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

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." (William Trevor)

from "Comfort Cult: On the honest unlovliness of William Trevor's world" by Francine Prose in Harper's Magazine, December 2002

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

Writing Advice: Youth

There is something about writers—the first fifteen years of their life is never lost to them. It is like a well which is never exhausted.

from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer

The Difference Between Fiction and Reality

The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense. (Tom Clancy)

We Must Enjoy Art

We must enjoy art. No commentary or footnote should explain our pleasure. It is true that there are vulgar readers who enjoy kitsch but the enjoyment of kitsch is better, in my eyes, than the masochism of the reader who reads out of duty or to adjust himself to some vogue of art. It is also true that the great writers were all sufferers but they never wanted the reader to suffer‑the very opposite, they wanted him or her to forget their troubles while they read.

from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer

Waiting for Gogol

I feel that America is waiting for a Gogol or a Sholem Aleichem, because behavior in this country has become so standardized that we are slowly losing our sense of human values. It is a result of the fact that the media are so omnipresent in this country. We are fooled by myriads of generalizations and by floods of propaganda.

from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer

The Cult of Personality

When people begin to be less interested in art, they become more interested in the artist and vice versa. When literature and art become overly "erudite" and develop a cult of personality, it means that the interest in art is gone and the artist has become a kind of idol.

from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer

A Child is Not Influenced by 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

Choosing the Best Descriptive Details

First impressions, experts tell us, are usually formed in the first ten seconds. The law of "primacy" is at work here--what a person observes first is usually remembered most strongly. This applies to characters in your fiction, just as it does to people you meet in everyday life.

Your task is to create a "visual" for the reader (external), a sense of what is inside the character (internal), and something about that character that sets him or her apart (singularity). That last is crucial because great characters are unique. Even if you are using an "ordinary person" as your main character, you can--and should--give that character a strong individuallife.

So GRAB the reader's attention. If your character is bizarre in some way, that's always good. For more "normal" characters, you'll have to look closely to your imagination for the details that are, to use a general term, "unusual." Why? Because the usual is dull, cliched.

Character description ought to do at least double duty: give us a picture of the character and also indicate something about the character's inner life. Inner life comes from a combination of things: background, habits, living conditions, dreams. There is an infinite universe of connections from which to draw. These are the some basics of creating vivid characters.

from the Creating Dynamic Characters Workshop
http://www.WritersOnlineWorkshops.com

Writing Advice: Truth

There are a number of writers now who think that when they distort reality, it may magnify their power. Distortion is not the ideal of literature, because deep in his heart every writer wants to tell the truth. He is, in a way, a carrier of the truth, but he carries the truth in his own way, according to his emotions. A writer who will sit down and distort reality arbitrarily will never succeed from a literary point of view. When you read Tolstoy you see that although he's dreaming, he's trying his best to make his dreams as convincing as possible. I feel that now there is a tendency in literature towards distorting the order of things, not to create great art but to be "original" through distortion. Distortion and originality have become synonyms, while actually they are very far from one another.

from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer

The Short Personal Essay

The short personal essay is the most publishable of all genres of creative writing. Unlike the market for fiction or poetry, there is always a place to send a personal essay. If you write something true and honest from your- heart (or funny bone), if there's a point to it, if the subject and word count is right for the market, it will eventually be published.

. . . .Though not adhering to the formal rules of the essays you wrote in English class, the personal essay is crafted and shaped: it has a beginning, a middle and an ending. The opening must draw the reader in, set up expectations for what the essay is about. The essay's tone and subject are clear in the first paragraph.

In the middle of the essay, something happens: An anecdote illustrates your theme. The reader wants to go through the experience with you, not be told about it from a distance. Use the devices of fiction. Set the scene. What were your five senses picking up? What was said? Use dialogue if you can. Be specific in your details and descriptions of people and places.

from "On Writing Personal Essays" by Barbara Abercrombie
The Writer January 2003

Your Characters Weaknesses

Don’t short-change your characters by choosing tepid weaknesses [for them]. Remember, the harder the struggle, the more emotion you can build.

from “Fiction’s Connecting Link: Emotion” by Kathy Jacobson


The Complete Handbook of Novel Writing edited by Meg Leder and Jack Heffron

On Writing and Getting Published

The Importance of Reading

Read. That's the single best thing an aspiring writer can do for his or her work. I once heard an editor say, "Read a thousand books of the genre you're interested in. THEN write yours."

I was astonished and pleased to hear her say this--because that's exactly what I did. During the years when I had no thought of writing for children, I read and read and read. Middle-grade novels. Hundreds of them--easily more than a thousand. Then I wrote mine--and it sold on its first submission. Luck? Coincidence? Maybe...but I doubt it.

My personal reading list draws from a wide variety of genres. I love middle-grade novels best, but I also read Young Adult novels and picture books. I read adult literary fiction, mysteries and nonfiction. I read poetry. I love books on food and travel. Whether a wondrous story or a hilarious passage of dialogue or a beautiful sentence or a memorable image, every bit of reading I do helps my own writing. The rhythm of language and the way words combine to communicate more than their dictionary meanings infuse the serious reader's mind and emerge transformed when that reader sits down to write. That's really the best possible advice I could give any writer--read. But I find that folks are often disappointed with this advice, so I'll offer a few more basic tips.

Discipline

I don't write every day because I also teach part-time. But on my writing days, I sit down at the keyboard in the morning and I don't get up until I've written at least two double-spaced pages. That's about 500 words, which works well for me. Find what works for you.

On bad days, I might get 480 words written and throw them all away the next day. (My theory there is, I figure I'm getting all the awful stuff out of me...) On good days, two pages becomes twenty. But--and this is key--when I sit down to write I never know for sure which kind of day it's going to become. I do my two pages no matter how crummy I feel about writing that day...and when I'm lucky, the act of writing itself turns the day into a good one.

Linda Sue Park's website (December 2000)


A Single Shard

What Makes a Story?

