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IWSG, September 2024: Incompatible Advice

2024-09-042024-09-04 John Winkelman

Lake Michigan, seen from the shore at Rosy Mound Natural Area in Ottawa County, Michigan.

[ Lake Michigan, seen from the shore at Rosy Mound Natural Area in Ottawa County, Michigan. ]

The Insecure Writers’s Support Group question for September 2024 is: What’s a writing rule you learned in school that messed you up as a writer?

Honestly, other than standard grammar, and oddball things like “‘I’ before ‘E’ except after C”, I don’t remember any rules which might have been sent my way that really stuck. For instance, “The first word in every line of poetry must be capitalized” was disproved the first time I read a poem written after about 1900.

The writing attitude which messed me up the most, and which still causes me some angst here in my mid-fifties, is that  writing is meant to be published. The quiet parts here being “for other people to read” and “and monetized.” With such debased motivation and viewpoint, the characters in a story are no longer living, they are performing.

Here we can easily be pulled into the infinitely-regressive fractal layers of reality, simulation, imagination, dream, metaphor, nothing, Nothing, memory, wu-wei, etc., until Baudrillard and Laoze are fist-fighting in heaven.

(And don’t get me started on AI [sic].)

Writing is meant to be written. Everything else is secondary.

 

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Posted in Literary MattersTagged IWSG, writing

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3 thoughts on “IWSG, September 2024: Incompatible Advice”

  1. Gail M Baugniet says:
    2024-09-04 at 18:44

    Definitely like your attitude and your poetic comment that writing is meant to be written.
    Granted, if I wrote like C.J. Box or Randy Wayne White, publication would naturally follow.

    Reply
  2. Yvonne V says:
    2024-09-04 at 19:46

    Beautiful photo!

    There is a joy to writing for its own sake.

    Happy IWSG Blog Hop Day!

    Reply
  3. Alex J. Cavanaugh says:
    2024-09-04 at 20:04

    If you don’t write for you and for joy first, the publishing part doesn’t matter.

    Reply

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