WRITING TIPS by Pseudonymous Bosch

I WANT TO SHARE Pseudonymous' tips on how to be a great writer.......

OF COURSE, you can also visit the SECRET website at http://www.thenameofthiswebsiteissecret.com. 

(C) Pseudonymous Bosch 2013

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Many dear readers have been writing to me, asking how they can make the jump from dear reader to dear writer. I feel that I should share some advice with everyone.

Buy lotto tickets. If you don't win, you still have a little piece of paper. You can use that little slip of paper as a bookmark, and/or to take notes on. Reading and writing is always good advice for any fledgling author.

And if you win big, don't forget about Pseudonymous!

What is my method for writing a book?  When readers ask me this, I usually tell the truth: I don’t have one.  There is no method to my madness, just…madness.  Likewise, when they ask for advice about their own writing, I tell them I don’t have any--not any good advice anyway.  But, I admit, these aren’t very satisfying answers.  And, as much I try to avoid the question, people keep asking me how I come up with my story ideas.

In order to get all of you budding young authors off my back, I’ve decided to come up with some helpful suggestions. Or at least some suggestions that seem helpful.  Here's what I’ve got so far.  Let me know what you think.  And please tell me if you have any writing advice of your own.  I know I could use it...

1. LIE

Lying is always your first and best option when it comes to writing fiction.  Need a subject for a story?  Just make it up.  Whoever wrote write what you know obviously didn’t know what they were writing.  As far I’m concerned, the whole point of fiction is that it’s supposed to be fictional.  If it’s true, it’s not fiction, it’s non-fiction.  If writers only wrote what they knew, there would be no stories about fairies or dwarves or dragons.  No animals would ever talk.  Only murderers would write murder mysteries, and only ghosts would write ghost stories.  A story starts with an act of imagination.  And if your ending is half-decent, it ends with one too.  A good liar is a good tale-teller.  So, please, tell tall-tales.  The taller the better.

2. CHEAT

Then again, take it from me, it’s very hard to make up something new every time you sit down to write.  This is what they call writer’s block and it results in a lot of hair-tearing, teeth-gnashing, and of course chocolate-eating.  When you can’t come up with something that has never happened, cheat--use something that has happened.  But change it up a little.  In real life, it was your brother that stuck your head in the toilet?  Well, that’s the great thing about fiction.  Now you can stick his head in.  So you didn’t actually throw your book at your teacher when he called on you—this is your chance.  One word of caution, however: please, please change the names of the people involved.  You only want them to suspect you’re writing about them…  

3. STEAL

When you’re completely drawing a blank, when the wondrous wellspring of your imagination has dried up, when you’ve mined all your childhood memories for golden story-nuggets, then it’s time to commit the ultimate authorial crime: Grand Theft Autho.  In other words, steal an idea from another story.  Maybe from a movie you saw.  Or a book you liked.  Or even better, a book you didn’t like.  But in this case you should change it up more than a little, you should change it up a lot.  When I was younger, one writer might have copied another with impunity.  Nowadays, with so much information at everyone’s fingertips, you will almost certainly be caught.  So make sure all your words are your own and that you change the context of the idea/event/theme you are stealing. Then you will not be a plagiarist, you will be a master thief.

Say, just for instance, the movie you’re stealing from concerns a friendship between a boy and an alien.  Maybe you make your story about the friendship between a boy and a dragon.  Oh, shoot, that’s been done.  How about a boy and a whale?  Oops, that’s been done, too.  A boy and a robot…?  Oh, well, you know what I mean.  In fact, there are plenty of stories to be written about aliens, dragons, whales, AND robots.  I’ll tell you a secret: there are very few original ideas.  (Not even the idea that there are few original ideas is original.)  Most writers, even the best writers, steal all the time.  In the end, the important thing is not so much where your ideas come from, but what you do with them.  But that’s a subject for another essay: not Lie, Cheat, and Steal but, let’s see, how about Shake, Rattle, and Roll?

Class dismissed.

(C)