Q: If you could talk to your novice-writer self, what bit of advice would you give?
A: I still feel like a novice-writer. My advice to me right now is to write better, to learn to articulate your ideas with a little more poetry and elegance, maybe buy a cat – all of the best writers seem to own a cat.
But I’m guessing the spirit of this question relates to what advice I would provide to my younger self when I first began writing fiction.
I only wrote sporadically when I was younger. And for that reason, I’d tell my younger self not to waste so much time. I’d tell me to write more often, to get into a routine and practice as much as I could as early as I could. I think doing so would have helped me learn a lot more about story telling by now.
I think one of the main reasons I didn’t write as much as I would have liked was because I didn’t know what to do with the stories I produced, other than force some of my friends to read them. So I’d also tell my younger self about these wonderful online magazines that might, one day, actually buy one of the stories you’re writing and publish it.
Writing is foremost about my own enjoyment, but I get such a buzz from realising others might read them, and hopefully enjoy them. And I’m grateful to magazines like Metaphorosis for publishing some of them.
Michael Gardner’s story “Nana Naoko’s Garden” was
published on Friday, 12 October 2018.
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