Meet Lois McMaster Bujold
Science Fiction Writer
Wisdom

Karen:Do you have any advice for the girls who are thinking about writing? What would you say to them?

Lois:If you're thinking about writing, sit down and start writing! Don't wait for your teachers. Heavens, don't wait for your teachers. If you can find friends who are interested, you can write for each other and that's a good way to get started. You do need a sympathetic audience who is able to read the way you mean to be read. And they can sometimes be very hard to find.

One of the things about being on the net is that even if this sort of person isn't on your block, and usually when you're a young girl you're kind of limited to a very small physical area, you may be able to find friends on the net and E-Mail stuff back and forth to each other for critique or use E-Mail the way my friends and I use U.S. Mail.

There's a danger on the net in that you'll have so much fun communicating with friends directly that you won't want to draw back long enough to communicate with them through your fiction. But that's something every writer has to overcome when they get into being on the net.

Find somebody who wants to listen and reciprocate. Finding the right listener is so important. But just do it, don't wait. Start now, write the kind of stories that interest you. Don't worry about that depressing old dictum "Write what you know". If you need to know something, look it up. Learn how to find out what you need to know to make it right. Be passionate, be picky, have enough self-criticism to demand of yourself your best and not sort of let it slide by. And remember that the greatest defect any piece of fiction can have is not to be finished.

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