Malcolm Gladwell’s oft-cited claim you need 10,000 hours to get proficient at anything may be wrong—it’s neither the minimum required for proficiency, nor any guarantee you’ll become proficient.
•I’m sure everyone reading this knows not to spend royalties before you get the check. This writer didn’t. And here’s comics writer Kelly Sue deConnick on making people uncomfortable “so my daughter won’t have to.”
•Sexism and the female writer.
•An interesting discussion in comments on why TV focuses on high school so much more than college.
•My fellow writer and friend Liz Berger on bad boys. My own post on the topic (and links to Foz Meadows’ more in-depth discussion) here.
•Knite Writes argues that putting out a crappy indie book poisons the well for other writers.
•If you’re writing a story around 1960, here’s some sample recipes.
•A statistical (if, as the author notes, hardly rigorous) study of which types of authors (self-published, traditional, hybrid) do best. Though I suspect some of the self-published zero-income authors are just using their writing as a tool rather than an endgame—self-help gurus who can use their book to promote themselves as experts (as one business adviser once put it, few people are going to care that it’s self-published).
•Mighty God King rips into the argument that Mary Jane’s (in Spider-Man) only attribute is her looks, or that a Peter-MJ marriage just doesn’t work because she’s too beautiful (“as if somehow “hot wife” means “everything right in the world” or for that matter that being hot somehow requires a character to have no burdens in life.”).
•A couple of posts on Facebook for authors.
•For self-publishing authors, some thoughts on back-cover blurbs.
•John Scalzi on why he doesn’t self-publish, and what his publisher does for him.
•Natania Barron and Jonathan Wood on their writing processes.
•Cora Buhlert has several good links (including my own posts) and her own comments on the SFWA dispute. And John Scalzi responds to a threat to sue him over linking to a particular article.
Writing links (#SFWApro)
Filed under Writing
Thanks for the ping! I enjoyed those links on writing process. Incidentally, I’m already an ardent planner (not a pantser), but I’m toying with the idea of adding even more structure to my editing process now, and using MRUs or similar scene-structuring tools (http://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/articles/writing-the-perfect-scene/). What do you think of those? Help or hindrance?
Like most tools I think it depends on you. I find them more of an annoyance (and I automatically distrust any proclamation that You Must Do It This Way), but obviously they work for others.