Warren Adler's Blog, page 20
July 14, 2016
INTERESTING LITERATURE Features WHY I WRITE: WARREN ADLER’S REFLECTION ON THE 70TH ANNIVERSARY OF GEORGE ORWELL’S PIVOTAL ESSAY
People often ask, and I ask myself on a daily basis, why I have spent more than six decades writing novels, short stories, essays, poems, plays and occasional reportage, continuing to ply this obsession into the cusp of my dotage.
My answer to others and especially to myself never seems quite adequate. Whether I take the high road proclaiming the need to find artistic and aesthetic truth in the human condition or the low road of pure egoism, I sound like either a pompous ass or a mere poseur.
I can take refuge in proclaiming it’s an addiction, some genetic craving or perhaps the necessity to unburden myself of a brain overstuffed with stories. Maybe it’s the fear of some yet undiscovered affliction of the mind or maybe I can review events in an unloved childhood citing loneliness, abuse, cruel parenting, hunger or poverty that forced me out of despair and into some inner fantasy life. None of which would necessarily be true. [Continue Reading on Interesting Literature]
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July 13, 2016
A.M. Madden
In 2014 a middle-aged mother of two got laid off after twenty-four years with the same retail company and was suddenly unemployed. At the same time, she was just finishing up her first book—which she started as a self-challenge. Suddenly, that book became so much more than a little project. She researched self-publishing, and released it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords. She watched it slowly become noticed, read, reviewed, bought, and liked!!! Crazy story, but it’s true. When I first published, I had absolutely no expectations. I am a reader first and foremost, a lover of all things in the romance genre. When I decided to write my own perfect love story, I assumed three people would read it…including my mother. I made a few mistakes, one of which was publishing without a social media following or website. I didn’t have it properly edited. I had a friend “paint” my cover for me…it was awful. Not only did I spend my time writing, I spent it developing relationships with bloggers and readers while researching everything I could in regards to the self-publishing industry. Over the last two years, I published nine books, hit several bestseller lists, including USA Today, and won a few awards. My dream job came later in my adult life, and I’m so grateful it did. If I can entertain one person with my books, and have them walk away wishing my characters were real, well then I feel my job is done.
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July 11, 2016
The Top 3 Writing Mistakes That Make a Bad Novel
I’ve taught creative writing courses for a number of years at several schools like NYU, and I always told my students what writing mistakes they should avoid. Here is a list of 3 writing mistakes that I have come across most often in my career. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a novice or a pro, every writer should keep in mind while perfecting their craft.
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July 6, 2016
Debra Gaynor
Sarah and Ryan in 2002 are our first born grandchildren. They live about an hour and a half from us. When they were little we would make the trip to pick them up knowing what was going to transpire. TEARS! Sarah and Ryan loved our German Shepherd, Buddy, and he loved them. So I began to tell them “Buddy Stories.” Every other weekend we would buckle them into their car seats and I’d ask, “Who wants to hear a Buddy Story?” I would tell the most outrageous tales of Buddy. I always started out with “Once Upon A Time” and I would include Buddy’s best friends, Sarah, Ryan, Shirley Squirrel, Freddy Frog and any other characters I could think of. Soon Sarah and Ryan were laughing at Buddy’s antics. The stories got more exciting with each telling. Sarah and Ryan would ask for a Buddy story as soon as they got in the car and not just one Buddy story, as soon as I finished one they would want another.
Sarah and Ryan came to me a couple of years ago and asked me to put them on paper and have them published. So began the series, “Buddy Stories.” So why do I write? I write for my grandchildren and because something in me says write.
http://www.bookreviewsbydebragaynor.com/
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June 29, 2016
Martha Brockenbrough
I fell in love with reading when I was a child. Books were comfort. They were exciting. Heartbreaking. Funny. Full of wonder. They were a place I could go to experience other lives and in doing so, learn how better to live my own. This is why I write: to say something about what it means to be a human being, and to offer companionship to others who share this world with me. The Game of Love and Death in particular grapples with life’s central question: what significance does love have when every last one of us will someday die?
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June 24, 2016
What Does it Mean to be “Based On a True Story”?
I have always been somewhat amused by the phrase ‘Based on a True Story’ that I see on book covers and movie screens. The line is of course a marketing strategy to connect potential readers or viewers with what is essentially a fictional interpretation of an authentic, perhaps remembered, contemporary or historical event or situation, well known or not, that might trigger interest.
In an odd way it embellishes the definition of all fiction as based on “true” stories as defined, interpreted, observed, remembered or imagined by the author. From the creative writer’s viewpoint all stories and characters are “true” whether they are based on authentic contemporary or historical events and people or not. Therein lies the beauty of imaginative invention.
