I ran across some advice from Ray Bradbury in my Pocket suggestions on Firefox. He was an extremely prolific and successful writer, so probably worth listening to.
Ray Bradbury's Writing Advice
A few highlights:
Write a LOT for practice.
If you can write one short story a week—it doesn’t matter what the quality is to start, but at least you’re practicing, and at the end of the year you have 52 short stories, and I defy you to write 52 bad ones. Can’t be done. At the end of 30 weeks or 40 weeks or at the end of the year, all of a sudden a story will come that’s just wonderful.
Writer’s block is a warning sign.
What if you have a blockage and you don’t know what to do about it? Well, it’s obvious you’re doing the wrong thing, aren’t you? . . . You’re being warned, aren’t you? Your subconscious is saying I don’t like you anymore. You’re writing about things I don’t give a damn for. . . If you have writers’ block you can cure it this evening by stopping what you’re doing and writing something else. You picked the wrong subject.
Write what you love.
Fall in love and stay in love. Do what you love, don’t do anything else. Don’t write for money. Write because you love to do something. If you write for money, you won’t write anything worth reading.
Have you found good advice that helps you that you can share in the comments?
In the spirit of practicing writing, tonight’s challenge is to write at least two paragraphs using these random words:
saffron
hologram
waif
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