{"id":19700,"date":"2013-07-23T00:01:37","date_gmt":"2013-07-23T04:01:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/?p=19700"},"modified":"2013-07-23T08:18:54","modified_gmt":"2013-07-23T12:18:54","slug":"writers-you-might-be-doing-it-wrong-if","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/2013\/07\/23\/writers-you-might-be-doing-it-wrong-if\/","title":{"rendered":"Writers: You Might Be Doing It Wrong If&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>If you think of yourself as &#8220;aspiring,&#8221; you might be doing it wrong.<\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;re more interested in a book&#8217;s metadata than its theme, you might be doing it wrong.<\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;re more concerned about publishing the book than writing it, you might be doing it wrong.<\/p>\n<p>If you talk, tweet, think or write about writing more than you actually write: <em>doin&#8217; it wrong<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>If you always find an excuse why you&#8217;re not writing, then UR DOIN&#8217; IT RONG.<\/p>\n<p>If your writing life is filled with the blubbery carcasses of unfinished manuscripts lying about like dynamite-exploded whales and you&#8217;ve never finished a story, you&#8217;re doing it wrong, hoss.<\/p>\n<p>If you keep cheating on your current manuscript by porking other, momentarily-sexier manuscripts behind the barn, yep, that&#8217;s some wrong-flavored wrongness with hot wrong sauce.<\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;d rather play video games or watch movies or masturbate to at twerking videos on Tumblr &#8212; in other words, if you&#8217;d rather be doing anything else but\u00a0<em>writing<\/em> &#8212; you&#8217;re doing it wrong.<\/p>\n<p>If you think that there&#8217;s one way up the mountain &#8212; and that you or someone else is the magical sherpa who will guide you up that mountain &#8212; oh yeah, you&#8217;re doing it wrong.<\/p>\n<p>If you self-publish because you&#8217;re bitter at the traditional publishing establishment and not because of the very many valid reasons for self-publishing, you&#8217;re doing it wrong.<\/p>\n<p>If you think any kind of publishing is a get-rich-quick-scheme lottery-ticket: YOU WRONG.<\/p>\n<p>If you think writers or other artists shouldn&#8217;t get paid: YOU DOUBLE WRONG.<\/p>\n<p>If you think you don&#8217;t need an editor: you are Mister Wrongyfaced Wrongypants, Esquire.<\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;ve inhaled the aerosolized horseshit and buy into the divide between\u00a0<em>literary\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0<em>genre<\/em> fiction, BZZT, that&#8217;s some wrong-ass shit, chief.<\/p>\n<p>If you believe in any of the tribal breakdowns in writing and publishing (trad-pub versus self-pub, Amazon is god or Amazon is the devil, women don&#8217;t write as well as men), then let me spell it out with these Scrabble tiles, here&#8230; D O I N I T W R O N G<\/p>\n<p>If you can&#8217;t make us care about your characters&#8230; drum roll please, <em>doin&#8217; it wrong<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;re not willing to try new things in writing &#8212; new characters, new POVs, new plotting or planning styles, new something,\u00a0<em>new anything<\/em> &#8212; then you sure ain&#8217;t right.<\/p>\n<p>If you rely on magical thinking and it hurts you more than it helps you:\u00a0<em>du machst es falsch!<\/em><\/p>\n<p>If you let writer&#8217;s block win, you got it all wrong.<\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;re a writer who doesn&#8217;t read, ooh, holy shitkittens, <em>you&#8217;re super-mega-ultra-wrong<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;re a writer who only reads for pleasure, who never reads non-fiction, who refuses to read outside a single beloved genre or medium, yeah, you&#8217;re probably pretty wrong over there.<\/p>\n<p>If you hate bookstores, you&#8217;re Mayor Wrongdong of Wronglesburg, Population: YOU.<\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;re an asshole to your audience, you&#8217;re BIG SUPER CRAZY FACE WRONG.<\/p>\n<p>If you spend a lot of your time getting into fights on the Internet, you&#8217;re a big bucket of wrong.<\/p>\n<p>If you don&#8217;t like writing and yet you persist at being a writer: wrong, wrong, wrong.<\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;re not writing, then you&#8217;re\u00a0<em>motherfucking wrong<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>So\u00a0<em>get right<\/em> &#8212; and go write.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you think of yourself as &#8220;aspiring,&#8221; you might be doing it wrong. If you&#8217;re more interested in a book&#8217;s metadata than its theme, you might be doing it wrong. If you&#8217;re more concerned about publishing the book than writing it, you might be doing it wrong. If you talk, tweet, think or write about [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-19700","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"hentry","6":"category-theramble","8":"no-featured-image"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pv7MR-57K","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19700","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19700"}],"version-history":[{"count":30,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19700\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19748,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19700\/revisions\/19748"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19700"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19700"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19700"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}