Mechanics are Bullshit. Create more Content.

Here, go read this:

It's a 14,000 word book written by a 9-year-old girl.

Did you finish? Of course not. You just scanned past the link because who the hell has time for that? Daisy Ashford has time for that is who, which is why she has a foreword written by J.M. Barrie and you're still sitting there just messing about on the internet.

Daisy Ashford had time to write and cheerfully re-read her delightfully hilarious little novel over and over because Daisy Ashford didn't give one single fuck about the mechanics of writing.

How many times have you re-written or re-drafted the first chapter of your novel? Don't deny that you have a first chapter - you're reading a blog about a literary magazine. I'm betting you have five first chapters of five distinct novels that were all abandoned over dissatisfaction with metaphor formulation or the inability to walk away from some questionable subject-verb agreements for the sake of a story. So how many times have you re-written or re-drafted that chapter? Too many times.

Put down the red pen. (Unless you're a copy-editor, in which case I'm sorry I'm making your job harder, but you're my hero anyway.) Walk away from your chapter. You've written it. It's done. Now write the second chapter.

Let's go back to darling Daisy for a second. Let's clarify what I mean when I say she didn't care about mechanics.

Daisy's little novel was written in a rough (but pretty) scrawl in the pages of her workbook. All sentences, paragraphs, and chapters are jammed together in a beautiful jumble that pours in a torrent over the reader exposing them line by line to the story with no concern for the pettiness of punctuation or sensible spelling. The title of the novel is The Young Visiters because Daisy couldn't be arsed to look up the proper pluralization of "visitor" - it would have taken time away from her story.

In my time working with A Few Lines I've met a lot of poets. Some are good poets, some are terrible poets, all are struggling to make sense of poetry in our frighteningly literal world and most of the poets I've met will spend hours agonizing over a single line, or even a single word, in a poem. I understand that, to an extent. Specificity is vital in short format writing, and one ill-chosen adverb can change the tone of an entire poem. But seriously, stop it poets. Write the poem first, then worry about the mechanics. Figure out if your core concept translates well into an entire work before you finesse the shit out of every phrase.

Michelangelo didn't carve David pubes first and move on from there. He started with a big chunk of rock and wrought a man from it, getting down and dirty with the details when the concept of the sculpture had largely been realized.

So writers, read Daisy Ashford's book. Enjoy the book. Look at the story and the pacing and everything that makes The Young Visiters an engaging read. Then think about your writing and when you get stuck just ask yourself what Daisy would do.

And have fun. This is supposed to be fun, you know.

Cheers,
     - Alli