Raymond Chandler Papers: Selected Letters and Nonfiction, 1909-1959
Saturday, December 31, 2005
The First Person Character
The point about Marlowe is to remember that he is a first person character, whether he shows up that way in a radio script or not. A first person character is under the disadvantage that he must be a better person to the reader than he is to himself. Too many first person characters give an offensively cocky impression. That's bad. To avoid that you must not always give him the punch line or the exit line. Not even often. Let other characters have the toppers. Leave him without a gag, insofar as it is possible. Howard Hawks, a very wise hombre, remarked to me when he was doing The Big Sleep that he thought one of Marlowe's most effective tricks was just giving the other man the trick and not saying anything at all. That puts the other man on the spot. A devastating crack loses a lot of its force when it doesn't provoke any answer, when the other man just rides with the punch. Then you either have to top it yourself or give ground.
Raymond Chandler Papers: Selected Letters and Nonfiction, 1909-1959
Raymond Chandler Papers: Selected Letters and Nonfiction, 1909-1959
Friday, December 30, 2005
Arresting Motion
The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling "Kilroy was here" on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass. (William Faulkner)
Thursday, December 29, 2005
Prose Writers and Poets
For the last three hundred years or so, prose writers have, from time to time, glanced over in the direction of the poets for guidance in certain matters of life and writing. Contemplating the lives of poets, however, is a sobering activity. It often seems as if the poets have extracted pity and terror from their work so that they could have a closer firsthand experience of these emotions in their own lives. A poet's life is rarely one that you would wish upon your children. It's not so much that poets are unable to meet various payrolls; it's more often the case that they've never heard of a payroll. Many of them are pleased to think that the word "salary" is yet another example of esoteric jargon.
I myself am an ex-poet. My friends the poets like me better now that I no longer write poetry. It always got in the way of our friendships, my being a poet, and writing poems. The one thing that can get a poet irritated and upset is the thought of another poet's poems. Now that I do not write poetry, I am better able to watch the spontaneous combustion of poets at a distance. The poets even invite our contemplation of their stormy lives, and perhaps this accounts for their recent production of memoirs. If you didn't read about this stuff in a book, you wouldn't believe it.
Prose writers, however, are no better. Their souls are usually heavy and managerial. Prose writers of fiction are by nature a sullen bunch. The strain of inventing one plausible event after another in a coherent narrative chain tends to show in their faces. As Nietzsche says about Christians, you can tell from their faces that they don't enjoy doing what they do. Fiction writers cluster in the unlit corners of the room, silently observing everybody, including the poets, who are usually having a fine time in the center spotlight, making a spectacle of themselves as they eat the popcorn and drink the beer and gossip about other poets. Usually it's the poets who leave the mess just as it was, the empty bottles and the stains on the carpet and the scrawled phrases they have written down on the backs of pizza delivery boxes -phrases to be used for future poems, no doubt, and it's the prose writers who in the morning usually have to clean all of this up. Poets think that a household mess is picturesque -for them it's the contemporary equivalent of a field of daffodils. The poets start the party and dance the longest, but they don't know how to plug in the audio system, and they have to wait for the prose writers to show them where the on/off switch is. In general, poets do not know where the on/off switch is, anywhere in life. They are usually off unless they are forcibly turned on, and they stay on until they are taken to the emergency room, where they are medicated and turned off again.
Prose writers, by contrast, are unreliable friends: They are always studying you to see if there's anything in your personality or appearance that they can steal for their next narrative. They notice everything about you, and sooner or later they start to editorialize on you, like a color commentator at a sports event. You have a much better chance at friendship with a poet, unless you are a poet yourself. In your bad moments, a poet is always likely to sympathize with your misery, and in your good moments to imagine you as a companion for a night on the town. Most poets don't study character enough to be able to steal it; they have enough trouble understanding what character is.
Of all human occupations, the writing of poetry leaves the most time for concentrated leisure activities. Poets have considerable quantities of time and a low boredom threshold, which makes them fun and scary to be around. With poets, you are likely to find yourself, as I once did, driving around town at 2 A.M. looking for a restaurant that sells roast beef sandwiches; the sandwiches, in this case, were not for the poet but for his hunting dogs, who had become accustomed to this diet. Loyalty is a religion for poets, and in any case they need the requirements of friendship to fill the other twenty-three and a half hours of the day. They are distractible, however, since they are usually thinking about an image or a favorite phrase or a new approach to the sacred. Prose writers have to spend hours and hours in chairs, facing paper, adding one brick to another brick, piling on the great heap of their endless observations, going through the addled inventory of all the items they've laboriously paid attention to, and it makes them surly-all this dawn-until-dusk sitting for the sake of substantial books that you could prop open a door with, big novels with sentences that have to go to the far right-hand margin of the page. Fiction writers get resentful, watching poets calling it quits at 9:30 A.M. Writing prose is steady work, but it tends to make prose writers grumpy and money grubbing and longfaced. They feel that they should be rewarded for what they do: observing everything and everybody with that wide-eyed staring look, like a starving cat painted on a velvet canvas.
Poets are the nobility of the writing world. Their nobility has to do with their spiritual intelligence and mindhaunted love for language and their subtle perfectionism. Poets can trace their lineage back to Orpheus, but prose writers can't go much further than that money grubber, Samuel Richardson, or that jailbird, Cervantes. Like it or not, prose fiction writers have always been part of the middle class; like other members of the middle class, they perk up when the subject turns to money. You can be a prose writer without having any kind of primary relation to the gods, but poets are often god-touched, when they are not being butchered by the gods, and this fate affects them in curious ways. They think about fate often if not obsessively. Like other nobles who spend their days scouting the heavens, however, poets have little understanding of most worldly occupations, except for writing poems and falling in love and having great sex, which is why half of their poems are about writing poems or falling in love and having great sex.
It's a good thing for prose writers that poets generally gave up telling stories in poems around the turn of the century. Each one of the English Romantic poets, with the possible exception of Shelley, was a great storyteller, and even Shelley wanted to write, with The Cenci, a play that could be produced on the stage; Coleridge's Ancient Mariner has a great story to tell and Keats's story of Lamia has a startlingly nightmarish quality. The story of Don Juan will keep you stimulated and alert, and even Tennyson could tell a story, although there is a softening in Tennyson that gives his narratives a gauzy mix of the medieval and the romantic that we now associate with the paintings of Maxfield Parrish. Despite their great achievements, Pound, Eliot, and Stevens and many other Modernists and Postmodernists did not care to get themselves involved with extended narratives of any kind. They saw, or thought they saw, that progressive narrative was itself a fiction and led to a progressivist view of history in which they did not believe. All their stories have turned into little shards of broken glass, each shard an enclosed historical moment, and part of the experience of reading their poems involves spending hours gluing these pieces of glass together. It is interesting to me that poets have mostly renounced telling stories in their poems, but as an ex-poet I am pleased that they have done so, because it gives me a mission in life.
from Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction by Charles Baxter
I myself am an ex-poet. My friends the poets like me better now that I no longer write poetry. It always got in the way of our friendships, my being a poet, and writing poems. The one thing that can get a poet irritated and upset is the thought of another poet's poems. Now that I do not write poetry, I am better able to watch the spontaneous combustion of poets at a distance. The poets even invite our contemplation of their stormy lives, and perhaps this accounts for their recent production of memoirs. If you didn't read about this stuff in a book, you wouldn't believe it.
Prose writers, however, are no better. Their souls are usually heavy and managerial. Prose writers of fiction are by nature a sullen bunch. The strain of inventing one plausible event after another in a coherent narrative chain tends to show in their faces. As Nietzsche says about Christians, you can tell from their faces that they don't enjoy doing what they do. Fiction writers cluster in the unlit corners of the room, silently observing everybody, including the poets, who are usually having a fine time in the center spotlight, making a spectacle of themselves as they eat the popcorn and drink the beer and gossip about other poets. Usually it's the poets who leave the mess just as it was, the empty bottles and the stains on the carpet and the scrawled phrases they have written down on the backs of pizza delivery boxes -phrases to be used for future poems, no doubt, and it's the prose writers who in the morning usually have to clean all of this up. Poets think that a household mess is picturesque -for them it's the contemporary equivalent of a field of daffodils. The poets start the party and dance the longest, but they don't know how to plug in the audio system, and they have to wait for the prose writers to show them where the on/off switch is. In general, poets do not know where the on/off switch is, anywhere in life. They are usually off unless they are forcibly turned on, and they stay on until they are taken to the emergency room, where they are medicated and turned off again.
Prose writers, by contrast, are unreliable friends: They are always studying you to see if there's anything in your personality or appearance that they can steal for their next narrative. They notice everything about you, and sooner or later they start to editorialize on you, like a color commentator at a sports event. You have a much better chance at friendship with a poet, unless you are a poet yourself. In your bad moments, a poet is always likely to sympathize with your misery, and in your good moments to imagine you as a companion for a night on the town. Most poets don't study character enough to be able to steal it; they have enough trouble understanding what character is.
Of all human occupations, the writing of poetry leaves the most time for concentrated leisure activities. Poets have considerable quantities of time and a low boredom threshold, which makes them fun and scary to be around. With poets, you are likely to find yourself, as I once did, driving around town at 2 A.M. looking for a restaurant that sells roast beef sandwiches; the sandwiches, in this case, were not for the poet but for his hunting dogs, who had become accustomed to this diet. Loyalty is a religion for poets, and in any case they need the requirements of friendship to fill the other twenty-three and a half hours of the day. They are distractible, however, since they are usually thinking about an image or a favorite phrase or a new approach to the sacred. Prose writers have to spend hours and hours in chairs, facing paper, adding one brick to another brick, piling on the great heap of their endless observations, going through the addled inventory of all the items they've laboriously paid attention to, and it makes them surly-all this dawn-until-dusk sitting for the sake of substantial books that you could prop open a door with, big novels with sentences that have to go to the far right-hand margin of the page. Fiction writers get resentful, watching poets calling it quits at 9:30 A.M. Writing prose is steady work, but it tends to make prose writers grumpy and money grubbing and longfaced. They feel that they should be rewarded for what they do: observing everything and everybody with that wide-eyed staring look, like a starving cat painted on a velvet canvas.
Poets are the nobility of the writing world. Their nobility has to do with their spiritual intelligence and mindhaunted love for language and their subtle perfectionism. Poets can trace their lineage back to Orpheus, but prose writers can't go much further than that money grubber, Samuel Richardson, or that jailbird, Cervantes. Like it or not, prose fiction writers have always been part of the middle class; like other members of the middle class, they perk up when the subject turns to money. You can be a prose writer without having any kind of primary relation to the gods, but poets are often god-touched, when they are not being butchered by the gods, and this fate affects them in curious ways. They think about fate often if not obsessively. Like other nobles who spend their days scouting the heavens, however, poets have little understanding of most worldly occupations, except for writing poems and falling in love and having great sex, which is why half of their poems are about writing poems or falling in love and having great sex.
It's a good thing for prose writers that poets generally gave up telling stories in poems around the turn of the century. Each one of the English Romantic poets, with the possible exception of Shelley, was a great storyteller, and even Shelley wanted to write, with The Cenci, a play that could be produced on the stage; Coleridge's Ancient Mariner has a great story to tell and Keats's story of Lamia has a startlingly nightmarish quality. The story of Don Juan will keep you stimulated and alert, and even Tennyson could tell a story, although there is a softening in Tennyson that gives his narratives a gauzy mix of the medieval and the romantic that we now associate with the paintings of Maxfield Parrish. Despite their great achievements, Pound, Eliot, and Stevens and many other Modernists and Postmodernists did not care to get themselves involved with extended narratives of any kind. They saw, or thought they saw, that progressive narrative was itself a fiction and led to a progressivist view of history in which they did not believe. All their stories have turned into little shards of broken glass, each shard an enclosed historical moment, and part of the experience of reading their poems involves spending hours gluing these pieces of glass together. It is interesting to me that poets have mostly renounced telling stories in their poems, but as an ex-poet I am pleased that they have done so, because it gives me a mission in life.
from Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction by Charles Baxter
Wednesday, December 28, 2005
Never Trust the Artist, Trust the Tale
The artist usually sets out - or used to - to point a moral and adorn a tale. The tale, however, points the other way, as a rule. Two blankly opposing morals, the artist's and the tale's. Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it. (D. H. Lawrence)
Tuesday, December 27, 2005
Easy on the Hooptedoodle
1. These are rules I've picked up along the way to help me remain invisible when I'm writing a book, to help me show rather than tell what's taking place in the story. If you have a facility for language and imagery and the sound of your voice pleases you, invisibility is not what you are after, and you can skip the rules. Still, you might look them over.
