When rains of summer fall
and wind howls from the sea
the dead rise to feel the storm’s touch and wander
on well-worn tracks that lead nowhere
The sleepless listen and hope that the night will pass
that blue sky will return
and see shallow graves reopened by the river
to swallow the lost ones
whose voices become echoes
borne away by swift rushing waters
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What’s the best advice anyone ever gave you about writing?
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Photo by Elvis Bekmanis on Unsplash
The Light is On 
12 responses to “Rains of Summer”
I’ve never had any writer friends to give me advice, so my personal advice is to write when the energy is there, and sometimes write crap—you never know when a piece you weren’t warm on can be salvaged into something better.
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That’s great advice! Reminds me of something I saw posted on Reddit the other day: “You can edit shit, but you can’t edit nothing.”
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That’s right, polish those turds once you produce them.
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Write what you want not what the market dictates.
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Good advice!
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I think it depends strongly on what you’re trying to write. I’ve written 4 textbooks (including a local market leader), lots of academic papers, a couple of popular science articles, and one short story (which sold), plus lots of poetry (which I’ve never tried to sell). And I supervise PhD students. So I write for profit and pleasure.
This is my advice:
If it’s a thesis or text: write at least a page every day and more most days, using your best (easiest to concentrate) time of day for writing and less productive times for editing and literature searching. Increasingly I’m telling my students to write outlines before diving in because the old advice “you can edit shit but you can’t edit nothing” meant I had to read too much shit. I suspect all that applies to a novel as well.
If you want to sell what you write for real money: look at the market, write for the market. Edit ruthlessly. Accept feedback. In Australia, the average annual income of people who list themselves as “authors” is $62k, but only $13k of that comes from their writing. So plan on a day job for a while at least.
If you want to write for pleasure: write what you want, enjoy the process, enjoy the product, share it with who you want to share it with.
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I just saw “you can edit shit but you can’t edit nothing” for the first time the other day, and now in your comment for the second time! A bit of a synchronicity, and interesting to think about ways of avoiding the shit in the first place…
Your whole comment is full of good stuff. Especially editing ruthlessly and accepting feedback. Gotta learn to step away from the ego when it comes to that part of the process… Thanks for taking the time to comment!
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I think you need an ego to write in the first place, but you need to set it aside if you want to sell your writing. 🙂
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That’s a very succinct way of putting it. I’m not yet ready to start querying the book I’ve been writing, but I will definitely keep your advice in mind when that time comes. Cheers (:
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[…] Rain of Summer (a poem written or audio) […]
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A true wordsmith, I love your work.
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Thanks so much (:
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