This post will be much more like a tweet. It’s short and points you to a link of a new favorite writer, Melinda Snodgrass, a blog post at her website about her plotting, and she’s an excellent plotter. Anyhow, here you go: How I Write.
New Year’ Eve 2011 update of Books Bought, Books Read (with commentary as warranted):
Books bought since Oct. 1, 2011:
In the SF Masterworks series:
Books Read:
An update to my pollysyllabic spree:
Books bought
Books checked out
Books read
Zen in the Art of Writing: Essays on Creativity Third Edition/Expanded by Ray Bradbury
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Most books on writing are a variation on a theme: they explain several techniques to improve writing; they give examples of those techniques; and then they supply exercises for practice.
Ray Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writing provides almost none of that sort of writing advice. The closest thing to that sort of writing instruction is a section in which Bradbury talks about how he makes lists of nouns and then reviews those lists as a source for ideas.
In this collection of essays, Bradbury, using personal anecdotes about how he wrote and found inspiration for some of his most famous short stories and novels, spends most of his time not instructing on technique, but talking about how writers can tap their creative spark, their subconscious creative mind, their Muse by writing what they love and by writing with gusto and joy.
The lead essay’s opening paragraph sums the theme of the book:
Zest. Gusto. How rarely one hears these words used. How rarely do we see people living, or for that matter, creating by them. Yet if I were asked to name the most important items in a writer’s make-up, the things that shape his material and rush him along the road to where he wants to go, I could only warn him to look to his zest, see his gusto.
And how do you do this? As Bradbury digs deeper, he suggests you approach writing perhaps as a Zen master might approach it — through work, through relaxation, through nonthinking, and through further relaxation.
To work, of course, is a common piece of advice given by writers in writing advice books. Bradbury suggests a standard of setting a regular daily schedule, and a set amount of words.
But unique to his advice are the parts about relaxation and nonthinking.
Relaxation, as Bradbury uses the word, isn’t kicking back at the beach; it’s achieved through work. As you work, as you build quiet confidence in your self and your writing, you relax, your body responds to natural rhythms. And as you relax, you stop thinking and you create.
The essays are for the most part inspiring, in particular the lead essay “The Joy of Writing” and the title essay “Zen and the Art of Writing”. In fact, to writing, Bradbury adds a spiritual dimension lost in books solely concerned with technique, a spiritual needed to truly be creative.
OK, decided to re-up a meme. The idea is pilfered from Nick Hornby’s wonderful book about the joys of reading and acquiring books The Pollysyllabic Spree.
Books Bought thru June 1–June 20, 2011
Books Read, June 1–June 20, 2011
Philip K. Dick’s kind of become an obsession. Also trying to read and collect the SF Masterworks (the photo link is not my collection, but I wish it was ) put out by Gollancz (Oh, by the way, I have a birthday coming up in July. Hint, hint).
Also, I’m not being a good Buddhist at all (not that I’ve ever declared myself a Buddhist officially), given I’ve skipped meditation a few times lately, have imbibed some intoxicating drinks in recent days, and find myself too deeply attached to reading and acquiring books to ever renounce this particular form of sweet suffering.
Here’s a brief segment of a Richard Matheson interview on writing. Note Matheson mentions he writes in longhand and will not use a computer.
Hello all! Below are links to PDFs of some recent writing I’ve been doing. They are science fiction story beginnings drawn from writing prompts by Joe Haldeman. I am asking/begging/pleading/grovelling for any interested readers out there to give these “shitty” first drafts (as Anne Lamott might say) a look-see and give me feedback, especially to which beginnings you think have the greatest potential for a short story. Remember, these are drafts—I haven’t proofread them for errors.
I’m probably late to send writers to this blog by writer Mur Lafferty:
Her podcasts on writing are informative. I’m listening to one as I’m writing this post and she’s talking about blogging and about what to write on blogs.
That’s been something I’ve wondered about for this blog. Should it be personal? Should it be much more objective, focusing on careers or advice?
Go check it out.
Most of Walter Mosley’s advice in This Year You Write Your Novel is standard to almost every book on writing or writing class, explaining point of view, going over dialogue and description, and expounding the merits of showing versus telling.
The bulk of the book covers these elements of fiction in brief but useful segments, perfect for 
reference and reminders. Though brief, they are insightful.