A story consists of a sequence of actions that occur when a sympathetic character encounters a complicating situation that he confronts and solves.


Writing for Story: Craft Secrets of Dramatic Nonfiction by a Two-Time Pulitzer Prize Winner by Jon Frankli

I Write Whenever It Suits Me

I write whenever it suits me. During a creative period I write every day; a novel should not be interrupted. When I cease to be carried along, when I no longer feel as though I were taking down dictation, I stop. (Francois Mauriac)

Books that Changed My Life

Isaac Bashevis Singer once said that every writer needs to have an address. Why else do we speak of Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy as Russian writers, and of Jane Austen and Dickens and George Eliot as English writers, and of Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Márquez as South American writers, and so on? In this connection, and in nuance and perception (and with conscious respect for the obvious differences in stature and renown), I am a Jewish writer as John Updike is a Christian writer, or as V. S. Naipaul is a Hindu writer, or as Salman Rushdie is a Muslim writer. I have been, enchanted by Jewish fable (the golem tale, for instance) or struck to the marrow by Jewish historical catastrophe (as in the little book called The Shawl). It is self-evident that any writer's subject matter will emerge from that writer's preoccupations, and it goes without saying that all writers are saturated, to one degree or another, in origins, in history. And for everyone alive in the century we have left behind, the cataclysm of murder and atrocity that we call the Holocaust is inescapable and indelible, and inevitably marks-stains-our moral nature; it is an event that excludes no one.

And yet no writer of stories should be expected to be a moral champion or a representative of "identity." That way lies tract and sermon and polemic. When a thesis or a framework-any kind of prescriptiveness or tendentiousness-is imposed on the writing of fiction, imagination flies out the door, and with it the freedom and volatility and irresponsibility that imagination both confers and demands. I have never set out to be anything other than a writer of stories. It disturbs me when, as sometimes happens, I am mistaken for a champion of identity in the currently fashionable multicultural sense, with its emphasis on ethnic collectivities. (The Greek origin of the word "ethnic," by the way, refers to anyone who is neither Jewish nor Christian. One of my dictionaries defines ethnic as "pagan.")

Writing Advice: The Human Ocean

The experiments which the modernists make all deal with form, with what they call form, with silly things‑whether to punctuate a poem or not to punctuate, whether to sign with capital letters or with small letters. This is of no value. I say to myself, why don't they look into the human ocean which surrounds them where stories and novelties flow by the millions? It's there where my experiments take place‑in the laboratory of humanity, not on a piece of paper.

from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer

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 Young Reader Only Cares About the Story, Not the Author

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.

from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer

The Young Reader Only Cares About the Story, Not the Author

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.

from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer

The First Fifteen Years of Life

There is something about writers—the first fifteen years of their life is never lost to them. It is like a well which is never exhausted.

from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer

Books that Changed My Life

Isaac Bashevis Singer once said that every writer needs to have an address. Why else do we speak of Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy as Russian writers, and of Jane Austen and Dickens and George Eliot as English writers, and of Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Márquez as South American writers, and so on? In this connection, and in nuance and perception (and with conscious respect for the obvious differences in stature and renown), I am a Jewish writer as John Updike is a Christian writer, or as V. S. Naipaul is a Hindu writer, or as Salman Rushdie is a Muslim writer. I have been, enchanted by Jewish fable (the golem tale, for instance) or struck to the marrow by Jewish historical catastrophe (as in the little book called The Shawl). It is self-evident that any writer's subject matter will emerge from that writer's preoccupations, and it goes without saying that all writers are saturated, to one degree or another, in origins, in history. And for everyone alive in the century we have left behind, the cataclysm of murder and atrocity that we call the Holocaust is inescapable and indelible, and inevitably marks-stains-our moral nature; it is an event that excludes no one.

And yet no writer of stories should be expected to be a moral champion or a representative of "identity." That way lies tract and sermon and polemic. When a thesis or a framework-any kind of prescriptiveness or tendentiousness-is imposed on the writing of fiction, imagination flies out the door, and with it the freedom and volatility and irresponsibility that imagination both confers and demands. I have never set out to be anything other than a writer of stories. It disturbs me when, as sometimes happens, I am mistaken for a champion of identity in the currently fashionable multicultural sense, with its emphasis on ethnic collectivities. (The Greek origin of the word "ethnic," by the way, refers to anyone who is neither Jewish nor Christian. One of my dictionaries defines ethnic as "pagan.")


The Book That Changed My Life: Interviews with National Book Award Winners and Finalists

Autobiography, The Starting Poing

The [role of autobiography is] a starting point, much in the way that physical details are a starting point for writing about meaning and time and dimension. The reader should think that whatever you write is autobiographical, because they should be convinced intensely of the reality of the piece. They should feel that it comes from somewhere very deep in the writer. But the minute you work in language or fiction, there's a translation that occurs-like the translation from one language to another, from book to film, thought to speech. Life and art are such different forms of being. One fears death; the other subverts it.

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

Quote: Because We Lost the War

When The Moviegoer won the National Book Award, Walker Percy was asked why there were so many good Southern writers. "Because we lost the War," he said, and Flannery O'Connor later glossed his remark with startling eloquence. "What he was saying is that we have had our Fall," she explained. "We have gone into the world with an inburnt sense of human limitations, and with a sense of mystery that could not have developed in our first state of innocence—as it has not developed sufficiently in the rest of the country."

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.

