Writers' rooms. Structured Procrastination. Bobulate. Elizabeth Gilbert on nurturing creativity. Ten rules for writing fiction. Elmore Leonard: Using adverbs is a mortal sin 1 Never open a book with weather. If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a character's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways than an Eskimo to describe ice and snow in his book Arctic Dreams, you can do all the weather reporting you want. 2 Avoid prologues: they can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword.
But these are ordinarily found in non-fiction. 3 Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue. 4 Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said" ... he admonished gravely. 5 Keep your exclamation points under control. 6 Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose". 7 Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. 8 Avoid detailed descriptions of characters, which Steinbeck covered. Diana Athill Margaret Atwood Roddy Doyle 1 Write. On words alone. Writing more than anything else is a way of clarifying one’s thoughts; the initial act is not for the reader: [W]riting worth reading is the product, at least to some degree, of this extraordinarily intimate confrontation between the disorderly impressions in the writer’s mind and the more or less orderly procession of words that the writer manages to produce on the page.
But the negotiation of being “public” might change how writers feel about their own words: Writing, initially a very private act, has the potential to become an overwhelmingly public act. …. But how a writer chooses to negotiate the transition between the privacy of writing and the publicness of reading will ultimately determine what kind of a writer he or she is. What’s remarkable about these paragraphs is one can substitute “writing” with whatever craft you’re pursuing. Alone, With Words. Writers write in order to be read. This is obvious. But the speed with which words, once written, are now being read—a speed shaped by technological innovations long before the Internet turned the quick turnaround into the virtually instantaneous turnaround—has set me to thinking about the extent to which writing, for the writer, ought to have a freestanding value, a value apart from the reader.
There is too much talk about the literary marketplace, the cultural marketplace, and the marketplace of ideas. We need to remember that a book—or a painting or a piece of music—begins as the product of an individual imagination, and can retain its power even when largely or even entirely ignored. (The paintings of Piero della Francesca were overlooked for several centuries.) Writing, before it is anything else, is a way of clarifying one’s thoughts. I am not saying that writers need to be or ought to be isolated, either from other writers or from the reading public at large. Blog: Frank Chimero (Text Playlist) Ways of reading / from a working library. Always read with a pen in hand. The pen should be used both to mark the text you want to remember and to write from where the text leaves you.
Think of the text as the starting point for your own words. Reading and writing are not discrete activities; they occur on a continuum, with reading at one end, writing at the other. The best readers spend their time somewhere in between. Reading must occur everyday, but it is not just any daily reading that will do. The day’s reading must include at minimum a few lines whose principal intent is to be beautiful—words composed as much for the sake of their composition as for the meaning they convey. A good reader reads attentively, not only listening to what the writer says, but also to how she says it. If a book bores you, or tells you things you already know, or is not beautiful, do not hesitate to discard it. Every book alights a path to other books. A single book struggles to balance on its spine; it pines for neighbors.
HOWTO: Read more books. I’ve read a hundred books a year for the past couple years. Last time I mentioned this, a couple people asked how I could read so many books. Do I read unusually quickly? Do I spend an unusual amount of time reading? I did a simple calculation: The average person spends 1704 hours a year watching TV. If the average reading rate is 250 words per minute and the average book is 180,000 words, then that’s 142 books a year. To my surprise, I wasn’t reading nearly enough books.
Block your favorite blogs. I suspect few people will take all of this advice, but hopefully some of it is useful to you. Of course, long ago Cosma Shalizi said all this shorter and better: Where do you find the time to read so much? …but then again, everything I write is just commentaries on off-hand remarks by Cosma. posted by Aaron Swartz on March 2, 2010 # Um, #3 seems a little extreme. I also read a lot, but would like to have some evidence that it helps me with my broader life and goals. Nice post. Nice post. The Walrus.
Lynda Barry visited Toronto recently to speak at a book festival, and to teach her class on creative writing, “Writing the Unthinkable.” In her lively festival talks — which felt more like happenings than your typical button-down, staid author’s reading — she presented excerpts from her latest book, What It Is, asked the audience to shout their first phone numbers out loud, and sang “You Are My Sunshine” with her mouth closed. She also bemoaned her sometime status as a publishing industry “gateway chick” — she says she’s like the last girl guys go out with before they realise they’re gay, only in her case it’s publishers realising they want to “date” something completely different than Lynda Barry books. That’s changing now that she’s settled with Drawn and Quarterly, who plan to collect all of Barry’s longrunning, seminal alternative comic strip, Ernie Pook’s Comeek, and who recently published What It Is to tremendous acclaim.
Oh, it absolutely is. It’s the sister book. No, for this. Contemporary Writers in the UK - Contemporary Writers.