Week 14 Story Lab: Advice to Writers

Advice to Writers

This week for my story lab, I chose to browse advicetowriters.com. As I am nearing the end of this course, I have found that I have learned quite a lot about writing and what goes into the process of it, so I felt that it was fitting to explore a site that could make my writing even better before the semester is done.

The first thing that caught my eye was the fact that this site does a quote of the day. I really liked this because it means that this site values content submitted by authors from all over, who all have the same goal in mind: to maker other writers better. The fact that there is a daily quote from an author that is highlighted on this page is just a really cool idea to me and makes me feel like this site has become very helpful to all kinds of people.

Typewriter, Wikimedia

The quote of the day when I completed this assignment featured advice about women in fiction. In this 'quote', the author discusses how she first began noticing how women were being portrayed in works of fiction in general. To her, it seemed like women were only using their bodies to "try and make good boys do bad things", and that they were doing so in almost all kinds of literature. This is something that she desired to change, so in her own works, she wanted to portray a woman who embraced her sexuality, but wasn't 'using it for evil'. To her, including a woman like this enforces the idea that women in literature should be able to be 'whole people' and not just vessels for misplaced sexual aggression. This isn't so much advice as it is a kick ass testimonial that shows the difference that women in literature are making, and I really enjoyed reading it.