About to call it a day. (By that I mean stop writing and do the little tasks such as having-a-life.

I once wrote an article called “A Few Keys to the Kingdom” for Writers Digest, which was directed to budding writers. It has been reprinted quite a bit, and I thought it might be of interest to some of you who are contemplating taking on the masochistic mantle of ‘writer’. <Grin>

Here are some of those “keys”:

(“A Few Keys to the Kingdom: Thoughts on Getting Published, and on Being the Best Writer You Can Be,” by Jack Dann. Copyright © 1989 by Writer’s Digest. First published in Writer’s Digest, January 1989. All rights reserved by the author.)

1. You must begin. Every day you must write, no matter what.

2. Give the best part of every day to your writing. Get up early and write if you can. If you can’t, read or put your desk in order or do research. It’s important to establish the habit of working every day.

3. Make appointments with yourself to write. Make yourself feel as guilty as possible. Do whatever you must to get to the computer.

4. Copy! Don’t plagiarise, but find writers you admire, and read and reread their best work. Dissect their prose sentence by sentence and paragraph by paragraph. Memorise passages if you have to, but get into the weave of the writer’s work. It will give an unconscious form and balance to your own work. Don’t worry, no one else will know. You will put these unconscious “forms” through your own sensorium.

5. Read constantly and widely.

6. Be prepared to be surprised and upset by what you write.

7. Don’t try to be a critic while you’re writing. The first stages of writing are often intuitive, right-brained work. But once you have a draft, or you become blocked on a story, you must rethink and rework.

8. If you’re having trouble with a sentence or a passage or a plot twist, ask yourself if something doesn’t need to be cut. If you have an especially elegant sentence that just isn’t working with the rest of your humdrum prose, cut out the sentence. It’s probably purple, anyway.

9. If you find yourself blocked, take a break and read and take notes and read and take more notes. Being blocked is natural. It’s your unconscious asking for more information.

10. Rewrite everything until you feel that what you have on paper corresponds as closely as possible to that wonderful image you originally had in your mind.

11. Keep working toward making clear sentences and building solid story structures. Style is really only transparency of thought and idea. Writing well is a result of clear thinking. Cut out everything that sounds nice but doesn’t convey the specific meaning you want. Find the exact word to express your thought: that’s what Roget made his Thesaurus for. The particular way you think, the way you experience and perceive the world, will become your “style”.

12. Read Strunk and White’s =The Elements of Style=.

13. Send your work out to editors!