The Five Principles Of The Way of the Writer

1. Write.
1. Source: "You don’t have to go to school to be a writer! You have to write to be a writer!" Jeff Hess, advice from a mentor in Addrianna Reitenbach’s Pumpkin.
2. What does this mean?
1. First, it doesn’t matter if anyone ever reads what you write or that you are paid for your work. It only matters that you write, and
2. Second, how do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice. The more you write, the better writer you become. You cannot help but constantly improve.
2. Suck marrow.
1. Source: "I wanted to live deep and to suck out all the marrow of life." Henry David Thoreau, Where I lived and what I lived for, Walden. p. 81.
2. What does this mean?
1. First, every writer needs raw material to fuel their muse. To write about life you need to live life, and
2. Second, how you live is the key. Elizabeth Barrett Browning passed her life in a sickbed yet lived more deeply than most world travelers.
3. Trample barley.
1. Source: "The fields are green too, and the new barley has been well trampled to strengthen the roots and make it grow well." Miyamoto Musashi in Eiji Yoshikawa’s Musashi. p. 183.
2. What does this mean?
1. First, be able to murder your darlings, those beautiful words, sentences, paragraphs and chapters that you are so proud of, as you edit, and
2. Second, be willing to take risks in life and to accept that by trampling your heart you make it stronger.
4. Practice courageous impatience.
1. Source: "Good ideas are never accepted automatically. They must be driven into practice with courageous impatience." Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, quoted in Analog Magazine. Issue and page uncertain.
2. What does this mean?
1. First, all bureaucracies hate change. They want more of the same so that they don’t have work harder or differently.
2. Second, If you want to change that, you need to be courageous, like Dorothy confronting the wizard, to get what you want.
5. Publish.
1. Source: "Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech or of the press; …." First amendment to the United States Constitution, adopted 1791.
2. What does this mean?
1. First, you have a constitutional right to publish what you write in any form that you can afford, and
2. Given the current state of the Internet you publish, disseminate to the public, everything you write and want to share for very little cost.