Not necessarily this post, just in general. Read.
And if you’re interested in writing, and writing well, listen when good advice appears, but evaluate it yourself. Here is some of what I’ve found to be good advice and interesting commentary on the written word, how it’s made, and where the industry surrounding it may end up:
Writing Excuses is a remarkable podcast by three authors with considerable humor, wit, and thoughtfulness between them…www.writingexcuses.com
10 Rules For Writing, guardian.co.uk edition is the article that got me thinking that maybe I should post something on this topic, for those interested parties. Something I heard about on Neil Gaiman’s twitter feed – if you’re on Twitter and you like the written word you should consider following him.
From the New York Review of Books and a link from Michael Stackpole’s Twitter feed (getting a trend here?) comes an article on the future of the publishing industry. It’s lengthy and cerebral but worth a read.
Want more?
It’s out there, and Google is your friend. Many authors blog, and their posts can be invaluable or at minimum entertaining. Find authors you like on Twitter and follow their accounts – there are a number of them. Writers write, after all, and Twitter is a unique method for distributing the written word. Look up organizations that advocate for authors in the arena you’d like to write in – for sci-fi and fantasy authors SFWA is a good start.
A word of warning: so far most websites featuring useful information for writers are either super-professional, or they look like they were designed in 1998 and haven’t seen a design update since. Neither of these two groups of sites is inherently superior in terms of content, though, so don’t judge a website by its graphics in this case.
A Word About Writing Comics
If you’d like to write for comics, consider that writing a comic is strikingly similar to writing a screenplay. I’ve found that in writing for sequential art projects I’m making heavy use of screenwriter resources and tools as well as those meant for more print-ready writing disciplines. If you’re just starting out consider swapping out your word processor for something that will format your work appropriately – not everybody writes best with the same tools, so find the approach that works best for you. There are a wide variety of methods for writing comic scripts – some writers prefer to work on index cards, others favor a normal word processor, others use notebooks the old-fashioned way.
Because I frequently expect to draw any comic I write myself, I’m finding that I prefer to write in a manner that requires the least re-formatting before I draw my thumbnails. As I like to see my comic script formatted a certain way, this calls for a specialized solution. I’ve been making use of Celtx for a little while now. It’s basically a free scriptwriting software, but it comes preloaded with the capability to format your work for a comic or stage production as well as a screenplay. It’s a program that looks simple at first, but in fact it features a broad array of tools that I’m quickly finding indispensable. I discovered that the current version features comic-specific script formatting, and it’s making a world of difference for me. Plus, the end result can be output quickly and painlessly to PDF for printing or sending off as review material.