Literary Birthday – 3 June – Marion Zimmer Bradley
Marion Zimmer Bradley was born on 3 June 1930 and died on 25 September 1999.
From Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Advice to New Writers
- The main way to get started as a writer is to write: apply the seat of the pants firmly to the seat of the chair and just get down to it. Having a thousand ‘good ideas’ in your head is no good; you have to get them on paper. Just sit down and do it.
- There’s no ‘magic secret’; writing is like everything else; ten percent inspiration or talent, and ninety percent hard work. Persistence; keeping at it till you get there. As Agnes de Mille said, it means working every day — bored, tired, weary, or with a fever of a hundred and two.
- Think of this: a thousand pages sounds like a lot. But write three pages a day and a year from now you’ll have a book.
- There are a few things you have to learn. I cannot urge you strongly enough — learn to type. You don’t need a computer, or a thousand dollars’ worth of word processing equipment, but you should beg, borrow, or steal a typewriter. No editor will read a manuscript that doesn’t look professional.
- Never listen to criticism from anyone unless they can sign a check. Never mind what your best friend, or your aunt, or your English teacher thinks. Trust only professional criticism.
- Read a couple of good books on technique. I recommend to my own students a good book by Dean Koontz called Writing Popular Fiction. Lawrence Block’s The Novel From Plot to Print is another good one. So is a book called One Way to Write Your Novel by Dick Perry. All of these are published by Writer’s Digest and you should subscribe to that magazine now. I have had a subscription for thirty years. I still read every issue.
- When you finish your book, wrap it up, and send it to an editor who publishes that kind of book. Agents? You don’t need one till you have a good track record of sales; in fact, most reputable agents won’t touch you till you have sold a lot of work. The kind of agent a beginner can get, you’re better off without.
- And that’s really all there is to it; it’s more than I knew when I started.
- Good luck.
For more writing tips you might want to read What is a short story? by Marion Zimmer Bradley.
Marion Zimmer Bradley was an American author of fantasy, historical fantasy, science fiction, and science fantasy novels. Her works included The Mists of Avalon and the Darkover series, beginning with Darkover Landfall. She was noted for the female perspective in her writing. Bradley was the editor of the long-running Sword and Sorceress anthology series, which encouraged submissions of fantasy stories featuring original and non-traditional heroines from young and upcoming authors. Bradley was posthumously awarded the World Fantasy Award for lifetime achievement in 2000.
Though Bradley remained popular during her lifetime, her reputation was posthumously marred when in 2014 her daughter reported that Bradley had sexually abused her, and allegedly assisted her second husband, convicted child abuser Walter Breen, in his own grooming and sexual abuse of multiple unrelated children.
Source for Advice / Source for image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MarionZimmerBradley.jpg
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