2. Never open a book with weather.
If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a character's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways to describe ice and snow than an Eskimo, you can do all the weather reporting you want.
3. Avoid prologues.
They can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in nonfiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want.
There is a prologue in John Steinbeck's "Sweet Thursday," but it's O.K. because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: "I like a lot of talk in a book and I don't like to have nobody tell me what the guy that's talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks. . . . figure out what the guy's thinking from what he says. I like some description but not too much of that.
. . . Sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle. . . . Spin up some pretty words maybe or sing a little song with language. That's nice. But I wish it was set aside so I don't have to read it. I don't want hooptedoodle to get mixed up with the story."
4. Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue.
The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But said is far less intrusive than grumbled, gasped, cautioned, lied. I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with "she asseverated," and had to stop reading to get the dictionary.
5. Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said" . . .. . . he admonished gravely.
To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances "full of rape and adverbs."
6. Keep your exclamation points under control.
You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.
7. Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose."
This rule doesn't require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use "suddenly" tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.
8. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apostrophes, you won't be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavor of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories "Close Range."
9. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
Which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants" what do the "American and the girl with him" look like? "She had taken off her hat and put it on the table." That's the only reference to a physical description in the story, and yet we see the couple and know them by their tones of voice, with not one adverb in sight.
Don't go into great detail describing places and things.
Unless you're Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language or write landscapes in the style of Jim Harrison. But even if you're good at it, you don't want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.
And finally:
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.
A rule that came to mind in 1983. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he's writing, perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character's head, and the reader either knows what the guy's thinking or doesn't care. I'll bet you don't skip dialogue.
My most important rule is one that sums up the 10. If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can't allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative. It's my attempt to remain invisible, not distract the reader from the story with obvious writing. (Joseph Conrad said something about words getting in the way of what you want to say.)
If I write in scenes and always from the point of view of a particular character (the one whose view best brings the scene to life) I'm able to concentrate on the voices of the characters telling you who they are and how they feel about what they see and what's going on, and I'm nowhere in sight.
What Steinbeck did in "Sweet Thursday" was title his chapters as an indication, though obscure, of what they cover. "Whom the Gods Love They Drive Nuts" is one, "Lousy Wednesday" another. The third chapter is titled "Hooptedoodle 1" and the 38th chapter "Hooptedoodle 2" as warnings to the reader, as if Steinbeck is saying: "Here's where you'll see me taking flights of fancy with my writing, and it won't get in the way of the story. Skip them if you want." "Sweet Thursday" came out in 1954, when I was just beginning to be published, and I've never forgotten that prologue.
Did I read the hooptedoodle chapters? Every word. (Elmore Leonard)
--from a forwarded email
2. Never open a book with weather.
If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a character's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways to describe ice and snow than an Eskimo, you can do all the weather reporting you want.
3. Avoid prologues.
They can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in nonfiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want.
There is a prologue in John Steinbeck's "Sweet Thursday," but it's O.K. because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: "I like a lot of talk in a book and I don't like to have nobody tell me what the guy that's talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks. . . . figure out what the guy's thinking from what he says. I like some description but not too much of that.
. . . Sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle. . . . Spin up some pretty words maybe or sing a little song with language. That's nice. But I wish it was set aside so I don't have to read it. I don't want hooptedoodle to get mixed up with the story."
4. Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue.
The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But said is far less intrusive than grumbled, gasped, cautioned, lied. I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with "she asseverated," and had to stop reading to get the dictionary.
5. Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said" . . .. . . he admonished gravely.
To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances "full of rape and adverbs."
6. Keep your exclamation points under control.
You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.
7. Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose."
This rule doesn't require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use "suddenly" tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.
8. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apostrophes, you won't be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavor of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories "Close Range."
9. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
Which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants" what do the "American and the girl with him" look like? "She had taken off her hat and put it on the table." That's the only reference to a physical description in the story, and yet we see the couple and know them by their tones of voice, with not one adverb in sight.
Don't go into great detail describing places and things.
Unless you're Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language or write landscapes in the style of Jim Harrison. But even if you're good at it, you don't want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.
And finally:
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.
A rule that came to mind in 1983. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he's writing, perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character's head, and the reader either knows what the guy's thinking or doesn't care. I'll bet you don't skip dialogue.
My most important rule is one that sums up the 10. If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can't allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative. It's my attempt to remain invisible, not distract the reader from the story with obvious writing. (Joseph Conrad said something about words getting in the way of what you want to say.)
If I write in scenes and always from the point of view of a particular character (the one whose view best brings the scene to life) I'm able to concentrate on the voices of the characters telling you who they are and how they feel about what they see and what's going on, and I'm nowhere in sight.
What Steinbeck did in "Sweet Thursday" was title his chapters as an indication, though obscure, of what they cover. "Whom the Gods Love They Drive Nuts" is one, "Lousy Wednesday" another. The third chapter is titled "Hooptedoodle 1" and the 38th chapter "Hooptedoodle 2" as warnings to the reader, as if Steinbeck is saying: "Here's where you'll see me taking flights of fancy with my writing, and it won't get in the way of the story. Skip them if you want." "Sweet Thursday" came out in 1954, when I was just beginning to be published, and I've never forgotten that prologue.
Did I read the hooptedoodle chapters? Every word. (Elmore Leonard)
--from a forwarded email
Monday, December 26, 2005
Great Art = Great Logic
A human being cannot escape logic. The great artists were also great logicians. Consider the stories of Edgar Allan Poe. You may say, "What kind of logic is there in Edgar Allan Poe?" Great logic. It is true that he believed in apparitions, and miracles, but once this premise was made he constructed his story accordingly. But the writers who distort reality distort logic. (Isaac Bashevis Singer)
from
Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer
from
Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer
Sunday, December 25, 2005
Justification in Every Line
A work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line. (Joseph Conrad)
Saturday, December 24, 2005
Reading and Rereading
A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight. (Robertson Davies)
Friday, December 23, 2005
Staying Close to the Edge
I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center. (Kurt Vonnegut)
Thursday, December 22, 2005
Write What You Know
What the heck does that mean, anyway? Does it mean I can't write about anything that hasn't happened to me? If it doesn't involve the Midwest or lawyers or writers or book-selling, am I out of my depth?
The answer, of course, is that this rule is not to be interpreted literally. I have heard E. L. Doctorow say that any writer of fiction should be able to write about any period in history after reading only a single sentence written from that time. He was telling his audience that writers are blessed with active imaginations for a reason. I need only enough familiarity with my subject matter to give the reader the feeling that I have some idea of what I am talking about.
You can achieve most of what you need through a little bit of research, a smidgen of intuition, and a judicious use of imagination. What you want to avoid-what the rule is really all about-is trying to write a story in which the central elements rely on extensive life knowledge that you don't have. So, for example, you don't want to tackle a story in which the lead character is a doctor trying to cure cancer and where a consideration of various current advances in medicine is central to the plot if you don't know anything about doctors or cancer or medicine and don't want to research all three extensively. You want to write about aspects of the human condition that you are comfortable exploring or inhabiting over the course of your book.
From Sometimes the Magic Happens by Terry Brooks.
The answer, of course, is that this rule is not to be interpreted literally. I have heard E. L. Doctorow say that any writer of fiction should be able to write about any period in history after reading only a single sentence written from that time. He was telling his audience that writers are blessed with active imaginations for a reason. I need only enough familiarity with my subject matter to give the reader the feeling that I have some idea of what I am talking about.
You can achieve most of what you need through a little bit of research, a smidgen of intuition, and a judicious use of imagination. What you want to avoid-what the rule is really all about-is trying to write a story in which the central elements rely on extensive life knowledge that you don't have. So, for example, you don't want to tackle a story in which the lead character is a doctor trying to cure cancer and where a consideration of various current advances in medicine is central to the plot if you don't know anything about doctors or cancer or medicine and don't want to research all three extensively. You want to write about aspects of the human condition that you are comfortable exploring or inhabiting over the course of your book.
From Sometimes the Magic Happens by Terry Brooks.
Wednesday, December 21, 2005
Starting a Novel or a Marriage
Starting a novel isn't so different from starting a marriage. You are diving into the lives of your characters, knowing that you will fall in love with all of them, knowing (as surely Elizabeth Taylor knew) that in the end the love will finish and turn you out on the street alone.
from "Why Not Put Off Till Tomorrow the Novel You Could Begin Today?" (Ann Patchett)
from "Why Not Put Off Till Tomorrow the Novel You Could Begin Today?" (Ann Patchett)
Tuesday, December 20, 2005
Casting the Minor Roles in Your Fiction
Secondary characters are like kids and dogs: they'll steal a scene if you let them.
With secondary and bit players you have the opportunity to add spice to your story. Any minor character can be made more interesting if you'll just give the process some thought. Cab drivers, truck drivers, waitresses, cops,doormen, maids--a whole host of "bit players" spring up in our fiction and it's easy to reach for the cliche models.
Most fiction writers invent secondary characters as the need for them arises in the story (a novel will require many, a short story very few or none at all). A scene involving the main character will be imagined, and thenpopulated with other characters that must be present to make the scene work. When this happens, spend at least a few minutes "auditioning" possible characters, and then cast the best one for each role, avoiding stereotypes.Once that's done, take a few minutes to create the following basic "bio" for each secondary character:
a tip from WritersDigest.com
With secondary and bit players you have the opportunity to add spice to your story. Any minor character can be made more interesting if you'll just give the process some thought. Cab drivers, truck drivers, waitresses, cops,doormen, maids--a whole host of "bit players" spring up in our fiction and it's easy to reach for the cliche models.
Most fiction writers invent secondary characters as the need for them arises in the story (a novel will require many, a short story very few or none at all). A scene involving the main character will be imagined, and thenpopulated with other characters that must be present to make the scene work. When this happens, spend at least a few minutes "auditioning" possible characters, and then cast the best one for each role, avoiding stereotypes.Once that's done, take a few minutes to create the following basic "bio" for each secondary character:
* Name, vocation, nationalityThis is the start. If you decide later to expand the secondary character, you can simply add more depth to the portrait. If, however, this is more of a bit player--one who won't have a significant impact on character or plot--you probably won't have to go any further.
* A physical tag, one thing that stands out about his/her physical appearance
* A speech tag, anything about the mode of speech that is unique
a tip from WritersDigest.com
Monday, December 19, 2005
Style
In stating as fully as I could how things really were, it was often very difficult and I wrote awkwardly and the awkwardness is what they called my style. All mistakes and awkwardness are easy to see, and they called it style. (Ernest Hemingway)
Sunday, December 18, 2005
The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor
One of my favorite writers is Flannery O'Connor. I think her Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor is one of the greatest books of the 20th century (although I've never seen it on anyone else's list). One can open the book at random and find great pearls of wisdom. I found the following quote by doing just that:
Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor
selected and edited by Sally Fitzgerald (1979)
I am very handy with my advice and then when anybody appears to be following it, I get frantic. . . .Don't [write] anything that you are not interested in. . . . start simply with a character or anything that you can make come alive. When you have a character he will create his own situation and his situation will suggest some kind of resolution as you get into it. Wouldn't it be better for you to discover a meaning in what you write than to impose one?
Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor
selected and edited by Sally Fitzgerald (1979)
Saturday, December 17, 2005
The Heart of the Story
Be very clear about where the heart of the story is, what is most important, what's at stake. Have you managed to stay focused on that? Is that where the energy is coming from? 0r have you digressed onto other things which are easier or flashier?
from "An Interview with Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni" by Sarah Anne Johnson The Writer's Chronicle September 2002
from "An Interview with Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni" by Sarah Anne Johnson The Writer's Chronicle September 2002
Friday, December 16, 2005
The Pen is a Formidable Weapon
The pen is a formidable weapon, but a man can kill himself with it a great deal more easily than he can other people. (George Dennison Prentice)
Thursday, December 15, 2005
Writing as Organic
I don't make any decisions while I'm working. Some people comfort themselves with decisions and work into the interior of the piece, but that's just a different way of doing it. I want my work to have an organic organization-to feel and appear to the reader as if it opens out of itself like an organic thing: like a flower or a piece of fruit. I don't make decisions it about it at the outset. I try to take my cues from the work itself, because if I make decisions I'm going to limit what I can do.
