"Pooh pooh" is being gentle. I'd use only four carefully chosen letters in front of "them."
If I had had to write literary fiction to learn things like plot, setting, internal dialog, and so on, I doubt I would ever have sold even a single story. The reason? I wanted a more interesting challenge. I needed to write action/adventure to keep me going, else I would have stopped right there and gone back to fooling with electronics. I learned how to plot first, and then (with effort) learned the rest, by writing SF and (very occasionally) fantasy. Good advice from established writers helped me more than I appreciated at the time, but above all else I had the freedom to practice in areas that excited me. Genre is more tolerant of mistakes, and engages inexperienced writers more thoroughly than tightly constrained literary fiction. I look back at my college-years fiction and groan a little, but it was practice, and it was fun. If not for that, I would not be writing what I'm writing today.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2009-09-30 01:36 am (UTC)If I had had to write literary fiction to learn things like plot, setting, internal dialog, and so on, I doubt I would ever have sold even a single story. The reason? I wanted a more interesting challenge. I needed to write action/adventure to keep me going, else I would have stopped right there and gone back to fooling with electronics. I learned how to plot first, and then (with effort) learned the rest, by writing SF and (very occasionally) fantasy. Good advice from established writers helped me more than I appreciated at the time, but above all else I had the freedom to practice in areas that excited me. Genre is more tolerant of mistakes, and engages inexperienced writers more thoroughly than tightly constrained literary fiction. I look back at my college-years fiction and groan a little, but it was practice, and it was fun. If not for that, I would not be writing what I'm writing today.