Cat Rambo sez:

I write in large sketch pads, because I like the space to draw arrows and circles and make marginal notes. . . . I always have liked writing with cheap fountain pens, but they’re harder to find than they used to be, and I have a bad habit of losing more expensive ones. So it’s ball-point today, which moves reasonably quickly, but lacks a fountain pen’s rapid grace. 

So why am I telling you all this? Because it’s a prelude to passing along the best writing advice I ever got. Are you ready? You might want to write this down if you’re still figuring out your own process.  It’s this: what other writers do doesn’t matter. Syne Mitchell told my CW class: “Figure out what works for you. And do it. Lots.” And I’m repeating it because that is seriously good advice. You don’t need to write two thousand words a day like Stephen King. You don’t have to write in silence, or with only classical musical playing, or by sticking your head in a victrola after downing a bottle of cheap red wine. What you need to do is experiment and find what gets you writing, and keeps you writing.

All the fiction I write is composed acrostically, out of the first letters of every line of every bit of apparently unrelated work I do, like e-mails, memos, shopping lists, this blog post, all the way back to juvenalia composed out of and precisely simultaneously with old school essays. 

I suppose maybe there are other, easier ways of writing, but I consider them cheating.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008 at 7:09 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.