I’ve been writing since I was just 10 years old. Over half of my lifespan has been spent creating characters and telling stories with them. And while I don’t know everything there is to know about writing, here the few nuggets of wisdom that I’ve earned.
1. Your writing will never be good enough.
If you’re like me, you’re a perfectionist when it comes to writing. You want every single word, sentence, and paragraph to be as close to perfect as you can get it. But it never will be.
Writing, like any art form, is highly subjective. I’ve been in workshops before where peers gave me complete opposite feedback. Maybe one loves the voice, but hates the plot. The other will hate the voice, but love the plot. So who do you listen to? No matter what you change, someone ends up disliking your work. And sorry, but that’s never going to go away.
You can overcome this pretty simply: stop caring. Constructive criticism is a writer’s best teacher, but there comes a point when you have to accept that someone somewhere is always going to find fault with your writing. Don’t let it get you down.
2. You need an editor.
Back when I was young(er), I was firmly convinced that every single draft I wrote was perfect. (Give me a break; I was a teenager, I obviously knew everything.) Revisions were for people who didn’t have confidence in their work or just weren’t good.
I cannot begin to tell you how wrong this sentiment is. Revisions and edits are necessary for literally anything. In my job, we make edits and revisions for social media posts. If a tweet needs a once-over from an editor, so does your screenplay.
Luckily for us, finding an editor is easy these days. You can hire a professional, join a writing group, or even just ask a friend you trust to give it a read. But it’s important that before your writing sees the light of day, you get someone else’s eyeballs on it and make some edits. Trust me; it needs them.
3. Write what makes you happy.
I spent a good part of my college career asking myself one question: what do people want to read? I studied genre trends, thumbed through the annual Writer’s Market to see what people wanted, looked at upcoming releases. Every time I wrote I felt like I had a thousand invisible eyes judging every word I typed.
I obsessed so much about what people wanted to read that I forgot to ask myself a much more important question: what do I want to write?
The great thing about writing that aside from the laws of grammar, spelling, and punctuation, there are no rules. (Honestly, many writers choose to ignore even these and still find success.) So long as a piece accomplishes what you wanted it to do, you’ve succeeded.
Don’t worry about your audience until the second or third draft. The first one? That’s just for you.
In the Ink 