Unsolicited Writing Advice You Want

Some advice for writers from our own Elissa Bassist:

– First piece of writing advice: “Never take credit”–Stephen Elliott (half-pictured above)

– Your writing should amuse you; if it doesn’t, there’s hardly any point to suffering this much or being this vulnerable or getting that addicted to [fill in the thing to which you got really addicted or hope to get addicted because it’ll give you “material”].

– Writing is the opportunity to take the worst things that have happened to you and turn them into the most beautiful.

– Do you want someone to tell you that your short story sucks and that you should be intellectually and environmentally safe by recycling it? TOO BAD. No one can tell you this. No one gets to tell you what’s trash/recyclable; you decide.

– An MFA program will really help you if you have a high self-esteem problem.

– If someone judges you through your writing, that someone is doing a bad job reading.

– Write every day. If you can’t do that, do this: set an egg timer for 20 minutes; get a pencil and paper and have them touch; don’t lift your pen or pencil off the paper; write “I cannot write every day” on the piece of paper until you have something else to say; do this every day.

– “The moment I stop being a reader is the moment I stop being a writer”–a famous writer said this to me once.

– A conversation between two writers: Writer 1 says, “Blah blah blah,” and Writer 2 says, “Shut up and write.”

– You can’t dismiss an experience because there have been worse experiences.

– “No one who writes good fiction has an Internet connection”–poorly paraphrased advice from Jonathan Franzen.

– If anyone has told you you shouldn’t write or that no one would read your writing if he/she had a choice or that you’re unloveable, please email me at funnywomen [at] therumpus dot net, and I will tell you that any person who craps on your dream is a tampon popsicle.

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For more from Elissa, such as her “Writer’s Guide to Using Twitter“ check out ElissaBassist.com.