Tips for Aspiring Young Writers: #1

I'll be placing these tips in the Appendices of the next four Jake Sloan Adventures.

They are intended as personal encouragements and coaching tips for anyone who might be thinking of writing stories of their own.  They are observations and personal mantras for your consideration:

#1.

Success in writing is less about intelligence and more about diligence.  The general experience of writers is that great stories tend to not come fully-formed out of the head, but come forth in parts and pieces which are thoughtfully arranged for the best impact on the reader.  That goes to intelligence.  Meaning, artful products are more about composition.  The brilliance we see in good literature, well-constructed stories and the like are a function of aptitude applied over time, rather than some flash-in-the-pan production during one afternoon of brainstorming. 

The second part of this is diligence.  In order to produce this kind of synthesis of concepts it takes regular work.  A person must stay at it, become regular about their effort.  Success is more dependent upon this perseverance through the process.  Moments of inspiration will come, but they usually only make themselves available to the diligent.

One of my favorite author quotes comes from Stephen King, in his On Writing (2002), when he describes how he regularly sits down at his desk, placed in a certain location in his home so that he can concentrate and be free of distractions for a few hours at a time.  He talks about the classical Muse, the Greek god of artful inspiration.  But his Muse is a slightly different character, styled just for him, “Traditionally, the muses were women, but mine’s a guy; I’m afraid we’ll just have to live with that”:

“There is a muse,* but he’s not going to come fluttering down into your writing room and scatter creative fairy-dust all over your typewriter or computer.  He lives in the ground.  He’s a basement kind of guy.  You have to descend to his level, and once you get down there you have to furnish an apartment for him to live in. You have to do all the grunt labor, in other words, while the muse sits and smokes cigars and admires his bowling trophies and pretends to ignore you. Do you think it’s fair?  I think it’s fair.  He may not be much to look at, that muse-guy, and he may not be much of a conversationalist, but he’s got inspiration.  It’s right that you should do all the work and burn all the mid-night oil, because the guy with the cigar and the little wings has got a bag of magic.  There’s stuff in there that can change your life.  Believe me, I know.”  (pp. 208-209)