Tuesday, April 21, 2015


You have to pay for everything you write, everything you feel, otherwise you can take nothing away. Audiences WANT evidence, storytellers have to find the evidence and present it. This is the case with both fictional and factional stories. What is the evidence that supports the kind of emotional awareness the story is seeking to stimulate? Where is it? It is not something that you simply appropriate - you have to earn it. This is especially the case for writers. Bad writing is writing that hasn't been earned - it's been stolen, appropriated, copied or otherwise conned from some experience or other in which the writers hasn't really been invested. There are three forms - SENTIMENTALITY (unearned emotion), PORNOGRAPHY (unearned intimacy) and PROPAGANDA (unearned knowledge).

- Billy Marshall Stoneking

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