The Writer's Chronicle, May/Summer 2002
An Interview with Jayne Anne Phillips by Sarah Anne Johnson
The Writer's Chronicle, May/Summer 2002
An Interview with Jayne Anne Phillips by Sarah Anne Johnson
Wednesday, December 14, 2005
About Editors
Years ago, Ford Madox Ford referred to editors as swinging doors "that authors kick both on entering and leaving." Writer's, of course, tend to describe editors using somewhat different metaphors. Clearly an adversarial relationship is often perceived where, if there were better communication, none needs to exist. Granted, an editor's job is primarily that of a naysayer-at the Georgia Review we are forced to decline over 15,000 manuscripts each year-but that situation only exists because writers freely submit so much work arid would strongly resist any effort to curb that privilege.
One of the questions I am asked frequently at writers' conferences is, "How does it feel to have all the power that goes with being editor of the Georgia Review?" Such a question, it should be noted, is never raised by one aware of how much editing is routine drudgery, how much uncertainty editors have over near-acceptances, how much guilt accumulates over dated correspondence and aging manuscripts still awaiting responses. Power? We're just human beings, making what we hope is a responsible and creative contribution to a literary enterprise that is much larger than any individual writer or editor.
"Of Editors, Writers, and Swinging Doors" by Stanley W. Lindberg
The Writer's Chronicle December 2002
One of the questions I am asked frequently at writers' conferences is, "How does it feel to have all the power that goes with being editor of the Georgia Review?" Such a question, it should be noted, is never raised by one aware of how much editing is routine drudgery, how much uncertainty editors have over near-acceptances, how much guilt accumulates over dated correspondence and aging manuscripts still awaiting responses. Power? We're just human beings, making what we hope is a responsible and creative contribution to a literary enterprise that is much larger than any individual writer or editor.
"Of Editors, Writers, and Swinging Doors" by Stanley W. Lindberg
The Writer's Chronicle December 2002
Tuesday, December 13, 2005
Faulkner
Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use. (Ernest Hemingway)
Monday, December 12, 2005
Advice from Richard Russo
Russo finds that short stories pose a lesser risk ("If short stories fail, it's a month out of your life-damage control:'), buy are much more difficult for him to write. "They are all about control, which I've never had a lot of. I'm a creature of digression. You can't allow yourself to be distracted."
Yet distraction is exactly what Russo goes after in his writing environment. He prefers to write in diners or busy places, where his mind can wander and make connections. "You can end up where you didn't mean to go, but it's probably more interesting than where you meant to go in the first place:'
Russo's advice to novelists in particular is this: "Whatever you're working on, take small bites. A few pages at a time. Whatever you're working on should be the most exciting thing. The task will not be overwhelming if you can reduce it to its smallest component:'
Also: "Don't keep a journal because you'll think what you remembered to write down was important when it's actually not."
from "Master of the Tragicomedy: Richard Russo" by Jane Friedman
Yet distraction is exactly what Russo goes after in his writing environment. He prefers to write in diners or busy places, where his mind can wander and make connections. "You can end up where you didn't mean to go, but it's probably more interesting than where you meant to go in the first place:'
Russo's advice to novelists in particular is this: "Whatever you're working on, take small bites. A few pages at a time. Whatever you're working on should be the most exciting thing. The task will not be overwhelming if you can reduce it to its smallest component:'
Also: "Don't keep a journal because you'll think what you remembered to write down was important when it's actually not."
from "Master of the Tragicomedy: Richard Russo" by Jane Friedman
Sunday, December 11, 2005
Saturday, December 10, 2005
The Aim of Every Artist is to Arrest Motion
The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling "Kilroy was here" on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass. (William Faulkner)
Friday, December 09, 2005
Thursday, December 08, 2005
How to Tell a Story
Now, literal-minded men might think it's a mistake to exaggerate while telling a story. They think, Oh, I'll lose my credibility. This is incorrect. A good storyteller knows that exaggeration is key, that it's worthless unless it's extreme, and that it doesn't work unless you, as the storyteller, begin to actually and truthfully (99.9 percent) believe in it.
from "How to Tell a Story" by Jeanne Maria Laskas, Esquire November 2000
from "How to Tell a Story" by Jeanne Maria Laskas, Esquire November 2000
Wednesday, December 07, 2005
The Aim of Every Artist is to Arrest Motion
The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling "Kilroy was here" on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass. (William Faulkner)
Tuesday, December 06, 2005
Don't Read So Much
One of the things I tell my students at Houston is, "Stop! Don't read so much." Usually teachers are saying just the opposite, but there comes a time when you have to shut down all of the input channels, and you have to go into yourself and. write what's in there. Sometimes students in writing programs are using too much of their logical and critical brainpower and not enough of their intuition.
from "An Interview with Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni" by Sarah Anne Johnson The Writer's Chronicle September 2002
from "An Interview with Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni" by Sarah Anne Johnson The Writer's Chronicle September 2002
Monday, December 05, 2005
Talking with Writers
Talk is a way writers can help each other find new directions. "Hey, that's great; have you written about it?" "That's a good line, 'I lived here six years and can't remember a thing, not a thing.' Write it down and begin a poem with it." Once I came home from a visit in Boston and said to a friend in passing, "Oh, he's crazy about her." She was in the process of writing a mystery novel in those days and honed in, "How can you tell he was crazy about her? Tell me what actions he did." I laughed. You can't make general statements around writers-they want me not to "tell" but to "show" with incidents.
Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within by Natalie Goldberg
Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within by Natalie Goldberg
Sunday, December 04, 2005
The Knowledge of a Whole Larger Story
What I learned from reading so many novels, is that the novel, as it goes on, has to expand. It has to give you a sense of a larger life, not just the story you're dealing with, no matter how well it's told. There must be a sense of resonance, a sense that in that story is the knowledge of a whole larger story whose presence is felt.
from "An Interview with Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni" by Sarah Anne Johnson The Writer's Chronicle September 2002
from "An Interview with Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni" by Sarah Anne Johnson The Writer's Chronicle September 2002
Saturday, December 03, 2005
Judging Your Work
Q. By what standards do you judge your own work? Is objectivity difficult? Are you ever fully satisfied with a finished work?
A. I suppose the standards are largely instinctive. I have a sort of feeling for what I'm doing, else I wouldn't be doing it. I don't suppose objectivity is difficult. I wouldn't be attached to a sorry story just because I had written it. Sometimes you need time between you and the story before you can really see it whole; usually it's good to see how somebody else reads it. Distance is always a help. Sometimes I'm fully satisfied with something I've written but most of the time I'm just satisfied that this is the best I can do with my limitations. (Flannery O'Connor)
Conversations with Flannery O'Connor edited by Rosemary M. Magee. Excerpt from an Interview with C. Ross Mullins, Jr. published in Jubilee, June 1963
A. I suppose the standards are largely instinctive. I have a sort of feeling for what I'm doing, else I wouldn't be doing it. I don't suppose objectivity is difficult. I wouldn't be attached to a sorry story just because I had written it. Sometimes you need time between you and the story before you can really see it whole; usually it's good to see how somebody else reads it. Distance is always a help. Sometimes I'm fully satisfied with something I've written but most of the time I'm just satisfied that this is the best I can do with my limitations. (Flannery O'Connor)
Conversations with Flannery O'Connor edited by Rosemary M. Magee. Excerpt from an Interview with C. Ross Mullins, Jr. published in Jubilee, June 1963
Friday, December 02, 2005
Rules of Writing? Rubbish
I have found in several how-to-write books statements such as, "Your novel should begin with a one-sentence paragraph," "No paragraph in a story should contain more than four sentences," and so on. Rubbish! Such "rules" originated in periodicals printed in columns - newspapers, pulp magazines, The New Yorker - which really do have to break the fight grey density of the print with frequent indents, large initial caps, and line breaks. If you publish in such periodicals, expect to let the editors add breaks and paragraph indents. But you don't have to do it to your own prose.
"Rules" about keeping sentences and paragraphs short are mechanical spin-offs from journalism and a highly artificial school of "action" writing. If you obey them, you'll prob-ably sound like second-class Hemingway. If that's what you want, that's how to achieve it. To me it's only worse than sound-ing like first-class Hemingway. But then, it takes all sorts.
from Steering the Craft: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Navigator or the Mutinous Crew by Ursula K. Le Guin
"Rules" about keeping sentences and paragraphs short are mechanical spin-offs from journalism and a highly artificial school of "action" writing. If you obey them, you'll prob-ably sound like second-class Hemingway. If that's what you want, that's how to achieve it. To me it's only worse than sound-ing like first-class Hemingway. But then, it takes all sorts.
from Steering the Craft: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Navigator or the Mutinous Crew by Ursula K. Le Guin
Thursday, December 01, 2005
The Shears of the Censor
The censor pretends he is protecting tender hearts, shielding children from sex and violence, keeping the righteous on the right path, guarding against temptation, preserving virtue. How? By burning books, tearing out tongues, stretching necks, stoning women. . . .by force feeding his own people a philosophy not only false and wicked now but false and wicked the day it was first announced by some university lord and used to purchase or preserve his
privileges and hoodwink the world.
Free thinkers throughout history have sought to expose these deceitful practices and to tell the truth about the real enemies of the mind. From Socrates and Cicero through Lucretius to Bruno, Spinoza, Hume, Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud, that task has been bravely undertaken-their honor can be proclaimed and celebrated.
Each culture will produce its own pap.
The chief mode of censorship in a commercial society is, naturally enough, the marketplace. What will the bookstore stock, the library lend, the papers report, the publishers publish?
In short, the question is: Do I own my own beliefs, or do they own me? If they own me, then the institutions that formulate and guard and sanctify these notions own me. I have joined a group. To say, "I am a philatelist and a member of the stamp club," is one thing. To say, "I love to collect stamps, and I attend meetings of the stamp club," is quite another.
Because so many dogmas are obvious fictions, they can be maintained only by means of patient and repeated indoctrinations, through promises of punishment and prompt retaliation for any lapse. One can identify falsehoods by finding the facts that tattle on them, but an equally good signal is the security that surrounds their insecurity: the walls and towers and guns and radio stations, the beating tom-toms, the pulsing pulpits, the political pronouncements, historic myths, martyred heroes, infallibles, and invincibilities upon whose shields the enemy's missiles must harmlessly ring and clatter to a holy ground.
From "Shears of the Censor" by William Gass
Harper's Magazine, April 1997
privileges and hoodwink the world.
Free thinkers throughout history have sought to expose these deceitful practices and to tell the truth about the real enemies of the mind. From Socrates and Cicero through Lucretius to Bruno, Spinoza, Hume, Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud, that task has been bravely undertaken-their honor can be proclaimed and celebrated.
Each culture will produce its own pap.
The chief mode of censorship in a commercial society is, naturally enough, the marketplace. What will the bookstore stock, the library lend, the papers report, the publishers publish?
In short, the question is: Do I own my own beliefs, or do they own me? If they own me, then the institutions that formulate and guard and sanctify these notions own me. I have joined a group. To say, "I am a philatelist and a member of the stamp club," is one thing. To say, "I love to collect stamps, and I attend meetings of the stamp club," is quite another.
Because so many dogmas are obvious fictions, they can be maintained only by means of patient and repeated indoctrinations, through promises of punishment and prompt retaliation for any lapse. One can identify falsehoods by finding the facts that tattle on them, but an equally good signal is the security that surrounds their insecurity: the walls and towers and guns and radio stations, the beating tom-toms, the pulsing pulpits, the political pronouncements, historic myths, martyred heroes, infallibles, and invincibilities upon whose shields the enemy's missiles must harmlessly ring and clatter to a holy ground.
From "Shears of the Censor" by William Gass
Harper's Magazine, April 1997
Wednesday, November 30, 2005
Rules of Writing? Rubbish
I have found in several how-to-write books statements such as, "Your novel should begin with a one-sentence paragraph," "No paragraph in a story should contain more than four sentences," and so on. Rubbish! Such "rules" originated in periodicals printed in columns - newspapers, pulp magazines, The New Yorker - which really do have to break the fight grey density of the print with frequent indents, large initial caps, and line breaks. If you publish in such periodicals, expect to let the editors add breaks and paragraph indents. But you don't have to do it to your own prose.
