Evil Monkey Guide to Creative Writing

The lovely Maggie flagged up a wonderful blog posting called the Evil Monkey Guide to Creative Writing. Can't say I've experienced everything cited by its author, but I do recognise far too many of these warnings and salutary events. Here's a small extract from it, to whet your appetites...

More than half of all writing advice you receive over your lifetime will be incorrect, incomplete, or howlingly wrong. You will encounter advice driven by neuroses, bitterness, failure, ego, and arrogance. In books and in writing workshops, you will have instructors who mistake their own path to success as the only path to success. Yet others will try to impose upon you their own writing style, their own list of valid subject matter and approaches. Anecdotal evidence will loom large. Some advice, some instructors, will be actively obstructionist, driven by the belief that “toughening beginners up” – discouragement – is good practice for the real world of writing.