The road to publication (Writing Forums)

The road to publication (Writing Forums)

Ariadne, I Love You – Blog Tour

The most important lesson I have learned, on what turned out to be a thirty-year journey to becoming a published author, is best summed up by Chuck Wendig’s crude aphorism: finish your shit. It doesn’t matter how good that story is in your head, or for how many weeks, months or years you polish those first few chapters – if you don’t finish the damn thing it doesn’t exist and that’s the end of it.

I first started writing when I was about ten or eleven, gruesome little horror skits that I’d scratch out in a hardback Manila notepad. There’d be one, maybe two characters, little to no plot: just terrible things happening to people, sometimes a ghost; the end. When I was about seventeen, I started taking writing more seriously, penned longer pieces – scripts mostly – that had a beginning, a middle and… well, that was the thing. I could finish an outline of a longer piece, but when it came to actually sitting down to write it, I could never get to the end…

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