Thord D. Hedengren

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Tag: advice

  • Ian Fleming on writing thrillers

    Ian Fleming, in an essay on writing thrillers, published in 1963:

    We thus come to the final and supreme hurdle in the writing of a thriller. You must know thrilling things before you can write about them. Imagination alone isn’t enough, but stories you hear from friends or read in the papers can be built up by a fertile imagination and a certain amount of research and documentation into incidents that will also ring true in fiction.

    The whole thing is worth a read.

    A bit of self-promotion follows. If you need more inspiration and helpful emails to reach your writing goals (you have goals, right?), do request a beta to BlankPage, an online writing app I’m a part of. Ping me on Twitter and I’ll fast-track your beta invite.

  • Backup, Backup, Backup

    I can’t state this enough: Backup your work, writers.

    Backup. Your. Work.

    Those of you who haven’t lost precious work due to hard drive failure, theft, or similar data loss, often have a hard time grasping the seriousness of the situation. But when you sit there, realizing that all your hard work is gone forever, then you know true despair.

    Everyone should keep backups, and writers should keep more than most. There is no excuse, it is so easy. Not only can you use typical backup solutions like an external drive or a Time Machine, you can easily add additional layers of protection. Syncing to the cloud is obvious, sign up for Dropbox or similar this instance if you haven’t already.

    I also keep a backup email account which get a copy of the day’s writing. Make it a habit to email your backup email account every day and you know you won’t loose more than a day’s work at least. Your backup email account need to be with a different provider than your primary one, of course.

    Text doesn’t take much room. Back it up everywhere, keep an USB drive handy, backup to your FTP server. Whatever.

    Just backup.

  • Talk is cheap

    Sometimes it is easy to say too much. If you’re a productive fellow you probably have a ton of ideas, some hopes, and a dream or two. The projects are piling up and as you work your way through them you can’t help but start looking towards the horizon for the Next Big Thing that you’ll dazzle the world with.

    Do yourself a favor and shut up.

    I know all too well how easy it is to start talking about a project way too early. It’s gonna be great, I just know it, and then I’ll convince anyone who’ll listen that this is the case. Most of the time they’ll believe me, I’m persuasive like that. You might be too.

    The problem is when you don’t deliver. Real artists ship, you know. So keep your projects, ideas and plans to yourself and don’t start talking about them until the very last moment, ideally a bit later than that. You’ll get a nice reputation of being the one who always delivers, which will make your impact all the better.