"Rules" about keeping sentences and paragraphs short are mechanical spin-offs from journalism and a highly artificial school of "action" writing. If you obey them, you'll prob-ably sound like second-class Hemingway. If that's what you want, that's how to achieve it. To me it's only worse than sound-ing like first-class Hemingway. But then, it takes all sorts.
Steering the Craft: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Navigator or the Mutinous Crew by Ursula K. Le Guin
"Rules" about keeping sentences and paragraphs short are mechanical spin-offs from journalism and a highly artificial school of "action" writing. If you obey them, you'll prob-ably sound like second-class Hemingway. If that's what you want, that's how to achieve it. To me it's only worse than sound-ing like first-class Hemingway. But then, it takes all sorts.
Steering the Craft: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Navigator or the Mutinous Crew by Ursula K. Le Guin
Tuesday, November 29, 2005
Among Other Writers
So writing is not just writing. It is also having a relationship with other writers. And don't be jealous, especially secretly. That's the worst kind. If someone writes something great, it's just more clarity in the world for all of us. Don't make writers "other," different from you: "They are good and I am bad." Don't create that dichotomy. It makes it hard to become good if you create that duality. The opposite, of course, is also true: if you say, "I am great and they aren't," then you become too proud, unable to grow as a writer or hear criticism of your work. Just: "They are good and I am good." That statement gives a lot of space. "They have been at it longer, and I can walk their path for a while and learn from them."
Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within by Natalie Goldberg
Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within by Natalie Goldberg
Monday, November 28, 2005
Falling in Love with Other Writers
Writers are great lovers. They fall in love with other writers. That's how they learn to write. They take on a writer, read everything by him or her, read it over again until they understand how the writer moves, pauses, and sees. That's what being a lover is: stepping out of yourself, stepping into someone else's skin. Your ability to love another's writing means those capabilities are awakened in you. It will only make you bigger; it won't make you a copycat. The parts of another's writing that are natural to you will become you, and you will use some of those moves when you write. But not artificially. Great lovers realize that they are what they are in love with. That is what happened to Allen Ginsberg when he wanted to write so that Jack Kerouac could understand him: " . . . being in love with Jack Kerouac he discovered he was Jack Kerouac: that's something love knows. " You are Ernest Hemingway on a safari when you read Green Hills of Africa, and then you are Jane Austen looking at Regency women and then Gertrude Stein doing her own Cubism in words, and then you are Larry McMurtry in Texas walking to the pool hail in a dusty town.
Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within by Natalie Goldberg
Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within by Natalie Goldberg
Sunday, November 27, 2005
The Opening Promise
As a writer, you must know what promise your story or novel makes. Your reader will know. She may buy your book because it belongs to a genre that promises certain things (romance, science fiction, horror, political thriller). Or she may come to your story without preconceptions, in which case she'll form them pretty quickly from your characters, tone, plot and style.
By the time she's read your opening, your reader knows what you've implicitly promised. A satisfying middle is one that develops that promise with specificity and interest. A satisfying ending is one that delivers on the promise, providing new insight or comfortable confirmation or vicarious happiness. Even when it's surprising in some way, the ending feels inevitable, because it fulfills the promise of the story. And-this is important-the ending feels satisfying only because the beginning set up the implicit promise in the first place.
In your first scene, however, your main goal is to keep your reader interested. You do that through focusing not on overall meaning but on the four elements that make a first scene compelling: character, conflict, specificity and credibility.
Beginnings, Middles and Ends by Nancy Kress
By the time she's read your opening, your reader knows what you've implicitly promised. A satisfying middle is one that develops that promise with specificity and interest. A satisfying ending is one that delivers on the promise, providing new insight or comfortable confirmation or vicarious happiness. Even when it's surprising in some way, the ending feels inevitable, because it fulfills the promise of the story. And-this is important-the ending feels satisfying only because the beginning set up the implicit promise in the first place.
In your first scene, however, your main goal is to keep your reader interested. You do that through focusing not on overall meaning but on the four elements that make a first scene compelling: character, conflict, specificity and credibility.
Beginnings, Middles and Ends by Nancy Kress
Saturday, November 26, 2005
Critiquing Short Stories
When critiquing a piece of writing, consider the following elements: You may find it easier to put your critiques into the headings below, and give your views on each topic. Some prefer to break the story down into parts and refer to each element in the story that they feel needs further work.
What can be problematic is when a person writes about how the story has affected them personally and/or offers praise. Although praise and sentiment are very worthwhile they are not what a writer needs most when trying to "polish" their work to perfection. In the end, it is ultimately whatever you are most comfortable with, but at all times consider what would you most want for feedback on your writing.
CHARACTERIZATION: Do the characters seem real with depth and emotion, or are they recognizable stereotypes? Are the motives of the characters understandable and logical to the story? Are the good guy(s) likeable and the bad guy(s) really bad?
The characters are very important to any story and they must be believable. There is room in any critique for characterization.
DIALOGUE: Does the dialogue seem realistic? Can the reader imagine real people talking as the characters do?
SETTING: If the story is, for example, about the rich and famous, details of wealth must be included. If about poor people, the reader has to see that they are poor. Is there atmosphere in the story allowing the reader to experience what the characters experience? Can the reader imagine the location around the characters clearly?
POINT OF VIEW: Is the POV first or third person? If it is third person, is the narrator able to see into the heads of the characters? Is the POV consistent throughout the piece?
DEVELOPMENT: Does the story develop logically, so that the reader can follow the specific changes, which occur in the story, or does the story make sudden leaps, which cause the reader to lose the direction of the narration? Is the progression of characters and events logical, or is the whole story too confusing?
PACING: Pacing is a key to appeal; how well does the reader get involved in the story? Does the action progress slowly or quickly? How long does it take for the story to be set up? Is the reader drawn into the story from the beginning? Is it non-stop action or character development? Different readers prefer different paces in what they read.
MECHANICS: A beginning writer often has trouble with mechanics and needs help. Sentence structure, verb agreement, and aspects of basic style are considered here. If a reader feels that there are problems with mechanics, s/he will specify the problems seen, rather than simply stating that they are there.
Readers react to what they read. Sometimes the gut reaction to the story is more important than anything mentioned above--especially when the writer is more experienced. Gut reaction can negate nearly anything, with the exception of flaming another writer.
SHORT STORY CRITIQUES from shortstorygroup.com
What can be problematic is when a person writes about how the story has affected them personally and/or offers praise. Although praise and sentiment are very worthwhile they are not what a writer needs most when trying to "polish" their work to perfection. In the end, it is ultimately whatever you are most comfortable with, but at all times consider what would you most want for feedback on your writing.
CHARACTERIZATION: Do the characters seem real with depth and emotion, or are they recognizable stereotypes? Are the motives of the characters understandable and logical to the story? Are the good guy(s) likeable and the bad guy(s) really bad?
The characters are very important to any story and they must be believable. There is room in any critique for characterization.
DIALOGUE: Does the dialogue seem realistic? Can the reader imagine real people talking as the characters do?
SETTING: If the story is, for example, about the rich and famous, details of wealth must be included. If about poor people, the reader has to see that they are poor. Is there atmosphere in the story allowing the reader to experience what the characters experience? Can the reader imagine the location around the characters clearly?
POINT OF VIEW: Is the POV first or third person? If it is third person, is the narrator able to see into the heads of the characters? Is the POV consistent throughout the piece?
DEVELOPMENT: Does the story develop logically, so that the reader can follow the specific changes, which occur in the story, or does the story make sudden leaps, which cause the reader to lose the direction of the narration? Is the progression of characters and events logical, or is the whole story too confusing?
PACING: Pacing is a key to appeal; how well does the reader get involved in the story? Does the action progress slowly or quickly? How long does it take for the story to be set up? Is the reader drawn into the story from the beginning? Is it non-stop action or character development? Different readers prefer different paces in what they read.
MECHANICS: A beginning writer often has trouble with mechanics and needs help. Sentence structure, verb agreement, and aspects of basic style are considered here. If a reader feels that there are problems with mechanics, s/he will specify the problems seen, rather than simply stating that they are there.
Readers react to what they read. Sometimes the gut reaction to the story is more important than anything mentioned above--especially when the writer is more experienced. Gut reaction can negate nearly anything, with the exception of flaming another writer.
SHORT STORY CRITIQUES from shortstorygroup.com
Friday, November 25, 2005
The Silver Crown (Bernard Malamud)
Wonderful. The nuances of the story are brilliant. I'm convinced the outcome of the story is different for every person and the perceived content reflects an individual's belief.
I used this story in two separate classes and the discussions were the best I've ever had.
I used this story in two separate classes and the discussions were the best I've ever had.
Thursday, November 24, 2005
The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor
I think The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor is one of the greatest books of the 20th century (although I've never seen it on anyone else's list). One can open the book at random and find great pearls of wisdom. I found the following quote by doing just that:
I am very handy with my advice and then when anybody appears to be following it, I get frantic. . . .Don't [write] anything that you are not interested in. . . . start simply with a character or anything that you can make come alive. When you have a character he will create his own situation and his situation will suggest some kind of resolution as you get into it. Wouldn't it be better for you to discover a meaning in what you write than to impose one? (The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor selected and edited by Sally Fitzgerald (1979))
Wednesday, November 23, 2005
Push Yourself
Push yourself beyond when you think you are done with what you have to say. Go a little further. Sometimes when you think you are done, it is just the edge of beginning. Probably that's why we decide we're done. It's getting too scary. We are touching down onto something real. It is beyond the point when you think you are done that often something strong comes out.
Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within by Natalie Goldberg
Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within by Natalie Goldberg
Tuesday, November 22, 2005
What I know, for sure ... I think
Everybody won't like everything you write. Some people won't like anything you write. Get over it.
Stay off an editor's "Life's too short to deal with this person" list. At the same time, don't be a wimp. Practice professionalism.
Don't tell yourself lies about either your strengths or your weaknesses as a person and a writer. Looking yourself in the face is the first step to creating great characters.
Read widely.
from "What I know, for sure ... I think" by Susan Elizabeth Philips
The Writer January 2003
Stay off an editor's "Life's too short to deal with this person" list. At the same time, don't be a wimp. Practice professionalism.
Don't tell yourself lies about either your strengths or your weaknesses as a person and a writer. Looking yourself in the face is the first step to creating great characters.
Read widely.
from "What I know, for sure ... I think" by Susan Elizabeth Philips
The Writer January 2003
Monday, November 21, 2005
Point of View
Choosing a point of view is a matter of finding the best place to stand, from which to tell a story. The process shouldn't be determined by theory, but driven by immersion in the material itself. The choice of point of view, I've come to think, has nothing to do with morality. It's a choice among tools. On the other hand, the wrong choice can lead to dishonesty. Point of view is primary; it affects everything else, including voice. I've made my choices by instinct sometimes and sometimes by experiment. Most of my memories of time spent writing have merged together in a blur, but I remember vividly my first attempts to find a way to write Among Schoolchildren, a book about an inner-city teacher. I had spent a year inside her classroom. I intended, vaguely, to fold into my account of events I'd witnessed there a great deal about the lives of particular children and about the problems of education in America. I tried every point of view that I'd used in previous books, and every page I wrote felt lifeless and remote. Finally, I hit on a restricted third-person narration.
That approach seemed to work. The world of that classroom seemed to come alive when the view of it was restricted mainly to observations of the teacher and to accounts of what the teacher saw and heard and smelled and felt. This choice narrowed my options. I ended up writing something less comprehensive than I'd planned. The book became essentially an account of a year in the emotional life of a schoolteacher.
The Writing Life: Writers on How They Think and Work (edited by Marie Arana)
That approach seemed to work. The world of that classroom seemed to come alive when the view of it was restricted mainly to observations of the teacher and to accounts of what the teacher saw and heard and smelled and felt. This choice narrowed my options. I ended up writing something less comprehensive than I'd planned. The book became essentially an account of a year in the emotional life of a schoolteacher.
The Writing Life: Writers on How They Think and Work (edited by Marie Arana)
Sunday, November 20, 2005
You Can't Imagine a Three-legged Dog
An old saw about a three-legged dog states, "You can't imagine a three-legged dog running." But as soon as you read that sen-tence, your nervous system contradicts it - you do see that three-legged dog. And it's running. The dog is ridiculous, clumsy, endearing, inspiring, or even oddly graceful.
