It's All Just a Draft by Tobias S. Buckell Introduction: I'm sitting at my desk checking my correspondence (virtual or real). And while here, it quickly becomes clear that the most common request I get isn't a request to write something, or appear somewhere, or sign a book (or even, as I'd prefer, a check), but it is a person asking me advice about writing. I often tell people to read my blog. I started it in 1998 as a way to chronicle my life as I worked toward becoming a published writer. It contained snippets of my daily life, thoughts, and lots of tips about writing as well. But not a lot of people want to wade through the seven years or so of the archives I do have available there right now. Fair enough. So I set out to collect the best blog posts into a bundle. When I mentioned I was doing that, several people suggested I turn it into a book, and suddenly here we were: Why not give all those people asking me about my writing advice a single place where they could find it all? Moving the posts and trying to put them into some format started me thinking about writing advice, and what my favorite writing advice books were. There was the clever, witty, You're Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to a Coffee Shop by John Scalzi, collecting all his posts about writing. There was On Writing by Stephen King. Word Work by Bruce Holland Rogers. How To Write Science Fiction and Fantasy by Orson Scott Card. The Turkey City Lexicon. The 10% Solution by Ken Rand. All of these were books on my shelves that I found useful. Mostly I mused about the sheer arrogance of me writing a 'how to' book. Here I am with a mere four novels and thirty or so odd short stories sold. Who am I to tell anyone, anywhere, how to do anything. I barely scraped into my own career. But when I thought about the tips, tricks, and hints that I used to get ahead, I remembered that many of them came from writers just ahead of where I was and who were I wanted to be. Some of my favorite books were written by authors right after they were first published. I think the reason for this is that it is just around this time when artists are most aware of their process, or what it took for them to figure out how to do what they just did. Well practiced masters of their crafts can often internalize their habits to such a degree it's hard for them to explain or pass on how they came to do what they do. Many more will know that a certain tool or approach works, but forget the process in which they learned that. Passing on the rote knowledge, to someone who may be in a different situation, or who's a different kind of writer, may well be damaging. As a result, some of my favorite books about writing blended the story of the writer's developing career with how they came to figure out how be a writer. Most of this stuff is buried in my emails, blog posts, and articles I wrote about writing over the last decade. And all of the writing advice comes with a heavy dose of the personal, as the writer is a personal creature. I think it's a mistake to try to unbind the how of how a particular writer writes from the where and when, because the new writer reading it loses the context, and thus has one less tool to understand how it might, or might not relate to them. And so this is a long introduction explaining to you why this is as much a biography as a 'how to,' and what things I know to pass on are all couched in the terms of how I learned them. There is no list of things to do. Just a rambling series of things that I did. |
Donate
If you enjoyed It's All Just a Draft or found it useful, consider a donation: 
|
Index |