4.26.2006

Thought Exercise
With every word you or I write, we become better writers. Somewhere in the universe there is a sheet of paper listing how many words Harley needs to write before he sells a book. It might be so many that I never sell a book. Or it might be just around the corner.

I think this is true of any person who wants to be a writer. It's my belief that it doesn't matter so much where you begin; more important is how long and hard you are willing to work to make improvements.

Either way, assuming that my vampire novel is a flop, come May 31st I’ll still be +90,000 closer to meeting that deadline in the sky. And that's pretty fun.

Improvement. Totally doable.

3 comments:

Mike said...

"With every word you or I write, we become better writers."

Very true. I keep running into teenage gamers at my local gaming store who want to be writers ... yet they don't actually write anything. I think they like the idea of being writers more than the act of writing itself.

Like the old joke goes - "How do you get to Carnegie Hall ...? Practice, baby, practice."

ec said...

Mike, I feel your pain. I've received more than a few emails from young wannabes who want assurances that their first work--which they have not yet begun to write--will be accepted for publication. And they want to know how much they can expect to get from it.

My favorite is the guy who wanted to write Star Wars stories, but didn't want to waste his time if he couldn't be assured of publication. So he wanted to write a page or two, send it to me, and if I was fairly certain it would be published I was to forward it on to George Lucas. If Mr. Lucas gave the go-ahead, then and only then would this aspiring writing consider writing the story to be worth his time.

Yikes. Egogentric much? :)

ec said...

Oops. Should have been "egocentric." My fingers keep stammering today.