Wes Demott's Blog, page 2

Practical advice for getting started on your novel (NEW and open for comment)

Let's assume you already have an idea in mind for your novel, and lots of scenes you already intend to write. Let's further assume that you've written your outline, done your research, are sure of your facts, and feel ready to actually start writing your novel.

Now you're face with the dreaded… (Cue Scary Music)…blank page.  Hundreds of them, in fact, and that can be pretty intimidating.

Although lots of new novelists crank out the first chapter or two without a problem, almost every writer hits the wall at some point.  But I learned a secret that keeps that from happening to me, and it works for everyone with whom I've shared it, too.  I got much of it from"> Ernest Hemingway, and using this method allows me to avoid ever sitting down and wondering what to write next.

First off, I already have my outline (I'll say it again: the time invested in an outline will more than pay off when you're writing your book), and my outline tells me, more or less, what I'm going to write today. My personal goal is five pages a day because, hey, at that rate in just two months I'll have a first draft, right?

But I don't usually want to jump right into writing five pages of a novel when I first sit down at my laptop. Like many of you, I need to warm up a bit.

Some writers, especially when they're starting out, do writing exercises to get the juices flowing. At some point, though, you realize you're a professional writer and want to make all your efforts count, so the idea of exercising, while sounding nice, pretty much goes out the door with the tread mill and stationary bike

So instead of doing writing exercises, the first thing I do when I sit down is edit the five pages I wrote yesterday. Sometimes I go back ten pages.  I read and edit them, sometimes a couple of times, sharpening the dialogue, augmenting details, making sure I use the exact right words, because what sounded wonderful yesterday might not even make sense today (if you've written for a while, you know how true that can be).  So I polish it. And while I'm cleaning up the words I wrote yesterday, an amazing thing happens.  I get drawn back into the story, and become anxious to write what happens next.

Now here's the coolest part: When I finish editing yesterday's work, I know exactly what happens next because Ernest told me: "Stop writing when you know what happens next." So, when I finished writing yesterday, I wrote a sentence or two about what happens next, something like:

Taz goes to town and gets thrown in jail while Pete guards Wasafiri but gets boarded by the mysterious guy they saw in the opening scene.

 It's not much, certainly, but you can imagine how easy those few lines make it to segue from editing your work from yesterday to writing your work today, especially when an outline fleshes it out even further.

This advice will really simplify your efforts to write you novel.  And after you've written it, I have another important tip for you.

Walk away from it for several months!

That's right.  Put it in your grandma's panty drawer and don't even think about it for a long time. I kid you not, when you re-read it after a long break you will go: "God, am I glad I did not let anyone else read this."

I swear by that.  My friend Brooke Cooley mentioned the value of that advice to her on her blog, and everyone who tries it, values it.  So should you, even though I know you're proud of your accomplishment and probably know of an agent who's willing to read it.  I'm also sure your friends have read a few pages and were wonderfully encouraging.  Your dog and perhaps even your boyfriend salivate over it (I'm not judging) and you just know it's destined for bestseller status.

But if you will just once take this advice, and see the difference in the quality after you wait a few months, you will never again finish your manuscript and then send it off.  I've been a professional writer for a long time and am still amazed at how dramatically I improve my novels after letting them sit and season a bit.

And on a personal note, I would have been much farther along in my career if someone had given this advice to me.  But like many of you, I was sure my novel was perfect and amazing, I had an agent waiting to read it, and they already had a publisher in mind.  That was back in the day when we printed out our manuscripts and sent them to agents in a manuscript box, complete with return postage.

Want to know what it costs to print and send a four-hundred page manuscript to and from NYC? I can tell you.

Lastly, writing is re-writing.  Creating your story is hard, but editing your own work is probably the most fun of the whole process because you're cleaning, amplifying, and adding beautiful, light touches. So don't cheat yourself out of the experience of self-editing, or the benefits.

One other tip: don't feel like you have to write your novel from beginning to end. If there's a scene or chapter you're anxious to write, then by all means get it on paper and save it with a description – but not a chapter number. I have just such a scene right now titled "Something for Isabelle," and even though I know what its chapter number is according to the outline, an outline is merely a guide and not a jailor.  I'll often break an outline chapter into two chapters, or decide that a little something else needs to come first.  If I number the chapters I write out of sequence, it gets a bit trickier to keep track of them when I change their location in the story.

 

Creating Great Characters

Creating Good Characters

(As I've said elsewhere on this blog, there are hundreds of excellent books on the craft of writing, and I suggest you read lots of them. But I add nothing to this discussion by merely regurgitating that information and so will offer up what I think for you to accept or reject. If it's totally wrong-headed, the blame is mine alone).

