By BookBaby author Dawn Field
Want to be certain your writing career never leaves the ground? These 23 tips will help you stave off success and fail as a writer!
To ensure you fail as a writer:
1. Don’t worry too much about your opening line. Readers will soon be past it and into the good stuff.
2. Don’t be concerned that your ending goes off with a fizzle. The rest of the book was worth the price of admission.
3. Don’t worry about typos and grammatical errors. Trivial details won’t bother veteran readers.
4. Go with your first complete draft as your final draft. Your gut instincts were correct the first time around, you’ll just dilute them when you edit.
5. Only write when the urge hits you. If you need discipline to write, it’s not really writing.
6. Do not exercise, enjoy hobbies, or have any kind of life outside of writing . Any minute spent doing something else is time down the drain.
7. Sleep as little as possible. Sleep deprivation will unlock your inner writing god.
8. Quit your day job immediately. Work gets in the way of your writing.
9. Be as original as possible, forget conforming to any genre expectations.
10. Ignore the belief that publishable books have structure or that you need one.
11. Leave details as ambiguous as you can. Let your readers rely on their mind-reading abilities to intuit what you really meant .
12. Make sure your readers cannot easily form mental images from your story.
13. Don’t worry about logical inconsistencies, keep your readers on their toes!
14. Do not waste time learning the craft of writing. Focus on producing lots of words – that’s what writing is all about.
15. Don’t read, not even the great authors. And especially never read other authors in your genre . Their writing might rub off on you and make yours less original.
16. Do not research your topic. Your intuition is more compelling than facts.
17. Do not ever read for other writers. Critiquing will just cloud your mind and take your focus off your own work.
18. If an editor critiques your writing, stick to your guns that it’s his fault he didn’t understand “what you really meant.”
19. If a reader gives you feedback that something in the plot seems to be missing, ignore her. Better yet, prove it’s “all there” by pointing to page 224, where three words in the middle of a paragraph at the end of the chapter “explain it all.”
20. Never back up the electronic copy of your work. It’s good for your creative juices to be in constant fear of losing your book beyond the event horizon of the cyber black hole.
21. Forget the idea of practicing any kind of writing other than your book. It’s just a distraction.
22. Do not stoop so low as to take the advice of writers who have walked the path before you. You need to find your own path in your own way.
23. Never show your writing to anyone.
I’m sure I missed a few… please add yours in the comments section!
Dawn Field (July 20, 1969 – May 2, 2020)
In late 2015, Dawn Field submitted a post to the BookBaby Blog. While many unsolicited submissions don’t quite meet the needs (or standards) of our readers, something about it stood out. I posted the article, and to my grateful amazement, that initial contribution flourished into a five-year collaboration resulting in over 100 posts published here. Sadly, on May 2nd, 2020, Dr. Field suddenly and tragically passed away at the age of 50. In an effort to bring some of her work back into the conversation, and with the permission of her family, we are re-publishing some of Dr. Field’s posts so a new generation of BookBaby Blog readers can experience and learn from her commitment to share what she was learning on her own journey as a writer.
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This BookBaby blog article How To Fail As A Writer In 23 Easy Steps appeared first on and was stolen from BookBaby Blog .