Thanks for the tip

As a rule, creative writing manuals fall into two camps.

There's the stereotypically male one. Do this. Follow these instructions. Here are ten bestselling novelists. Read them and do exactly what they did. This is a good approach if your hobbies include going to Bellevue and shopping for a new straitjacket.

Then there's the stereotypical female. Find out how you feel. Face your issues. Here are eight to fourteen things you can find while searching your navel. Reading these you can waste time facing personal problems that either you're not ready to deal with or that you don't actually have.

Kelly Link's roundup isn't a book. In hard copy it would be a magazine article of a couple of pages. There isn't really that much to say. But what she does say is helpful.

The exercise of starting with one sentence and going onto the next, say. It gives you the idea, "Why don't I try to make every sentence a keeper?" Is this possible? I don't know. Probably not. But the attempt is energizing, not tiring.

Recently I went back to a project that I had played with and sort of given up on. It was the usual deal for me. Start out with what seems like an interesting idea. Meander. Get a few pages done and sort of give up. This time out, though, a funny thing happened. The interesting idea led to other interesting ideas. As time went on I got more keyed up, not less. And while endings suck in general, I managed to wrap this draft up in a way that wasn't embarassing.

There have been other changes in my life and outlook lately, and these have helped too. But I figure I should at least give Link's advice partial credit.