Advice to writers

I love to read how writers create, so sometimes I make note of accounts of how they do it. As I said somewhere on this blog, I once wrote a book. It was actually published. On Amazon.com and everything. Yet I have a hard time completing anything longer than a paragraph, hence my blogs. So this is really advice to myself, Clemens. It comes from an interview with Nora Roberts in Borders Bookstore's Newsletter to customers in which the author says:

Well, first: There ain't no muse. If you sit around and wait to channel the muse, you can sit around and wait a long time. It's not effortless. If only. Well, if it was, then everyone would do it, and where would we be then? So I work really hard to make it as fluid as possible, as readable and entertaining as possible.

I'll vomit out the first draft: bare-bones, get-the-story-down. I don't edit and fiddle as I go, because I don't know what's going to happen next. Once I get the discovery draft down, then I'll go back to page one, chapter one, and then I start worrying about how it sounds, where I've made mistakes, where I've gone right, what else I have to add, where's the texture, where's the emotion. I start fixing. And then, after I've done that all the way through again, I'll go back one more time, and that's when I'm really going to worry about the language. And the rhythm, and making sure that I haven't made a mistake, that I've tied up all the loose ends reasonably.

Everyone works in a different fashion, but this method, or something like it, works for me when I write my non-fiction and it is similar to the method I advise my students try.

Sometimes they listen.