Many Opinions

Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion . . . is but knowledge in the making. (John Milton)

Distortion is not the Ideal of Literature

There are a number of writers now who think that when they distort reality, it may magnify their power. Distortion is not the ideal of literature, because deep in his heart every writer wants to tell the truth. He is, in a way, a carrier of the truth, but he carries the truth in his own way, according to his emo­tions. A writer who will sit down and distort reality arbitrarily will never succeed from a literary point of view. When you read Tolstoy you see that although he's dreaming, he's trying his best to make his dreams as convincing as possible. I feel that now there is a tendency in literature towards distorting the order of things, not to create great art but to be "original" through distortion. Distortion and originality have become synonyms, while actually they are very far from one another.

from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer

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" THE WRITER'S CHRONICLE September 2002

Writing from Memory

Chekhov was perfectly aware that he wrote out of his memories. He said: "I can only write from my memories, and I have never written directly from nature. The subject must first seep through my memory, leaving as in a filter only what is important and typical." We know some of the memories which were later shaped into stories, and it is instructive to observe what he took from them and what he left out.

from Robert Payne, Image of Chekhov: Forty Stories in the Order in Which They Were Written

A Writer Describes but Doesn't Explain

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.

from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer

Quote: The Power of Poetry

"The Power of verse is derived from an indefinable harmony between what it SAYS and what it IS. Indefinable is essential to the definition." --Paul Valery, quoted by Edward Hirsch in How to Read a Poem.

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 "Stein on Writing"--Chapter One)

What Kind of Writing Pays Best?

"I once asked this literary agent what kind of writing paid best. He said: ransom notes."

from Elmore Leonard, in GET SHORTY

Literature is a Form of Daydreaming

Literature is actually a form of daydreaming, under control or with a purpose. Not with a message, but with a purpose.

from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer

Passive Voice

Simply put, passive voice is a verb phrase; that is, a verb string consisting of a being verb plus a past participle; for example: The submarine was (being verb) sunk (past participle).

Also, writers often follow the verb with a prepositional phrase that begins with "by." The object of the preposition, the doer of the verb's action, should be the subject; for example: The submarine was sunk by the Germans.

Sometimes passive voice is necessary.

--from Joy Bagley, writer and workshop leader

Flannery O'Connor's "Moment of Grace"

"There is a moment of grace in most of the stories, or a moment where it is offered, and is usually rejected. Like when the Grandmother recognizes the Misfit as one of her own children and reaches out to touch him. It's the moment of grace for her anyway--a silly old woman--but it leads him to shoot her. This moment of grace excites the devil to frenzy."

from Flannery O'Connor's THE HABIT OF BEING letter to Andrew Lytle, 4 February 1960

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

Children's Picture Book/China: Lon Po Po

Lon Po Po: A Red-Riding Hood Story from China by Ed Young (Illustrator)(Caldecott Medal Book 1990) (****)

The art is absolutely gorgeous and resembles Chinese decorative panels. The images are a mix of both abstract and realistic images and the color is subdued and to me provokes a palpable feeling of tension. A beautiful book.

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.”

(from ONE WRITER'S BEGINNINGS by Eudora Welty)

Working Without a Net

As John Irving says, none of the novels knows that you've written any of the other novels. Writing is always like working without a net. It doesn't get easier.

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

Rewriting

An old tutor or a college said to one of his pupils: Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.


Life of Johnson by Thomas Boswell

One Book Writers

I had the feeling then that my lot was to be one of those writers who write one book and become silent forever. There are such writers. But I said to myself that even if a writer writes one book which makes sense, he's still a writer.

from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer

Writers Who Annoy Readers

We have now a whole bevy of writers who take pride in annoying the reader. They make him feel guilty and bore him. They weep on the reader's shoulder and this is proclaimed the very mission of the so called serious writer. The great writers always gave joy to the readers even in their tragedies. Kafka, Joyce, and Proust are great talents, but Kafkaism, Joyceism, and even Proustism have become a burden to young students. The fact is that all "isms" are bad for literature. Every "ism" is by its very definition a cliché. In literature and in art generally all schools and disciples are bad. The various schools and "isms" of literature were invented by professors. Tolstoy didn't belong to any school. Only small fish swim in schools.

from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer

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, (Prenticeana)

Juvenile Novel: A Single Shard

A Single Shard (Linda Sue Park)

After reading the excellent interview article about the author in THE WRITER, I purchased A SINGLE SHARD. It was a wonderful read with clean simple prose that propels the plot forward. What was amazing about her sentences was how she packed her research and information about Korea in every sentence without taking away from the flow of the story. The two problems I had with the book were the cover illustration and the title (and I don't know if she had control over these two items) I thought both gave too much away, esp. the title.

She has a wonderful website and has photos of the art objects mentioned in A SINGLE SHARD. Also, the website is a great source of information about other author's books because she reviews what she reads and posts the reviews monthly.

Her website:
http://www.lindasuepark.com/books/singleshard/singleshardbs.html

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

The More You See What Other People Do, the More You Learn About Yourself

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.

from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer

A Writer Needs a Tough Skin

". . . A writer, shy or not, needs a tough skin, for no matter how advanced one's experience and career, expert criticism cuts to the quick, and one learns to endure and to perfect, if for no other reason than to challenge the pain-maker." (from Sol Stein in "Stein on Writing"--Chapter One)

First-rate Excellence in Literature

First-rate excellence in literature, as in other matters, is either an accident or the outcome of a process; and in either case demands a course of years to secure." (John Henry Newman)

The Problem is Reading Too Much

Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking. (Albert Einstein)

Publishing is an Industry Bedeviled by Pessimism

As the number of original titles published in Britain in 1927 numbered 13,810, compared to 119,000 in 2001 (of which about 75,000 were general trade books), it is still harder to sustain the charge that good writers are being passed over. And there is evidence that volumes are actually rising. In the first half of 2002, the number of books bought in the US rose by 1.6 per cent to 557m copies.

Quantity is not everything, but the doomsayers' view that the consumer is being denied a wide choice of books (and thus points of view) is hard to sustain. One could argue that non-mainstream thinking is not published by big houses and therefore not widely available, but to do so would be oxymoronic: what is mainstream if not that which is widely available?

With its over-educated, overworked, underpaid legions, publishing is an industry bedeviled by pessimism. This pessimism blinds people to the fact that we are living in a golden age of book publishing in which quantity and quality rival anything in the past, in which books have never been so well published and in which they occupy a more boisterously visible place in the general culture than ever before.