The great number of books on the topic of characters reflects its importance, yet I know many writers and, sadly, read many books by authors who don't seem to understand how essential great characters are to a good story.

It might help to keep in mind that you'll be asking readers to voluntarily spend their money and a great deal of their time with your characters. Think about that. Now think about how small a percentage of the people you meet interest you enough to spend long hours with them. That should give you an idea of the importance of great characters.

To me, great characters are essential to a good story, and I close most books after 100 pages if I don't care what's happening to whom. Why should I bother reading the plot if I don't give a damn about the person it affects.

And with that, my friends, I segue into the debate between "character-driven" stories and "plot-driven" stories.

The ">James Bond books (and movies) are plot driven. You don't know much about Bond and you kind of like it that way. You never worry if he'll survive because you know he will.  Although there have been a few moments when we've given a glance at a past hurt or a clue to some insecurity, overall, Bond is Bond, and will be Bond long after we've all taken that last shot of Jack Daniels, toasted our own lives, and checked out. We read the books and watch the movies for the story (the plot) – all the intrigue and gadgets and explosions they can stuff into it.

Bond books are fun, no doubt.

Now, think of another successful book like it.

I'm sure they're out there, but my point is that most stories have characters in whom we invest our emotions and concerns and, to some extent, our friendship or hatred.  You usually have a reaction to someone you meet in your own life, and I think it's fair of your readers to anticipate a reaction to characters they meet in your book.

For an easy comparison, consider Robert Ludlum's Jason Bourne in ">The Bourne Identity to Ian Fleming's James Bond in any of his many books. Do you care about Bourne?  Hope he learns his past?  Feel for his lost love and his sad life alone?

I do. I want him to have all the good things I have in life, and why? Because Ludlum made me care about him, almost like he's a friend, and in spite of the fact that he's done some bad things.

So how do you develop good characters?  Good question.  Here are some thoughts?

I read a book very early on that advised new writers to create a back story for their characters. I took that advice to heart and created entire past lives for all of my characters. I knew where they were born, what sports they played, what made them proud or ashamed, what embarrassed them, if they had brothers or sisters, lost their hair early, rebelled or conformed as they grew up…you get the idea.

The process forced me to delve into why Angelo Cortez, a villain in ">Walking K, was so vicious, and then discover that he'd only turned to violence after he'd been horribly humiliated. The carnage he caused earned him a fearful respect, and respect of any kind was preferable to shame in any form, at least to him.

It also helped me discover that Peter Jamison's actions in ">The Fund were driven by a guilty responsibility for once allowing a loved one to get hurt, and a determination to never let it happen again (the themes of honor and responsibility show up a lot in my books).

Bits of those particular back stories actually wound up in the storyline, but most of what I'd learned about my characters did not. It was just an exercise I'd done so that I knew them well enough to know what they would do in a situation, and not just what I wanted them to do.

And that's the key, I think. You should know your characters so thoroughly in your head and your heart that they'll tell you, "I would never do that" when you're trying to shoehorn them into an action. I know Taz Keaton (in the Mayday Salvage and Rescue series that starts with ">Tortuga Gold) will never hurt me, but that his half-brother, Sam, might. And even though those things are fairly easy to determine, I had to be sure of them before I could write their stories.

Perfect people, whether saints or villains, are boring, but fully-drawn but imperfect characters can provide both you and the reader with the same fun journey of discovery as a partner. But as with a partner, you should know them pretty well before you start.

In The Fund, I outlined Jack Kane as a bad man, a heartless, soulless killer. But as I wrote that international best-seller Kane kept whispering to me that he was really a pretty decent guy who'd been re-molded by the cauldron of injustice into a vengeful man who hated his actions as much as we did. I kept trying to write him as out-and-out bad, but his voice was so loud that I finally listened to him.

That required me to rewrite the entire ending of that book, and you know what? It's the ending of that book that has kept it selling since 1999, and why the updated version will continue to sell for a long time. The ending that Jack Kane forced me to discover is why ">Publishers Weekly praised it this way:

 "Near the novel's end, the story shifts gears with unexpected plot twists and a major, clever character shift, opening up many intriguing and fresh new perspectives…ending with a flourish as a stylized, turn-on-a-dime crime story where the lines between love, murder and espionage are deftly blurred."  

Wow. Nice, huh? But the ending almost didn't happen that way, and wouldn't have if I hadn't known (and heard) my characters.

The point is obvious, I hope. By knowing all of your characters so well that you can hear them in your head, and then paying attention to what they tell you, they can enrich your story far beyond anything you could have done on your own. And yes, you have to be a little crazy to be a good fiction writer.

Now, you might be wondering where in the writing process you develop your characters.  For me, it's during the outlining process (discussed in another post). While the outline is helping me determine the scope and type of my cast of characters, I start thinking about their lives before they appear in my book, and continue to flesh them out through the extensive outlining process.