Let the Crazy Child Write!: Finding Your Creative Writing Voice
by Clive Matson
Let the Crazy Child Write!: Finding Your Creative Writing Voice
by Clive Matson
Saturday, November 19, 2005
Achieving Place in Story
It may be going too far to say that the exactness and concreteness and solidity of the real world achieved in a story correspond to the intensity offeeling in the author's mind and to the very turn of his heart; but there lies the secret of our confidence in him.
from "Place in Fiction" from
by Eudora Welty
from "Place in Fiction" from
by Eudora Welty
Friday, November 18, 2005
Literature is Connected to Ones Roots
Literature is completely connected with one's origin, with one's roots. The great masters were all rooted in their people. Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Gogol were as Russian, as Ukrainian as they could be. Write about the people you know best, whether they are Jews or Protestants or Turks.
If you write about the things and the people you know best, you discover your roots, even if they are new roots, partial roots. In other words, you should not deny your father's roots or your mother's roots. You cannot write a love story of two human beings without dealing with their background-what nation they belonged to, what language their fathers spoke at home, and where they grew up. When you talk about a writer you always mention his nation, his language. Writers, more than any other artists, belong to their nation, their language, their history, their culture. They are both highly individualistic and highly attached to their origin.
When you want to write a letter, let's say to someone who lives in Poland, you cannot address it to just "a man." It will never arrive, because there are three or four billion men in the world. You have to address it to Mr. So-and-So, give the name of the country, the city, the street, the number of the house, and sometimes the number of the apartment. The same thing is true in literature. Of course, we know that you are writing about a man, but the question is what man, where does he come from, where does he live, what language does he speak? You have to give his spiritual address. Of course, an address in literature is different from an address on an envelope, but the idea is the same. Go from the general to the particular, until we know there is only one such person. Literature assumes that no men or women are completely alike. Individuality is the axiom of literature.
from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer
If you write about the things and the people you know best, you discover your roots, even if they are new roots, partial roots. In other words, you should not deny your father's roots or your mother's roots. You cannot write a love story of two human beings without dealing with their background-what nation they belonged to, what language their fathers spoke at home, and where they grew up. When you talk about a writer you always mention his nation, his language. Writers, more than any other artists, belong to their nation, their language, their history, their culture. They are both highly individualistic and highly attached to their origin.
When you want to write a letter, let's say to someone who lives in Poland, you cannot address it to just "a man." It will never arrive, because there are three or four billion men in the world. You have to address it to Mr. So-and-So, give the name of the country, the city, the street, the number of the house, and sometimes the number of the apartment. The same thing is true in literature. Of course, we know that you are writing about a man, but the question is what man, where does he come from, where does he live, what language does he speak? You have to give his spiritual address. Of course, an address in literature is different from an address on an envelope, but the idea is the same. Go from the general to the particular, until we know there is only one such person. Literature assumes that no men or women are completely alike. Individuality is the axiom of literature.
from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer
Thursday, November 17, 2005
Good and Bad Ideas for Novels
I would like to begin by saying a few words about good and bad ideas for novels: ideas, which as ideas may be worthwhile or impoverished.
Many novels of beginners and others fail before they even get started, because the ideas do not lend themselves to imaginative development. By this I mean that the ideas, to begin with, are such that trivialize experience. In such ideas possibility does not, even in defeat, exist. The possibility of an esthetic and moral development, the two becoming one. I am not arguing that worthwhile ideas are necessarily what we call affirmative experience. The test, however, is that man will be important whether he fails or succeeds; his life will have value for us; the reader will know this value and will feel it.
Granted that there are weak ideas, one would think that a writer would discover and discard his before he is too long involved in them, but such is not always the case. When one has learned the discipline of completing his stories (one of the signs of the professional writer is that he won't abandon a story if he can possibly help it) he will go on with a trivial idea to the very end.
The writer may think he is exercising his will by completing the story, but he is not exercising it by abandoning the idea as trivial. This is what may have occurred in some of the later work of Mark Twain, of Steinbeck, Dos Passos, Hemingway, and others. At this point one may ask: isn't it possible that the ideas of these writers are good but that there is a deficiency of some sort in carrying out the conception, a failure of taste or talent? That is always a danger with any writer, but I think that we may say that even when a man's creative powers, for one reason or another, are on the wane, he can still deal with good ideasfor instance, Tolstoy in RESURRECTION and Faulkner in some of his latest pieces. Compare with Steinbeck's SWEET THURSDAY and Hemingway's ACROSS THE RIVER AND INTO THE TREES.
It seems to me that the most important thing a writer can do to help himself to a good book is first to help himself to a significant idea, a worthwhile theme. “To create a mighty book,” said Melville, “one must have a mighty theme.” By theme is meant idea or concept, perhaps argument; it can of course mean both.
Right now I want to make an obvious statement: that a significant idea (a mighty theme) is not easy to come by. That in order to come by it the author must strive, must strain; he must enlarge himself and his experience. He must obviously not grab at the first thought that flies through his head, no matter how strongly it appeals to him. One says, look into yourself and write, but that is often not enough, because the self may be shallow, even a talented writer's self. I would say, look into the world and write; look into your brother's heart and write. Often if we make the attempt to understand others we begin to understand ourselves. At this point look into your heart and write.
Is there such a thing as a worthwhile idea for a novel, per se? Someone may justly ask: Mayn't it be said that writers working with, let us say, Melville's mighty theme: "the mystery of iniquity" and Faulkner's "the human heart in conflict with itself," can fail with them, come to artistic disaster? Obviously they can, and have. A child who chances upon these themes may fail with them, and so may a writer who doesn't understand them, who can't see farther than the length of his arm. But mayn't it be said that a writer who alights upon these ideas, who discovers them through his own searching, his experience and meditation, who is moved by them, by a vision of the drama inherent in them, by their enormous possibilities of imaginative development, who senses the concealed veins in them, will he not, given the fact that he is as talented as the next man, have far greater opportunities to produce something of importance than he who doesn't have such ideas and can't seem to acquire them?
Let me define a significant idea for a writer as one that is basically dramatic and will therefore lend itself to the uses of imagination. It will have a strong ideational content and compel the writer, in one way or another to deal with ideas as ideas. It will in the end, whether it is affirmatively handled or not, in the sense of an affirmative philosophy of life, so long as it achieves its necessary form, make man seem important, even great, his life of extraordinary importance; and in having these possibilities the idea may be said to possess moral content. At the very least we can say that a writer, good or bad, working with themes that have throughout history been considered to be worthy, important, significant, has a better opportunity for true intellectual and esthetic achievement than he working with ideas that yield little or nothing in the way of insights about man and his condition to the reader. I could now endlessly qualify what I have just said but I shall leave it as it stands.
Why are significant ideas so hard to come by and halfbaked ones so easy?
Bernard Malamud in Talking Horse: On Life and Work
Many novels of beginners and others fail before they even get started, because the ideas do not lend themselves to imaginative development. By this I mean that the ideas, to begin with, are such that trivialize experience. In such ideas possibility does not, even in defeat, exist. The possibility of an esthetic and moral development, the two becoming one. I am not arguing that worthwhile ideas are necessarily what we call affirmative experience. The test, however, is that man will be important whether he fails or succeeds; his life will have value for us; the reader will know this value and will feel it.
Granted that there are weak ideas, one would think that a writer would discover and discard his before he is too long involved in them, but such is not always the case. When one has learned the discipline of completing his stories (one of the signs of the professional writer is that he won't abandon a story if he can possibly help it) he will go on with a trivial idea to the very end.
The writer may think he is exercising his will by completing the story, but he is not exercising it by abandoning the idea as trivial. This is what may have occurred in some of the later work of Mark Twain, of Steinbeck, Dos Passos, Hemingway, and others. At this point one may ask: isn't it possible that the ideas of these writers are good but that there is a deficiency of some sort in carrying out the conception, a failure of taste or talent? That is always a danger with any writer, but I think that we may say that even when a man's creative powers, for one reason or another, are on the wane, he can still deal with good ideasfor instance, Tolstoy in RESURRECTION and Faulkner in some of his latest pieces. Compare with Steinbeck's SWEET THURSDAY and Hemingway's ACROSS THE RIVER AND INTO THE TREES.
It seems to me that the most important thing a writer can do to help himself to a good book is first to help himself to a significant idea, a worthwhile theme. “To create a mighty book,” said Melville, “one must have a mighty theme.” By theme is meant idea or concept, perhaps argument; it can of course mean both.
Right now I want to make an obvious statement: that a significant idea (a mighty theme) is not easy to come by. That in order to come by it the author must strive, must strain; he must enlarge himself and his experience. He must obviously not grab at the first thought that flies through his head, no matter how strongly it appeals to him. One says, look into yourself and write, but that is often not enough, because the self may be shallow, even a talented writer's self. I would say, look into the world and write; look into your brother's heart and write. Often if we make the attempt to understand others we begin to understand ourselves. At this point look into your heart and write.
Is there such a thing as a worthwhile idea for a novel, per se? Someone may justly ask: Mayn't it be said that writers working with, let us say, Melville's mighty theme: "the mystery of iniquity" and Faulkner's "the human heart in conflict with itself," can fail with them, come to artistic disaster? Obviously they can, and have. A child who chances upon these themes may fail with them, and so may a writer who doesn't understand them, who can't see farther than the length of his arm. But mayn't it be said that a writer who alights upon these ideas, who discovers them through his own searching, his experience and meditation, who is moved by them, by a vision of the drama inherent in them, by their enormous possibilities of imaginative development, who senses the concealed veins in them, will he not, given the fact that he is as talented as the next man, have far greater opportunities to produce something of importance than he who doesn't have such ideas and can't seem to acquire them?
Let me define a significant idea for a writer as one that is basically dramatic and will therefore lend itself to the uses of imagination. It will have a strong ideational content and compel the writer, in one way or another to deal with ideas as ideas. It will in the end, whether it is affirmatively handled or not, in the sense of an affirmative philosophy of life, so long as it achieves its necessary form, make man seem important, even great, his life of extraordinary importance; and in having these possibilities the idea may be said to possess moral content. At the very least we can say that a writer, good or bad, working with themes that have throughout history been considered to be worthy, important, significant, has a better opportunity for true intellectual and esthetic achievement than he working with ideas that yield little or nothing in the way of insights about man and his condition to the reader. I could now endlessly qualify what I have just said but I shall leave it as it stands.
Why are significant ideas so hard to come by and halfbaked ones so easy?
1. There are times when society itself conceals the traditionally valuable ideas.I think it is now clear what I meant when I said before that it was necessary to strive for the significant theme, to enlarge the self to encompass it. I might add that I am one of those who feeldespite a good deal of evidence to the contrarythat the enlargement of one's character as a person, his wisdom, knowledge, power to love, will not hurt him as an artist.
2. The writer may not be able to recognize the valuable ideas because he has had no education to speak of: no knowledge of himself; no knowledge of the ideals of Western Civilization; no mature philosophy of life.
3. He may not be serious as a writer, a trickster, immature, dishonest so that he will settle for the first thing that looks good. Anything goes if he can possibly sell it and too often he can.
4. He may have a false idea of what drama is, will equate it with trauma or sickness or sensationalism.
5. He may be afraid to take a chance with material that is not to a large extent autobiographical: he may rely too strongly on memory and not enough on invention.
6. He may be led astray by attempting to write what his contemporaries, as contemporaries, are writing. In too many cases he knows modern writing but hasn't read anything before 1900.
7. He may have no love for anyone but himself.
Bernard Malamud in Talking Horse: On Life and Work
Wednesday, November 16, 2005
Advice to Writers
Richard Russo finds that short stories pose a lesser risk, but they are much more difficult for him to write. "They are all about control, which I've never had a lot of. I'm a creature of digression. You can't allow yourself to be distracted."