The future, it seems, belongs to writers, readers and entrepreneurs. There will be as many or as few masterpieces published as ever, but they will enter the world through proliferating channels. More publishers will exist and some of them will also be famous authors. For less well-known writers, making a living from the written word is likely to be hard, but no harder than it is now. From the industry point of view, as it sits on the tail-end of the longest economic boom in postwar history, all this seems somehow unimaginable. From the consumer's point of view, the golden age is set to continue. But for publishers, ordinary writers and booksellers, the next few years could be the last great days of publishing as we have known it since the 16th century.

From "Good Books"
Toby Mundy
Prospect Magazine, October 2002

The Writer's Best Friend

The wastepaper basket is the writer's best friend. ISAAC B. SINGER

The Appearance of Reading

"Many [new readers] are making a fashion statement of sorts, carrying around tattered copies of 'in' books-"not necessarily to read, but to be part of a scene," says Jeremy Ellis, a manager at Austin's Book People. Garrett kemps, for example, has everyone from William Shakespeare to William Faulkner on his shelves, but rarely reads more than 40 pages of any one volume. "In this day and age, it's much important to appear like you know something than it is to actually know something," says the 23-year-old Web designer in Los Angeles."

From "Look Who's Reading" by Pooja Bhatia
Wall Street Journal 11/9/01

Experience Becomes Literature. . .

"Experience becomes literature when the reader ceases to care whether or not the story is true." Garrison Keillor

Stories are Better than Truth

Lawyers are storytellers "who take the raw and disjointed observations of witnesses and transform them into coherent and persuasive narratives." The reason that storytelling works is because the linear narrative has been proved to be the best way to persuade a judge or a jury. Also, the disjointed statements of witnesses mean little until they are connected into a single meaningful story.

from "Author argues stories are more important for lawyers than truth", by
Malcolm Abel in the ASHEVILLE CITIZEN TIMES

The Essential Gift for a Good Writer

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in shockproof sh*t-detector. ERNEST HEMINGWAY

The Power of Suggestion

The following is a letter to the editor published in the Nov./Dec. issue of Poets&Writers

David Long's "Stuff: The Power of the Tangible" (Sept./Oct. 2002) while invaluable and penetrating, does not address an interesting concomitant question: Why are there so many great works of prose fiction that do not "write about stuff"?

Jane Austen, Stendhal, Henry James, and Marcel Proust have all created palpable fictional universes without cultivating the kind of physical detail and concreteness found in Long's examples. Reread PRIDE AND PREJUDICE and you will notice that Austen's. . . description of Darcy's estate is quite general. Stendhal renders the Battle of Waterloo in THE CHARTERHOUSE OF PARMA with very few particulars. Likewise, neither James nor Proust are much interested in naming objects or listing things for the sake of it.

A work of literature is given life by the reader's memory and imagination. Flat and mundane details of the sort cited by Long can stifle the quickening act of the mind we call reading. Lady Murasaki, and other masters allow us to "see" entire physical worlds for ourselves by the power of their suggestion.

Edmund de Chasca
Senior Editor, Boulevard

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. (William Faulkner as quoted in the THE QUOTABLE SOUTH edited by Al Dixon and published by Hill Street Press)

Dialogue

"I was the first reader for an editor of one of the biggest companies in the business. For two years, while writing my own first novel, I dropped by an editor's office once a week to pick up several manuscripts, mostly novels, took them home, read them, and prepared a 'reader's report' including a brief plot summary and a paragraph giving my recommendation as to whether it was a 'hit' or a 'miss' and why. . . .

"I often saw the editor I worked for wander over to the slush pile table and riffle quickly through half a dozen manuscripts before handing me one to read. I was mystified: What could she possibly see from ten seconds of flipping pages? When I asked her, she answered, 'I'm looking for lots of dialogue.' Questioned further, she explained that one of the major flaws in novels from beginning writers was too much narration, not enough lively conversation between characters. Dialogue is vital in getting a reading from an unagented script, not just well written dialogue, but plenty of it."

--Confessions of a First Reader, by Roy Sorrels

Poetry: Wislawa Szymborska (9/11)

I read a Reuter's story about Poland's Nobel Prize-winning poet Wislawa Szymborska's moving tribute to the victims of Sept. 11th in the United States and thought the poem "A photograph from Sept. 11" extremely moving.

A PHOTOGRAPH FROM SEPT. 11

They jumped from the burning stories, down
-- one, two, a few more
higher, lower.
A photograph captured them while they were alive and now preserves them
above ground, toward the ground.
Each still whole
with their own face
and blood well hidden.
There is still time,
for their hair to be tossed,
and for keys and small change
to fall from their pockets. They are still in the realm of the air, within the places
which have just opened.
There are only two things I can do for them
-- to describe this flight
and not to add a final word.

I'm a fan of Szymborska's work, Poems, New and Collected: 1957-1997 and thought the poem A Photograph from Sept. 11 extremely moving, especially what I felt was a powerful ending. A friend had a differing opinion about the ending. The poem reminds me of Chekhov. He was a master at painting a picture without the editorials. In the same way, I felt Ms. Szymborska's decision to describe and not comment increased the power of the poem.


Poems, New and Collected: 1957-1997

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)

Challenged by a Conflict

Terry Brook’s Rule #3: A PROTAGONIST MUST BE CHALLENGED BY A CONFLICT THAT REQUIRES RESOLUTION.

Conflict is necessary in every book because that's what generates concern for and interest in our characters. The more complex and overwhelming the threat to a protagonist, the better the opportunity for the author to create a compelling conflict and a dramatic resolution. Of course, you can overdo this. Too many threats make the story unbelievable. Too much conflict renders it unrealistic. As with all things, you have to find a balance that works.

From SOMETIMES THE MAGIC HAPPENS by Terry Brooks.

