Chris's Philosophy of Writing (Menu Tour)

Note: I'm going to keep doing the Friday Menu Tour until we've kind of gone through most of the good ones, but next week it will become the "brunch post." I'm almost done unpacking and sitting on the phone for an hour to make health insurance payments and all the bullshit that comes from uprooting an eleven year life and transplanting it into a single bedroom. I've got some posts lined up for this weekend and a dynamite schedule planned for next week.

Again, this Friday series is a tour of menus you can find on the side bar or up in The Reliquary. 

Chris's Philosophy of Writing

These are manifestos, rants, edicts, warnings, fundamental precepts and more. I claim no authority of fiat (in fact, sometimes that's what I'm most objecting to), but they are as close to the core nuggets of my personal philosophy of writing as anything is likely to get.  Some are several articles surrounding a core idea like Dorothea Brande or politics.  Some are very (very) long, some are obviously papers I wrote for college, and many are more than a little self indulgent.  But all are fundamental to what I understand of writing.

A lot of these articles show up in other menus--or rather they are cross posted here because while they might be about linguistics or process or in some other way fit in another menu, they are also core precepts I think are vital.

Earning Your "Er."
No Apologies: A Defense of Why Speculative Fiction Should Need No Defense.
What We Talk About When We Talk About Writing- It's much more than just the writing part.
A Fish, a Rat, and a Prescriptivist Walk Into a Bar Why most linguistic prescriptivism bothers me.
Ten thousand hours It takes a lot of work.  A LOT of work.
NaNoWriMo: The Good, The Bad, and the Really Really Ugly
The A to Zen of a Writer's Life
The Modern Artist's Survival Guide
An Open Letter to Lynn Shepherd
The 17 Rules of Writing
A Passive Aggressive Memo to Other Artists
On Sister Act 2 and How to Know If You Should Be a Writer
Ten Reasons to Write Daily (Accentuate the Positive)
Don't Make It So Damned Hard

Series Articles

The Lessons of Brande Dorothea Brande's book Becoming A Writer has shaped how I fundamentally approach writing. 1 The book and what it's about.  2 Cultivating internal dualism.  3 Morning writing.  4 The Floating Half Hour of Writing

Writers and Politics Be careful when dealing with politics. The truth is a casualty of political writing.  Avoiding politics entirely isn't the answer.  But there are reasons to be cautious.

It's Really Okay NOT to Write. Really  Intro & Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7