Tag: books
In The Trenches, Sigh In—Sigh Out
“Please don’t entertain for a moment the utterly mistaken idea that there is no drudgery in writing. There is a great deal of drudgery in even the most inspired, the most noble, the most distinguished writing. Read what the great ones have said about their jobs; how they never sit down to their work without a sigh of distress and never get up from it witout a sigh of relief. Do you imagine that your Muse is forever flamelike — breathing the inspired word, the wonderful situation, the superb solution into your attentive ear? … Believe me, my poor boy, if you wait for inspiration in our set-up, you’ll wait for ever.”
― Ngaio Marsh, Death on the Air and Other Stories
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To contest? Or not to contest?
[found on blog.nathanbransford.com]
“What should writers know about contests?
The absolute most important advice I can give you is this: read and understand the fine print.
Know what you’re entering. Know what happens to your work in the event you win (or even/especially if you don’t win). Make sure you’re completely comfortable with it.”
For more information on writing contests from Nathan, click HERE.
[found on http://blog.nathanbransford.com/2009/12/all-about-writing-contests.html]
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In The Beginning…No, Now.
“They say everything that can be written has been written. I say we are just getting started.”
― Andrew Barger, Mailboxes – Mansions – Memphistopheles: A Collection of Dark Tales
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Reality Need Not Apply
“Writing fiction feels like an adventurous act, nudging aside reality a word at a time.”
― James Van Pelt
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Writing Tips From the Masters
[found on openculture.com]
“Here’s one way to become a better writer. Listen to the advice of writers who earn their daily bread with their pens. During the past week, lists of writing commandments by Henry Miller, Elmore Leonard (above) and William Safire have buzzed around Twitter. (Find our Twitter stream here.) So we decided to collect them and add tips from a few other veterans — namely, George Orwell, Margaret Atwood, and Neil Gaiman. Here we go:
Henry Miller (from Henry Miller on Writing)
1. Work on one thing at a time until finished.
2. Start no more new books, add no more new material to “Black Spring.”
3. Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.
4. Work according to the program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!
5. When you can’t create you can work.
6. Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.
7. Keep human! See people; go places, drink if you feel like it.
8. Don’t be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only.
9. Discard the Program when you feel like it–but go back to it the next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude.
10. Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.
11. Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.
George Orwell (From Why I Write)
1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
Margaret Atwood (originally appeared in The Guardian)
1. Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can’t sharpen it on the plane, because you can’t take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.
2. If both pencils break, you can do a rough sharpening job with a nail file of the metal or glass type.
3. Take something to write on. Paper is good. In a pinch, pieces of wood or your arm will do.
4. If you’re using a computer, always safeguard new text with a memory stick.
5. Do back exercises. Pain is distracting.
6. Hold the reader’s attention. (This is likely to work better if you can hold your own.) But you don’t know who the reader is, so it’s like shooting fish with a slingshot in the dark. What fascinates A will bore the pants off B.
7. You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there’s no free lunch. Writing is work. It’s also gambling. You don’t get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but essentially you’re on your own. Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don’t whine.
8. You can never read your own book with the innocent anticipation that comes with that first delicious page of a new book, because you wrote the thing. You’ve been backstage. You’ve seen how the rabbits were smuggled into the hat. Therefore ask a reading friend or two to look at it before you give it to anyone in the publishing business. This friend should not be someone with whom you have a romantic relationship, unless you want to break up.
9. Don’t sit down in the middle of the woods. If you’re lost in the plot or blocked, retrace your steps to where you went wrong. Then take the other road. And/or change the person. Change the tense. Change the opening page.
10. Prayer might work. Or reading something else. Or a constant visualisation of the holy grail that is the finished, published version of your resplendent book.
Neil Gaiman (read his free short stories here)
1. Write.
2. Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.
3. Finish what you’re writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.
4. Put it aside. Read it pretending you’ve never read it before. Show it to friends whose opinion you respect and who like the kind of thing that this is.
5. Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.
6. Fix it. Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.
7. Laugh at your own jokes.
8. The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.
William Safire (the author of the New York Times Magazine column “On Language”)
1. Remember to never split an infinitive.
2. The passive voice should never be used.
3. Do not put statements in the negative form.
4. Verbs have to agree with their subjects.
5. Proofread carefully to see if you words out.
6. If you reread your work, you can find on rereading a great deal of repetition can be by rereading and editing.
7. A writer must not shift your point of view.
8. And don’t start a sentence with a conjunction. (Remember, too, a preposition is a terrible word to end a sentence with.)
