DON'T TELL ME HOW TO DO MY JOB!!!

So school has began and I have to temporarily hide away from writing the stuff I love the most to suffer through class (I actually kind of like my classes this semester but that's not the point) but I figure I'd take this time to address someone that's freaked me out since I started writing. Those writer's tips lists, the ones every good writer and their mom have written, Vonnegut, Palahniuk, and dozens of others have these lists, more industrious authors have BOOKS about them and they all freak me the fuck out and the more I read the less I know.

So, I'm lucky, as far as writing goes because I literally don't have to think about it, not much anyways. Almost everything I write seems to just WILL itself into my mind almost fully formed. I just gotta nip off an extra toe here, a second head there, sew up the holes and BAM I'm done. Of course reading different authors and analyzing their styles has helped a lot too but it's more patchwork additions to my style than reprogramming my creative nerve center in accordance with the rules. But not thinking about what I'm writing is a double edged sword, when everything works it's all great, and I can normally feel it when it doesn't work, but it's sort of hard for me to explain to anyone else WHY it all works. I figure out the plot, figure out who the characters are, have the plot modify the characters, describe stuff, throw in some talky words and I'm done...but there's so much more beneath the surface that I just KNOW to do and here's where the effing instruction manuals fit in...they make me doubt myself.

I think I actually found Vonnegut's rules to writing first, then via Stumble: Writing I found a BUNCH of different guides to writing, what to do, what not to do and instinctively, wanting to do the right stuff, I read them all. This quickly turned into a creative mindfuck with me re-reading things and just musing over where I did that and made sure NOT to do that and generally overreacting to everything. According to everything I've seen and noticed about my fellow Columbia students and a lot of writers in general I'm not normal, not even close. Everything I do is a response to a simple question 'what would be cool'.

I've learned that with the way I work, I shouldn't worry about it, not that I think I know everything about writing, but I learn best by example and instead of reading someone's rules to writing I should READ their writing. That's what I've been doing, Reading Cormack McCarthy and Richard Price has really made me start looking at atmospheric pressure and pacing as well as McCarthy's beautiful use of negative space and what I would say is some of the best word choice I've ever. Price had a way of describing characters that I've been trying to mimic ever since. I find it a little weird that when someone tells me their rules I freak, but when I simply figure them out for myself...I'm fine.