Every writer make mistakes. New writers don’t have a monopoly on mistakes but they do make rookie mistakes. Here’s what I wrote on the Moonlight Press blog recently:
Albert Einstein once said, “Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.” If you’re a new writer, you’ll inevitably make mistakes. We all make mistakes – especially when we’re embarking on a new path. Writing is no different.
Over the past thirty years, we’ve learned a lot about writing and publishing – both from a creative perspective and from a business one. Here are our unofficial observations about the most common mistakes new writers make.
Self-publishing or shopping a first (or even second) draft. As a new writer, you might think that your writing is just fine the way you put it onto the page or computer screen. It isn’t. Believing in the infallibility of a first draft is the hallmark of an inexperienced writer. The more experienced you get, the better your writing gets. And the better your writing gets, the more…
Anyone who knows me knows that I was an accidental academic.
When I took my first part-time university teaching position so many years ago,
I had no intention of making it permanent. I didn’t see myself starting off as
a lowly assistant professor making my way up the academic ladder to associate
professor and finally the ultimate academic goal: Full Professor. But that’s
what happened. You know the old saying… “If you want to make God laugh, tell
her your plans…” Well, God must be laughing. Anyway, that happened, but that
part of my life is also over. And I find myself back where it all began: teaching
writing.
Yes, that first course I taught all those years ago was a
writing course. You see, I had already begun to carve out a path for myself as
a writer. I had published numerous magazine articles mostly in my specialty
area of health and medicine, and I had also already published my first book –
also in my specialty area. So, teaching writing seemed natural to me. And it
still does. However, my venue has changed.
This past year I finally pulled together thirty years of writing
and publishing experience to share it with the world. I thought I’d be able to
be a mentor to newbie writers just starting out. But something happened.
In the intervening years between when I first established
myself as a writer, and today, the writing and publishing industry has
undergone nothing short of a transformation. Everyone can be published today. No
one seems to need a publisher. Or even an editor. And so many writers are part
of an online writing community that oozes self-congratulation and disingenuous positivity
about everyone’s writing – all because you never know what someone else might
say about your writing. You pat my back and I’ll pat yours, or something
like that.
The upshot of this whole project was a book that seeks not only to provide a bit of mentoring to new writers but also to provide a foundation in reality and to disabuse writers these days of some of the myths about fame and fortune as a writer. The book is Permission to Write: How to Write a Book and Other Myths from the Real World of Writing and Publishing. I’ve also decided to share additional materials through the medium of video.
Thus, I’ve begun a 10-part series to accompany the book. The first episode “Want to be a rich and famous writer? Don’t give up your day job” is already up and running.
Today episode number two launches: “Don’t write that book! Or at least don’t publish it.”
So you can see that I don’t necessarily paint a rosy picture for wannabe writers. However, serious wannabe writers will get through them and still want to write that book. Those are the writers I aim to help.
The videos are posted on the Moonlight Press YouTube channel. Let your friends who “wanna write a book” know.
I really hate it when perfectly good words are stripped of their meaning as a result of inappropriate and over use. Here’s what I wrote about this on the Moonlight Press blog…
Have you noticed something? Everything these days is awesome.
Your coffee order at Starbucks is, “Awesome!” or so says the barista. You’ve just
told the drycleaner that you’re dropping off two suit jackets. That, too, is “Awesome.”
The sad truth is that when everything is awesome, nothing is awesome.
When did those of us who publish books get so crabby? But we are crabby about this kind of devaluation of formerly useful words.
Many years ago, we were the ones who cringed every time
someone said that something was “groovy.” We just gritted our teeth and hoped
that the day would come when it would die out. It did.
But now we have a bigger problem because the word we are
having a problem with is a real word that has a specific definition that dates
to the sixteenth century. “Groovy” on the other hand, has a somewhat looser…
Patricia J. Parsons 