Advice for New Writers

Budding writers get a lot of advice - some of it good, some of it bad, a lot of it indifferent. But one thing you can always count on is that it's going to be abundant. So I'll toss my two cents out there because after a dozen years and more than 600 published magazine and newspaper articles, I feel I can offer some concrete advice to new writers.

One of the first things a new writer will hear is "write what you know," which is great advice if you are limiting yourself to personal essays, columns and opinion pieces. However, if you're like me "writing what I know" is a pretty shallow pool from which to dip. And it limits me to my own narrow path of experience.

I think a better piece of advice is the very cliché "It's not what you know, but who you know." Now that's not to say your own experience and expertise won't be helpful, I'm just saying that picking someone else's expert brain can only be beneficial in the long run.

This is "duh-huh" for those writing non-fiction articles. In order to submit something of substance to a reputable publication, you need to quote some sources. Your wife's brother doesn't qualify, unless, of course, your brother-in-law from Dallas is an exterminator and you're writing an article about dealing with termites in Texas.

This information isn't just for non-fiction writers though. Fiction enthusiasts can benefit from this unsolicited counsel too.

Maybe you're an accountant by day and mystery writer by night. Your protagonist has just stumbled upon the corpse of his ex-wife in a most inconvenient spot. He needs to make her go away. Said wife has been dead let's say a week. What do you know about week old dead people? Heck, what do I know about week old dead people? If you're going to go into any sort of detail here, you need to consult an expert.

If you're lucky, you regularly have dinner with Bill Bass from the University of Tennessee's Anthropological Research Facility affectionaly known as "The Body Farm." (Well, I don't know if eating regularly with a forensic anthropologist that spends his days communing with corpses would be considered lucky, but I've heard him speak and read his books. He's a funny guy. So maybe.) You could also find a local expert in your own backyard like a funeral home director or crime scene investigator. If that fails, find a book on the subject and make yourself familiar. (Bill Bass up there. He's got some books you could read.)

So to sum this whole thing up, in addition to writing what you know, find someone else and write what they know too. In their own words of course. With quotation marks. That'd be good too.