The great thing about working with an outline is that you can change it without much trouble if a character balks at the role you've given him (as Jack Kane did).  With an outline I can easily see the changes I need to make throughout the book, and all the clues I need to give, inserting them in a sentence here and there that will become a scene when I move from outline to novel. Without an outline, I would have to try to find and correct any reference to the character trait or personal history that no longer applied to my revised view of my character.

Final thought: Make sure you invest as much time in your villains as your heroes. Robert Ludlum was dead right when he said that failing to do so leaves you with villains who are nothing more than straw men. Any teenage girl will tell you that bad guys are inherently interesting, but they still need to have soul and life, and it's up to you as the writer to breathe that into them.

Questions? Fire away.

Manuscript format

Manuscript Format

This is a quick topic because there is a well-established format for most writing.  I write novels, short-stories and screenplays. This post is about short-story and novel format, but I'll mention here that screenplays are completely different and need to be studied and understood on their own.  There are a few software programs for screenwriting that are pretty good.  I've only used ">FINAL DRAFT©. I was pleased the way it worked and its ease of use.

Format for Novels

 Leave plenty of margins for editorial notes, at least 1.25 inches.

Start the text of each chapter on the twelfth double-spaced line down the page (halfway, in other words).

The chapter heading can be one double space above it, but don't use bold type or a different font. Just use Times New Roman for everything.

Put hard page breaks between the chapters.

The SLUG identifies each page of your manuscript by name and author.  If using MS Word, go to "View" then "Headers and Footers" and type your name and the title of your manuscript in italics (DeMott/">Tortuga Gold) and click "align right."

While on "Headers and Footers," shift to "Footer" and click to insert page number. Align center.

At the end of the story, center a dash, double zero, and a dash so the editor knows you're done, as in:  – 00 -

As mentioned elsewhere, putting the attribution before a name is very much out of fashion.  Say: Taz said.  Not: said Taz.

Use a cover sheet that has the title of the novel in the center, with "by" centered below it and your name centered below that.  Double-space.

At the bottom right corner include the word count and post a copyright notice (even if you haven't yet copyrighted it).  Then include your contact information.  If you're agented, use just your agent's contact information.  Here's how it looks.

 75,647 words

Copyright © 2011 Wes DeMott

Representation (note: what follows should be single spaced, not double as shown):

xxxxxxxx, Literary Agent

xxxxHart Street

North Hollywood,CA91605

818-xxx-xxxx

818-xxx-xxxxx(fax)

xxxxxxxx@pacbell.net

A Model (Paradigm) For Your Novel

(All these articles are my own thoughts. There are plenty of books on each of these subjects, and I suggest you read them, which means I add nothing by merely regurgitating that information.)

A Model (Paradigm) For Your Novel

 You've had your idea, you've jotted down some scenes you want to write, and perhaps you've even hammered out a rough outline. That's fantastic, really. You're farther along than you think, and probably quite a ways ahead of the person who sat down to write Chapter One/Page One with no real idea where they were heading after the opening.

Now what?

Good question.

If you've been thinking about your novel for a while, I hope you've also been reading books of a similar type, and reading them like a writer (at this point you might want to go back and read the relevant University of Georgia Seminar posted on this site). With luck, you've read a few books that feel comfortably familiar, written in a style and structure you can imagine using for your own story.

If so, that's great, because you're at a good place to divert some attention from your outline and deconstruct those novels (perhaps reverse-engineer is a better term), noting the structure, tense, number and role of main characters, story flow, turning points, places where the drama rises and falls, how it builds to a powerful conclusion, and anything else that stands out. Don't steal the words or style or story, and for God's sake don't plagiarize a word of it, but feel free to use it as a guide

I started out wanting to write thrillers because it was a world I knew pretty well professionally, the subject interested me, and I enjoyed reading them. So when my mentor, Sterling Watson, to whom I'll always give lots of credit, gave that same advice to me, I'd already read most of Ludlum's books. I'd also seen a movie called Three Days of the Condor and decided to read that book by James Grady (titled Six Days of the Condor).

In the end, I applied Robert Ludlum's story concept to the structure and style of Condor and another book, Marathon Man, by William Goldman, using them as paradigms. I read and studied all of them several times, and aimed for that collective target. That doesn't mean, however, that I was a slave to them, or that you should be a slave to another writer's style. The opposite is actually true; you need to write your book so that no one but you could have written it.

And, of course, while studying those books I kept getting ideas and jotting them down. I didn't work off an outline back then and so my notes were terribly disorganized, but the point I want to make is that studying a paradigm will inspire new ideas for your story, advancing that process. It's not a static endeavor in which you abandon your own novel to study another's.

