Allen Guthrie's Infamous Writing Tips. Allen Guthrie, an acquisition editor for Point Blank Press, wrote up a 'white paper' three years ago called 'Hunting Down the Pleonasms' that has become a cult classic. Guthrie gave Adventure Books of Seattle permission to reprint this document wherever we liked. It is a permanent download over at our main site, but I wanted to reproduce it here.
It is very specific. Over at the AB site, it's been downloaded hundreds of times, and I think every writer should post this on the wall near their computer. 'Hunting Down the Pleonasms' I can’t stress strongly enough that writing is subjective. 1: Avoid pleonasms. 2: Use oblique dialogue. 3: Use strong verbs in preference to adverbs. 4: Cut adjectives where possible. 5: Pairs of adjectives are exponentially worse than single adjectives. 6: Keep speeches short. 7: If you find you’ve said the same thing more than once, choose the best and cut the rest. 8: Show, don’t tell. 9: Describe the environment in ways that are pertinent to the story.
Calendar patterns. Some of my evaluative patterns The first 28 added 2008.0127 Similarly, comics should have good art . If not for the great art in Age of Bronze and Murena , I would have little reason to read them — after all, Homer and Gibbon are still in print. There are, of course, all kinds of good art; though I generally prefer comics with very realistic and detailed art, I certainly wouldn't want to see Zot! In any other style. And it probably comes as no surprise that I think films should be beautiful to look at . But let's move beyond the surface. Non-fiction also tends to fall into the trap of failing to communicate with the reader. And just as non-fiction writers often need to unpack things for the reader, narrative writers must resist the temptation to summarize. Writers of narrative have much more structural freedom than their colleagues in the non-fiction world. However, twists only work if you have some investment in the story being twisted .
13 Writing Tips. Twenty years ago, a friend and I walked around downtown Portland at Christmas. The big department stores: Meier and Frank… Fredrick and Nelson… Nordstroms… their big display windows each held a simple, pretty scene: a mannequin wearing clothes or a perfume bottle sitting in fake snow. But the windows at the J.J. Newberry's store, damn, they were crammed with dolls and tinsel and spatulas and screwdriver sets and pillows, vacuum cleaners, plastic hangers, gerbils, silk flowers, candy - you get the point. Each of the hundreds of different objects was priced with a faded circle of red cardboard. She said the perfect comment at the perfect moment, and I remember it two decades later because it made me laugh. For this essay, my goal is to put more in. Number One: Two years ago, when I wrote the first of these essays it was about my "egg timer method" of writing. Number Two: Your audience is smarter than you imagine.
Number Four: Surprise yourself. Why I Write. Gangrel, [No. 4, Summer] 1946 George Orwell’s “National Union of Journalists” press card (1943) From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books. I was the middle child of three, but there was a gap of five years on either side, and I barely saw my father before I was eight. However, throughout this time I did in a sense engage in literary activities. When I was about sixteen I suddenly discovered the joy of mere words, i.e. the sounds and associations of words.
So hee with difficulty and labour hard Moved on: with difficulty and labour hee. which do not now seem to me so very wonderful, sent shivers down my backbone; and the spelling ‘hee’ for ‘he’ was an added pleasure. (i) Sheer egoism. (iii) Historical impulse. Yoga For Black People. Character Arc & Development - Novel Writing Tips. How novels came to terms with the internet. Back in the early 1990s, David Foster Wallace wrote an essay urging young American novelists to find a way to come to terms with the role of television in contemporary life. He believed they were going about it the wrong way, but at least they were trying, which was more than he could say for the generation of older writers he complained about in the same piece ("E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction").
One of these, an unnamed "gray eminence" who ran a graduate workshop that Wallace attended in the 1980s, scolded his students for including "trendy mass-popular-media" references in their work. Treating of such things, he insisted, would only date their writing, pegging it as belonging to the "frivolous Now" instead of to the proper province of literature, the "Timeless". Twenty years later, in the current frivolous Now, Wallace's essay itself seems a shade dated, and not just because today's novelists confront a very different communications behemoth in the form of the internet. Showing Character Change. By Joy Cagil As has been indicated by writers and writing coaches, in a good story, characters create conflict; consequently, conflict creates drama.
