BY MCKENNA GARDNER
You know the quote: “Dress for the job you want, not the job you have.” Well, let’s be honest, that isn’t exactly foolproof.
If you’ve always wanted to be a rock star, but show up to your high school band teacher interview in shredded jeans and studded leather, you may be in trouble. The same holds true for writing. If you write the way you hope to someday write, it will show. Painfully so.
There is a fine line between putting your best foot forward, to use another cliché, and putting a false foot forward. You dress your best when attending an interview because you want the interviewer to judge you by what you have to offer, not by the way you appear.
With writing, every author has a different way of communicating ideas, some more artistically than others; but get a little too out in left field and you’ll find yourself ostracized by editors and publishers because their first impression of you did not grant sufficient time for them to develop a second.
Unless you write only for your own enjoyment and couldn’t care less about sharing your work with the world, your ideas must be presented in fairly standard ways in which the public can understand.
It becomes imperative that we write how we write, not write how we aspire to write. The way to improve our writing is through more writing, more critiques, and more reading.
Got a scene stuck in your head, even though it doesn’t go with any current story you’re working on? Perfect. Write it. Write it in first person past point of view. Write it again in third person present. Then again in a different location, or with different characters.
By messing around with what’s already in our head, without any intention of sharing our work, we’ll begin to discover what genres, POVs, and writing style best fits our current state. When we write naturally, it feels that way to the reader. The flow is continuous and enjoyable.
Of course it is important to dress the part of a multimillion dollar author, which probably only requires a robe and mug of hot liquid, but the only way to get there is hard, repetitive work, and hours upon hours of writing. There are no shortcuts to becoming a brilliant writer, but the long route is guaranteed to be filled with numerous adventures. How can you beat that?
When she’s not dressing for success at Steampunk conventions and fancy-dress balls, senior editor and dogbody McKenna Gardner writes and edits from her home in Arizona. Her most recent project, A Midsummer Night’s Steampunk by Scott Tarbet, was released in November 2013.
Her next projects, Primal Storm by R. A. Smith, and Kingdom City by Benjamin Ireland, will be release in winter, 2014.