>>The Sexy Adventures of Mr. Tumnus and Charles Xavier.<<
Lol I love this bit. But they left out the whiney moron from Wanted.
Those are all great things to tell a young writer. However, the best advice you can give to an aspiring writer is to tell them honestly if they really just haven't got it. I get so sick of reading crap written by people who have no business sitting at a word processor. This occurs mostly in fan fiction, which is why mostly none of it is tolerable, but it occurs some in original stuff too. I read a novel, written by someone I work with, which was just horrible. It was full of gratuitous sex and violence, mostly sex (and graphic sex at that) and the story was boring as hell. I told him straight, this sucks, throw it in the trash bin when you get home. He didn't take to that very well, but I refuse to encourage a writer that has no talent for the craft. You can teach someone how to act. Acting is easy. You can't teach someone how to write if they don't have a natural ability to do so. Unfortunately, there are people with no talent for the craft who get paid to write crap. It's depressing...
Without a certain amount of talent and self awareness, you can't teach someone to act, either.
I can't tell you how many hours I wasted with a cute girl in high school, trying to prepare her for some school musical or another only to discover that for some people it's impossible to do more than hit your marks and say a line.
In trying to get her to access her emotions, all I did was anger her, and even that came off phony....