#WritersCoffeeClub May 28: Do you have advice for other authors that you haven't heard from different sources?
Yes: "there's more than one way to do it." (For almost any value of "it" that doesn't involve mathematics or formal logic.)
This is actually advice from a programmer, Larry Wall (inventor of Perl) but it applies especially strongly to writing fiction. Whatever you're trying to do, consider alternative ways of doing it.
When the first rumors about Perl6 started flying, one of the rumors was that they were going to clean up the syntax, and it was going to be simpler. And then the rumors started flying that they were going to make the thing even more complicated with more gratuitous ways of doing the same thing in different ways. I sort of lost track of it then. Which set of rumors actually turned out to be real?
