m. c. de marco

Charlie Jane Anders reveals 12 Secrets To Being A Super-Prolific Short Story Writer at io9. Unnumbered but still lurking there in the introduction is the classic story-a-week advice. Also of note are secret #6, share one of your worlds with yourself, and #12, write to different markets.

I was pointed to A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing via a mailing list. It comes with this handy summary of the past five hundred blog posts. Some of the advice struck me as much deeper than the topic of writing itself:

Know When To Quit

The measure of a human being is what makes them finally give up. The stronger the person, the more they can take.

Alexandra Sokoloff asks What’s your structure? I need to write a short story by the end of the month, but it still has no plot. Fortunately, short story structure is simpler than novel structure: just seven points.

Via Daring Fireball: John Hughes on how he wrote Vacation ‘58, the predecessor to National Lampoon’s Vacation is available in a Zoetrope back issue. Here’s how he found time to write:

Like many other copywriters at the agency, I was working at home at night and on weekends. I was writing on the commuter train. I was also writing at work.

Michael Burstein has two posts up about “the value of our work” and the tendency of people to ask writers to give away their writing or their time for free. I sometimes get asked to write for free (both fiction and non-fiction), though no one ever asks me to test their software for free. It is surprisingly difficult to convey the notion that I write for money; fortunately now I can just point them to Michael’s free posts…

I’m behind again on the aggregator, so here’s a month-old article from the Fix about the day job:

[Jonathan Safran Foer’s] premise was that challenging or meaningful jobs can suck away writers’ energy and commitment to writing. If the day job is important to the writer and emotionally satisfying, irreplaceable time and enthusiasm will go into the job, leaving less and less to the important work of writing.

Via SFScope: I’m much more excited than you will likely be about a new blog, William Shunn’s Flog: Notes on Manuscript Formatting for Fiction Writers. He says:

For well over a decade my formatting guide “Proper Manuscript Format” has been available online, with the result that I’ve fielded hundreds of questions on the subject from writers around the English-speaking world.