My chair recently asked me to do a Two Minute Lecture for our Humanities Division. “Maybe you can talk about your writing,” he said fliply.
Maybe. Writing’s about all I ever talk about.
So I said yes. Because some ideas and thoughts have been percolating in my brain lately. Most of them sparked by a post from the inimitable Chuck Wendig on his blog Terrible Minds. Like this post:
http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2018/06/12/setting-free-the-sacred-cows-of-writing-advice/
This discussion of writing advice that doesn’t work but is always given comes up a lot of Twitter, too.
And I also ran into a lot of debunking of standard writing advice in my recent reading of Jeffrey Somers’ excellent book Writing Without Rules.
So it seemed only right that this be the subject of my Two Minute Lecture, tentatively titled, “Writing Advice You Can (and should) Ignore.”
Right now, my plan is to take 3 or 4 writing advice standards and then explain briefly (it is only 2 minutes after all) why they’re perhaps not as valid or helpful as people think.
Stay tuned to see how well well that goes.