Description: Writer, editor, etc.
[Note: The following article was written in March 2011. It’s here because I’m migrating old posts from a different site to my current one.]
This is another post in The Skill List Project : an attempt to list all the skills involved in writing and selling fiction, particularly science fiction and fantasy. Last time around, we talked about Reading judiciously . At the end of that posting, I made the rash promise to show “judicious reading” in action: I’d pull apart a sample piece of writing to see what we could get out of it.
Theoretically, a writer should be able to learn from any passage of prose. We could, for example, look at the infamous Eye of Argon , a piece often mentioned when people talk about atrocious writing. “Eye of Argon” isn’t a book, but it has enough awfulness to fill a trilogy.