Finding Time to Read

I never understand when people say they don't have time to read. They're lying. It's easy to have the time; just don't watch television and live alone." (John Waters)

Writing a Novel is like Building a Wall Brick by Brick

I quit writing if I feel inspired, because I know I'm going to have to throw it away. Writing a novel is like building a wall brick by brick; only amateurs believe in inspiration. (Frank Yerby)

Richard Ford

After lunch at Dunbar's, [Richard] Ford climbs back in the Jeep to give a quick driving tour of the city; as he passes a particularly seamy-looking housing development, he declares, "There is no street in New Orleans that I wouldn't walk down." He pauses. "But that's not to say that I wouldn't get my ass kicked."

Ford talks a good deal about ass-kicking: He reminisces about the time he foiled a mugging by slamming the hapless thief in the face, and he remembers exchanging punches with a neighbor who refused to keep his dogs from barking, an episode that concluded with Ford in handcuffs and the neighbor in the hospital. At a later point during this interview, while taking a brief walk through the French Quarter, Ford gets into a shouting match with a guy, admittedly a schmucky guy, who is for some reason creeping his car along the sidewalk. The argument begins with Ford calling him a douche bag, continues with the driver asking the Pulitzer Prize winner to lick his balls and ends with Ford making some disparaging comments about the man's mother. "Richard goes directly to his emotions," says Russell Banks, the author of Affliction and Sweet Hereafter and a friend of Ford's. "He comes to full alert whenever anybody acts like an idiot."

from "Ford Tough" by Michael Kaplan, BOOK, March/April 2002

Definition of Story

“A story consists of a sequence of actions that occur when a sympathetic character encounters a complicating situation that he confronts and solves. (Jon Franklin, WRITING FOR STORY, p. 71)

Novel: The Outside World

The Outside World (Tova Mirvis) ***

Several years ago Tova Mirvis' first novel The Ladies Auxiliary was my runner-up for favorite novel of the year. So, when I saw the new novel at the bookstore, I picked it up and my wife and I read it on the drive to Florida and back.

Mirvis' gift is drawing a world that many of us will never see. Her representation is detailed and alive and the reader feels transported, and a part of this strange (to us) culture. At the same time, she captures the universality of individuals and relationships and we see ourselves reflected back from the pages.

The plot seems to unravel a bit at the end but this is common with a novel that has so many characters woven through 250 plus pages. But the plot is almost secondary and the time spent inside the orthodox jewish culture was time well spent.


The Outside World

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. (Novelist/Essayist Joy Williams)

Intellectuals Make People Feel Alienated

"I think something horrible happened in American letters, which is that intellectuals started acting as if other people couldn't understand what they were talking about," adds Mr. Silverblatt, a grad-school dropout whose resume includes such unpoetic occupations as hotel desk clerk, publicist and screenwriter. "That's often true when they're talking about novels and poetry. These are the things we've made. They're our culture. And I think it's a crime when intellectuals make people feel alienated from what is the greatest treasure we have." (Joanne Kaufman quoting "Bookworm" host Michael Silverblatt in the article "A Bibliophile With a Hypnotic Gift of Gab")

Evoking Sensation

"Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader, not the fact that it's raining, but the feeling of being rained upon." (E. L. Doctorow as quoted by Sol Stein in "Stein on Writing")

Seduced by the 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 "Stein on Writing"--Chapter One)

A Writer Deals 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 "Stein on Writing"--Chapter One)

Books are Potent Things

Walt Whitman called reading "an exercise, a gymnast's struggle." To me it is a creation, a lovemaking of small discoveries, hidden treasures, big dreams, I'm saddened almost beyond words when I think of what's being lost-what's already been destroyed-by people who are afraid of books.. . Books are potent things. . . Books and stories and reading are the meat of revolution and change, they can be dangerous and unpredictable.

Thoreau said, "How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book."

Only those who already have power have an interest in censorship.

from "Censors and Sensibilities" by Sallie Tisdale
Mirabella, January 1995

Novel: Blue Angel

Blue Angel

Predictable. The plot had no surprises. Her female characters were strong and fully developed, but her male characters didn't make the grade. Swenson, the novel's main character was convincing in his bumbling paranoia, but totally unconvincing in his repetitious endearments for his wife. And the great novel the student was writing, spare me.

I never felt strongly enough about Swenson for me to be engaged in the book.

My favorite line in the book: ". . .Ruby says, "How's your novel coming, Dad?" . . . "Great," he replies. "It's going great!" And for a moment, he thinks it is. All he needs to do is write it."

I felt the confrontation at the end of the book, exploring language and its ambiguity and its openness to varied interpretations was excellent, although it fell short of what I felt was a genius interpretation of the same theme by David Mamet in OLEANNA.


Oleanna: A Play

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.

Short Story Writing Tips (from shortstorygroup.com)

Trevor and Truth

. . . .reading Trevor, I feel that I am being told the truth--the melancholy, regrettable, unromantic truth, but a truth I recognize. In its quiet, offhand tone, with its beautiful, measured, clean sentences, Trevor's work tells us: Life is hard and frequently painful; people make devastating mistakes; acceptance and coming to terms with one's lot are more sensible and attainable goals than a blissful sojourn on earth and paradise thereafter. "Truth," Trevor has said, "is the most important thing that there is, and if you lose sight of it, your writing will be destroyed in the end."

from "Comfort Cult: On the honest unlovliness of William Trevor's world" by Francine Prose in HARPER'S MAGAZINE, December 2002

Trevor and Characters

Asked about his [William Trevor's] unusual ability to "get inside" so many
characters, "regardless of their age, sex, or background," Trevor has described it as a matter of observation--a characteristically unassuming explanation compared with the depths of feeling and empathy, the soaring powers of the imagination that another writer of similar range might claim for himself. "It does seem to me that the only way you can get there is through observation. . . . I think there's something in writers of fiction that makes them notice things and store them away all the time. . . . Writers of fiction are collectors of useless information. They are the opposite of good, solid, wise citizens who collect good information and put it to good use. Fiction writers remember tiny little details, some of them almost malicious, but very telling."

from "Comfort Cult: On the honest unlovliness of William Trevor's world" by Francine Prose in HARPER'S MAGAZINE, December 2002

The Death of Long Articles

There is little evidence to suggest increased television viewership is killing off reading. When asked by Harris to describe their top leisure-time activities, Americans still regularly put reading at the top of the list (28 percent of those polled in 2001), outscoring even the boob tube (20 percent). Nor has increased television viewing sapped the time we spend reading, according to time-diary studies. While the average time spent reading a newspaper declined dramatically between 1965 and 1995, "all other reading, including books and magazines, is increasing," reports John P. Robinson, a professor at Maryland, who authored the study.

