Via Neil Gaiman’s journal, advice from authors, written on their hands.
There’s a common thread through many of these photos: the idea that a large part of successful writing is just plain sticking to it.
At the Asilomar writer conference, there was an ending ceremony where all of us wrote something to inspire ourselves on each of two index cards. One was burned in a big rustic fireplace (I had a sudden flash of a prim agent reading my reassembled card while sitting on a cloud floating over London) and the other copy was kept. Mine is currently taped to my computer case. It has one word. “Persist.”
Two of the hand photos in the photo gallery have the same word.
Robert Heinlein’s famous “Rules for Writing:”
1.) You must write.
2.) You must finish what you write.
3.) You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order.
4.) You must put the work on the market.
5.) You must keep the work on the market until it is sold.
I’d plug the word “excessive” into Rule 3, but I know what he meant–I’ve seen people who have been “polishing” the same manuscript for ten years. Otherwise the same overall theme of “not giving up” is there.
TomAlanBrosz 