Yet distraction is exactly what Russo goes after in his writing environment. He prefers to write in diners or busy places, where his mind can wander and make connections. "You can end up where you didn't mean to go, but it's probably more interesting than where you meant to go in the first place:'
Russo's advice to novelists in particular is this: "Whatever you're working on, take small bites. A few pages at a time. Whatever you're working on should be the most exciting thing. The task will not be overwhelming if you can reduce it to its smallest component:'
Also: "Don't keep a journal because you'll think what you remembered to write down was important when it's actually not:'
From WRITER'S DIGEST February 2003
"Master of the Tragicomedy: Richard Russo" by Jane Friedman
Yet distraction is exactly what Russo goes after in his writing environment. He prefers to write in diners or busy places, where his mind can wander and make connections. "You can end up where you didn't mean to go, but it's probably more interesting than where you meant to go in the first place:'
Russo's advice to novelists in particular is this: "Whatever you're working on, take small bites. A few pages at a time. Whatever you're working on should be the most exciting thing. The task will not be overwhelming if you can reduce it to its smallest component:'
Also: "Don't keep a journal because you'll think what you remembered to write down was important when it's actually not:'
From WRITER'S DIGEST February 2003
"Master of the Tragicomedy: Richard Russo" by Jane Friedman
Tuesday, November 15, 2005
How to Write Faster
The secret is not to try to be perfect. If you try to be perfect, you procrastinate, you go over and over what you wrote, you make no forward motion. Trying to be perfect doesn't produce masterpieces, only agony and slow writing.
I'm not writing to be remembered fifty years from now,, I'm writing to entertain myself. You have to work with the engine you were given. I get up at 4:30 and exercise for thirty minutes. By 6:00 AM., I'm at my desk. I reread the previous one to four chapters and make pencil edits to get back into my characters' heads. I write on an IBM Selectric because of dyslexia. I try to write a chapter a day in two five-page slugs.
Everything I write is carefully plotted out. For a screenplay, I write a forty page treatment. For a book, I write a seventy-page synopsis. All the hard plotting and thinking comes first. Some writers say their characters ran away with the story. That's the result of an undisciplined process.
Never write for money. You're going to be underpaid at the beginning of your career. When you're old and senile; they'll pay you half a million for a script.
from "How to Write Faster" by Stephen J. Cannell, Esquire February 2003
I'm not writing to be remembered fifty years from now,, I'm writing to entertain myself. You have to work with the engine you were given. I get up at 4:30 and exercise for thirty minutes. By 6:00 AM., I'm at my desk. I reread the previous one to four chapters and make pencil edits to get back into my characters' heads. I write on an IBM Selectric because of dyslexia. I try to write a chapter a day in two five-page slugs.
Everything I write is carefully plotted out. For a screenplay, I write a forty page treatment. For a book, I write a seventy-page synopsis. All the hard plotting and thinking comes first. Some writers say their characters ran away with the story. That's the result of an undisciplined process.
Never write for money. You're going to be underpaid at the beginning of your career. When you're old and senile; they'll pay you half a million for a script.
from "How to Write Faster" by Stephen J. Cannell, Esquire February 2003
Monday, November 14, 2005
I Need a Rest Badly
"I need a rest badly and I cannot rest until this is done and I sometimes think that when it is done it will feel as tired as I am and it will show."
--Raymond Chandler in a letter to Jamie Hamilton August 19, 1948
--Raymond Chandler in a letter to Jamie Hamilton August 19, 1948
Sunday, November 13, 2005
The Thinking Period
For me, it begins with just thinking about what I want to write-the plot, characters, setting, mood, pacing, point of view, twists and turns, thematic structure, anything and everything that has to do with the story. I have learned it is a process I cannot rush. Sometimes it goes quickly and sometimes it takes forever. Think of it as a percolation period, when you let your ideas brew and the flavor of your story build.
Lots of ideas occur to me while this is going on. I don't write them down. I don't write anything down-except for names, which go on a name list I carry with me everywhere. But nothing else. It's a firm rule. I used to think that if I got an idea, I should write it down immediately so that I wouldn't lose it. Sometimes I would wake in the middle of the night with brilliant ideas that I would dash down on slips of paper so they would be saved for when I awoke the next morning. What happened was that either I couldn't make sense of them or they turned out to be not so brilliant after all. So I've changed my thinking on this. If an idea doesn't stick with me for more than twenty-four hours, it probably wasn't all that hot in the first place.
Anyway, this thinking period-this dream time-is crucial to everything that happens later, but particularly to the construction of my outline. I want to be able to picture my story in images before I try to reduce it to mere words. I want to think about the possibilities. Everyone asks a writer where he gets his ideas. You've already seen the chapter on that. The truth is that coming up with ideas is easy; it's making up the stories that grow out of them that's hard.
by Terry Brooks
Lots of ideas occur to me while this is going on. I don't write them down. I don't write anything down-except for names, which go on a name list I carry with me everywhere. But nothing else. It's a firm rule. I used to think that if I got an idea, I should write it down immediately so that I wouldn't lose it. Sometimes I would wake in the middle of the night with brilliant ideas that I would dash down on slips of paper so they would be saved for when I awoke the next morning. What happened was that either I couldn't make sense of them or they turned out to be not so brilliant after all. So I've changed my thinking on this. If an idea doesn't stick with me for more than twenty-four hours, it probably wasn't all that hot in the first place.
Anyway, this thinking period-this dream time-is crucial to everything that happens later, but particularly to the construction of my outline. I want to be able to picture my story in images before I try to reduce it to mere words. I want to think about the possibilities. Everyone asks a writer where he gets his ideas. You've already seen the chapter on that. The truth is that coming up with ideas is easy; it's making up the stories that grow out of them that's hard.
by Terry Brooks
Saturday, November 12, 2005
Place
What is there, then, about place that is transferable to the pages of a novel? The best things - the explicit things: physical texture. [Stories]. need the warm hard earth underfoot, the light and lift of air, the stir and play of mood, the softening bath of atmosphere that give the likeness-to-life... (Eudora Welty)
from "Place in Fiction" in
On Writing
by Eudora Welty
from "Place in Fiction" in
On Writing
by Eudora Welty
Friday, November 11, 2005
Writing Advice: Children & Critics
When I was young I used to read books and I never really looked at who the author was. I didn't care. When I was a boy of twelve, I read Tolstoy, but I didn't know it was Tolstoy. I didn't even know that I was reading a translation. What's the difference? I was interested in the story, not the author. I could not repeat the word Dostoyevsky. I didn't care because a real reader, especially a young reader, never cares too much about the author. On the other hand, the academic reader doesn't really care about the story; he cares about the author. We are living now in a time when people are so interested in the author that the story is almost secondary, which is very bad. Many of the readers of today themselves want to be writers. They are interested in the shop; they are interested in the maker. The good reader, the real reader when he is young, doesn't care so much who Tolstoy was and what he was. He wants to read the book and he enjoys it.
Children are wonderful because they are completely independent readers. A child would not read a book because it was written by a "great writer" —a man with great authority. The fact that Shakespeare has written it will not impress a child‑the child will look over the story by himself and see if he likes it or not. You cannot impress a child by criticism. You cannot say, "This is a wonderful book because such and such critic has said it's wonderful." A child doesn't care about the critics, because the child himself is a critic. A child will not read a book because it was advertised in a very big way. He is actually a more independent reader than the adult, who is impressed by authorities, criticism, and big advertisements in the New York Times or on television. It's harder to fool children than to fool adults when it comes to literature.
from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer
Children are wonderful because they are completely independent readers. A child would not read a book because it was written by a "great writer" —a man with great authority. The fact that Shakespeare has written it will not impress a child‑the child will look over the story by himself and see if he likes it or not. You cannot impress a child by criticism. You cannot say, "This is a wonderful book because such and such critic has said it's wonderful." A child doesn't care about the critics, because the child himself is a critic. A child will not read a book because it was advertised in a very big way. He is actually a more independent reader than the adult, who is impressed by authorities, criticism, and big advertisements in the New York Times or on television. It's harder to fool children than to fool adults when it comes to literature.
from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer
Thursday, November 10, 2005
Faulkner
Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use. (Ernest Hemingway)
Wednesday, November 09, 2005
Don't Write Stage Directions
"Don't write stage directions. If it is not apparent what the character is trying to accomplish by saying the line, telling us how the character said it, or whether or not she moved to the couch isn't going to aid the case. We might understand better what the character means, but we aren't particularly going to care." (David Mamet)
Tuesday, November 08, 2005
Short Story Writing Tips
Why do some stories truly ring in the mind while others leave you with the feeling of 'what was the point?'. To make your short stories more effective, try to keep in mind these following points while writing:
1. Have a clear theme. What is the story about? That doesn't mean what is the plot line, the sequence of events or the character's actions, it means what is the underlying message or statement behind the words. Get this right and your story will have more resonance in the minds of your readers.
2. An effective short story covers a very short time span. It may be one single event that proves pivotal in the life of the character, and that event will illustrate the theme.
3. Don't have too many characters. Each new character will bring a new dimension to the story, and for an effective short story too many diverse dimensions (or directions) will dilute the theme. Have only enough characters to effectively illustrate the theme.
4. Make every word count. There is no room for unnecessary expansion in a short story. If each word is not working towards putting across the theme, delete it.
5. Focus. The best stories are the ones that follow a narrow subject line. What is the point of your story? Its point is its theme. It's tempting to digress, but in a 'short' you have to follow the straight and narrow otherwise you end up with either a novel beginning or a hodgepodge of ideas that add up to nothing.
1. Have a clear theme. What is the story about? That doesn't mean what is the plot line, the sequence of events or the character's actions, it means what is the underlying message or statement behind the words. Get this right and your story will have more resonance in the minds of your readers.
2. An effective short story covers a very short time span. It may be one single event that proves pivotal in the life of the character, and that event will illustrate the theme.
3. Don't have too many characters. Each new character will bring a new dimension to the story, and for an effective short story too many diverse dimensions (or directions) will dilute the theme. Have only enough characters to effectively illustrate the theme.
4. Make every word count. There is no room for unnecessary expansion in a short story. If each word is not working towards putting across the theme, delete it.
5. Focus. The best stories are the ones that follow a narrow subject line. What is the point of your story? Its point is its theme. It's tempting to digress, but in a 'short' you have to follow the straight and narrow otherwise you end up with either a novel beginning or a hodgepodge of ideas that add up to nothing.
Monday, November 07, 2005
Teaching Myself to Write
. . . at 19 or 20, I'd started writing short prose pieces. Those developed into the one-page fictions in my first book, Sweethearts, which was published by a small press. I taught myself to write fiction by writing very compact, spiral-shaped pieces that moved according to language rather than plot or idea.
The Writer's Chronicle, May/Summer 2002
An Interview with Jayne Anne Phillips by Sarah Anne Johnson
The Writer's Chronicle, May/Summer 2002
An Interview with Jayne Anne Phillips by Sarah Anne Johnson
Sunday, November 06, 2005
Dealing with the Unspoken
[Thornton] Wilder taught me that what a writer deals with is the unspoken, what people see or sense in silence.
--from Sol Stein in Chapter One
Stein on Writing: Master Editor of Some of the Most Successful Writers of Our Century Shares His Craft Techniques and Strategies
--from Sol Stein in Chapter One
Stein on Writing: Master Editor of Some of the Most Successful Writers of Our Century Shares His Craft Techniques and Strategies
Saturday, November 05, 2005
Writing is Sedentary
Writing is sedentary. Without a regular exercise program, both your body and your creative brain will be in trouble. (Oh, stop whining. You know I'm right.)
--THE WRITER January 2003 From "What I know, for sure ... I think" (A best-selling author offers words of wisdom gleaned from 20 years of writing) by Susan Elizabeth Philips
--THE WRITER January 2003 From "What I know, for sure ... I think" (A best-selling author offers words of wisdom gleaned from 20 years of writing) by Susan Elizabeth Philips
Friday, November 04, 2005
Writing Advice: Precision in Language
The writer who tries to be precise is forced to reject almost all adjectives. He has to function practically with only those nouns which express clear and simple images. The language of technology does not stir the reader's emotions; it has neither the power to entertain the reader nor to lift his spirit. It may sound like a paradox, but the thicker the dictionaries become, the poorer the language is becoming for the writer of fiction. The art of writing nowadays lies not in finding new words, but in avoiding more and more those words which have become nothing but empty clichés, like "good, bad, decent, immoral, charming, ugly, noble, clever, attractive," and many, many others which are now stale.
from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer
from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer
Thursday, November 03, 2005
On the honest unlovliness of William Trevor's world
We are the tools and instruments of out talent. We are outsiders; we have no place in society because society is what we're watching, and dealing with. . . . Personally, I like not being noticed. I like to hang about the shadows of the world both as a writer and as a person; I dislike limelight, and the center of things is a place to watch rather than become involved in.
from "Comfort Cult" by Francine Prose in HARPER'S MAGAZINE, December 2002
from "Comfort Cult" by Francine Prose in HARPER'S MAGAZINE, December 2002
Wednesday, November 02, 2005
Throw Another Handful of Characters on the Fire
I remember Virginia Woolf was reviewing a book. . .but one of her complaints was when the author lost his way, he would just throw another handful of characters on the fire. (Joy Williams)
Tuesday, November 01, 2005
Experience Becomes Literature. . .
