Back when I first tried my hand at fiction, if you wanted instruction you had to buy a book (or find one at the library) or maybe subscribe to Writers Digest. Today there's more writing advice on the web than you can shake a stick at, which is pretty much what I'd like to do.

I'm not sure I could have survived so much advice. A hundred authors will suggest a hundred ways to do a thing, but the individual author can only do it one way at a time, and probably in a different way than any of those suggested. But it would've been hard to resist trying all the suggestions.

Maybe I would have progressed more rapidly and been a better writer today if I'd had access to and heeded vast quantities of advice. But I doubt it.

Even today, I'm intimidated by most of the writing instructions I make the mistake of reading. How can people be thinking so hard when they write? How can they pull off all the skillful literary maneuvers they lay claim to? If I ever blundered into one of those writing workshops, what the heck would I say?

Enough. If I start musing about how to end this, or whether the first line's snappy enough, I'll end up ditching the whole mess.