Long narratives, in the form of books, remain popular with young people. A separate 1999 Gallup poll found book readership rates essentially unchanged over the previous two decades. Fifty-six percent of eighteen- to twenty-nine-year-olds read six or more books a year, compared to 62 percent of those ages fifty to sixty-four. Of adolescents ages twelve to eighteen, 56 percent reported reading ten or more books in the year, according to another poll by the National Education Association in 2001. Polls by the Pew Center for the People and the Press have come to similar conclusions. Young people read books and magazines at roughly the same rates as older Americans, though men in this category tend to lag behind women.

Rolling Stone traded its rock roots for bubble-gum pop just to keep its mass-market share, with four Britney Spears covers in the last three years. The new Rolling Stone seeks to solve that problem in another way, by increasing the number of stories it runs while decreasing their length, a tactic that more closely resembles the Internet than a book. This tactic, pioneered by Blender, offers more to a wider spectrum of readers, with 100 or 200 album reviews in each issue. In place of a long narrative, the readers create their own story as they pick and choose their way through the magazine. "It's not about your narrative," says Black. "It's about me."

Editors have been forced to design their magazines for an indifferent reader, according to Michael Wolff, media columnist for New York. "We've shoved magazines down the throats of people," Wolff said. "They flip through magazines because they don't really want them."

From "Does Size Matter?"
BY MICHAEL SCHERER
Columbia Journalism Review
October 2002

Jacket Copy

Judging by their fulsome endorsements on the jackets of so many novels, it's apparent that some critics don't get out much. To blurb-bestowers, no work is ever just moderately entertaining. Books are "captivating," "enthralling," "sprawling," and even "festooning." Maybe I'm just naive, but when I read a book that's billed as 'a masterpiece of savage comedy," I expect something like WISE BLOOD or THE LOVED ONE. "Riveting from first page to last" is a description that gets my hopes tip: it promises at least the intensity of CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, and a lot more than BABBITT. Obviously, I deal with some disappointment. I guess honesty doesn't make good jacket copy, or we'd see more blurbs like this:

"A dense book in which very little happens."

"A well-written but depressing novel, lacking in excitement what it makes up for in style.

As far as outward versus inward fiction, I think that introspection is here to stay. We're an inward-looking society, and despite what Tom Wolfe says, that's not entirely a bad thing, either for the culture or for the novel as an art form. Many of us. . .actually enjoy all the navel gazing.

from "Looking Up from the Navel" by Betty Smartt Carter, BOOKS AND CULTURE, July/August 2002.

Why Reading Matters To George Mason University Students

During spring 2000 undergraduate students were invited to reflect on why-or if-reading mattered to them. The following are a few student responses.

Heather Doerr
Reading is an art. It is more than just comprehending words on paper. It is an interactive and lively experience for the imagination and a respite for the soul. Characters and story plots come alive in the mind. An entire world can be created simply by letting the imagination digest the language. Society today speeds along so fast that it doesn't take the time to stop and soak in life. Reading lets one enjoy the world around, through personal experiences and point of view. All memories and senses are awake when reading and yet while the outside world is still, the mind and imagination run wild. Reading gives temporary reprieve from the pressures of life and creates a new identity and a new environment. It is about learning. New ideas and opinions are introduced. Theories are proven or disproved. Reading is discovery in its most basic element.

Rachel Donelson
Reading connects me to the rest of the world and helps me define who I am. If you are what you know, what I read is tightly intertwined with who I was, who I am now, and who I will become. I go through phases of what I like to read. When I was young, I liked to read about historical children's adventures, like Little House or Tom Sawyer. In high school I read a lot of mid-twentieth century novels, from the beatniks to the dystopian visionaries. Now I've finally expanded my world to include nonfiction. Reading helps me get out of my mental ruts; it helps me accept other people's ideas. It can also connect me to people of the past. There's something comforting about knowing that my questions and faults are similar to the ones St. Augustine struggled with when he was my age-even though he lived 1700 years ago. Reading makes the vastness of space-time smaller and more manageable.

Alessandra Gazzo
I believe that reading functions as a means of expanding your world. It is a way to gain new perspectives on your world as well as learning about things which are completely out of your everyday life. By reading you can experience things which would otherwise be impossible. We do not live long enough to see or do anywhere near all that we would like to. Reading provides an opportunity to get a glimpse of some more of those things we cannot do.

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.

from The Writing Life: Writers on How They Think and Work edited by Marie Arana

The Difference Between What People Say and What People Feel

I don't know anything more interesting than the difference between what people say and what they feel. There's a whole universe there below the surface. I'm always interested in the way that feelings underneath leak out and shape behavior. People try very hard to have them not show up or change anything or affect anything. But our defenses leak. That's how we know they're there. I love that. (from an interview with Amy Bloom by Sarah Ann Johnson)

True or False?

In every volume of poems something good may be found.
--Quote from Boswell's LIFE OF JOHNSON

Writer's Block

Do not confuse writer's block with other emotional states that interfere with your writing such as anger, grief, illness, laziness, horniness, and so on. True writer's block has four primary causes: not knowing your characters well enough, trying to edit and write at the same time, fear of failure, and fear of success. . . .Trying to write and edit at the same time creates class-two writer's block. When you write, you have to first draft your novel without worrying whether every I is dotted and every t is crossed. The manuscript isn't going to be perfect; it's only a draft.

