This is because my fiancee vanished. Left with no warning or explanations on the 4th of May. Myself and my daughter have been heartbroken and it is been hard to carry on doing the basics such as breath, eat, drink and wash.

Let alone write a story.

Please hold on, the website is not dead and the project will continue and catch up. My real life has to come first right now and it is a mess.

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1 Marry somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer’s a good idea.

2 Don’t have children.

3 Don’t read your reviews.

4 Don’t write reviews. (Your judgment’s always tainted.)

5 Don’t have arguments with your wife in the morning, or late at night.

6 Don’t drink and write at the same time.

7 Don’t write letters to the editor. (No one cares.)

8 Don’t wish ill on your colleagues.

9 Try to think of others’ good luck as encouragement to yourself.

10 Don’t take any shit if you can ­possibly help it.

Via

Related posts:

1. Famous Authors Writing Advice – #11 – Neil Gaiman
2. Famous Authors Writing Advice – #2 – Stephen King
3. Famous Authors Writing Advice – #13 – Anne Enright

1 The first 12 years are the worst.

2 The way to write a book is to actually write a book. A pen is useful, typing is also good. Keep putting words on the page.

3 Only bad writers think that their work is really good.

4 Description is hard. Remember that all description is an opinion about the world. Find a place to stand.

5 Write whatever way you like. Fiction is made of words on a page; reality is made of something else. It doesn’t matter how “real” your story is, or how “made up”: what matters is its necessity.

6 Try to be accurate about stuff.

7 Imagine that you are dying. If you had a terminal disease would you ­finish this book? Why not? The thing that annoys this 10-weeks-to-live self is the thing that is wrong with the book. So change it. Stop arguing with yourself. Change it. See? Easy. And no one had to die.

8 You can also do all that with whiskey.

9 Have fun.

10 Remember, if you sit at your desk for 15 or 20 years, every day, not ­counting weekends, it changes you. It just does. It may not improve your temper, but it fixes something else. It makes you more free.

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Related posts:

1. Famous Authors Writing Advice – #5 – Margaret Atwood
2. Famous Authors Writing Advice – #3 – Elmore Leonard
3. Famous Authors Writing Advice – #1 – CS Lewis

Ray Bradbury

Don’t start out writing novels. They take too long. Begin your writing life instead by cranking out “a hell of a lot of short stories,” as many as one per week. Take a year to do it; he claims that it simply isn’t possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row. He waited until the age of 30 to write his first novel, Fahrenheit 451. “Worth waiting for, huh?”

You may love ‘em, but you can’t be ‘em. Bear that in mind when you inevitably attempt, consciously or unconsciously, to imitate your favorite writers, just as he imitated H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Arthur Conan Doyle, and L. Frank Baum.

Examine “quality” short stories. He suggests Roald Dahl, Guy de Maupassant, and the lesser-known Nigel Kneale and John Collier. Anything in the New Yorker today doesn’t make his cut, since he finds that their stories have “no metaphor.”

Stuff your head. To accumulate the intellectual building blocks of these metaphors, he suggests a course of bedtime reading: one short story, one poem (but Pope, Shakespeare, and Frost, not modern “crap”), and one essay. …

Get rid of friends who don’t believe in you. Do they make fun of your writerly ambitions? He suggests calling them up to “fire them” without delay.

…

Write with joy. In his mind, “writing is not a serious business.” If a story starts to feel like work, scrap it and start one that doesn’t. “I want you to envy me my joy,” he tells his audience.

Don’t plan on making money. He and his wife, who “took a vow of poverty” to marry him, hit 37 before they could afford a car (and he still never got around to picking up a license).

List ten things you love, and ten things you hate. Then write about the former, and “kill” the later — also by writing about them. Do the same with your fears.

Just type any old thing that comes into your head. He recommends “word association” to break down any creative blockages, since “you don’t know what’s in you until you test it.”

Remember, with writing, what you’re looking for is just one person to come up and tell you, “I love you for what you do.” …

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How does one get published?

How do you do it? You do it.

You write.

You finish what you write.

You look for publishers who publish “that kind of thing”, whatever it is. You send them what you’ve done (a letter asking if they’d like to see a whole manuscript or a few chapters and an outline will always be welcome. And stamped self-addressed envelopes help keep the wheels turning.)

