Weaselstink asked Jason Pargin:

Hey Jason, now that I know you don't read any of these questions, I thought I might as well just scream into the void and ask if you have any advice for writing and self-publishing a book, as I am trying to do that. Like is it a good idea to be good at writing before I do that? Or should I spew out 100 pages or so of garbage and call it good? Any other advice you have would be helpful as well. Thanks if you do answer!

Jason Pargin This is not a universal rule, it's just the one that I went with, but my deal was I wasn't going to try to charge money for my writing until I got good at it because I was basically asking readers to beta test my writing, to see how they responded and what I might have been doing wrong. So I wrote for free on the internet for several years before eventually selling print copies of my novel and getting hired to edit for a major outlet. I know the fashionable advice is to never work "For exposure" but that rule is for when profitable companies come and try to get you to do creative work for them for free - the rule is not a general life rule like "never give work away just so you can get feedback." I think MOST novelists these days come from a background of having written fanfic on wattpad or something like that, where they just put it out into the world and looked at the response and used that as their book-writing school. Otherwise I feel like it's hard to get better at writing in a vacuum, you want some kind of feedback to address your writing blind spots (of which you will have many, at first - you'll get so focused on some perfect descriptive sentence you've crafted without realizing that the entire chapter, or entire plotline, shouldn't even be in the story).

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