If you read Ludlum or Marathon Man or Six Days of the Condor, and then any of my books, you'd see almost no similarity at all. But if I hadn't studied them, my books would look entirely different than they actually turned out (and you might not have gotten a chance to read them because they might not have even sold to a publisher). So, to increase your chances of writing a successful first novel, and to cut down on time-consuming mistakes and rewrites, please find a paradigm and study it.

One other thing: I don't want to make a big deal of this, but I know some of you are thinking you don't need to study other works or learn the rules of writing because it's your intention to write with liberation, freed of the constraints of an industry longing for that brave new style and unique new voice. To you I say: I hope you are that new voice.

But everyone who's broken the mold and poured the molten lead of their talent into a new and exciting casting has first learned the rules, and then learned how to break or expand them.  If you have that amazing voice inside you, I'll bet a drink against a dung heap that you'll never get it down and recognized until you first learn the rules. Further, in my own case, my "I'm a new and fresh talent" egotism was largely motivated by laziness, and perhaps a lack of commitment that sought to short circuit around the hard work of learning the process. Sound familiar to any of you?

And yes, I hated it when I was told the same thing :0.  (BTW, smiley faces/emoticons are like exclamation points. If you feel you need one, then you probably chose insufficient words to truly carry the meaning of your sentence.)

Loving Zelda

Challenge your emotions with a story of love lost and devotion

via Loving Zelda.

Pages I am working on

Still working on this. Please enjoy another article and come back soon.

Coming soon – A paradigm

Coming Soon. Please check back.

Coming soon – creating characters

I'm working on this. Will post soon.

Previous Post – Point of View

Crossing the Point of View Bridge

 (This is very important stuff.  Please make sure you understand it completely, and post a comment if you don't.)

Your story will probably dictate whether it's told in first or third person or, rarely, second person.  Most novels are third person (past tense).  First person is a little unusual but there's a lot of it.  Other than the 3rd person prologue, I wrote ">HEAT SYNC in 1st person. The prologue and first chapter are on my website (www.wesdemott.com) if you need a quick example of both.

None of that is very complicated stuff, really, but what does complicate things for many new writers is point-of-view (POV).  Your understanding of POV is critical, and probably the hardest thing for a new writer to learn. But once understood it will become obvious.

Although a few books are written in a omniscient point-of-view (as though from a god-like perspective where the writer/narrator sees all and knows all), that tends to separate the reader from the character. That's why so many books are written in the view of one character at a time. The POV can shift from scene-to-scene throughout a novel, but each scene is in one person's POV.

The hallmark of an unpolished writer is an accidental point of view shift between characters. Here's an example written in Wes's third-person POV (and not the omniscient POV):

Wes struggled as he wrote about accidental point of view shifts, thinking of the best ways to describe it and trying to remember how he finally got a grip on it while the reader waited impatiently, hoping like hell that Wes would just get on with it before Dancing with the Stars came on.

Do you see it?  If not, read it again.

See it now?

Since that passage is written from my POV it can only report to you what I'm thinking. It's impossible for me (or the writer pretending to be me, poor soul) to also know what you're thinking or seeing or feeling or hoping.  The writer can only tell you what I'm thinking.

Sure, the writer can guess about what you're thinking, but they can't know.  You see this all the time, and in the example above it could be accomplished (assuming we were actually in the room together) by changing "…the reader waited impatiently" to "…the reader seemed impatient, with a look of hope that Wes…"

Got it?  Perhaps not.  As I said, it's tricky.

Look at it this way: You're talking to your girlfriend, thinking about how nice she looks and the crazy-wild adventure you'd like to have with her later.  Maybe she's thinking the same thing, but you just never know (hey, she's a woman AND in a different POV).

Maybe she's about to dump you or drag you behind the couch or tell you she's having Clive Cussler's baby, but you don't know and can only guess based on what she's saying and how she's acting—those things you can see, hear, and intimate from her body language and behavior.

It's the same with writing. You have to be in a person's POV to really know what's in their head.

So how do you accurately convey information about what another character is thinking?  You add a few lines of white space, perhaps with some *  *  *, and then intentionally shift POV, almost immediately identifying whose POV we're in.  For instance:

 …and so Wes hoped he'd conveyed it accurately, but wasn't sure.  He wanted to keep trying but knew he risked the mass suicides of those readers who'd already learned it.

*    *    *

 The beautiful reader studied what Wes wrote, and then she studied it again, thinking it mustn't be that hard but yet still unsure that she understood it until…Wham! It was suddenly as obvious as missing alimony. She knew she'd never screw it up again.

Warning: If you are really sure you understand this, good for you.  If you have doubt, as I said above, post something and let's work it out. All editors and agents (and me) will put down a book as soon as we see that the writer hasn't crossed that first essential bridge.

