{"id":552,"date":"2010-04-03T06:56:16","date_gmt":"2010-04-03T12:56:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/booklifenow.com\/?p=552"},"modified":"2010-04-03T06:57:47","modified_gmt":"2010-04-03T12:57:47","slug":"there-are-no-rules-that-can%e2%80%99t-be-broken-writing-advice-from-marly-youmans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/booklifenow.com\/2010\/04\/there-are-no-rules-that-can%e2%80%99t-be-broken-writing-advice-from-marly-youmans\/","title":{"rendered":"There Are No Rules That Can\u2019t Be Broken: Writing Advice from Marly Youmans"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jeremy L. C. Jones <\/em><\/a>is a freelance writer, editor, and part-time professor.\u00a0 Jones is a frequent contributor to <\/em>Clarkesworld Magainze<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0 He is also the director of <\/em>Shared Worlds<\/em><\/a>, a creative writing and world-building camp that he and <\/em>Jeff VanderMeer <\/em><\/a>designed in 2006.<\/em>\u00a0<\/p>\n

——<\/strong><\/p>\n

Marly Youmans<\/a>\u00a0is a poet and a fiction writer\u2026 and a poet and a fiction writer.\u00a0 Each time she switches between genres, Youmans proves the inexhaustibility of her imagination and creativity.\u00a0 (See Youmans\u2019 essay, \u201cLuck\u2019s Child,\u201d on page 302 of BookLife<\/em>.)<\/p>\n

Youmans\u2019 fiction ranges from The Wolf Pit<\/em>, an award-winning Civil War novel, to Ingledove<\/em>, a young adult fantasy novel. In between fiction projects, she writes poetry, much of which has been collected in Claire<\/em> and the forthcoming The Throne of Psyche<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Youmans will spend much of her summer teaching creative writing at places such as Hollins College <\/a>and Shared Worlds<\/a>.\u00a0 Below, she talks about some of the best writing advice she has given, missed, and received.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0——<\/strong><\/p>\n

Marly Youmans<\/a>: The advice I frequently give is to finish what you begin because you learn a great deal by forcing yourself to finish a thing, no matter how ill it looks to you! Solving problems by doing<\/em> is the only way to move forward as a young writer.<\/p>\n

\u201cFinish\u201d is advice I dole out often to my daughter, who is a teenage writer and artist and much more.<\/p>\n

But what is the best piece of advice that I\u2019ve ever received?<\/p>\n

I was a maniacal reader as a child, so it certainly wasn\u2019t advice to read. That is good advice if you\u2019re not<\/em> much of a reader, but how could you desire to become a writer if you had not been a reader? Every writer has been mad to read at some point.<\/p>\n

Writing every day is excellent advice, but I don\u2019t do it. I doubt any mother with three children does.<\/p>\n

Probably the best piece of advice I missed<\/em> entirely was when poet Michael Harper <\/a>told me with an air of surprise that I was quite good with form. I had tossed off three or four formal poems for an exercise, and everybody else in our group refused to write any at all. If I had taken Michael Harper’s remarks seriously, I might have discovered something about myself and what I loved that took me years to find out on my own because I was under the thumb of what the world said was the thing to do.<\/p>\n

But you ask about the best piece of advice that I took<\/em> and used<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are no rules that can\u2019t be broken.\u201d I\u2019m sure somebody said something like that to me early on, and it is true. Rules have a kind of fascination for us. We welcome most the ones that seem like something we already believe or do. We enjoy the silly or odd ones. We ignore the rest. But there is almost no important rule that cannot be overturned. (Some of the seemingly minor ones like not overusing adverbs or using complicated dialogue tags like \u201che gargled through a mouthful of hot soup\u201d are impossible to overturn except in the case of comedy and satire.)<\/p>\n

I wonder what the biggest rule that I have broken might be. I tend to be violently allergic to doing the same thing twice, and that is precisely what many publishers want us to do: the same thing twice. Or thrice. Etc. Perhaps that is my broken rule.<\/p>\n

Or perhaps I have just broken the rule that says that one must answer questions in a straightforward and sensible manner. Yes, no doubt I have just broken that good rule.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and part-time professor.\u00a0 Jones is a frequent contributor to Clarkesworld Magainze.\u00a0 He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006.\u00a0 —— Marly Youmans\u00a0is a poet and a fiction writer\u2026 and a poet and a fiction writer.\u00a0 Each time she switches between genres, Youmans proves the inexhaustibility of her imagination and creativity.\u00a0 (See Youmans\u2019 essay, \u201cLuck\u2019s Child,\u201d on page 302 of BookLife.) Youmans\u2019 fiction ranges from The Wolf Pit, an award-winning Civil War novel, to Ingledove, a young adult fantasy novel. In between fiction projects, she writes poetry, much of which has been collected in Claire and the forthcoming The Throne of Psyche.\u00a0 Youmans will spend much of her summer teaching creative writing at places such as Hollins College and Shared Worlds.\u00a0 Below, she talks about some of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/booklifenow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/552"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/booklifenow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/booklifenow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/booklifenow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/booklifenow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=552"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/booklifenow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/552\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":568,"href":"https:\/\/booklifenow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/552\/revisions\/568"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/booklifenow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/booklifenow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/booklifenow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}