In addition, a story shows more depth if its characters go through changes. The question is: how can a writer go about showing the changes inside his characters during the trajectory of the story? Let us take a brief look at how some characters may go through a change in a story. If a story is written from the first person point of view, the character may show the workings of his mind through the narration of his feelings, or the change can be followed in a character's journal. In Flowers for Algernon, by Daniel Keyes, the main character, Charlie Gordon, keeps a journal of his progress throughout the story to let us follow the drastic change in his mental progress and decline. In a play, a character may show his inner change and his inner workings through asides and soliloquies. About the Author. A Handbook of Rhetorical Devices. Robert A. Harris Version Date: January 19, 2013 This book contains definitions and examples of more than sixty traditional rhetorical devices, (including rhetorical tropes and rhetorical figures) all of which can still be useful today to improve the effectiveness, clarity, and enjoyment of your writing.
Note: This book was written in 1980, with some changes since. The devices presented are not in alphabetical order. To go directly to the discussion of a particular device, click on the name below. If you know these already, go directly to the Self Test. A Preface of Quotations Whoever desires for his writings or himself, what none can reasonably condemn,the favor of mankind, must add grace to strength, and make his thoughts agreeable as well as useful.
Men must be taught as if you taught them not; And things unknown propos'd as things forgot. Style in painting is the same as in writing, a power over materials, whether words or colors, by which conceptions or sentiments are conveyed. 1. Literary technique. A literary technique (also known as literary device) is any method an author uses to convey his or her message.[1] This distinguishes them from literary elements, which exist inherently in literature. Literary techniques pertaining to setting[edit] Literary techniques pertaining to plots[edit] Literary techniques pertaining to narrative perspective[edit] Literary techniques pertaining to style[edit] Literary techniques pertaining to theme[edit] Literary techniques pertaining to character[edit] Literary techniques pertaining to genre[edit] Notes[edit] Jump up ^ Orehovec, Barbara (2003).
References[edit] Heath, Peter (May 1994), "Reviewed work(s): Story-Telling Techniques in the Arabian Nights by David Pinault", International Journal of Middle East Studies (Cambridge University Press) 26 (2): 358–360. Web Design Schools Guide. If you want to write, you have to read. Period. But while many fledgling novelists think that means digging into the classics, it also means paying attention to what other modern writers are doing online. We’re living in a golden age of information dissemination, when creative types of people in all fields can easily share their knowledge and successes with each other.
Some of the best resources for aspiring novelists are found in blogs by writers, editors, agents, grammarians, and others just like them who are working hard to tell a story of their own making. If you’ve ever considered sitting down at your computer to take a swing at the next great novel, let these blogs help get you there. Authors and Publishing From insights to the publishing world to blogs by published authors, these will help you get a handle on what it means to be a writer. Style and Tips Sure, there are always copy editors to clean up the fine points of your novel. Grammar Girl: Accept that you need Grammar Girl. Bad sex please, we're British: Can fictive sex ever have artistic merit? - Features, Books. Readers were not the only ones forming a hasty queue. In the decades following November 1960, writers exulted in their new-found Lawrentian rights to express their erotic imaginations before critics began questioning the artistic merits of this modern-day deluge of explicit sex in literary fiction.
By the early 1990s, a peculiarly British form of disapproval had grown out of the notion that sex and serious literature made for uncomfortable bedfellows. The priapic imaginings of otherwise revered writers – Philip Roth, John Updike, Amos Oz, John Banville – were selected and sneered at for inducing the wrong type of grunts and groans, in the annual tradition that has become The Literary Review's Bad Sex Awards.
The most purple of this year's blue passages is once again to be put in the stocks by the magazine at their awards ceremony later this month. But for all the vituperation at authors who get it wrong, there appears to be little consensus on how to get it right. Are Stieg Larsson and Dan Brown a match for literary fiction? | Books | The Observer. On my way back to London the other day, I was clawing my way toward the buffet car when I noticed with a shock that more or less the entire train carriage was reading… novels. This cheered me up immensely: partly because I have begun to fear that we are living in some kind of Cowellian nightmare, and partly because I make a good part of my living writing them.
