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 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

The Right Word

The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause. (Mark Twain)

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:

"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

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.

from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer

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.

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