"Experience becomes literature when the reader ceases to care whether or not the story is true." (Garrison Keillor)
Monday, October 31, 2005
Where a Writer Looks
Literature is not enriched by a man who is all the time looking into himself, but by a writer who looks into other people. The more you see what other people do, the more you learn about yourself.
fromConversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer
from
Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer
Sunday, October 30, 2005
A Blank Mind Led to "Ragtime"
It was not a blank page but a blank mind that led to RAGTIME-the emotional exhaustion that came inevitably after the completion of THE BOOK OF DANIEL. The blank mind, when it has no wish to think or improve upon existence, grants you a simple unreflective being that is very pleasant and peaceable. Fortunately it doesn't last. One day I was sitting in my study, on the top floor of my house in New Rochelle, and I found myself staring at the wall. Perhaps I felt it was representative of my mind. I decided to write about the wall. And then about all the walls together. "My house was built in 1906," I wrote. "It is a great, ugly three-story manse, with dormers, bay windows, and a screened porch. When it was new the shingles were brown and striped awnings shaded the windows .. . ." I then imagined what New Rochelle looked like when the house was new. In those days trolley cars ran along the avenue at the bottom of the hill. People wore white in the summer. Women carried parasols. I thought of Teddy Roosevelt, who was president at the time. And the blank page of my mind began to fill with the words of a book.
But wherever books begin, in whatever private excitement of the mind, whether from the music of words, or an impelling anger, or the promise of an unwritten-upon page, the work itself is hard and slow, and the writer's illumination becomes a taskmaster, a ruling discipline, jealously guarding the mind from all other, and necessarily errant, private excitements until the book is done. You live enslaved in the book's language, its diction, its universe of imagery, and there is no way out except through the last sentence. (E. L. Doctorow)
The Writing Life: Writers on How They Think and Work
edited by Marie Arana
But wherever books begin, in whatever private excitement of the mind, whether from the music of words, or an impelling anger, or the promise of an unwritten-upon page, the work itself is hard and slow, and the writer's illumination becomes a taskmaster, a ruling discipline, jealously guarding the mind from all other, and necessarily errant, private excitements until the book is done. You live enslaved in the book's language, its diction, its universe of imagery, and there is no way out except through the last sentence. (E. L. Doctorow)
The Writing Life: Writers on How They Think and Work
edited by Marie Arana
Saturday, October 29, 2005
Characters I Invent
The characters who go to make up my stories and novels are not portraits. Characters I invent along with the story that carries them. Attached to them are what I borrowed, perhaps unconsciously, bit by bit, of persons I have seen or noticed or remembered in the flesh--a cast of countenance here, a manner of walking there, that jump to the visualizing mind when the story is underway. (Elizabeth Bowen said, "Physical detail cannot be invented." It can only be chosen.) I don't write by invasion into the life of a real person: my own sense of privacy is too strong for that; and I also know instinctively that living people to whom you are close--those known to you in ways too deep, too over flowing, ever to be plumbed outside love--do not yield to, could not fit into, the demands of a story. On the other had, what I do make my stories out of is the 'whole' fund of my feelings, my responses to the real experiences of my own life, to the relationships that formed and changed it, that I have given most of myself to, and so learned my way toward a dramatic counterpart. Characters take on life sometimes by luck, but I suspect it is when you can write most entirely out of yourself, that a character becomes in his own right another human being on the page.” (Eudora Welty)
One Writer's Beginnings
One Writer's Beginnings
Friday, October 28, 2005
Halloween & Charles Williams
When October comes around, I always think about the author Charles Williams. Charles Williams (1886-1945) was a leading member (albeit for a short time) of the Oxford literary group, the "Inklings", with C. S. Lewis and J. R. R Tolkien. He was a prolific author of plays, fantasy novels (there's nothing else quite like it), poetry, theology, biography and criticism.
Williams worked as an editor for the Oxford University Press. His seven novels appeared from 1930 onwards. His first, War in Heaven (1930) has my favorite first sentence of any novel:
Unlike much fantasy fiction, Williams' novels deal with the "irruption of supernatural elements into everyday life".
All Hallows' Eve (1945), the last novel Williams wrote, is so creepy, it is the first thing I think of when Halloween is mentioned.
The following is from T.S. Eliot 's introduction to the edition I have of All Hallow's Eve and illustrates several of the unique qualities of Williams.
Williams worked as an editor for the Oxford University Press. His seven novels appeared from 1930 onwards. His first, War in Heaven (1930) has my favorite first sentence of any novel:
The telephone bell was ringing wildly, but without result, since there was no-one in the room but the corpse.
Unlike much fantasy fiction, Williams' novels deal with the "irruption of supernatural elements into everyday life".
All Hallows' Eve (1945), the last novel Williams wrote, is so creepy, it is the first thing I think of when Halloween is mentioned.
The following is from T.S. Eliot 's introduction to the edition I have of All Hallow's Eve and illustrates several of the unique qualities of Williams.
"Williams seemed equally at ease among every sort and condition of men, naturally and unconsciously, without envy or contempt, without subservience or condescension. I have always believed that he would have been equally at ease in every kind of supernatural company; that he would never have been surprised or disconcerted by the intrusion of any visitor from another world, whether kindly or malevolent; and that he would have shown exactly the same natural ease and courtesy, with an exact awareness of how one should behave, to an angel, a demon, a human ghost, or an elemental. For him there was no frontier between the material and the spiritual world. Had I ever had to spend a night in a haunted house, I should have felt secure with Williams in my company: he was somehow protected from evil, and was himself a protection. He could have joked with the devil and turned the joke against him. To him the supernatural was perfectly natural, and the natural was also supernatural. And this peculiarity gave him that profound insight into Good and Evil, into the heights of Heaven and the depths of Hell, which provides both the immediate thrill, and the permanent message of his novels."
Thursday, October 27, 2005
Use Good Ideas
Don't let your search for the great idea blind you to the merely good idea," advises inventor Bob Metcalfe. "Reject everything except for the very best and you'll end up with nothing." Educator Donald Kennedy has similar feelings: "A lot of disappointed people have been left standing on the street corner waiting for the bus marked Perfection." What good ideas can you use?
from CREATIVE WHACK PACK (Roger von Oech)
from CREATIVE WHACK PACK (Roger von Oech)
Wednesday, October 26, 2005
The Human Quality of the Novel
"The intensely, stiflingly human quality of the novel is not to be avoided; the novel is sogged with humanity; there is no escaping the uplift or the downpour, nor can they be kept out of criticism. We may hate humanity, but if it is exorcised or even purified the novel wilts, little is left but a bunch of words." (E. M. Forster)
Tuesday, October 25, 2005
Origins of a Story
Q. How does a story come into being? Do you create it or does it create you? Do you think there's a danger of a writer's exhausting his material?
A. I don't know that I could really say how a story comes into being. I suppose it's about fifty-fifty as to whether you create it or it creates you. If it's a good story, it's as much a revelation to you as it is to the reader. I'm afraid it is possible to exhaust your material. What you exhaust are those things that you are capable of bringing alive. I mean if you've done it once, you don't want to do the same thing over. The longer you write the more conscious you are of what you can and cannot make live. What you have to do is try to deepen your penetration of these things.
Conversations with Flannery O'Connor edited by Rosemary M. Magee. Excerpt from an Interview with C. Ross Mullins, Jr. published in Jubilee, June 1963
A. I don't know that I could really say how a story comes into being. I suppose it's about fifty-fifty as to whether you create it or it creates you. If it's a good story, it's as much a revelation to you as it is to the reader. I'm afraid it is possible to exhaust your material. What you exhaust are those things that you are capable of bringing alive. I mean if you've done it once, you don't want to do the same thing over. The longer you write the more conscious you are of what you can and cannot make live. What you have to do is try to deepen your penetration of these things.
Conversations with Flannery O'Connor edited by Rosemary M. Magee. Excerpt from an Interview with C. Ross Mullins, Jr. published in Jubilee, June 1963
Monday, October 24, 2005
Write Every Day?
Some people hear the rule "Write every day" and do it and don't improve. They are just being dutiful. That is the way of the goody-two-shoes. It is a waste of energy because it takes tremendous effort to just follow the rules if your heart isn't into it. If you find that this is your basic attitude, then stop writing. Stay away from it for a week or a year. Wait until you are hungry to say something, until there is an aching in you to speak. Then come back.
Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within by Natalie Goldberg
Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within by Natalie Goldberg
Sunday, October 23, 2005
Book Signings
"As a writer friend of mine once said, 'We must show up in person to show the reading public that we are extremely disappointing as people. We must do this for the sake of all literature. We must show them who writers really are. It keeps them more interested in books than in us, which is, after all, good for sales.'"
from a lecture by Lorrie Moore in San Francisco (City Arts & Lectures, March 1, 1997)
from a lecture by Lorrie Moore in San Francisco (City Arts & Lectures, March 1, 1997)
Telling the Truth
If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people. (Virginia Woolf)
Saturday, October 22, 2005
Among Other Writers
We always worry that we are copying someone else, that we don't have our own style. Don't worry. Writing is a communal act. Contrary to popular belief, a writer is not Prometheus alone on a hill full of fire. We are very arrogant to think we alone have a totally original mind. We are carried on the backs of all the writers who came before us. We live in the present with all the history, ideas, and soda pop of this time. It all gets mixed up in our writing.
Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within by Natalie Goldberg
Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within by Natalie Goldberg
Friday, October 21, 2005
Writing Advice: Writers as Outsiders
"We are the tools and instruments of out talent. We are outsiders; we have no place in society because society is what we're watching, and dealing with . . . . Personally, I like not being noticed. I like to hang about the shadows of the world both as a writer and as a person; I dislike limelight, and the center of things is a place to watch rather than become involved in."
from "Comfort Cult: On the honest unlovliness of William Trevor's world" by Francine Prose in Harper's Magazine, December 2002
from "Comfort Cult: On the honest unlovliness of William Trevor's world" by Francine Prose in Harper's Magazine, December 2002
Thursday, October 20, 2005
The Right Word
The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause. (Mark Twain)
Wednesday, October 19, 2005
The "Wise Reader" Method for Author Feedback
A writer needs feedback on his work especially during the first few draftsof a story. He needs to know what works and what does not, what to cut, what to expand, and so on. While many of us would like to help our fellow authors in this endeavor, most of us are not (mercifully) experienced critics or book reviewers. We read or hear a piece, form a general impression, and then are at a loss for words beyond, "It didn't do much for me," or "I liked it," or "That's pretty good."
Here is a more effective way to read or listen to an author's work, and thenrespond. Advocated by Orson Scott Card in his book How to Write Fantasy & Science Fiction, he calls it the "Wise Reader" method. Briefly, the aim of the method is not to tell the writer what or how to revise (how to fix anything) but instead to report your response to what he has already written so he knows where a story needs work. In Mr. Card's words:
Card goes on to say that he prefers a Wise Reader not have formal literarytraining, lest he is tempted to diagnose, analyze, or offer prescriptions. Card says:
So how do we become Wise Readers for authors sharing their work with us? Here are five key points a Wise Reader monitors as he reads a story. (Keeping pencil and paper handy during this process is most helpful):
Card ends his exposition on wise readership with good news and bad news. The good news, he says, is that industriously applying the method assures an author his work is as polished as he can get it, and increases, perhaps dramatically, his likelihood of publication. The bad news is that no one becomes a part-time Wise Reader. Once we have learned the technique, we apply it to all the books we read, all the movies we see. We find ourselves grumbling over art we used to enjoy in blissful naivete. Nonetheless, wise readership is worth the effort and cost because, in the end, it make betterreaders and writers of us all.
by Fred W. Hansen
Here is a more effective way to read or listen to an author's work, and thenrespond. Advocated by Orson Scott Card in his book How to Write Fantasy & Science Fiction, he calls it the "Wise Reader" method. Briefly, the aim of the method is not to tell the writer what or how to revise (how to fix anything) but instead to report your response to what he has already written so he knows where a story needs work. In Mr. Card's words:
"Rare is the writer who actually knows what he's written when it first comesout on paper. A passage you think is clear won't be. A character you think is fascinating will bore other people silly because you haven't yet grasped what it is that makes him interesting. But you won't know it until someone else has read it and told you.
