Three Pieces of Advice to Writers (And To Anyone Creating Anything)

[Brad]

Read this good article on writing by Tara Sophia Mohr and thought I'd share with all you folks.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/three-...

Let me and everyone else here know your thoughts on the article.

Cheers!

[Will]

I think I partly agree with her third point, but not her first two.

1. "Feedback never tells you anything about yourself" - well, not really. Feedback tells us how someone else perceived our work. That ought to tell us, if we are brave enough to listen, how successful we are at transmitting our thoughts and ideas to someone else.

Yes, it can sometimes help us to cope with negative criticism if we can distance ourselves from it. But equally we are not going to improve as quickly as we might if we don't take some of the criticism on the chin and try to learn from it.

2. "There is no-one whom your book will mean more to than you". Hmm. That depends. Once we publish something it belongs more to our readers than it does to us. That can mean that readers take more from our books than we do.

3. "We should write every day and also take part in non-writing too." Well, yes, it would be nice if all of us could write every day. But that's not always possible. Some of us have to grab what scraps of time we can in between a day job, family and other commitments.

And sure it helps to be grounded with non-writing stuff. But we have seen some fabulous books written by people who locked themselves away to do nothing but writing until their book was finished.

All in all, I think this is a case of YMMV. This blog shows one point of view, but its conclusions won't work for everyone.

[Brad]

Hi Will! Thank for your input. One question, though:

What is YMMV?