FROM James N. Frey on writer's block in HOW TO WRITE A DAMN GOOD NOVEL

Feng Shui for Writers

Tie three Chinese coins with a red string around your front main entrance inside door knob, on your desk's wealth corner or under your desk. Put a three-legged frog on a low table where he can see the front door. Put crystals (quartz and citrine are best), balls, clusters and pyramids all around. Make a money vase by filling it with stones and beads and Chinese coins (in groups of three), soil from a rich person's garden and other trinkets that are precious and meaningful to you. The vase should be wide at the bottom, narrow in the middle and wide at the top. It should be hidden in a cupboard. Keep nine fish-eight red or gold and one black-to absorb negative energy, in your wealth corner.

The most important thing to remember is intent. You have to want something bad enough to get it. You still have to do the work. You have to have the talent and drive to succeed but a little push in the luck department doesn't hurt at all!

From FENG SHUI FOR WRITERS by Sephera Giron

Trademarks

The best thing is, we don't have to put the little TM symbol next to the trademark, but the trademark people say a writer needs to distinguish what a trademark is by capitalizing the first letter, putting it all in caps, italics or boldface type, or in quotes, then adding the product after the trademark. For example: Apple computers, ZIPLOC resealable bags, "Cheerios" cereal, or Parker (in italics or boldface type) pen. Trademarks should not be pluralized, and it's considered a proper adjective. They should not be used in the possessive form, or as a verb.

From Kay Parkin on TRADEMARKS (from an article found on using trademarks in writing)

Reasons Reading is Good

Reading doesn't cause a hangover, takes very little physical energy and affords few opportunities for public embarrassment.

By the hour, books are way cheaper than psychotherapy. When I'm bitter and alienated, I can turn to Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground and find solace in kindred suffering: "I am a sick man … I am a spiteful man. An unattractive man. I think that my liver hurts." It's a rollicking good tale about self-imposed agony.

Similarly, there's Whitman for joy and Neruda for love, or the more contemporary—Lorrie Moore for wit and ... wait—am I describing books as friends? As words that embody empathy and shared ideas? And is that pathetic or wonderful?

--Stacy J. Willis

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

Style

A good many writers have insisted that style can be neither taught nor learned. Like tears or sweat, they say, it is something that springs from within. You either have the gift or you don't. This is probably true, but only to a point. The good stylists work at their craft. Consciously or unconsciously, they master the little dog tricks of euphony and cadence. The novelist searches for the significant details that will put flesh on the bones of a character. Little by little we learn what works for us--bare and bony sentences, or china dogs with pouting eyes, or perhaps no "style" at all.

From WRITER'S ART by James Kilpatrick

Character Description Made Easy

Characters are the heart of a great story. Without great characters and great character development, "The Great Gatsby" can be seen as just another weepy romance and Holden Caulfield as merely a maladjusted teen. Pushcart Prize-winning author Josip Novakovich lends us two exercises from his book "Fiction Writer's Workshop" that will help you develop your characters.

Objective: To learn how to look at evidence of character in the whole body, not just the face. The body expresses the mind.

Describe a character by the shape, posture and gait of his body. Don't describe his head and don't tell us that the character is lazy or happy. Show these traits through body language.

Check: Do we see enough of the body's shape and motion? For a nervous patient in a hospital, did you mention his feet wrapped around a chair's leg like the emblem of medicine?

Objective: To create heroes from people you admire. Admiration for others is a writer's best friend (unlike self-admiration). As you admire a person, you naturally select traits and details that present the person in a heroic light. So you already know how to make heroes! With this capability, you are ready to become a fiction writer.

Describe a remarkable person you admire--a teacher, minister, carpenter, doctor. What makes the person unique? Avoid sentiment statements (e.g. "I know Mother will always be there for me"). Can you make us see her? Hear her? >

Check: Have you given us the person? If not, go back and show us your character struggling with problem.

Learn more about "Fiction Writer's Workshop" ($15.99), at: http://www.writersdigest.com/store/booksdisplay.asp?id=48033

Harris Puts Life on the Page

In 1991, he [E. Lynn Harris] quit his job and moved to Atlanta to write a novel. No one would publish it, so he spent $13,000 to print 5,500 copies. Bookstores balked, so he'd leave a book in beauty parlors ("like a sample") with his name and phone number. Readers who liked what they read while waiting would call him, and he'd deliver a copy in person, $12.95 each.

Eventually the novel made its way into local bookstores and came to the attention of a sales rep for Doubleday who told editors in New York, "There's a book down here making a lot of noise."

In 1992, Doubleday signed him to a $90,000 threebook deal for Invisible Life (in its 44th printing), a sequel and an autobiography he's still trying to finish.

HARRIS PUTS LIFE ON THE PAGE by Bob Minzesheimer (USA Today July 29, 2002)

Verbs

One way to identify and remember being verbs is by categories:

* the be group: be, is, are, am, was, were, been

* the have group: have, has, had

* the do group: do, did, done (usually used for emphasis or to form questions)

* others: must, may/might, shall/should, can/could, will/would

Note, however, that the be, have, and do verbs can be helping or main verbs.
* Jerry is witty (main verb). Jerry is coming (helping verb) home.
* Leon had a pet snake (main). He had caught it in the woods (helping).
* Judy does a good job (main). She does work hard (helping).

Also, must has come into modern usage as a noun; for example, "Another must for Sandburg fans is the performance of his Rootabaga stories." (We won't get into a discussion of the word need.)