Where were the Heats and the Closers, I wondered? The Maxims and the Cosmos? Where the iPads, the iPhones, the Blackberrys and the Game Boys, the Dingoos and the Zunes? My cheer modulated into something, well, less cheerful (but still quite cheerful) when I realised that they were all, in fact, reading the same book. In terms of sales, 2010 has been the year of the Larsson. I realise we are sailing into choppy waters here. We need to be clear-eyed here because although there is much written about this subject, there is also much theatricality to the debate. So it follows that genre tends to rely on a simpler reader psychology. Why we love bad writing - Laura Miller. Forget peace on earth — there won’t even be peace among the bookshelves after the salvo against popular fiction launched in the pages of the Guardian newspaper this week by the British novelist Edward Docx.
Docx, dismayed to find himself on a train full of passengers with their noses stuck in Stieg Larsson thrillers, announced “we need urgently to remind ourselves of — for want of better terminology — the difference between literary and genre fiction.” This, all too predictably, ignited multiple charges of outrage across the Internet. Guardian readers have already ably dismantled the straw men in Docx’s essay. I don’t agree with most of what he says, but he has a point when he suggests that the other side often resorts to arguments as trumped up as his own. In fact, ferocious defenders of genre fiction seem far more numerous to me than its (public) detractors, and Docx may have even done them a favor; they seem to enjoy their indignation an awful lot.
Why do people like bad books? JM Tohline: The Biggest Mistakes Writers Make When Querying Literary Agents. [If you are wondering how to write a query letter, this post will help you quite a bit - as you approach literary agents. If you're serious about becoming a better writer and getting published, you should also check out the help! For aspiring authors page when you finish reading this post. And of course: keep writing, keep reading, and best of luck!] Dear Aspiring Authors, Brew a pot of coffee.
This could be one of the most important things you'll ever read along your journey to publication. A few weeks ago, I emailed about 100 literary agents, asking them a simple question: What is the single biggest mistake writers make when querying you? Most of the responses began the same way: 'Only one? Over 50 agents found the time to respond, and I have compiled their thoughts for you within this post. Yes, reading this will take up a bit of your time (20-30 minutes, to give you a fair projection), but…how important is the success of your novel to you? Give your manuscript the chance it deserves!
Better yet, DON'T write that novel - Laura Miller. For me, the end of October is always slightly tinged with dread — provoked not by Halloween spooks, not even by election season, but by the advent of something called NaNoWriMo. If those syllables are nothing but babble to you, then I salute you. They stand for National Novel Writing Month. NaNoWriMo was started back in 1999 as a motivational stunt for a small group of writer friends. It’s since become a nonprofit organization with staff, sponsors, a fundraising gala and, last year, nearly 120,000 contestants. The purpose of NaNoWriMo seems laudable enough. In that spirit, NaNoWriMo has spawned countless tutorials, tip lists, FAQs, wikis and Twitter feeds, all designed to cheer the contestants on to their own personal finish line.
I am not the first person to point out that “writing a lot of crap” doesn’t sound like a particularly fruitful way to spend an entire month, even if it is November. Referenced in this article: School Library Journal on the 10/10/10 Reading Challenge. Kurt Vonnegut's Tips for Writing Fiction. The Jonathan Franzen flap and unconscious gender bias. - By Meghan O'Rourke. The literary debate of the fall is the tempest everyone is now calling, illogically, "Franzenfreude. " The storm, summarized here by Ruth Franklin in TNR online, has encompassed a debate about the place of commercial fiction and whether Jonathan Franzen's work is overrated. But I'm interested less in arguments about the relative merits of Franzen's latest novel, Freedom — I'm halfway through and find it artful and engaging—and more in the deeper question raised by the debate: Namely, why women are so infrequently heralded as great novelists.
A thought exercise, perhaps specious: If this book had been written by a woman (say, Jennifer Franzen), would it have been called "a masterpiece of American fiction" in the first line of its front-page New York Times review; would its author, perhaps with longer hair and make-up, have been featured in Time as a GREAT AMERICAN NOVELIST; would the Guardian have called it the "Book of the Century"? What can the first how-to book for fiction still tell us? - By Paul Collins.