9. Don’t overuse exclamation marks!!
10. Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences, as of 10 or more words, to their antecedents.
11. Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided.
12. If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.
13. Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors.
14. Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.
15. Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with singular nouns in their writing.
16. Always pick on the correct idiom.
17. The adverb always follows the verb.
18. Last but not least, avoid cliches like the plague; seek viable alternatives.”[found on http://www.openculture.com/2012/01/writing_rules.html]
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Beginners’ Blunders
[found on writing-world.com; Marg Gilks]
“Writing is easy; all you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.” — Gene Fowler
“You’ve written a great story, sent it out again and again, but it keeps being rejected. Why? What are some of the writing blunders you may be committing that set red “amateur” flags waving for agents and publishers — and invariably earn your story a rejection slip?
They’re Only Empty Words
Blonde bombshell, guns blazing, go the extra mile, passed with flying colors, under cover of darkness. Cliches like these pepper our everyday speech, but in a story, they’re a red flag. When you think about it, what information does a cliche convey to a reader? What does it mean to pass with flying colors? Why would a sexy woman be called a bombshell? What’s attractive about a bombshell? When you use cliches in your writing instead of creating original descriptions that actually engage the reader’s senses and emotions, you’re writing words that the reader will find very easy to forget.
Like cliches, empty modifiers like adjectives and adverbs are the sign of weak writing, produced by a writer without the imagination or the skill needed to create evocative descriptions that add depth to the story. Used to excess, they clutter up a story with empty words that distract the reader as she tries to envision an image that the words just aren’t conjuring.
Used in place of more vivid language, adverbs and adjectives are just as commonplace as cliches. “Fluffy white clouds” — ho-hum. Why not clouds that hang in the sky like dollops of whipped cream, or that are as plump as popcorn? “They moved quickly down the street.” How fast is quickly? Are they running, or speeding along in a car? If you replace the weak verb “moved” with one that’s more specific, you wouldn’t have to use the adverb “quickly” at all: They dashed down the street, or flew down the street on their bicycles.
“Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader — not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon,” said E.L. Doctorow, author of Billy Bathgate. A memorable story is one that readers experience. Get specific. Paint word pictures for your readers instead of falling back on tired phrases and descriptors, and you’ll create a story that publishers will want to share with their readers.
Tell Me No More!
Many beginning writers, faced with the dilemma of conveying background information or character details to the reader, go the obvious route — they throw it all at the reader in a big, expository lump of facts often called an “info dump.” They tell the reader everything.
Readers pick up a story to be entertained, not to be lectured. Nobody likes to be told what to think; like you, readers want to form their own opinions. Whenever possible, show the reader what she needs to know about a character or a society or a setting — persuade her to form an opinion that matches your goals in writing the scene or creating the character. If you have to resort to telling, feed it to the reader in manageable bits, woven into the story here and there, so the reader doesn’t realize she’s learning anything.
“Okay,” you think, “the reader needs to know what my character looks like, so I’ll have him look in a mirror, and describe what he sees.” Or: “Well, if two of my characters tell each other what the reader needs to know, then that’s showing because it’s dialogue, not exposition.”
Don’t. Neither solution is effective showing, it’s telling with props — and such a common blunder among beginners that the techniques themselves are considered cliches: “Sarah looked in the mirror and saw a pretty red-haired girl with green eyes and a freckled nose staring back at her.” Do you look in the mirror and see that? Or do you notice you need a shave or a haircut, or grin to examine your teeth? If you’re not noticing your physical description, your character wouldn’t naturally notice this, either.
“As you know,” you have one of your characters say, “we have been walking through this desert for the past five days, and it is quite hot. We have no water — we’ll have to find some soon, or we’ll die.” To which your other character responds, “Indeed. You know I’m the world’s foremost expert on skin cancer, and these sunburns can’t be doing us any good at all.” Are you laughing yet? I hope so! Nobody talks like this. So don’t make your characters say things they wouldn’t say naturally, just for the sake of conveying information.
Inept showing like this is just as bad as an info dump, and will earn you a rejection just as quickly. As with avoiding empty words, put a little more effort into how you convey information to the reader, so it becomes an experience, not an effort to read.
Head-hopping
You’ll probably notice when reading a contemporary novel that the story seems to be told in the voice of only one character. If there seems to be more than one character telling the story — different viewpoints — if you pay close attention to each scene within that novel, you’ll probably find that only one character seems to be sharing his or her perceptions of events in the scene with the reader. The character whose eyes readers see story events through, whose thoughts the reader “hears” in a scene or throughout a story or novel is called the point of view character. This is called “limited” point of view, and it’s the most common form you’ll see, because today’s readers like getting right inside a character’s head to experience the story.
