A Book, Some Editorial Advice and a Picture of a Kitty & a Puppy

It’s Friday, which means absolutely nothing to a freelancer since all days end up looking the same. But for the sake of the rest of the working world, I’m going to play along. Hooray for the weekend! (For the record, I almost never use exclamation marks. This is not because F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote of them, “An exclamation mark is like laughing at your own jokes,” but because I rarely feel all that exclamatory. So, if you see one on this blog, it’s either a sign of the apocalypse or a snide comment on the sentence that precedes it. Listen for the sound of hoofbeats. If you hear them and you’re not at a rodeo, it might just be the former.)

In order to set a trend early in this blog’s life, I’m declaring Fridays as “write a post about anything” days. This is my way of lowering expectations and providing for the likelihood that I’ll be underwhelmed by my own writing at least once a week. Which is not to say you are required to be underwhelmed as well. Feel free to be as whelmed as you like.

Friday Item Numero Uno – A Book

Shame, by Greg Garrett. Buy it. Read it. I edited it. Okay, so this could be considered shameless self-promotion (irony noted), except for the fact that it really is a great book and I’d recommend Greg’s writing even if the closest I ever got to editing it was scrawling “best” in my autographed copy between the words “To my…” and “friend, Steve.”

Fair warning if you’re looking for a whiz-bang-shoot-em-up thriller with paranormal tendencies – that ain’t this book. Shame is the story of John Tilden, a good man wrestling with relationships and regret and the lure of oft-remembered longings that threaten to redefine the life he has come to know. Reading Greg’s prose is like canoeing on a twisting, gently flowing river – it draws you in, carries you, sometimes surprises you, but always takes you to a satisfying ending.

Friday, the Second Thing – Some Editorial Advice

Ready? This one’s profound. You sure you’re ready? Because when I say “profound,” I mean it. Okay, here goes: Don’t take every bit of editorial advice as the gospel truth. Even what I just wrote.

I’ll give you a moment to catch your breath.

There’s a lot of great advice here on the Interwebs and also in those dust-gathering paper things with pages people in one possible future will refer to as “Pre-Kindle Reading Devices.” Learn as much as you can. Soak it all in. But don’t presume that what works for one (or even a thousand) will work for you, too. For example, many writer-advisors say, “Kill adverbs now!” (Unless they speak irony, in which case they might say, “Quickly, kill all adverbs!”) Hey, it’s generally pretty good advice, but maybe your book actually is better because it has three adverbs in it. Here’s another: conventional wisdom says don’t open your novel talking about the weather. Yeah, “It was a dark and stormy night” probably won’t give that agent you’re stalking a literary orgasm. But “When I was seven years old, a tornado swept through my small town and took everything with it but me” just might.

Here’s my best advice on the whole advice thing: Study all you can, then stuff all the study materials under your desk and simply write. The hints and tips and advice that most resonated with you will begin to naturally shape your writing. And even if your writing still sucks…er…isn’t brilliant, the best time to fix it is after you’ve written your first draft, right? At that point, you can go back to learnin’ and apply what you discover to your work in progress.

But then again, don’t take what I say as the gospel truth. (See “Some Editorial Advice” above.)

Finally, Friday Item 3 – A Picture of a Kitty & a Puppy

Because some of you were disappointed that my Tuesday post included words about writing and not a picture of a kitty and a puppy, here you go. Happy “Awe, cute!”ing.

Have a swell weekend.