When you're writing a book, you can't succeed unless you can recognize when you're shit.
If you have no self confidence and can't show your work to anybody then you'll never go anywhere and your fucking book will be stillborn. The best you can hope for at that point is that a friend will publish your work after you die like Franz Kafka.
No piece of work will ever be perfect. Even the finest novels and stories can be shat on, misunderstood or just found boring by a reader.
This is the age of the internet, we can see our haters in real time.
The thing is, while there's a popular joke that having an opinion on the internet will get you mobbed; the same is no less true for real life.
So back to the previous point. You can't trust the people who praise you and you can't trust the people who hate you. You've got to see for youself what works in the story, what would work in another story or what would be flat out shit in any circumstance and you better fucking feel ashamed for writing bullshit like that.
I had writer's block for about two weeks, I wrote a short paragraph about dwarves on motorcycles. Then I got stuck.
So I deleted it because while the idea was funny, it didn't fucking belong with my story and didn't serve the narrative in any way.
And this is a goddamn story where anything and everything happens, but the dwarves on motorcycles did not serve the story. They weren't funny or enlightening or even good background dressing. In another setting it might have been interesting . . . to at least me.
But I had to cut out a tumor from my precious novel. That little paragraph had to die so that the rest of the story could continue to live and be born.
My book is my baby, and I have to care for it and provide for it at every step of its gestation. I can't eve take a vacation from it, can't take a break from it.
Because even when I distract myself on this blog like a pregnant mother taking medication for morning sickness I always have that novel in the back of my mind if not the front of it.
So what do you love most?
If you have no self confidence and can't show your work to anybody then you'll never go anywhere and your fucking book will be stillborn. The best you can hope for at that point is that a friend will publish your work after you die like Franz Kafka.
No piece of work will ever be perfect. Even the finest novels and stories can be shat on, misunderstood or just found boring by a reader.
This is the age of the internet, we can see our haters in real time.
The thing is, while there's a popular joke that having an opinion on the internet will get you mobbed; the same is no less true for real life.
So back to the previous point. You can't trust the people who praise you and you can't trust the people who hate you. You've got to see for youself what works in the story, what would work in another story or what would be flat out shit in any circumstance and you better fucking feel ashamed for writing bullshit like that.
I had writer's block for about two weeks, I wrote a short paragraph about dwarves on motorcycles. Then I got stuck.
So I deleted it because while the idea was funny, it didn't fucking belong with my story and didn't serve the narrative in any way.
And this is a goddamn story where anything and everything happens, but the dwarves on motorcycles did not serve the story. They weren't funny or enlightening or even good background dressing. In another setting it might have been interesting . . . to at least me.
But I had to cut out a tumor from my precious novel. That little paragraph had to die so that the rest of the story could continue to live and be born.
My book is my baby, and I have to care for it and provide for it at every step of its gestation. I can't eve take a vacation from it, can't take a break from it.
Because even when I distract myself on this blog like a pregnant mother taking medication for morning sickness I always have that novel in the back of my mind if not the front of it.
So what do you love most?
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