The point of view (POV) that most novice writers fall into, however, is “omniscient” point of view. In this point of view, the narrator is all-knowing and all-seeing, popping from one character’s head into another, making the reader privy to everyone’s thoughts and everything that’s going on, even if that activity is off-stage, in the past or in the present or in the future. There is a lot of explaining — the omniscient narrator tells the reader what everyone is thinking and what is going on.
Sounds pretty good, huh. Look at that description of omniscient point of view again — the narrator is telling. Telling instead of showing is one of those red flags for rejection, remember? With omniscient, you are leaving nothing to the reader’s imagination. You’re not allowing the reader to participate, to experience, but merely to observe. For this reason, while omniscient POV is a legitimate point of view, it has fallen out of favor with today’s readers.
If point of view hops from one character to another within a scene in your novel or story, it will be perceived by an agent or publisher as poor writing. Manipulating point of view to best effect or maintaining it consistently takes attention and practice, but it’s one skill that sets more experienced authors apart from novices, and well worth learning.
Mechanics
Yes, this is the icky stuff — the grammar and punctuation and spelling that you’d rather not think about. But agents and publishers think about it — in fact, it’s the quickest way for them to tell if a manuscript is worth anything beyond a cursory look. If, in that first glance, they see too many mechanical errors, they’re not likely to give the story itself a chance.
Agent Noah Lukeman, author of The First Five Pages: A Writer’s Guide to Staying Out of the Rejection Pile, cites misuse of the question mark — a common blunder — as reason enough for a rejection. “The same holds true for the exclamation point,” and, to a lesser degree, parentheses, he says. Think of it — a simple little question mark could doom your story.
Punctuation marks are the most obvious red flags. You also have to watch out for the sneakier grammatical pitfalls, like dangling or misplaced modifiers and passive voice. A misplaced modifier occurs when a word or phrase is placed next to a word that it can’t possibly describe: Growling furiously, jaws snapping, the hunter trussed the bear cub. It’s a good bet the writer intended the bear cub to growl and snap, but written this way, it’s the hunter! A dangling modifier happens when a word or phrase has been dropped: While eating lunch, the crocodile swam past the dock. If the croc wasn’t doing the eating, this sentence needs the lunchers to be complete — While we were eating lunch. Both of these grammatical blunders can create reader confusion at best or, at worst, unintentional humor at your expense.
What is passive voice? While active voice describes an action a character is doing, passive voice describes what is being done — it conveys no action: “she put the books on the shelf” as opposed to the passive “the books were put on the shelf.” The very structure of passive verbs suggests that an action took place in the past, not the present. Remember, today’s readers want to feel as if they’re right there in the story, experiencing events. Active voice is simpler, less wordy, and is more immediate.
Take the time to brush up on grammar and punctuation; take a moment to look up the correct spelling of a word you’re not sure of; go over your manuscript carefully when you’re done, correcting typos and any other small errors that may detract or distract. It’s worth the effort.
You’ve probably realized by now that writing a good story takes more effort than simply sitting down and dashing off the first words that come to mind. But more effort means a greater likelihood that the finished product will earn publication — not rejection slips.”
[found on http://www.writing-world.com/fiction/fiction10.shtml]
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Oceanic U.S.S. Writer
“Writing is a vessel…with readers the ocean and authors as its sails…”
― William Petersen
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Write A Book You Can
“Anybody can write a book. But writing it well and making it sell — that’s the hard part.”
― Jay Taylor, The Rise Of Majick
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Places or faces?
[found on davehood59.wordpress.com; by Find Your Creative Muse]
“Place is more than Just Location
Writing about place or location of the event or experience is an important technique in creative nonfiction. It often plays a vital role in your story. It allows you to recreate the scene and experience in the mind of the reader. It can act as a backdrop or provide context for a personal essay. It can add meaning to a memoir. For instance, if a writer creates a memoir about child abuse, the place or location is significant. Place can also be the subject of creative writing. If you are writing a travel essay, you will be writing about the place you are visiting. Often, without a place or location, you have no experience or event.
This article will define what creative nonfiction writers mean by place/location and explain how to write about place/location in your creative nonfiction.
Definition of Place
In creative nonfiction, the place or location where the event or experience took place is more than just about the name of the place. It is also the physical location of the place, the physical attributes, such as the urban setting of crowds, pollution, public transit, traffic jams or the rural setting of open spaces, fewer people, fields, farms, and small communities.