Food for thought -quotes

INSPIRATION AND IDEAS

—No. 1—

"Every idea is my last. I feel sure of it. So, I try to do the best with each as it comes and that's where my responsibility ends. But I just don't wait for ideas. I look for them. Constantly. And if I don't use the ideas that I find, they're going to quit showing up."

—Peg Bracken

—No. 2—

"If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed quickly, to trap them before they escape."

—Ray Bradbury

—No. 3—

"Good writing is remembering detail. Most people want to forget. Don't forget things that were painful or embarrassing or silly. Turn them into a story that tells the truth."

—Paula Danziger

—No. 4—

"I have never felt like I was creating anything. For me, writing is like walking through a desert and all at once, poking up through the hardpan, I see the top of a chimney. I know there's a house under there, and I'm pretty sure that I can dig it up if I want. That's how I feel. It's like the stories are already there. What they pay me for is the leap of faith that says: 'If I sit down and do this, everything will come out OK.'"

—Stephen King

—No. 5—

"A writer need not devour a whole sheep in order to know what mutton tastes like, but he must at least eat a chop. Unless he gets his facts right, his imagination will lead him into all kinds of nonsense, and the facts he is most likely to get right are the facts of his own experience."

—W. Somerset Maugham

—No. 6—

"Don't put down too many roots in terms of a domicile. I have lived in four countries and I think my life as a writer and our family's life have been enriched by this. I think a writer has to experience new environments. There is that adage: No man can really succeed if he doesn't move away from where he was born. I believe it is particularly true for the writer."

—Arthur Hailey

—No. 7—

"Sit and quiet yourself. Luxuriate in a certain memory and the details will come. Let the images flow. You'll be amazed at what will come out on paper. I'm still learning what it is about the past that I want to write. I don't worry about it. It will emerge. It will insist on being told."

—Frank McCourt

—No. 8—

"My advice is not to wait to be struck by an idea. If you're a writer, you sit down and damn well decide to have an idea. That's the way to get an idea."

—Andy Rooney

—No. 9—

"As writers we live life twice, like a cow that eats its food once and then regurgitates it to chew and digest it again. We have a second chance at biting into our experience and examining it. … This is our life and it's not going to last forever. There isn't time to talk about someday writing that short story or poem or novel. Slow down now, touch what is around you, and out of care and compassion for each moment and detail, put pen to paper and begin to write."

—Natalie Goldberg

GETTING STARTED

—No. 10—

"I have a self-starter—published 20 million words—and have never received, needed or wanted a kick in the pants."

—Isaac Asimov

—No. 11—

"Two questions form the foundation of all novels: 'What if?' and 'What next?' (A third question, 'What now?', is one the author asks himself every 10 minutes or so; but it's more a cry than a question.) Every novel begins with the speculative question, What if 'X' happened? That's how you start."

—Tom Clancy

—No. 12—

"I think my stuff succeeds, in part, because of what it's about—a diagnosis by attempting the adventures oneself of universal American daydreams. Now, I'm not saying that any writer who decided to select that device or notion could have written a bestseller; you have to add ingredients that are very special, I agree, but I think I started out with a good pot to make the stew in."

—George Plimpton

—No. 13—

"Beginning a novel is always hard. It feels like going nowhere. I always have to write at least 100 pages that go into the trashcan before it finally begins to work. It's discouraging, but necessary to write those pages. I try to consider them pages -100 to zero of the novel."

—Barbara Kingsolver

—No. 14—

"When I start on a book, I have been thinking about it and making occasional notes for some time—20 years in the case of Imperial Earth, and 10 years in the case of the novel I'm presently working on. So I have lots of theme, locale, subjects and technical ideas. It's amazing how the subconscious self works on these things. I don't worry about long periods of not doing anything. I know my subconscious is busy."

—Arthur C. Clarke

—No. 15—

"An outline is crucial. It saves so much time. When you write suspense, you have to know where you're going because you have to drop little hints along the way. With the outline, I always know where the story is going. So before I ever write, I prepare an outline of 40 or 50 pages."

—John Grisham

—No. 16—

"I do a great deal of research. I don't want anyone to say, 'That could not have happened.' It may be fiction, but it has to be true."

—Jacquelyn Mitchard

—No. 17—

"Being goal-oriented instead of self-oriented is crucial. I know so many people who want to be writers. But let me tell you, they really don't want to be writers. They want to have been writers. They wish they had a book in print. They don't want to go through the work of getting the damn book out. There is a huge difference."

—James Michener

—No. 18—

"Don't quit. It's very easy to quit during the first 10 years. Nobody cares whether you write or not, and it's very hard to write when nobody cares one way or the other. You can't get fired if you don't write, and most of the time you don't get rewarded if you do. But don't quit."

