller.com – Tuesday November 14, 2023
The Indie Press Network has launched with the aim of connecting independent publishers with each other, as well as with booksellers and readers.
The open network will offer promotion opportunities for established presses’ titles and authors, as well as free, open-access resources for those starting out.
The Indie Press Network was founded by Will Dady of Renard Press, and is launching with an inaugural cohort of 10 member presses. It is open to all small publishers with five or fewer employees and aims to encourage and support new "would-be" publishers.
According to Renard Press, the network seeks to build on the work being done by other membership organisations to "decolonise publishing and to raise the profile of smaller presses who don’t have big marketing budgets".
Faber chair Page says he is 'confident' publishers will adapt to AI
thebookseller.com – Tuesday November 14, 2023
Stephen Page, Faber and Faber chair, has said that he is "confident" publishers will find their way with AI, adding that "technology usually amplifies publishing".
In a public lecture delivered at the University of West London on Thursday 9th November, Page reflected on the "five revolutions" that publishing has undergone over recent decades and how the book trade can rise to future challenges instead of being "swept up" in them. He said that human, intellectual, social and financial capital are "at the heart of what has made publishing endure" and will be essential in future challenges like AI.
"Publishing is innately revolutionary in its makeup," Page said. "It takes the ideas that will change society [and] makes them public through putting them into the world."
New Literary Agent Listing: Anna Olswanger
firstwriter.com – Monday November 13, 2023
Has been an agent since 2005. Represents a wide variety of genres but is currently focused on illustrated books (picture books and graphic novels).
Loch Long crime writing residency launched
thelochsidepress.com – Friday November 10, 2023
A new two-week residency for crime writers has been launched by Cove Park.
The fully-funded programme is for Scotland-based writers developing new work in crime fiction and scheduled to run in late March next year.
The writer will receive a total residency fee of £1,100 (£550 per week) and a travel allowance of up to £75 from the arts centre on the Rosneath Peninsula.
To apply, writers must be based in Scotland and have published at least one book with a traditional publisher.
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