Place is also about its socioeconomic attributes of a setting. Some places are poor, while others are wealthy. Some places have high unemployment, while others have an abundance of employment opportunities. Some places have schools and hospitals, while other places have nothing.
In writing about travel, place is much more than the physical location. It is about the culture, language, values, morals, beliefs, customs, cuisine, traditions, and way of life.
In writing a memoir, place often has significant meaning. It can be a catalyst for memories of childhood, adulthood, unique experiences. In the memoir, My Life: The Presidential Years, the Whitehouse was a special place for Bill Clinton. Place can also have significant meaning for ordinary people. In writing Eat, Pray, and Love, place had a powerful meaning for Elizabeth Gilbert. After her divorce and a mid-life-crisis, Gilbert decided to travel for a year by herself in an effort to restore balance and meaning to her life. Her memoir chronicles the three places she visited: Rome, India, and Bali. Each of these places had significant meaning to herself and to her life. She wrote about this powerful meaning in her memoir.
Some creative nonfiction writers view place as character. In recreating the scene or experience, the writer views place as a character in the story. Similar to developing a character, the place needs to be developed. The writer can use personification to develop the place. It can become nurturing, menacing, foreboding.
Yet place is more than just character. It is also about meaning. A place or location often has significant meaning. We can associate a particular place with good memories or bad memories, as being a happy place or sad place, as being a relaxing place or stressful place.
Clearly, when a creative writer writes about place, the writer must consider more than just its physical attributes or location.
How to Write about Place
In writing about place, you ought to consider the following:
- Name of the place
- Location of the place
- Physical attributes
- Home as place
- Nature as place
- Travel as place
- Meaning the place has for you
- Significance of the place
When writing about place, you first need to consider its name. Where did the name of the place originate? What is its history? What does it symbolize? For example, the city of Toronto originated as the Mohawk phrase tkaronto, later modified by French explorers and map makers.
You also need to consider writing about the important features, amenities, and physical attributes of place. For instance, in writing about Toronto, you can consider writing about its multicultural population, sports teams, and public transit, shopping centers, unique neighborhoods, landmarks, popular attractions, and the fact that it is located on Lake Ontario.
A place can also be about “home.” You can begin by exploring the meaning of home. Home is suppose to be a place of escape, comfort, protection, love, stability, and permanence—even solitude. What does home mean to you? What was my home like as a child? What did a like or dislike about the place called home? What memories do you have about your childhood home? For some people, home is a transient place, especially for people who travel, who are new immigrants, who end marriages or relationships.
In writing about place, you can also consider it in relation to nature. In his memoir, “Waldon”, Henry David Thoreau viewed nature, wildlife, and the woods as having a being a special place. According to Brenda Miller, who wrote “Tell It Slant”, a popular creative nonfiction text, Thoreau viewed the “human consciousness moved through nature, observing it, reacting to it, and ultimately being transformed by it. Miller goes on to suggest that when you write about nature as place, you need to consider how nature embodies larger forces, such as the physical attributes of a person you admire or the human condition or human experience.
In writing about place as a traveler, don’t write what everyone else has written. Your purpose is to find “a purpose for your writing above and beyond the travel experience itself”. (Tell It Slant) To create a travel piece that is more than just about transcribing the experience, you need to consider the theme and the significant meaning of the place.
When writing about a particular place, you ought to consider what meaning the place has for you. You can start by ask yourself the following: What does this place mean to me? How do I feel about this particular place? Do I like it? What do I like about it? Do I dislike it? What do I dislike about it? What are my memories of this place? What favorite memories do I have about this place?
Tips for Writing about Place
When writing about place, you must be original. You must be able to write about place from a unique perspective.
- Describe the place as if it is a character in your story. What is its appearance? Its behaviour? What is the place saying to you?
- Use literary devices to describe the place, such as metaphors, personification, and simile.
- Describe the physical attributes of the place using sensory images. How does place smell, sound, taste, feel, and appear to you?
- Write about place as it means to you. Do you have fond memories of the place? What do you like or dislike about the place? What is important? What is insignificant about the place? How does the place feel to you?
- Write about the significance of place. What universal truth embodies the place?
- Write about what you have learned about the sense of place/location?
- Don’t use clichés or hackneyed expressions to describe a place.
- Use concrete and specific details. Remember as many significant details about place as you can.
The place or location of an event or experience can have many meanings. Place can be your home, a travel destination, or a walk in the woods. When writing about place, consider its name. Write about its physical attributes. Write about what the place means to you. Write about the significance of the place. Write about theme and universal truth as it applies to place. Write about place from your own unique perspective.”
Editing Addict, LLC 