Ask the Author: Vincent H. O'Neil
Answered Questions (2)
Vincent H. O'Neil
The best advice I ever got about writing is this: You're not a writer, you're a storyteller. I adopted that as my approach, and ever since then I see ideas for stories all around me.
Sometimes it's just a neat turn of phrase I heard someone say, and when I was turning it over in my mind the phrase raised a couple of "what if" questions that then transformed into stories. Other times it's something I see happening that, if it changed just a little, would make for the beginning of a very interesting tale.
The ideas are all around us, and it's up to each storyteller to decide what helps him or her to see those ideas.
Sometimes it's just a neat turn of phrase I heard someone say, and when I was turning it over in my mind the phrase raised a couple of "what if" questions that then transformed into stories. Other times it's something I see happening that, if it changed just a little, would make for the beginning of a very interesting tale.
The ideas are all around us, and it's up to each storyteller to decide what helps him or her to see those ideas.
Vincent H. O'Neil
This is an interesting coincidence. I'm re-reading Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, and he had a marvelous observation about the times when his writing wasn't flowing:
"But sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made.
I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, "Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know."
So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there."
As always with Hemingway, I'm not exactly sure what he was saying. But I do follow the simple practice of taking a single idea, scene, or line that interests me and then wrapping words around it. That's how I keep going when the writing is difficult.
"But sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made.
I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, "Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know."
So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there."
As always with Hemingway, I'm not exactly sure what he was saying. But I do follow the simple practice of taking a single idea, scene, or line that interests me and then wrapping words around it. That's how I keep going when the writing is difficult.
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