Persinette

Keep in mind that, while it's very possible that your quality has gone down because you're struggling with the work, it's also plausible that this is just your brain playing tricks on you. Having ups and downs as you write is normal, but so is forgetting how much you originally hated your earlier stuff. As time passes and that instant feeling of 'how do I suck this much without absorbing the house around me like a black hole?' fades, you may look back at it with more of a impersonal reader's eye than a nervous writer's.

I'm just iffy about recommending a book which gives inaccurate advice - especially to new writers, who have very little basis for knowing better. If only 20% of the M&Ms in the bowl are poisoned, you don't advise someone to take a big ol' handful, y'know? And Monsieurs Strunk & White give an awful lot of terrible style advice (assuming, of course, that like me, you include 'avoid the passive voice' as a style proclamation). Forgive me, but I honestly give his opinion more stock than a text which breaks its own rules as it declares them.

There are some very valid disgreements with it as a text, though - which may result in new writers (who lack the experience to tell) receiving bad advice. There's a fascinating article about it (written by a linguist) here.

I can! Sometimes, on overcast days, I like to sit and imagine how frustrated and embarrassed he must be. Cheers me right up.

You start that thread, I'll chime in on it.

This might be because I'm english. Do you guys not use the word much over there? Wow, that's the nicest way anyone's ever called me a shit-stirrer. Out of curiosity, what tone does the word have on the other side of the pond? Here, it's pretty damn light - kinda like 'oh, you silly bugger'. There's almost an affectionate edge to it, if that makes sense? You're saying, well, 'I think you are being a bit silly but I hold no malice about it', only...not... Okay, I'm not sure I can think of a description that doesn't use other UK terms.

When'd I agree with you? I understand your perspective, but I think you're being a bit daft.

Oh, give over, kid. I don't much care what you do or don't call yourself - you want to be known as The Chris Formally Known as Gaylord, I'll abbreviate it to something catchy. I'm just saying that labels aren't some dread creature come to suck the life and breath outta you; leaving but a shrivelled, cock-loving carcass where there was once a dude called Chris. Basically: labels. Sometimes bad, sometimes good, sometimes useful. I really like it when people label me as 'black-pepper-allergic', because then they don't feed me stuff which makes my stomach do backflips. They're just ideas, man. A way to communicate shit.

Labels are just tools - you can use a spanner to bash somebody's head in as easily as fix a car. The things themselves aren't evil; they're just a way to navigate people easier. Does calling myself a geek boil my entire personality down to one hobby? No, but it makes it easier to find fellow hobbyists. No need to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

You know what would actually make a pretty awesome prompt? This list. Pick one and use it as your first line.

It's the Gentleman Bastard series, if memory serves me right.

Song lyrics, lines from poems and, when absolutely stuck, stealing from mythology and classic texts. (And just good old-fashioned 'happening to think up something cool'.) I don't really worry about length, for the most part - if it's not going to be published, why not just use whatever works?

While I appreciate your generous offer to allow me to have not said something you you disagree with, I think I'm going to continue having said it. But thank you.

'Minority' isn't always just used to refer to numbers - it also refers to cultural power, so to speak. And yes, there are limitations set on women's writing. Heavy ones. Women win a fraction of writing awards, especially compared to the number of female writers. Their work gets dismissed as 'women's fiction' in a way that men's is not. Some smug sod pops up once a month to explain how 'womenz just can't write substantial fiction like the menz can'. A lot of heavyweight female writers talk about how patronising interviewers are or about critics projecting onto their work because of their gender. A lot of women have had very good experiences as authors. A lot of women have encountered serious issues. There are a ton of queer writers, but you wouldn't say they face no issues around their sexuality - particularly when it comes to presentating queer characters (as do straight authors, for that matter). Hell, the classic example is that you know J.K Rowling as J.K Rowling because the publishers slapped her initials on the spine. Why? Because they thought a female name would stop her selling.

To put my two-penneth in on Ron's original question: I don't think that any minority group - queers, women, whoever - carries any particular obligation to Give The Right Impression in its fiction. A basic element of equal rights is the right to be terrible people without it being taken to reflect on your entire group. In some ways, I honestly think that is the marking of equality: to be taken as individuals. As people. And I don't think that is achieved by conforming to the image of Good Queers. I think it just helps to reinforce a false kind of equality; an equality where we are tolerated until we step out of line. Forgive me, thebrinkoftime, but you brought up The Simple Art of Murder and I have a lot of capital-t Thoughts about that essay. Care for a nerdy discussion? The issue I have with Chandler's essay is that he strays dangerously close to both misrepresentation and hypocrisy. Many of the stories he rails against so heavily are cozies - an entirely different mystery genre to his noir. It's akin to criticising high fantasy for not meeting the same criteria as urban fantasy. Some of his criticisms are still perfectly valid, but some of them are just flat out his demands that other authors cease writing in a genre he does not like. Where he strays into hypocrisy is what he holds up as real and what he holds up as fake. He judges other writers for having convoluted, contrived plots, but writes utterly unbelievable shapes and characters into his own stories. He laughs at fictional villains with complicated schemes, but has a character believe she killed somebody because the murderer tells her she did. I think he was an excellent and highly accomplished writer, but not one whose opinion I would take unalloyed. But we haven't evolved beyond that. We have moved beyong that particular style of mystery, but primarily because the world has moved on. The young lord is now the magician living in a windmill. He's Jonathan Creek, Jack Frost, Rosemary and bloody Thyme. The cozy is still as popular - and still as legitimate - as it ever was. Chandler wrote in pure unreality. He wrote about dirt and corruption and blood, but that doesn't mean it was realistic. He wrote from the id, he wrote the things which made his heart pound. He wrote an awful lot of utter fantasy. Dorothy Sayers gave her hero a wealth of worldly riches and a fancy car because she didn't have those things. Raymond Chandler created small, emotionally unstable blondes who attempted to seduce his hero because they excited him. And he made corrupt mayors and crooked cops and thugs with a shred of redemption in them, because those were his ideas of ugly reality. She wrote a generation of young men with shellshock because those were hers. They both wrote reality and unreality in equal measures, but I do not consider his version of an exaggerated world to be any more truthful or well-written than hers.