Tag Archives for writing

The First Rule of Beginning a Story . . .

. . . don’t start with strangers bashing each other in the mouth or the nuts or anywhere else. “[I]f you plunge instantly into the action, you risk losing the reader,” writes Damon Knight in Creating Short Fiction. “It is hard to take much interest in absolute strangers, no matter how enthusiastically they may be bashing each other.”

Of course, there are always exceptions to the rules of Write Club, as Chuck Palahniuk demonstrates in the opening of Fight Club:

fight 2Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, after that Tyler’s pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die. For a long time though, Tyler and I were best friends. People are always asking, did I know about Tyler Durden.

Why does this beginning work, though the narrator has a gun shoved in his mouth in the hook? (Also note the comma splice. Does that work for you? Why? I like it; it speeds the beginning, alerts you to the roller coaster ride you are about to begin, and tells you you’re about to get your nose bloodied, or worse, much, much worse.) I think Palahniuk’s beginning works, because, if you are like me, you’re suddenly asking who is this person who gets you a job then shoves a gun in your mouth? What kind of psycho is this? It raises suspense.

But Knight is probably right. You have to begin a story and make the reader care about the narrator. And unless the narrator has a gun in his mouth, you probably won’t be interested. You don’t have to have someone in such dire straits to get your money for  nothing and your beginning for free. You do need tension and suspense or provoke interest, as  Knight confirms, “The opening must establish character, setting, situation, the mood and tone of the story; it must provoke interest, arouse curiosity, suggest conflict, start the movement of the plot—all this in about two hundred words.”

What do you think? What makes a good beginning?

—Todd

But Learn the Rules First . . .

“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”—W. Somerset Maugham

Earlier, I tweeted the following link to breaking writing  rules. Thought I’d share it here for those who didn’t see it then. Also, I would say you do need to learn the rules, learn to use them effectively before breaking them.

Anyhow, enjoy:

5 Classic Writing Rules We Could Do Without

—Todd

John Scalzi on Writing

I have to recommend John Scalzi’s blog Whatever for any writer—fiction no matter the genre (and I’m not really sure why you don’t read science fiction), non fiction, copywriting, or whatever. Not only does he share insights about writing, but also gives other writers plugs. He’s also funny.

And an example of how the SF & F community seems much more willing to pay it forward with other writers than writers in other genres.

Scalzi also recently posted an interview in which he talks about his background as a journalist and film critic, and about the most important event of his life–getting laid off at AOL and deciding to become a freelance writer. At that point he took control of his career. Something writers need to do more of, even this on.

So, enjoy this video.

—Todd

How Many Words Must a Writer Write Down To Know He or She Has Written a Novel?

Word Count

Word Count

I once read somewhere Mark Twain kept a running word count in the margins of his manuscripts. Word counts are probably a weird obsession held largely by writers. We survive by them. Sometimes we’re paid by the number of words we write. Sometimes we use the count to measure a good day’s work, whether those words add up to a few sentences or several pages.

Word counts also tell us—somewhat arbitrarily—what sort of work we have written. Is it a Tweet (which actually is even more micro, down to the character)? Is it an essay? A short story? A novella? A novel?

A few months ago, a writer friend of mine Gerald Warfield and I shoptalked about just such things. We couldn’t come up with a solid answer. But a blog post from Writer’s Digest gives some novel advice at least, breaking down some average word counts for novels of different lengths.

The link is here. Of course, it’s not the end-all declaration of authority, but it must count for something.

—Todd

None but a blockhead

One of my new favorite writers is John Scalzi. Besides writing some good SF, he also writes a blog—Whatever—in which he writes, well, whatever he wants. Often his posts, to my delight, are a look inside another writer’s life; it’s the sort of site that’s often encouraging and inspirational, but grounded in the realities of writing for a living. And it helps me feel not quite so alone in my ambitions and worries and even my small triumphs as a writer.

One of today’s posts addressed an issue most writers have to struggle with—money. Specifically saying it’s OK and good to actually make money from writing. It doesn’t make you a hack or sell-out. Upbringing (“money is the root of all evil”) combined with university English courses and professors and fellow students that romanticized the suffering, always struggling pauper writer/artist, it’s hard to break free of such a negative mindset toward money. So, I wanted to share Scalzi’s post below for those, like me, who have struggled constantly with this issue:

 A Moment of Financial Clarification

One Word Writing Prompts: Episode 1, Through the Wormhole

Episode 1

Wormhole

Wormhole

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Welcome to One Word Writing Prompts. This, I hope, may be another irregular feature for this blog, and was suggested by writer Amy Sprague. Basically, your instructions, dear Reader, should you wish to participate, are to simply use the word below as a prompt to write something from it. And, if you would like, please feel free to post your creative output in the comments, and with your permission, I might share them in a later post. Have fun. Be creative.

