Writing Prompt: 

Thought for the day:

The contract between the author and the reader is a game. And the game . . . is one of the greatest inventions of Western civilization: the game of telling stories, inventing characters, and creating the imaginary paradise of the individual, from whence no one can be expelled because, in a novel, no one owns the truth and everyone has the right to be heard and understood.
Carlos Fuentes - Myself with Others: Selected Essays

Quick Take

Fiction writers post this next to your computer in extra-large and bold letters:
Scene = Change

Good Advice, Bad Advice?

I've sorted through some of the common bits of advice aimed at writers at my website.
As a person who writes advice books I realize this can be sticky territory.Would love to hear about good or bad advice you've followed as well as your writing questions.
Bring them on.

Human language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when all the time we are longing to move the stars to pity. ~ Gustave Flaubert

Pimping Your Book, Indie or Traditional

Here's a link with some useful info on pimping your book by Holly Robinson. She's been published by major publishers and self published her own novel, so she's writing from a learn-as-you-go perspective. And best, the topics she covers are practical and not so much like real pimping. I, for one, will never wear hats with feathers.

Thought for the Day:

There are so many different kinds of writing and so many ways to work that the only rule is this: do what works. Almost everything has been tried and found to succeed for somebody. The methods, even the ideas of successful writers contradict each other in a most heartening way, and the only element I find common to all successful writers is persistence-an overwhelming determination to succeed. ~ Sophy Burnham

March

I'm a bit of a grinder. Novels are very long, and long novels are very, very long. It's just a hell of a lot of man-hours. I tend to just go in there, and if it comes, it comes. A morning when I write not a single word doesn't worry me too much. If I come up against a brick wall, I'll just go and play snooker or something or sleep on it, and my subconscious will fix it for me. Usually, it's a journey without maps but a journey with a destination, so I know how it's going to begin and I know how it's going to end, but I don't know how I'm going to get from one to the other. That, really, is the struggle of the novel. ~Martin Amis 

Things I Wish I'd Known
Here is a link to writerly advice written by Eric Weinstein. He writes:
"3. Follow the rule or break it, but do what you do for a reason. Insofar as there are rules for writing, they exist as a kind of temporary shorthand for experience—they’re meant to be followed until your own eye, ear, and experiences are sufficiently developed, at which point you become free to crash around and try new things. Whether you follow any given “rule,” however, or break it as part of a larger literary project, you need to understand why you’re doing what you’re doing. A great writer can break any number of rules—to again refer to Kurt Vonnegut, he once said that Flannery O’Connor broke almost all of the rules he’d devised for writing a short story—but this is because she has mastered them, not because she read about them that one time in Intro to Creative Writing and decided they were dull and stultifying.
There are a bunch of Zen-type aphorisms I can think of that point to this same idea. One involves the old saying that to the beginner, there are many ways to do something, and to the master, there are only a few; another is a Bruce Lee quote: “Before I studied the art, a punch to me was just like a punch, a kick just like a kick. After I learned the art, a punch was no longer a punch, a kick no longer a kick. Now that I’ve understood the art, a punch is just like a punch, a kick just like a kick.” The point, as mentioned in #2, is that there’s no permanent substitute for experience."

Quick Take: 
Avoid verbing that is changing nouns to verbs such as journal, parent, mother, gift, host, headquarter, author. (Headquartered at his Tuscany villa, James Toscani hosted a party to celebrate the cookbook he had authored. As his guests left the party, he gifted them all with an autographed copy of his book.) Ugh. 

 Keep writing, keep dreaming, have heart

Thought for the Day:
"Editing itself is an excruciating act of self-discipline, mind reading, and stable cleaning. If it seems like a pleasure, something is probably wrong." ~ Arthur Plotnik

Thought for the Day: 

"Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines.What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination.” ~ Jeanette Winterson