Sooner or later, if you don’t give up and you have some measurable amount of ability or talent or luck, you get published. …

Even if you haven’t met any editors, send your stuff out.

The “slush pile” of unsolicited manuscripts is not always a bad thing – publishers take enormous pleasure in finding authors from the slush pile (Iain Banks and Storm Constantine are both writers who simply sent out manuscripts to publishers), although it occurs rarely enough that it has to be a special thing when it happens.

If you write short stories, don’t worry about agents, just find places that might print the stories and get them out there. …

On the whole, anything that gets you writing and keeps you writing is a good thing.

…

Believe in yourself. Keep writing.

1 Write.

2 Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.

3 Finish what you’re writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.

4 Put it aside. Read it pretending you’ve never read it before. Show it to friends whose opinion you respect and who like the kind of thing that this is.

5 Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.

6 Fix it. Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.

7 Laugh at your own jokes.

8 The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it ­honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.

Via, Via

Related posts:

1. Famous Authors Writing Advice – #1 – CS Lewis
2. Famous Authors Writing Advice – #10 – Various
3. Famous Authors Writing Advice – #5 – Margaret Atwood

Write One Inch at a Time
The best advice I’ve ever come across for any kind of writing is from Anne Lamott’s book, Bird by Bird. She says to write just one inch at a time. I love that! It’s so easy to be overwhelmed by a big project, but if I only have to concentrate on one inch, well, that I can handle. Eventually those inches will be feet and yards and whatever it takes to make a book. This is true for research, too, which can be overwhelming.
(Editor and children’s book author Maureen Boyd Biro, quoted in The ABC’s of Writing for Children, by Elizabeth Koehler Pentacoff. Quill Driver Books, 2002)

Finish Your First Draft
The best advice on writing was given to me by my first editor, Michael Korda, of Simon and Schuster, while writing my first book. “Finish Your first draft and then we’ll talk,” he said. It took me a long time to realize how good the advice was. Even if you write it wrong, write and finish your first draft. Only then, when you have a flawed whole, do you know what you have to fix.
(American journalist Dominick Dunne, quoted in Advice to Writers, by Jon Winokur. Pantheon, 1999)

Get Over It
October, 1987. Armadillocon, then the hippest science fiction convention on the face of the earth. I ran into Bill Gibson.

“We have to talk,” he said. “I’ve discovered the secret of writing.” . . .

“Okay,” I said. “What’s the secret of writing?”

A beat, for emphasis. Then: “You must learn to overcome your very natural and appropriate revulsion for your own work.”

It was the most useful writing advice anyone has ever given me.
(Science-fiction writer Eileen Gunn, “The Secret of Writing” in Stable Strategies and Others. Tachyon, 2004)

Simplify
I went from being a bad writer to a good writer after taking a one-day course in “business writing.” I couldn’t believe how simple it was. I’ll tell you the main tricks here so you don’t have to waste a day in class.

Business writing is about clarity and persuasion. The main technique is keeping things simple. Simple writing is persuasive. A good argument in five sentences will sway more people than a brilliant argument in a hundred sentences. Don’t fight it.

Simple means getting rid of extra words. Don’t write, “He was very happy” when you can write “He was happy.” You think the word “very” adds something. It doesn’t. Prune your sentences.
(Writer and cartoonist Scott Adams, The Dilbert Blog, June 16, 2007)

Murder Your Darlings
The Tao Te Ching’s call for simplicity parallels the writing instructor’s advice, to strive for simplicity and clarity in writing. English author Arthur Quiller-Couch originated one of the purest rules of writing you will ever hear. He advised, “If you require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it–wholeheartedly–and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.”
(Professor of English Ralph L. Wahlstrom, The Tao of Writing. Adams Media, 2005)

Lead With Your Best
The most useful advice on writing I’ve ever received comes from Gil Rogin, who told me that he always uses his best thing in his lead, and his second best thing in his last paragraph; and from Dwight McDonald, who wrote that the best advice he ever received was to put everything on the same subject in the same place. To these dictums I would add the advice to ask yourself repeatedly: what is this about?
(Pulitzer Prize-winning author Thomas Powers, quoted in Advice to Writers, by Jon Winokur. Pantheon, 1999)

Write With Authority
The best advice on writing I’ve ever received is “Write with authority.”
(Novelist and essayist Cynthia Ozick, quoted by Patrick Sebranek et al. in Writers Inc. Great Source Education Group, 2006)