His segment on showing versus telling, for instance, is one of the better ones that I’ve read. Mosley concisely explains why showing is preferable, in most instances, to telling.
I know that there are the sticklers out there among you who will say that everything expressed in words is told, not shown. After all telling is a function of speaking, and writing is nothing but an extension of speech. This is true. But there’s a difference between explanation and verbal action.
For instance, “Call me Ishmael” is the well-known first line of the American classic Moby Dick. Contrast this sentence with “His name was Ishmael.”
. . . .
“His name was Ishmael” is a flat statement that does not, on its own, draw us in. It is merely a piece of information.
The first example shows something to the reader, or, more accurately, it attempts to include the reader by engaging the reader on a personal level.
Besides drawing the reader into the novel’s world, Mosley explains, narrative that shows adds a “human aspect to its repertoire and, in doing so, includes the reader either emotionally or physically.”
Mosley’s book is also one of the first I’ve read that encourages fiction writers — or any prose writer for that matter — to study poetry seriously. Poetry teaches the writer, Mosley says, to appreciate the subtleties of language.
“Of all writing,” he says, “poetry is the most demanding . . . .In poetry you have to see language as both music and content.”
I was also impressed by Mosley’s differentiating between intuitive writers — those who basically plunge in and discover the story as they write —-and structure writers, who know the whole story from beginning to end, and don’t plunge in until they know it.
Some writing books, as Robert Olen Butler’s From Where You Dream, favor one method over the other. Butler suggests to some extent that the intuitive approach is the only approach that will allow a writer to tap into the creative zone necessary to write without restraint and create art.
“The intuitive and structured methods are equally valid,” Mosley says.
Truthfully, Mosley says, there are probably few writers who are strictly intuitive or structured.
One of my favorite sections of the book is a digression on genre. Mosley doesn’t stash any genre into the literary suburbs. It’s a refreshing outlook—in a refreshing book on writing — not always present in other books on writing, which seem to encourage writers to aspire only to literary writing, whatever that is.
“A novel is a novel is a novel,” he writes. “A crime story is a novel. A romance is a novel. . . .No one who is serious about literature would dismiss One Hundred Years of Solitude for being a fantasy. No one would write off The Stranger because of its courtroom or crime details.”
I like this post from SF Signal.
And as a bonus, I’m going to answer the questions the post presents, though no one thought to ask me:
What was the best writing advice you received as a teenager/young adult, and who gave it to you?
I never received any writing advice as a teenager. But, I never asked anyone. I didn’t write much as a teenager, although the urge to do something creative with language nagged me: at times I wanted to write and draw comic books, or become a published role-playing game designer (my first writing submission was a rpg module sent to Dragon magazine), or write fantasy novels like Robert E. Howard or Michael Moorcock. Much of that activity was discouraged. I did, however, read. And as almost all the answers in this post note, every writer was a voracious reader. Reading begets writing.
The first real writing advice I ever received came from Rita Mae Brown’s Starting From Scratch. To Miss Brown, reading was paramount. So was writing in active voice. Her book also suggested journalism as an avocation to prepare for the vocation of being a literary artist. I went with that, and have found that journalism may just be a vocation and literary writing the avocation. Or maybe it’s all just a dream.
If you knew then what you know now about the writing life, would you have continued to pursue it?
I think I would have pursued writing in some way, although I certainly would have made some changes in my education and career pursuits. In particular, if I had a better vision of what I wanted to write or of my desire to write before I entered university, I probably would have gone to J-school. I also would have paid more attention to the emerging technology, and not been such a damn Luddite, perhaps learning photography, videography, and would have become much more familiar with the InterWebs in its infancy than I was.
How much of a disconnect is there between your vision of the writing life and the reality of it?
Up until about 10 years ago, my vision and reality were seriously disconnected. I had visions of myself whacking away at a manual typewriter while living on the Left Bank of Paris with tons of expats, like Hemingway. I drew my whole image of what a writer’s life was like from Hemingway. I wasn’t really paying attention to what was going on around me. I certainly had a hard time connecting that image to a career path as a writer. I wasn’t aware of the changes in publishing. Or how difficult it is to publish a book. Or how technology has changed writers. That and it’s clear writers aren’t pop stars. I’m not even sure writers register as even blips in the galaxy.
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