A word or two about writing advice
Hello, all! I hope you've been well.
I want to say a bit about writing advice. Chances are there are some new/aspiring writers subscribed to this newsletter, toiling away in the word mines, and you should know that I am rooting for you. Keep writing!
That said. There's a lot of writing advice floating around, and sadly a lot of it comes from people with little or no actual success in selling their work. Many of them are just passing around things that they've heard from other writers and that they've taken as truth. But for the most part it's not.
Please be wary of any advice that seems to give hard and fast rules for how something must be structured, or what techniques you can and can't use--for example, "Editors won't buy stories in omniscient POV" or "Novels must have a Dramatic Triangle" or...you know, anything that's very specific about what you must or must not do.
This advice feels helpful and right, when you first hear it, because a lot of people around you will be repeating it, and also there's a point in your writing career where you desperately want The Answer. You're looking for the actual, exact steps you need to take to get where you want to go, because otherwise you're just writing and writing and getting rejections and you can't figure out why and how do you know if you should keep going or what you should be doing?? It's enough to drive a person distracted.
Sadly, none of these bits of advice or supposed rules are going to help. If you want to write, and write well, you have to read, write, and think very carefully and closely about what you read and write. You have to do this for years. You don't have to write every single day, because the work isn't always actual putting words down, sometimes the work is daydreaming or thinking, or reading a book you love. But it's a long haul with very little in the way of rules and it will literally take years. Just keep writing.
It's scary and depressing, because you have everything to choose from. It's so much easier to think that if you just follow steps one through twenty-five or whatever, you'll get there. No, you have to look at all the choices available and pick something, out of everything. And then another choice. Lean into those choices, do them as well as you can, send the project out and then start again with new choices for the next project.
Editors will totally buy pieces in Omniscient POV. They'll buy pieces in 2nd. Publishers will buy novels without a dramatic triangle. Editors reject stories in close 3rd that tick all the right writing advice boxes all the time. In fact, I'd bet it's the majority of what gets rejected. Ticking those boxes won't help you sell, and it won't necessarily help you become a better writer. (NOT ticking them won't do it either. It's not that simple.)
Any writing advice, even from an established pro, is "this worked for me." Try it! If you don't like it, if it doesn't work for you, toss it. Try something else. No one can give you the secret map to publishing. It's all just practice and persistence. So, my advice? Practice! And persist!
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Things I've read recently:
Semiosis by Sue Burke
This has been out a while, and halfway on my radar, but then Adrian Tchaikovsky (you've read Children of Time, right?) recommended it, which pushed it up to the top of my TBR. It's really really good.
Ragged Alice, Gareth L Powell
I actually read this a while ago, but Gareth mentioned it over on Bluesky as a book he really loved but that didn't get much attention. It's not much like his space operas (which are also excellent and you should check them out if you haven't yet) but it's very good.