Advice for Sybarites
Writing Tips for Sybarites
Or for anyone who doesn’t want readers to die of boredom
I love reading. I love writing. But nothing is worse than reading bad writing. Nothing is better than reading good writing.
When I start a book that promises to be good but is in fact bad, I feel violated. Not because I’m out some dollars — such is life — but because every time I read a new author I can’t wait to discover a fresh way to put together words, a new way to breathe, if you will. When the writer doesn’t deliver, the world shrinks.
I started thinking about good writing and bad writing in earnest after editing Sybarite for the last few months. Sybarite has been in existence for awhile, but I only dusted it off a recently, and started soliciting submissions. As they rolled in, I realized that there’s quite a bit — okay, a lot — of bad writing out there. It’s saggy. It’s boring. It’s unnecessarily complicated. People even use emojis.
It also turns out that people don’t like it when you tell them that their writing could be better, even if you are super nice when you tell them to stop using the eggplant emoji in the middle of a paragraph. Because I’m tired of offending people individually, here are a list of my writing tips, directed at no one in particular…