"Who? Your workshop? A teacher?
"They really can't do the job you need. You need someone to read it now, today, the minute you finish it. Someone who is committed to your career and wants you to succeed almost as much as you do.
"In other words, you need a spouse, or very close friend who is a brilliant critic.
"...Here's the good news: You can turn almost any intelligent, committed person into the Wise Reader you need. But first you have to understand that a Wise Reader is not someone to tell you what to do next, it's someone to tell you what you have just done. In other words you want your spouse or friend to report to you, in detail and accurately, on the experience of reading your story."
Card goes on to say that he prefers a Wise Reader not have formal literarytraining, lest he is tempted to diagnose, analyze, or offer prescriptions. Card says:
"...[Don't] imagine for a moment that he [the Wise Reader] can tell you how to fix your story. All he can tell you is what it feels like to read it."
So how do we become Wise Readers for authors sharing their work with us? Here are five key points a Wise Reader monitors as he reads a story. (Keeping pencil and paper handy during this process is most helpful):
* High Interest? What parts of the story kept you riveted to your seat? Werethere parts where you lost interest or found your mind wandering? Were thereparts that were out-and-out boring?
(This helps point the author toward sections of the story that needrevision, rearranging, or cutting.)
* Engaging Characters? What did you feel about each character? Love him? Hate him? Captured by him? Filled with apathy and inertia? Did you keep getting him confused with another character, or (really bad news!) forget who he was from chapter to chapter?
(This lets the author know when his readership is feeling the right thingsabout a character, and for the right reasons.)
* Clear Presentation? Did you understand all the scenes? If a scene is meant to convey mystery or confusion, did it come off that way? Were there places where you had to reread to get the picture of what the author was trying to say?
(This points to places where exposition is not handled properly, or the writing is plain confusing.)
* High Credibility? Were all the scenes, characters, actions, and dialoguebelievable? or were there spots where you simply could not buy what washappening in the story?
(This highlights cliches and areas needing better detail and explanation.)
* Effective Resolution? What do you think will happen next in the story? Arethere areas of confusion remaining, questions left unanswered, issues leftunresolved?
(If the reading is a fragment, questions left unanswered will notify the author about the conflicts and tensions he has successfully created. On the other hand, in a scene or complete work, it can also tell him what he has failed to explain to the reader's satisfaction.)
Card ends his exposition on wise readership with good news and bad news. The good news, he says, is that industriously applying the method assures an author his work is as polished as he can get it, and increases, perhaps dramatically, his likelihood of publication. The bad news is that no one becomes a part-time Wise Reader. Once we have learned the technique, we apply it to all the books we read, all the movies we see. We find ourselves grumbling over art we used to enjoy in blissful naivete. Nonetheless, wise readership is worth the effort and cost because, in the end, it make betterreaders and writers of us all.
by Fred W. Hansen
Tuesday, October 18, 2005
I Fight with Words
I'm something of a fatalist. I believe that what is destined will come to me. I would probably have gotten much more if I had gone after love, money, recognition, but it's not in my nature to take any action except in my work. My only battlefield is my desk or lap on which I write. There I fight with phrases, with words, but with people I'm very, very passive.
fromConversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer
from
Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer
Monday, October 17, 2005
Short Stories (Richard Ford)
The Granta Book of the American Short Story
An excerpt from Richard Ford's excellent (6500 word) introduction: STORIES I LIKE
My own until-recently-private standards for what comprises a good story written by somebody other than me should be, I think, mentioned here, along with two or three gate-keeping remarks: that standards almost always come after the fact and by themselves neither predict nor produce great short stories; that the very best stories observe standards all their own, discovered unpredictably in the private rigors of writing; that toward short stories I feel vulnerable to any conception of form that inspires invention and discovery; and that I'm willing to call a piece of writing a short story if that's what the writer says it is. Ultimately, it's a good thing that American short stories remain as dissimilar and as formally under defined as they are.
As for me, I've always liked stories that strain my credulity, rather than ones that affirm what I know, and in payment for that strain make me aware of something I didn't know-the otherwise inaccessible. These are stories that prove, for example, the connection between bliss and bale, or the discrepancy between conventional wisdom and the truth, or that reveal affection residing where before it had seemed absent. Such stories concede what I believe-that literature is a privileged speaking which readers come to hungry for what lived life cannot usually provide.
I've always liked stories that make proportionately ample rather than slender use of language; feeling as I do that exposure to a writer's special language is a rare and consoling pleasure. I think of stories as objects made of language, not just as reports on/or illustrations of life, and within that definition, a writer's decision to represent life 'realistically' is only one of a number of possibilities for the use of his or her words.
Forgive me, but I like stories that I finally come to feel I understand; that is, whose purport I become confident about because of some gesture in the story itself-this, even though the story may not make a lick of ordinary sense. I don't consider stories to be documents for analysis or texts for study. But since as a willing reader I know stories are made things and without a natural form, I like them to have contemplated all the important curiosities they arouse in me, or at least create the illusion that they've contemplated them.
I like stories that end rather than merely stop, stories that somehow assure me that their stopping point is the best moment for all progress to cease.
In broader terms, I like stories I don't feel I could have written myself, and that are at least smarter than I am about their own subject matters. Otherwise, why bother reading them if you don't have to?
Beyond that, even though I prefer stories in which the goings-on inside seem to matter in the way life and death seem to matter, if that is not the intention, then I like the story's effects to compensate for that preference of mine. I like stories whose ends you can't predict when you've read to the middle. Often mid-way of a story I make just such a silent prediction and am always disappointed when I'm right. Though whatever's there at the end needs, for greatest power, to arise somehow (plausibly?) out of the story's terms.
Finally I do like best of all stories whose necessity is in the implied recognition that someplace 'out there' there exists an urgency-a chaos, an insanity, a misrule of some dire sort which can end life as we know it but for the fact that this very story is written, this order found, this style determined, the worst averted, and we are beneficiaries of that order by being readers.
Sunday, October 16, 2005
Giving Up the Ghost
"On any given week, up to half of any nonfiction best-seller list is written by someone other than the name on the book," declared a 1997 New York Times piece that examined the growing presence of ghostwritten books in the publishing world. "Add those authors who feel enough latent uneasiness to bury the writer's name in the acknowledgements and the percentage, according to one agent, reaches as high as 80."
Sadly, very few of them are worth reading, including many of those I'd had a hand in producing.
Autobiography, if there really is such a thing, is like asking a rabbit to tell us what he looks like hopping through the grasses of the field. How would he know? If we want to hear about the field, on the other hand, no one is in a better circumstance to tell us--so long as we keep in mind that we are missing all those things the rabbit was in no position to observe.
Cocktail party material aside, somewhere along, the way, I lost my way. When I started I told myself that ghostwriting was as good a training ground for a novelist as most any other kind of writing, that someday I would resurrect my unpublished novel and be equipped, at long last, with the necessary skills to fix it. That by studying others' voices I would learn how to shape and refine my own. This was the crux of my John Hopkins voice class. Learning to modulate, even appropriate another's voice was useful, I instructed. Yet after a while, I warned my students, ghostwriting becomes an exercise in ventriloquism and nothing much else.
THE WRITER'S CHRONICLE (Volume 35, Number 1) from "Giving Up the Ghost" by Barbara Feinman Todd
Sadly, very few of them are worth reading, including many of those I'd had a hand in producing.
Autobiography, if there really is such a thing, is like asking a rabbit to tell us what he looks like hopping through the grasses of the field. How would he know? If we want to hear about the field, on the other hand, no one is in a better circumstance to tell us--so long as we keep in mind that we are missing all those things the rabbit was in no position to observe.
Cocktail party material aside, somewhere along, the way, I lost my way. When I started I told myself that ghostwriting was as good a training ground for a novelist as most any other kind of writing, that someday I would resurrect my unpublished novel and be equipped, at long last, with the necessary skills to fix it. That by studying others' voices I would learn how to shape and refine my own. This was the crux of my John Hopkins voice class. Learning to modulate, even appropriate another's voice was useful, I instructed. Yet after a while, I warned my students, ghostwriting becomes an exercise in ventriloquism and nothing much else.
THE WRITER'S CHRONICLE (Volume 35, Number 1) from "Giving Up the Ghost" by Barbara Feinman Todd
Saturday, October 15, 2005
Description
A writer should not be an interpreter. He should not try to explain the facts of life. He should only describe them, make them alive as possible.
fromConversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer
from
Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer
Friday, October 14, 2005
Writing Advice: Seduced by Language
"The best of good writing will entice us into subjects and knowledge we would have declared were of no interest to us until we were seduced by the language they were dressed in."
--from Sol Stein in Chapter One, Stein on Writing: Master Editor of Some of the Most Successful Writers of Our Century Shares His Craft Techniques and Strategies
--from Sol Stein in Chapter One, Stein on Writing: Master Editor of Some of the Most Successful Writers of Our Century Shares His Craft Techniques and Strategies
Thursday, October 13, 2005
Telling the Truth
If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.(Virginia Woolf)
Wednesday, October 12, 2005
A Character's Change/Resolution
"In the best stories, the odyssey from complication to resolution changes the character profoundly. In fact, the resolution often results not directly from the action but from a growing enlightenment -- often a suddenflash of insight -- as the character finally realizes what he has to do to solve the problem.
"Screenwriters often call this flash of insight or self realization, a 'plot point.' Screenwriters talk about two plot points, the first being thecomplication and the second coming near the end of the story, where the character finally fully perceives the nature of his problem and, as a result, sees how to solve it. But since we are discussing complication and resolution form, we have the need to refer to only one plot point, the second, or point of insight....
"Once you identify the plot point, you know you have found a story in which the character"s struggle leaves him a better, more mature individual. You have thus tied the character irrevocably to plot, and you have a viable story....
"If your story meets all the criteria it will, in the language of editors, 'work.' That means it will consist of a real person who is confronted with a significant problem, who struggles diligently to solve that problem, and who ultimately succeeds -- and in doing so becomes a different character....
"But the deeper satisfaction comes when the reader learns with thecharacter. The reader, like the character, thus becomes a better and wiser person; the story, in the final analysis, is an artificial experience. It doesn"t moralize but, like all experience, it teaches."
Writing for Story: Craft Secrets of Dramatic Nonfiction by a Two-Time Pulitzer Prize Winner by Jon Franklin (pages 89-90)
"Screenwriters often call this flash of insight or self realization, a 'plot point.' Screenwriters talk about two plot points, the first being thecomplication and the second coming near the end of the story, where the character finally fully perceives the nature of his problem and, as a result, sees how to solve it. But since we are discussing complication and resolution form, we have the need to refer to only one plot point, the second, or point of insight....
"Once you identify the plot point, you know you have found a story in which the character"s struggle leaves him a better, more mature individual. You have thus tied the character irrevocably to plot, and you have a viable story....
"If your story meets all the criteria it will, in the language of editors, 'work.' That means it will consist of a real person who is confronted with a significant problem, who struggles diligently to solve that problem, and who ultimately succeeds -- and in doing so becomes a different character....
"But the deeper satisfaction comes when the reader learns with thecharacter. The reader, like the character, thus becomes a better and wiser person; the story, in the final analysis, is an artificial experience. It doesn"t moralize but, like all experience, it teaches."
Writing for Story: Craft Secrets of Dramatic Nonfiction by a Two-Time Pulitzer Prize Winner by Jon Franklin (pages 89-90)
Tuesday, October 11, 2005
Staying Close to the Edge
I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center. (Kurt Vonnegut)
Monday, October 10, 2005
Humor
Whenever a person has wit, there's always a victim of this wit. He always makes fun of somebody, and it is always a human being. You don't say that a dog is funny or a horse is funny. No one will say that a rock or a river is funny. If you say that a table is funny, you make fun of the carpenter who made the table. Actually, humor is a criticism of human behavior.
fromConversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer
from
Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer
Sunday, October 09, 2005
Literature and Entertainment
I don't believe in forced reading, where students are forced by professors or they compel themselves to read. Since I believe that literature is basically entertaining, the quantity is as important as the quality.
fromConversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer
from
Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer
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