Tag Archive for James Preller writing advice

Finally, Writing Advice I Can Get Behind!

I get asked for writing advice from time to time. And every once in a great while I try to tackle it sincerely — here, and here, and here, and here, for a quartet of random samples. If you are really interested in my collected blather on the topic, just use the nifty “SEARCH” function to this blog and type in “writing advice” or “writing tips” or “aardvarks in bathing suits” and swim through the murky wisdom. Under “CATEGORIES” in the right sidebar there’s one titled “the writing process” which loosely gathers that kind of material too.

But for today, we’ll let this suffice. Carry on!

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The Writing Process: Think Harder, and Allow Time to Do Its Work

At a winter reading by the great George Saunders at SUNY Albany, he quoted Albert Einstein, who said:

“No problem is ever solved within the plane of its original conception.”

Which means, to me:

You cannot figure out the entirety of a story on the day you first conceive it. Layers must accumulate. Questions raised, pathways explored, dead-ends endured.

The writing of a story takes time, pure and simple. But more importantly, as Einstein said, it takes MOVEMENT from the original place of conception. Where you begin, the place you thought you were at, cannot be where the answers are found.

Keep writing. Keep moving.