Stand Out as a Real Person
[William] Zinsser says, “If you work for an institution, whatever your job, whatever your level, be yourself when you write. You will stand out as a real person among the robots.” He’s talking about the beige voice used by many in business, government, academic, and other institutional settings, but his advice applies even more so to the professional writer. He’s saying it exactly right: When you’re yourself on the page, you’re gonna “stand out as a real person among the robots.” The robots in this case being the folks in the mound of manuscripts piled high on any given editor’s desk.
(Author and teacher Les Edgerton, Finding Your Voice: How to Put Personality in Your Writing. Writers Digest Books, 2003

Remember to Play
The best piece of advice I was ever given was by Thornton Wilder, who read my work for a good ten years and was utterly invaluable as a mentor. The advice he gave me was, “In writing there should always be an element of play.” . . . Even though you are writing something dead serious, there must be an element of play in the work, your approach to the work, and even your doing of the work.
(Novelist John Knowles, quoted by Jimm Roberts in Southernmost Art and Literary Portraits. Mercer Univ. Press, 2005)

Show up for work
There’s a phrase, “sitzfleisch,” which means just plain sitting on your ass and getting it done. Just showing up for work. My uncle Raphael was a painter, and he used to say, “If the muse is late for work, start without her.” You have to be there. You have to be there, and do it, and grind it out, even when it is grinding and you know you’re probably going to rewrite all this tomorrow.
(Novelist and short story writer Peter S. Beagle, quoted in Novelish: A Writing Blog, Dec. 15, 2008)

Finally, the best advice of all is also the simplest, says author Peter Mayle: “Finish.”

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Related posts:

1. Famous Authors Writing Advice – #8 – Jeffrey A Carver
2. Famous Authors Writing Advice – #1 – CS Lewis
3. Famous Authors Writing Advice – #2 – Stephen King

1 Never worry about the commercial possibilities of a project. That stuff is for agents and editors to fret over – or not. Conversation with my American publisher. Me: “I’m writing a book so boring, of such limited commercial appeal, that if you publish it, it will probably cost you your job.” Publisher: “That’s exactly what makes me want to stay in my job.”

2 Don’t write in public places. In the early 1990s I went to live in Paris. The usual writerly reasons: back then, if you were caught writing in a pub in England, you could get your head kicked in, whereas in Paris,dans les cafés . . . Since then I’ve developed an aversion to writing in public. I now think it should be done only in private, like any other lavatorial activity.

3 Don’t be one of those writers who sentence themselves to a lifetime of sucking up to Nabokov.

4 If you use a computer, constantly refine and expand your autocorrect settings. The only reason I stay loyal to my piece-of-shit computer is that I have invested so much ingenuity into building one of the great auto­correct files in literary history. Perfectly formed and spelt words emerge from a few brief keystrokes: “Niet” becomes “Nietzsche”, “phoy” becomes  ­”photography” and so on. ­Genius!

5 Keep a diary. The biggest regret of my writing life is that I have never kept a journal or a diary.

6 Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire.

7 Have more than one idea on the go at any one time. If it’s a choice between writing a book and doing nothing I will always choose the latter. It’s only if I have an idea for two books that I choose one rather than the other. I ­always have to feel that I’m bunking off from something.

8 Beware of clichés. Not just the ­clichés that Martin Amis is at war with. There are clichés of response as well as expression. There are clichés of observation and of thought – even of conception. Many novels, even quite a few adequately written ones, are ­clichés of form which conform to clichés of expectation.

9 Do it every day. Make a habit of putting your observations into words and gradually this will become instinct. This is the most important rule of all and, naturally, I don’t follow it.

10 Never ride a bike with the brakes on. If something is proving too difficult, give up and do something else. Try to live without resort to per­severance. But writing is all about ­perseverance. You’ve got to stick at it. In my 30s I used to go to the gym even though I hated it. The purpose of ­going to the gym was to postpone the day when I would stop going. That’s what writing is to me: a way of ­postponing the day when I won’t do it any more, the day when I will sink into a depression so profound it will be indistinguishable from perfect bliss.

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Related posts:

1. Famous Authors Writing Advice – #6 – Roddy Doyle
2. Famous Authors Writing Advice – #2 – Stephen King
3. Famous Authors Writing Advice – #1 – CS Lewis

Short answer, it depends. The long answer provides the guidelines:

No absolutes exist for how long a writing needs to be. In general you have two main guidelines:
– Write your story to be as long as you want it to be. In other words, as many words as it takes.
– Write your story to be as long as the market that you wish to sell to requires.