>Wormhole

Copy Editing Conundrum 2: Comma Karma

Episode 2

*Here’s the latest Copy Editing Conundrum: it comes from an excellent book on graphic design, The Elements of Graphic Design.

Sequencing information should logically and clearly lead from the primary visual to the headline, then to the secondary visual, caption, subhead, and finally to the text. Each of these pieces should be chosen or written as one part of a single continuous message the purpose of which is to reveal to the reader what the article is about and why it is valuable to them.

My conundrum is this: in the second sentence should there be a comma after “message”? I would insert a comma. So copy editors, what would you do?

___

*Note: This is by no means a criticism of the book or its contents. As I say, it’s an excellent book.

 

 

Outlaw Writer

John Gardner: Literary OutlawJohn Gardner: Literary Outlaw by Barry Silesky

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A real teacher, I suppose, can teach through any medium, even if he’s dead.

John Gardner died at age 49 after a motorcycle accident about a year before his classic The Art of Fiction was published in 1983. It’s basically Gardner’s collected notes on the craft, along with exercises. (As an aside: Gardner, as a writing teacher, experimented with broadcasting his writing classes on TV, which seems to prefigure online instruction.)

About ten years after the book’s publication, a friend loaned me a copy at a key time in my long apprenticeship as a writer (like most writers, even famous ones, there are moments I fear I’m a fraud, given my success as a fiction writer amounts to two short stories published online over eight years ago). I read it, absorbed it, worked through its exercises, some of the toughest exercises any writer could and should try.

Its still one of the best books on writing any writer could read, and I recommend it, as I recommend John Gardner: Literary Outlaw, the first fairly extensive general biography of Gardner ever published. The biography is absorbing, for the most part, a solid portrait of a writer as full of foibles and contradictions as he was genius for writing and teaching writing.

In many ways Gardner, or the image of himself that he portrayed publicly, and to most of those who knew him privately, was a model writer, wholly devoted to writing, to the craft; writing absorbed him. It was as much a state of being, almost inseparable from the man, which is a recurrent  theme of the biography. I suppose today much of Gardner’s life as a writer falls into cliche: heavy drinking, womanizing, depressive (probably bipolar, given the envious bouts of energy Gardner seemed to possess, even after drinking astounding amounts of gin, etc.). And yet, it’s sort of a cliche you, as a writer, want to aspire to. A life almost wholly devoted to writing and literature.

As far as Gardner being a literary outlaw: I suppose he was at the time his fame and stature grew in the late ’70s and early ’80s, or infamy as some might and did say with the publication of his book On Moral Fiction, a polemic that pretty much slapped most of his contemporaries (Mailer, Updike, John Barth) in their, according to him, amoral faces.

In time, he would recant some of what he wrote in On Moral Fiction,and his novels (Grendel, Mickelsson’s Ghosts, for instance)would seem to contradict his dismissing the fiction of fabulists and metafictionists, such as Barth, as basically crap that largely broke its promises to the reader of providing a profulent uninterrupted dream, and rather descended into cheap wordplay. (Although to this day, Barth’s short story “Lost in the Funhouse” mostly makes me scratch my head and say WTF?)

At the time that I read On Moral Fiction, in the early ’90s, I loved it; back then, my life had turned seemingly into an absurd existentialist vacuum. I viewed the book then as sort of a secular bible. And, I suppose, its urge toward attempting to write not didactic fiction, but fiction that challenges and moves toward transcendence rather than the Abyss, is still a driving force in my writing.

And it’s not hard to believe Gardner reached such a transcendence in his own life, as Silesky suggests poignantly at the end of the biography, quoting one of Gardner’s students who wrote after visiting the site in 1998 in Susquehanna, New York where Gardner crashed his motorcycle and died: “‘In the mythology of death . . . one must cross the river; and there it was [the Susquehanna River]. All he had to do was get up, brush the grit off his trousers and step across.’”

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