Professor Beej

No, I’m not asking you to teach my illiterate self how to find meaning in the written word, rather I want to know how you find yourself gobbling up the wordy goodness you love.

I don’t remember how I first ran across In Her Name: Empire, but I remember why I downloaded it: Hicks was giving it away free on his blog for nothing more than signing up to his newsletter. I figured “why not?” and bought into his marketing. I’m glad I did.

Here’s the thing: you’ll probably never make a living by writing. Even if you luck into selling a manuscript, it’s unlikely that it will even pay your mortgage. No more amateur hour, no more kid gloves, and no more training wheels. (And no more motivational platitudes, am I right?) If you don’t treat writing like the job you want it to be right now, it will never happen.

Some writers can write anything. They’ll decide one day to sit down and bang out a Western — because they’ve never written a Western before — and POW! They’ve done it. Okay, I don’t know too many people like that — any, really — but I know lots of writers who think of themselves that way. But it’s not so easy to just pick a genre and immediately start writing.

If you’re a writer, I’d say that Nascence is every bit as important for you to read as Stephen King’s On Writing. Even though two books are vastly different in style and content, I have learned more about writing fiction from them than anything else I’ve read on the subject. Honestly.