For that second point, we have some rough guidelines based on past writing. To estimate this, we have to take in account that novels are getting longer. Novels of the 40s-60s are 40,000-60,000 words in general, modern novels are much longer.

Adults

Flash Fiction
100 – 1000 words. Some places have Micro and Flash as different genres, most do not. If you do count them as different genres then the, albeit loose, rules are – Micro refers to work under 100 words and Flash is under 1000 words. From Wikipedia:

The term “flash fiction” may have originated from a 1992 anthology of that title.[3] As the editors said in their introduction, their definition of a “flash fiction” was a story that would fit on two facing pages of a typical digest-sized literary magazine.

Short Story
1,000-4000 words for most magazines, 6,000 for a few longer magazines, these are mostly sci-fi or fantasy magazines. A general guide, to reach the maximum market audience you should keep your short story to under 4000 words. Short stories are generally under 7,500 words. From Wikipedia:

A short story is a work of fiction that is usually written in prose, often in narrative format. This format tends to be more pointed than longer works of fiction, such as novellas (in the 20th and 21st century sense) and novels. Short story definitions based on length differ somewhat, even among professional writers, in part because of the fragmentation of the medium into genres.

Novellette
7,500 – 20,000 words. Is the novellette a real category? Some debate exists on this point. However a lot of places have this category, including the Nebula awards, so I think it is valid. From Wikipedia:

A novelette is a piece of short prose fiction. The distinction between a novelette and other literary forms is usually based upon word count, with a novelette being longer than a short story, but shorter than a novella.

Novella
20,000 – 40,000 words. The short novel. From Wikipedia:

A novella generally features fewer conflicts than a novel, yet more complicated ones than a short story. The conflicts also have more time to develop than in short stories. They have endings that are located at the brink of change. Unlike novels, they are not divided into chapters, and are often intended to be read at a single sitting, as the short story, although white space is often used to divide the sections.

Novel
40,000 – 120,000 words. These days, unless you are very well established, a novel that is under 70,000 words is unlikely to be published, likewise a novel over 120,000 words. Sci-Fi/Fantasy Novels can be a little longer than other genres, but not excessively so. The longest genre is considered to be the Thriller, at around 100-110,000 words, the shortest is the Mystery genre at around 75-85,000 words. The average novel length is around 93,000 words.

Kids

Writing for kids is a very different business than writing for adults. The market requirements are for much shorter word counts, yet the market is more fluid at certain target audience ages. Remember that language use, style and content are far more confined when you are writing for children and should be taken into account. The following are word count guidelines:

Board book
10-100 words. These are the books made from thick card, intended for babies to play with and adults to read to them.

Picture books
50-500 words. The goal is 500 words or less, as the adult is likely to be reading these aloud. Today’s editors and agents are looking for more story with less text. For what is defined as a ‘late-picture book’ the word count could go as high as 1,000 words.

Emergent readers
Emergent readers might have as few as 32 words, the child is learning to read these books themselves as well as getting them read aloud to them.
A level 1 reader might have 200 words. A typical level 3 or 4 reader might have any where from 800 to 1,200 words. For a late emergent reader book the word count could be as high as 3,500 words.

Chapter books
5,000 – 25,000 words. These are the first novel-style books for children, a lot of these books are around the 10,000 word mark.

Middle grade novels
25,000 – 45,000 words.

Teen novels
40,000 – 80,000 words. These almost have the same requirements as an adult novel.

Online Sources

http://www.sffworld.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-8182.html

http://www.fictionfactor.com/articles/wordcount.html

http://beyond.customline.com/2008/12/11/how-long-is-a-novel/

http://www.sfwa.org/nebula-awards/nebula-weekend/other-useful-links/faq/

http://www.britishfantasysociety.co.uk/the-british-fantasy-awards-constitution-ii/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_fiction

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Length_of_a_novel

http://www.writingforchildrenandteens.com/writing-basics/how-long-does-it-have-to-be/

http://www.write4kids.com/colum44.html

http://www.superheronation.com/2010/05/11/length-guidelines-for-childrenya/

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What are your thoughts? This is extra work for me though, time I could spend writing, so if this is useful please let me know.

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