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

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

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

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

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

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

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