It is so refreshing to be able to read something Sari has handed out in just a few minutes! The advice is half rules-of-English and the other half advice-for-aspiring-writers. Maybe the best advice I've read was this: "Write books you'd like to read. Follow your own weirdness." I love that an award-winning writer is telling me that it's okay to write what I would want to pick up in bookstores. It has long been my belief that the first person you write for is yourself, because if you don't enjoy what you're writing about, then how is somebody else supposed to enjoy reading it?
Some of the advice almost made me want to start laughing, like "You'll have time to read after college." I certainly hope so, because I barely have time to read during college. And then there was "Don't describe feelings/ The way to a reader's emotions is, oddly enough, through the senses." A few years ago, I would have said that that sounds counter-intuitive. But all emotions are responses to sensations. If we see someone getting beat up, we feel badly for the person being beaten and want to dish out justice to the bully. Sensation before emotional response.
One more and I'll wrap it up: "Never, ever, get yourself into a situation where you have nothing to do but write and read. You'll go into a depression." I might go so far as to add: "and lose your sanity." Humans are creatures of experience, and as much as I may love it, reading and writing all day everyday is not experiencing anything. Writing and reading is rooted in human experience; as such, we as writers have to get some experience of our own. If we haven't experienced it for ourselves, it isn't true to us. And if it's not true to us, then we have failed.
-Josh Boyak
No comments:
Post a Comment