—Andre Dubus

—No. 19—

"Writing is like being in love. You never get better at it or learn more about it. The day you think you do is the day you lose it. Robert Frost called his work a lover's quarrel with the world. It's ongoing. It has neither a beginning nor an end. You don't have to worry about learning things. The fire of one's art burns all the impurities from the vessel that contains it."

—James Lee Burke

STYLE & CRAFT

—No. 20—

"What a writer has to do is write what hasn't been written before or beat dead men at what they have done."

—Ernest Hemingway

—No. 21—

"You have to follow your own voice. You have to be yourself when you write. In effect, you have to announce, 'This is me, this is what I stand for, this is what you get when you read me. I'm doing the best I can—buy me or not—but this is who I am as a writer."

—David Morrell

—No. 22—

"Oftentimes an originator of new language forms is called 'pretentious' by jealous talents. But it ain't whatcha write, it's the way atcha write it."

—Jack Kerouac

—No. 23—

"I think I succeeded as a writer because I did not come out of an English department. I used to write in the chemistry department. And I wrote some good stuff. If I had been in the English department, the prof would have looked at my short stories, congratulated me on my talent, and then showed me how Joyce or Hemingway handled the same elements of the short story. The prof would have placed me in competition with the greatest writers of all time, and that would have ended my writing career."

—Kurt Vonnegut

—No. 24—

"You should really stay true to your own style. When I first started writing, everybody said to me, 'Your style just isn't right because you don't use the really flowery language that romances have.' My romances—compared to what's out there—are very strange, very odd, very different. And I think that's one of the reasons they're selling."

—Jude Deveraux

—No. 25—

"I guess I believe that writing consists of very small parts put together into a whole, and if the parts are defective, the whole won't work."

—Garrison Keillor

—No. 26—

"I'm very concerned with the rhythm of language. 'The sun came up' is an inadequate sentence. Even though it conveys all the necessary information, rhythmically it's lacking. The sun came up. But, if you say, as Laurie Anderson said, 'The sun came up like a big bald head,' not only have you, perhaps, entertained the fancy of the reader, but you have made a more complete sentence. The sound of a sentence."

—Tom Robbins

—No. 27—

"We, and I think I'm speaking for many writers, don't know what it is that sometimes comes to make our books alive. All we can do is to write dutifully and day after day, every day, giving our work the very best of what we are capable. I don't think that we can consciously put the magic in; it doesn't work that way. When the magic comes, it's a gift."

—Madeleine L'Engle

PURPOSE

—No. 28—

"The only obligation any artist can have is to himself. His work means nothing, otherwise. It has no meaning."

—Truman Capote

—No. 29—

"Indeed, great fiction shows us not how to conduct our behavior but how to feel. Eventually, it may show us how to face our feelings and face our actions and to have new inklings about what they mean. A good novel of any year can initiate us into our own new experience."

—Eudora Welty

—No. 30—

"You need that pride in yourself, as well as a sense, when you are sitting on Page 297 of a book, that the book is going to be read, that somebody is going to care. You can't ever be sure about that, but you need the sense that it's important, that it's not typing; it's writing."

—Roger Kahn

—No. 31—

"They have to be given some meaning, the facts. What do they mean? The meaning's going to be influenced by a lot of things in you and your own culture. And some of these things you may be unaware of. But every historian has some kind of philosophy of life and society. … All kinds of strands and currents and factors are involved. You have to separate and put together and from that we should deduce that there's no situation in the present that's simple, either. No simple answers. And the historian, when he looks over one of these situations, is going to try and consider all these things and try to be objective and fair and balanced, but what he picks out as the meaning will, of course, be what he himself believes."

—T. Harry Williams

—No. 32—

"I've always had complete confidence in myself. When I was nothing, I had complete confidence. There were 10 guys in my writing class at Williams College who could write better than I. They didn't have what I have, which is guts. I was dedicated to writing, and nothing could stop me."

—John Toland

—No. 33—

"I write in a very confessional way, because to me it's so exciting and fun. There's nothing funnier on earth than our humanness and our monkeyness. There's nothing more touching, and it's what I love to come upon when I'm reading; someone who's gotten really down and dirty, and they're taking the dross of life and doing alchemy, turning it into magic, tenderness and compassion and hilarity. So I tell my students that if they really love something, pay attention to it. Try to write something that they would love to come upon."

—Anne Lamott

—No. 34—

"[The writer] has to be the kind of man who turns the world upside down and says, lookit, it looks different, doesn't it?"

—Morris West

—No. 35—

"The real writer learns nothing from life. He is more like an oyster or a sponge."

