kashish

do you have writing advice? i feel like i hate everything i write

read read read read read until you’re swollen with words. read advice from every author you love and read advice from every author you hate and read advice from the monster under your bed and read grammar books and read books from the black mountain poets and read books from modern poets and read self-published novels.

and once you’re filled up on ideas other people have given you, ignore everything you just were told and write what you want to read. if you’re absolutely in love with the luminous quality of alliteration, use it. if you’re amazed by the ability of adverbs to astonishingly and quickly multiply, flood your page with them. if you want to let every character die and come back to life, let them. if nobody dies and it’s 500 pages of people in a tea parlor talking, you just wrote a longer version of “no exit” by jean paul sarte and tbh it’s looking for an update. 

the reason i end up hating my work is twofold. either i’m stuck and it’s just a writing block and it doesn’t flow like it needs to, or i’m stuck because i’m too worried about perfection. i need a passage to ring perfect, and i get so caught up in silly things like commas and splicing and never using “said” that i can’t put anything down without feeling like i’m slogging through letters. i forget that the best part of writing a book is how fun it is to write a book. how caught up i get in the story, how sometimes i can even make myself laugh with surprise.

write because you want to hear yourself tell the story. write with a good sense of humor, honestly. i’ve written five novels, and while they’re not for publishing, they were for fun. we forget not everything has to be marketable and serious. that the best part of writing is when you evaporate and everything becomes story.

and when you’re just blocked? go back to the first part of this. and read.