The Mysterious Engine
Like all allegedly lofty pronouncements, mine is based solely on personal experience in the form of more than fifty novels and many short stories. All of these efforts have come 
out of the amalgam of observed situations, random readings, journalism, news, other fictions, personal traumas, encounters, memories, fantasies, dreams, frustrations, humor, pain, loss, stress, joy, pleasure, and whatever else my brain cells have encountered as they passed through a mysterious engine of cognition.
The very mention of the brain, our master circuit of total control, brings to mind the ultimate illustration of what I am trying to make understandable and my novel “Cult” is a fair example of what I am getting at.
It is “based upon” a personal experience in which I was able to observe first hand how the brain of a loved one was manipulated and enslaved by an idea that could obliterate all past logic and reduce one to acceptance of a self-destructive motivation founded on the premise of immortality and the promise of perpetual pleasure and reward.
That personal experience and the events I observed morphed itself into a wholly imagined story, a rearrangement of the “truth” of my observation of the power of this destructive transformation. What I consciously realized as I developed this story line was the worldwide implications of what I discovered through this experience and how it related to what was going on outside the orbit of my composition: How was it possible for people to accept a belief that a joyous and pleasurable immortality would be granted to those who obeyed the commandments of those who had essentially found a way to manipulate unsuspecting and susceptible brains?
The Filtering Process
It is a mind boggling truth that people, mostly young people, have been persuaded to kill others by becoming human bombs, and have been manipulated to believe they will be rewarded for such an act merely on the basis of ‘listening” to those who had discovered the method to command them to perform such destructive acts.
Suicide bombers are now an accepted part of the landscape of warfare, ordered to willingly destroy their lives and especially the lives of alleged enemies, to achieve a welcoming journey to a heavenly fantasyland. I observed the methodology of this process and wrote a story based on my baring witness. Yes, indeed, the story could be said to be “based” on what was “true” as filtered through the invention of a creative writer.
The point here is that all fictional writing is based upon a personal “truth” as conceived by the writer. It may be categorized as “fiction” for purposes of marketing but to the serious composer it is the absolute unvarnished truth.
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June 22, 2016
Meredith Wild
I believe I’ve always been a writer at heart. Throughout my life, I have often been drawn to the craft as a path to emotional survival, to help process an overwhelming physical world.
I came to write fiction after years of having buried many of my creative dreams under the tech company I’d started after college. The stresses of my “day job” ultimately drove me to write my first novel, a project that required me to dedicate huge blocks of time I couldn’t afford to part with to writing. I was so desperate for an escape that somehow I was able to give myself permission to make the time to see it through.
Fiction as a medium gave me a kind of freedom and relief from reality that I’d never experienced before with personal memoir. For the first time, I was allowed to fold my personal experiences and thoughts into a fantasy world that I could control—one with a happy ending too! This addictive quality of the creative life continues to draw me back to the page, grounding me and giving me a measure of control and a sense of accomplishment when the real world refuses to cooperate.
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June 20, 2016
Warren Adler on #WhyWritersMatter
I’ve been a member of the Author’s Guild for decades and I am proud to share my reflection for the #WhyWritersMatter campaign from The Writers’ Union of Canada (TWUC).
Does writing matter? It does. Especially to the writer who draws stories from the raw material of their observations and transforms them into reflections fueled by the imagination and the genetic gift of invention.
The serious writer of fiction offers a mirror to the reader, hoping to unscramble the distortion of the human condition and provide the reader some version of the truth of his or her existence.
We are all searching for life’s meaning, for understanding of our fellow men who spend barely a wink of time on the planet. While I approach the answer from a creative writer’s vantage, the question implies a universality of the written word as a primary tool of communication, enlightenment, criticism, analysis, opinion, contention, doctrine and dogma that must be protected, unfettered and untrammelled by any form of censorship or restriction.
In its practice and presentation, the arrangement of words is an art form that creates meaning out of the brain’s musings and must be respected, tolerated and endured as a handmaiden of thought—whatever the subject matter.
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June 16, 2016
Top Father’s Day Fiction From Warren Adler
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June 15, 2016
Janet B Taylor
Why do I write? Well see, I come from a family full of southern women with big hair and even bigger mouths. And man, do we love to tell stories. One day a few years ago, I had a shower epiphany. ‘What if I tried to write down some of these stories rolling around in my head?’ I mean, no matter how much people love you, eventually they get tired of hearing you blather on. But the page…the page never sighs or rolls its eyes when you retell a story for the seventeenth time. Once I got started, I couldn’t stop. And the next thing I knew, I had an agent and a 2 book deal and bam! Bob’s your uncle. The ability to tell a good story is inherent, I think, though it’s important to hone the craft part of things. But if you can call upon your storytelling ‘genes’ and get someone to pay you to do it…that’s just frosting on my grandmother’s famous lemon cake, isn’t it? Wait. Have I told ya’ll the story about how she came up with that recipe? Hang on to your hats, then. It’s a doozy…
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