writing life – Page 61 – Andrew Careaga

Friday Five: Q&A with indie author Kayla Hicks

‘You are going to make mistakes and this is okay, just make sure to learn from them.’

Kayla Hicks is a multi-genre indie author who is a prominent voice in the X/Twitter writing community. I appreciate how she uses the platform to encourage discussion about the writing business and share her own insights. I recently enrolled in her free, three-day email course for writers interested in using social media to build their audiences, and found great information in each lesson. I hope she offers it again!

Photo of Kayla Hicks, indie author — Kayla Hicks

Kayla is the author of 14 multi-genre novels covering the young adult, superhero fiction, and children’s categories. Her first, a YA dystopian novel titled Kale Stone: An Outliers Tale , was published in 2017, and her latest, The Day the Gnomes Moved In, came out a few months ago. So in addition to her activity on social media, she is a prolific writer as well. Kayla generously agreed to share more of her thoughts on writing in this week’s Friday Five.

Some writing advice about writing advice

In which a Substacker advises writers to ignore writing advice. Come again?

I had to snicker at the title of this post from Henry Oliver on his Common Reader Substack: Writing advice is a lie.

From there, Oliver offers some advice of his own. He tells us to ignore all that writing advice you see floating around Substack and in books. (Excluding his own, presumably.)

“Almost all of it is wrong,. Flat wrong. Plain wrong. Waste-of-time wrong,” he writes.