LIES, DAMNED LIES, AND WRITING ADVICE

Walk into a room with 10 people and you will find a writer. Everyone is a writer, or knows a writer. I'm not knocking that. Hell, I LOVE writing. You want to write, by all means, you should. Go for it, rock it out, make it happen. So now we come to the truth of the situation though. If you have a writer in every room, you also have writing advice in every room, because the only thing we love to talk about more than writing is......well...nothing. Lots of advice on writing gets bandied about. The worst, absolute worst, piece of writing advice is anything that tells you to follow what's selling. "You should write a crappy romance with light BDSM elements because it sells." "You should write vampires because they sell." "Oh you should steer clear of vampires because nobody reads that." "You should write like Jodi Picoult" You should write like John Grisham" "you should write like YA books." SHADDUP ALREADY WILLYA! Listen to me dear readers because I am only going to say this once. IT TAKES A LONG TIME TO WRITE A BOOK. BY THE TIME YOU WRITE WHATEVER TREND YOU THINK YOU SHOULD FOLLOW IT WILL BE OVER. Plus, why would you ever want to shortchange yourself by ripping off someone else's gig? Let Jodi Picoult write her books. Let Stephanie Meyers write her books. You? You should write your own damned book. Trust yourself. Write what you want to. Go crazy. Make shit up. It's fun. Create your own world and then go in and screw with it like the maniacal, power-hungry god that you are but do it honestly. Now the best piece of advice is this: HEAD DOWN. MAKE WORDS. That's mine. I coined it. You wanna be a writer? Well listen up cupcake, writers write. It's simple. Not easy. Simple. Get to writing. And no, messing around with your author fan page or checking your twitter does NOT count. Make words appear on your screen that make a story. Get busy writin' or get busy dyin'. Seriously. Why are you still reading this? Oh, you want a NSFW inspirational Kevin Smith video? Okay, but after that you open up your damn story and you don't look away from it until you have a decent chunk of wordage. I mean it....don't make me come over there.