Tag Archives: no respect

Monday morning writing joke: Let me preface this

Writer, no respect

Let me just preface my remarks by saying I shouldn’t have prefaced my remarks.

My critique group can be rather direct. I turned in the first part of the novel, including the preface. One member said he doesn’t read prefaces or preludes or prologues of any kind.

Another one wrote this on in the margin of her critique: “Your preface states that the characters bear no resemblance to any person living or dead. That’s precisely what’s wrong with this story.”

I guess an epilogue is out of the question.

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Monday morning writing joke: bird’s eye view

I'm a writer and I don't get no respect

A bird’s eye view of literature.

I’m a writer and I don’t get no respect. Just the other day my mother-in-law came to visit. She asked for one of my stories and I gave her the latest one I had written. The next day I had to go and visit her. I asked her how she liked the story. She said it wasn’t long enough.

“Long enough?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said. “There weren’t enough pages to line the bottom of my parrot’s cage. He’s not happy.”

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I’m a writer and I don’t get no respect

Writer Gets No Respect

Critics are everywhere.

One reason the human race has such a low opinion of itself is that it gets so much of its wisdom from writers. –Wilfrid Sheed

All writing is garbage. People who come out of nowhere to try to put into words any part of what goes on in their minds are pigs. –Antonin Artaud

The noted writer Theodore Sturgeon was once asked why so much of science fiction writing was “crap.” He paused for a moment, nodded, and said, yes, 90 percent of science fiction was crap, but that “90 percent of everything is crap.” This is known as Sturgeon’s Law, and is just as true today as it was in the early 1950s when he first pronounced it.

Same is true for critics of writers and writing.

[Errata: I had originally and erroneously attributed this to Robert Heinlein, another noted writer of such classics as Stranger in a Strange Land. My apologies and thank to Tom Dupree for pointing out my error. It is good to have smarter readers dropping by to read your blog posts. May we all be so fortunate. Thank you to all who stop by, read, like, and comment. It is one of the advantages of this blog format. Thank you all. –Editor]

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I’m a writer and I don’t get no respect

Writer don't get no respect

She threw the book at me!

I’m a writer and I don’t get no respect. Just the other day I hired an editor to help me with my manuscript, and the first thing she did was throw the book at me! The unabridged book at me. The one that defines words. You know it. D-i-k something something something.

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