—Gore Vidal

—No. 36—

"I think most writers … write about episodes meaningful to them in terms of their own imaginations. Now that would include a great deal of what they experience, but I'm not sure there's an autobiographical intention. … I believe I'm telling the truth when I say that, when I wrote Catch-22, I was not particularly interested in war; I was mainly interested in writing a novel, and that was a subject for it. That's been true of all my books. Now what goes into these books does reflect a great deal of my more morbid nature—the fear of dying, a great deal of social awareness and social protest, which is part of my personality. None of that is the objective of writing. Take five writers who have experienced the same thing, and they will be completely different as people, and they'd be completely different in what they do write, what they're able to write."

—Joseph Heller

CHARACTERS

—No. 37—

"A genuine creation should have character as well as be one; should have central heating, so to say, as well as exterior lighting."

—James Hilton

—No. 38—

"The writer must always leave room for the characters to grow and change. If you move your characters from plot point to plot point, like painting by the numbers, they often remain stick figures. They will never take on a life of their own. The most exciting thing is when you find a character doing something surprising or unplanned. Like a character saying to me: 'Hey, Richard, you may think I work for you, but I don't. I'm my own person.'"

—Richard North Patterson

—No. 39—

"Writers shouldn't fall in love with characters so much that they lose sight of what they're trying to accomplish. The idea is to write a whole story, a whole book. A writer has to be able to look at that story and see whether or not a character works, whether or not a character needs further definition."

—Stephen Coonts

—No. 40—

"When I was a Hollywood press agent, I learned how the Hollywood casting system worked. There was a roster of actors who were always perfect as doctors or lawyers or laborers, and the directors just picked the types they needed and stuffed them into film after film. I do the same [with

my characters], book after book."

—Richard Condon

—No. 41—

"I said the hell with Plot. I'm going to write stories about people that interest me, the way I see them. I'm sick of formula. I'm sick of Hero, Heroine, Heavy. … I'm sick of Characters. I'm going to write about men and women, all classes, types and conditions, within the limits of my own capabilities. People with faults, with nasty tempers, with weaknesses and loves and hates and fears and gripes against each other. People I can believe in because I know and understand them. People who aren't like anybody else's characters because they are themselves, like 'em or don't. … And all of a sudden I began to sell."

—Leigh Brackett

—No. 42—

"When you are dealing with the blackest side of the human soul, you have to have someone who has performed heroically to balance that out. You have to have a hero."

—Ann Rule

—No. 43—

"People do not spring forth out of the blue, fully formed—they become themselves slowly, day by day, starting from babyhood. They are the result of both environment and heredity, and your fictional characters, in order to be believable, must be also."

—Lois Duncan

—No. 44—

"To me, everything in a novel comes down to people making choices. You must figure out in advance what those choices are going to be."

—Marion Zimmer Bradley

—No. 45—

"The character on the page determines the prose—its music, its rhythms, the range and limit of its vocabulary—yet, at the outset at least, I determine the character. It usually happens that the fictitious character, once released, acquires a life and will of his or her own, so the prose, too, acquires its own inexplicable fluidity. This is one of the reasons I write: to 'hear' a voice not quite my own, yet summoned forth by way of my own."

—Joyce Carol Oates

PLOT & STRUCTURE

—No. 46—

"For a book to really work, form and function must go hand in hand, just like with buildings, as any decent architect will tell you."

—Tracy Chevalier

—No. 47—

"The problem for me is finding my own plots. They take a long time. … I like to have it happen, just like in our own lives. We don't always know where they're going, and if we make formal decisions on a given night, if we sit down and put a list of things we're going to do on a piece of paper, they almost never work out right."

—Norman Mailer

—No. 48—

"There is no finer form of fiction than the mystery. It has structure, a story line and a sense of place and pace. It is the one genre where the reader and the writer are pitted against each other. Readers don't want to guess the ending, but they don't want to be so baffled that it annoys them. … The research you do is crucial. In mystery fiction, you have to tell the truth. You can't fool the reader and expect to get away with it."

—Sue Grafton

—No. 49—

"Sometimes one can overanalyze, and I try not to do that. To a great degree, much of the structure has got to come naturally out of the writing. I think if you try to preordain, you're going to stifle yourself. You've got a general idea, but the rest has to come naturally out of the writing, the narrative, the character and the situation."

—Robert Ludlum

—No. 50—

"I make a very tight outline of everything I write before I write it. … By writing an outline you really are writing in a way, because you're creating the structure of what you're going to do. Once I really know what I'm going to write, I don't find the actual writing takes all that long."

—Tom Wolfe

—No. 51—

"We're past the age of heroes and hero kings. If we can't make up stories about ordinary people, who can we make them up about? … Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it's up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting."

