A Crucible

Without a crucible to contain the characters there can be no conflict, and without conflict there is no drama. Anytime you put your characters in a crucible, the antagonist and protagonist, for their separate reasons, are committed to continuing the conflict until there is a final resolution.

from HOW TO WRITE A DAMN GOOD NOVEL by James Frey

The Disease of Reading and Writing

“A fine gentleman like that, they said, had no need of books. Let him leave books, they said, to the palsied or the dying. But worse was to come. For once the disease of reading has laid hold upon the system it weakens it so that it falls easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing. And while this is bad enough in a poor man, whose only property is a chair and a table set beneath a leaky roof – for he has not much to lose, after all – the plight of a rich man, who has houses and cattle, maidservants, asses and linen, and yet writes books, is pitiable in the extreme. The flavour of it all goes out of him; he is riddled by hot irons; gnawed by vermin. He would give every penny he has (such is the malignity of the germ) to write one little book and become famous; yet all the gold in Peru will not buy him the treasure of a well-turned line. So he falls into consumption and sickness, blows his brains out, turns his face to the wall. It matters not in what attitude they find him. He has passed through the gates of Death and known the flames of Hell.” (Pg 75).

from Orlando: A Biography by Virginia Woolf

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 On Writing by Eudora Welty

A Deadline Bandit's Last Hurrah

When I was in publishing in the 1980s, hardly a season went by without some wonderful piece of gossip about the brilliant new book Douglas Adams was not writing. These tales were matched by scarcely credible reports of the increasingly desperate non-literary techniques employed by his then editor, Sonny Mehta, somehow to liberate this unwritten chef-d'oeuvre and place it before the massive and avid audience engendered by Adams's 1979 cult bestseller The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and its successors, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980) and Life, the Universe and Everything (1982).

'I love deadlines,' the recalcitrant author used to say. 'I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.' So there's an irony, which Adams would have enjoyed hugely, at the almost indecent speed at which, exactly a year after his untimely death at the age of 49, his widow, literary agent and some of his closest friends have assembled this posthumous volume from the recesses of the CD-ROM on which Adams had accumulated his unpublished writings (letters, speeches, introductions, faxes, pensées). For a man whose reputation went up with every book he didn't write, Adams was privately quite productive, leaving no shortage for his fans.

Robert McCrum
Sunday May 12, 2002 The Observer

The Disease of Reading and Writing

“A fine gentleman like that, they said, had no need of books. Let him leave books, they said, to the palsied or the dying. But worse was to come. For once the disease of reading has laid hold upon the system it weakens it so that it falls easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing. And while this is bad enough in a poor man, whose only property is a chair and a table set beneath a leaky roof – for he has not much to lose, after all – the plight of a rich man, who has houses and cattle, maidservants, asses and linen, and yet writes books, is pitiable in the extreme. The flavour of it all goes out of him; he is riddled by hot irons; gnawed by vermin. He would give every penny he has (such is the malignity of the germ) to write one little book and become famous; yet all the gold in Peru will not buy him the treasure of a well-turned line. So he falls into consumption and sickness, blows his brains out, turns his face to the wall. It matters not in what attitude they find him. He has passed through the gates of Death and known the flames of Hell.” (Virginia Woolf).

from Orlando: A Biography by Virginia Woolf

Literary or Commercial

(From WRITER'S DIGEST) ASK THE EDITORS

A reader asks: This may be a dumb question, but what's the difference between "commercial fiction" and "literary fiction"?

Anne Bowling, editor of "Novel and Short Story Writer's Market," says: This is not a dumb question at all, and I think the reason it's asked so often is because the definitions are so subjective. But in general, commercial fiction and literary fiction attempt to reach the same goal, which is to tell a good story. It's the methods and techniques they employ that differ.

Loosely, the commercial category includes mainstream fiction and the genres of romance, science fiction/ fantasy/horror, and mystery. The primary goal of commercial fiction is to entertain, while the dual goals literary fiction are to entertain and enlighten. In literary fiction, behind the plot line, the author will explore more universal themes about the human condition, and often use more sophisticated techniques to do so.

John Grisham is a good example: "Summons" is the latest of the best-selling author's legal thrillers ("The Firm," "The Runaway Jury"). But last year, he published a quiet novel titled "A Painted House," set during the cotton-picking season in 1952 Arkansas, which explores the nuances of class and interpersonal relations between the farm-owning family and migrant workers they've hired to help with the harvest.

The changes the characters undergo in the legal thrillers and "A Painted House" are quite different-- there's usually an action-oriented climax to the legal thrillers, whereas in literary fiction the changes will be more interior, and subtle, though certainly no less profound.

To Write One Must Read

[One of the common problems in student's work is] they just don't read. Even if they think they read, they, in actuality, don't read much. They don't come to writing with various backgrounds in reading. They haven't read a spectrum of writers, or read all the works of six or seven writers. Now more than ever, they're very sound and print-oriented, that is, very popular culture-oriented. They have less and less of a sense of history, and less interest in history. Kids who are 20 now grow up in a world in which emotional literacy is discouraged by the culture they live in. I don't hold them personally responsible. Somebody has to come along and convince them that it's important to read.

The Writer's Chronicle, May/Summer 2002
An Interview with Jayne Anne Phillips by Sarah Anne Johnson