FROM Joy Bagley (WNC Writers Facilitator (bagley030@aol.com)ON VERBS

On Jorge Luis Borges

The first monument of adult literature I discovered for myself was not Jane Austen at thirteen, but, at seventeen, the dull-green-spined Penguin Modern Classics edition of THE COLLECTED STORIES OF JORGE LUIS BORGES. Borges took me to a place where dry, crabbed, pedantic phrases could be the language of wonder. He made annotation into a technique of shimmering paradox. His footnotes had no bottom to them: you could fall through, and keep falling, tumbling without end into an abyss of recursive possibilities. Reference was the essence of what he did, pointing your attention from one apparently existing thing to another one, but it was always unreliable, because so many of the books, persons, places, flowers, gems, ideas he named were invented by him, glimmering into existence for just that moment at which he referred to them; and so many of the boxes he suggested you open were either empty, or contained an infinitely nested set of other ever-smaller boxes, or were larger on the inside than the outside, or, strangest of all, had no inside at all.

In "The Garden of Forking Paths," he proposed a novel in which, at every point of decision, both outcomes took place, until the book contained "a growing, dizzying web of divergent, convergent and parallel times."

In "The Library of Babel," he sketched-or rather, "adumbrated," to use one of the words from his mannered, repetitive vocabulary of favorites-a universe consisting entirely of ventilation shafts and hexagonal galleries, lined with identical volumes, whose pages contain every conceivable permutation of the 26 letters of the alphabet as they can be arranged at random over 410 pages. But not in order; the books are shuffled at random, and a librarian can walk for many miles over many years to find a single intelligible sentence, knowing all the while that, because the library comprises all possible permutations, it must therefore include the detailed history of the future, the autobiographies of the archangels, the faithful catalogue of the library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the proof of the falsity of those false catalogues, a proof of the falsity of the true catalogue, the gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary upon that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book in every language, the interpolations of every book into all books...

Borges's characteristic maneuver was a version, in story, of the Mobius twist that the mathematical philosophers had discovered early in the twentieth century. Hoping to put logic on a foundation of consistent, comprehensive axioms, Bertrand Russell found instead that the ability of a set to include itself as a member set off a rip in the axiomatic fabric into which the whole hope for reliable, consistent knowledge was then inex- orably sucked, like a black hole devouring the philosophic space. Later, Kurt Godel showed that even the simplest mathematical system, like arithmetic, had the potential to eat its own tail in the same way, and therefore could not be proved to map reality reliably. Borges haunted these points of conceptual unmaking, using the power of the authorial voice to be both within the story and (simultaneously) its external sustainer, as his analogue of Russell's problem, and thus the means to pry open a vortex.

Into the classification system of an imaginary Chinese encyclopedia, he introduced the category of "things contained in this encyclopedia," a part which must therefore contain the whole, which in turn must contain the part, that contains the whole, ad infinitum; and this was just one of his most modest and local embodiments of the idea. Here, in Borges's work, story became almost pure form. It contained just enough substance-just enough naming and evocation-to furnish the ideas with a backing, like the film of mercury on the back of a mirror that allows a flat thing to contain ever receding depths. Borges's stories actually reached the state that the dumbest idea-led science fiction only approximated to. They were truly about something other than people. They were about themselves, about the interesting diagrams that the multiplicity of things books do will make, if you reduce them to pure lines and angles: perfect reading, in a way, for Piaget's last age, of "abstract operations."

From THE CHILD THAT BOOKS BUILT by Francis Spufford

Quote: Finishing Cold Mountain

Courtney still means to finish his book (Charles Frazier's COLD MOUNTAIN). It's just that it was taking so long, all that walking across the whole state of North Carolina, it was pretty slow.

from Lee Smith's Novel

The Last Girls

Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within

Often when I ask a writer to name her favorite book on writing, Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within is mentioned.

I found the book wildly disorganized, with no discernable structure. Perhaps that's what Goldberg intended but it drove me crazy. That said, she offers some good suggestions, encouragement, and solid advice on many aspects of the writer's craft.

I wouldn't put this is a must read category, but it does have value. The following are a few gems from the work:

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.

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.

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.

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."

It's much better to be a tribal writer, writing for all people and reflecting many voices through us, than to be a cloistered being trying to find one peanut of truth in our own individual mind. Become big and write with the whole world in your arms.

Even if we go off alone to write in the wilderness, we have to commune with ourselves and everything around us: the desk, the trees, the birds, the water, the typewriter. We are not separate from everything else. It's only our egos that make us think we are. We build on what came before us, even if our writing is a reaction to it or we try to negate the past.

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.

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 (Natalie Goldberg)

Working on the Language

“The temptations is simply to assemble language and forgo the hard work of trying to penetrate it. No doubt everything has been brought up before, by someone else, or even by oneself; but if the language is truly worked, freshness is still possible. Worked language is how the writer can ‘make it new’ in the words of Ezra Pound.”

From “Footprints of Greatness on Your Turf” by Pat Conroy, New York Times 4/8/02

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.

If you're not getting anywhere, it's probably because you are writing something emotionally dishonest.

I write seven days a week. I don't have to write to pay my bills. I like the regularity. My wife-we've been married thirty eight years-she can't quite see it. She thinks it's a little compulsive.

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 ESQUIRE February 2003 How to Write Faster By Stephen J Cannell, creator of 40 TV shows (The Rockford Files, The A-Team, The Commish) and author of 350 movie scripts and eleven novels. (His seventh, The Viking Funeral, is in stores now.)

On Katherine Anne Porter

"What she does have aplenty is the ability to make things actual. The old girl can create the sweating stinking life out of anything, the purely animal."

from Flannery O'Connor's THE HABIT OF BEING letter to A., 23 June 1962 comment on Katherine Anne Porter

The Right Word

If a writer discards the exact but unfamiliar word in favor of the almost exact but generally familiar word, he gives his readers less than his best effort. At the same time, there is even more to be said in favor of writing in a vocabulary that one's readers will understand. He deliberately dumbs down. He deliberately dumbs down. At the same time, there is even more to be said in favor of writing in a vocabulary that one's readers will understand.

from THE WRITER'S ART by James Kilpatrick (Asheville Citizen-Times 11/24/02)