Okay, I’ll be honest – my skin is scrawling after reading that title. I swear I don’t want to make this into a clickbait-y thing, but we’re running out of options for material and I forgot about this website for a while.
1. That it’s okay to be a bloody-minded purist about writing and literature.
Who cares, right? Life is short and you’ve got to give a shit about something.
2. That you can learn from just about any book.
Please don’t ignore the classics. But also, you’ve got to read the fun, written-in-3-days, grammatical-errors-all-over-the-shop, nightmare novels about a love triangle that you’d never want to be part of in real life. Those are the best: it’s like taking a slightly dodgy car out on the back roads for a joy ride.
3. That there are no ‘rules’ specifically, even if other people claim that there are.
I don’t know what it is, but there’s a whole community out there that I don’t really fit into, and it’s all “10 rules for writing”, blah blah fuckin’ blah.
4. That the whole point of writing is trial-and-error.
So this turned into a list of four, and that’s the whole point of trial and error. I think I’m just frustrated about how clean and tidy people (well, writers, really) try to make an incredibly messy act (i.e. the act of writing a book), and then we all wonder why we get so many difficulties on the way to actually finishing it.
I’ll say it again (please, God, prove me wrong). I’ve never met another writer who I’ve actually liked.