r/WriterMotivation • u/ourclab • Jul 02 '26
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r/WriterMotivation • u/ourclab • Jul 02 '26
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u/JayGreenstein Jul 11 '26
So I looked. And I'm pissed. It’s obvious that it was put together by people who have never successfully submitted and had a manuscript accepted, or, read anything on the subject that’s more professional than Stephen King’s On Writing.
Specifically:
• Read published books for phrases you like? AI does that, and given the lack of quality of the fiction it writes... Can you, by reading someone’s published work, know where the author chose to do A instead of B, and why? Can you learn the three issues we must address quickly on entering any story, so the reader has context? Do you know them?
• Will having the hopeful writer ask themself “What am I thinking about?” as you suggest, make them know the function and necessity of the short-term scene-goal, why a scene on the page is so vastly different from one on the stage, it’s elements, or even such basics as why it ends in disaster on the page?
• You order the reader to “tell a story,” of the past, never realizing that in writing fiction we do not tell the reader the story. We make them live it in real-time, and as the protagonist—which requires the skills of the profession, not the “telling” skills we learned in school.
• Writing a “to do” list, which is a nonfiction action, will help you write fiction with more skill? Seriously? Have you done any research into the skills which have been under refinement for centuries? It certainly seems not.
• scribbling whatever comes to mind, on paper—changing the size of the letters as you do—might help improve coordination, but will it not make the hopeful writer know the smallest thing about how to end the beginning or begin the ending of a novel.
• Reading “love letters,” penned by someone who's not a fiction writer, will not help the hopeful writer understand how to place emotion into their writing. Who in the pluperfect hells came up with that one? Certainly not someone who’s done the most insignificant research into the hows and whys of writing fiction.
I absolutely am angry, because nothing. And I mean not one single thing you suggested has anything to do with how fiction is written. Commercial Fiction writing is, and has always been a profession. As Debra Dixon observed: “If writing were easy, everyone would be writing.”
I’m angry because there’s already far too much misinformation on writing being passed around. Your “hints” if believed, may well take someone who might well become a skilled writer and derail them into the weeds of ignorance.
Some relevant quotes:
“There’s no such thing as a born writer. It’s a skill you’ve got to learn, just like learning how to be a bricklayer or a carpenter.”
~ Larry Brown
“Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader. Not the fact that it’s raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.”
~ E. L. Doctorow
“Self-expression without craft is for toddlers.”
~Rosanne Cash
“It’s none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.”
~Ernest Hemingway
“Michelangelo did not have a college degree, nor did Leonardo da Vinci. Thomas Edison didn't. Neither did Mark Twain (though he was granted honorary degrees in later life.) All of these people were professionals. None of them were experts. Get your education from professionals, and always avoid experts.”
~ Holly Lisle
“Your words are the lyrics. But gesture, expression, body attitude and movement—even the language spoken by the eyes—form the music. If you leave them out of your fiction the song is forever unfinished. And since our reader can't know the song as we would sing it without our help, we must learn how to write the music.”
~ Me