Saturday, November 8, 2008

I've got writer's block

I really could not imagine what I would right about today. I am exhausted, fresh out of ideas, brain dead, utterly Palined. Then I remembered the best advice David Drake ever gave me about writing. If you want to be a writer then write. No really. Get something down on paper (or I should say hard drive these days. Write! You may think your words are drivel but get it down. Then edit and improve. I have heard so many people say that they have an idea, that they have a book in them. Ideas are cheap. Ideas are worthless. You have nothing until you sit down and write. Then suddenly you have a blog!

Don’t think about writing – WRITE!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

John, you've hit on a favorite theme of mine--which is indeed that ideas are easy, ideas are cheap, everyone's got a good idea. (I wouldn't go quite so far as to say ideas are worthless... but they're close-enough-to-worthless to be just like the free mints or matches that every bar and restaurant gives away). Execution is the hard part, the place where the rubber meets the road, the feat that separates the women-and-men from the girls-and-boys. In our case, of course, "execution" means: WRITING. And then revising, rewriting, honing, polishing, tweaking, fixing... until you've got a piece of work that tens of thousands of total strangers will spend their hard-earned cash and hard-won free time to read.

LauraR

Rowena Cory Daniells said...

Hi John,

I think it was Nora Roberts who said ... I can fix a bad page but I can't fix a blank page.

Cheers, R