—John Updike

—No. 52—

"Too many writers think that all you need to do is write well—but that's only part of what a good book is. Above all, a good book tells a good story. Focus on the story first. Ask yourself, 'Will other people find this story so interesting that they will tell others about it?' Remember: A bestselling book usually follows a simple rule, 'It's a wonderful story, wonderfully told'; not, 'It's a wonderfully told story.'"

—Nicholas Sparks

—No. 53—

"Transitions are critically important. I want the reader to turn the page without thinking she's turning the page. It must flow seamlessly."

—Janet Evanovich

RITUALS & METHODS

—No. 54—

"Write. Rewrite. When not writing or rewriting, read. I know of no shortcuts."

—Larry L. King

—No. 55—

"When I really do not know what I am saying, or how to say it, I'll open these Pentels, these colored Japanese pens, on yellow lined paper, and I'll start off with very tentative colors, very light colors: orange, yellow or tan. … When my thoughts are more formulated, and I have a sharper sense of trying to say it, I'll go into heavier colors: blues, greens and eventually into black. When I am writing in black, which is the final version, I have written that sentence maybe 12 or 15 or 18 times."

—Gay Talese

—No. 56—

"I think that the joy of writing a novel is the self-exploration that emerges and also that wonderful feeling of playing God with the characters. When I sit down at my writing desk, time seems to vanish. … I think the most important thing for a writer is to be locked in a study."

—Erica Jong

—No. 57—

"I'll tell you a thing that will shock you. It will certainly shock the readers of Writer's Digest. What I often do nowadays when I have to, say, describe a room, is to take a page of a dictionary, any page at all, and see if with the words suggested by that one page in the dictionary I can build up a room, build up a scene. … I even did it in a novel I wrote called MF. There's a description of a hotel vestibule whose properties are derived from Page 167 in R.J. Wilkinson's Malay-English Dictionary. Nobody has noticed. … As most things in life are arbitrary anyway, you're not doing anything naughty, you're really normally doing what nature does, you're just making an entity out of the elements. I do recommend it to young writers."

—Anthony Burgess

—No. 58—

"The conclusion to be drawn is that I am happiest writing in small rooms. They make me feel comfortable and secure. And it took me years to figure out that I need to write in a corner. Like a small animal burrowing into its hole, I shift furniture around, and back myself into a cozy corner, with my back to the wall … and then I can write."

—Danielle Steel

—No. 59—

"I try to keep my space very, very contained, because I feel that inspiration and the spirits and the story and the characters live there for as long as I'm writing."

—Isabel Allende

—No. 60—

"If I'm at a dull party I'll invent some kind of game for myself and then pick someone to play it with so that I am, in effect, writing a scene. I'm supplying my half of the dialogue and hoping the other half comes up to standards. If it doesn't, I try to direct it that way."

—Evan Hunter

—No. 61—

"I like to say there are three things that are required for success as a writer: talent, luck, discipline. … [Discipline] is the one that you have to focus on controlling, and you just have to hope and trust in the other two."

—Michael Chabon

—No. 62—

"I threw the thesaurus out years ago. I found that every time you look up a word, if you want some word and you can think of an approximately close synonym for it and look it up, you only get cliché usages. It's much better to use a big dictionary and look up derivations and definitions of various usages of a different word."

—James Jones

—No. 63—

"I try to write a certain amount each day, five days a week. A rule sometimes broken is better than no rule."

—Herman Wouk

—No. 64—

"I think writing verse is a great training for a writer. It teaches you to make your points and get your stuff clear, which is the great thing."

—P.G. Wodehouse

REVISION & EDITING

—No. 65—

"I do not rewrite unless I am absolutely sure that I can express the material better if I do rewrite it."

—William Faulkner

—No. 66—

"… Falsely straining yourself to put something into a book where it doesn't really belong, it's not doing anybody any favors. And the reader can tell."

—Margaret Atwood

—No. 67—

"I'm a tremendous rewriter; I never think anything is good enough. I'm always rephrasing jokes, changing lines, and then I hate everything. The Girl Most Likely To was rewritten seven times, and the first time I saw it I literally went out and threw up! How's that for liking yourself?"

—Joan Rivers

—No. 68—

"I've always felt that my 'style'—the careful projection onto paper of who I think I am—was my only marketable asset, the only possession that might set me apart from other writers. Therefore I've never wanted anyone to fiddle with it. … Editors have told me that I'm the only writer they know who cares what happens to his piece after he gets paid for it. Most writers won't argue with an editor because they don't want to annoy him; they're so grateful to be published that they agree to having their style … violated in public. But to defend what you've written is a sign that you are alive."

—William Zinsser

—No. 69—

"I almost always write everything the way it comes out, except I tend much more to take things out rather than put things in. It's out of a desire to really show what's going on at all times, how things smell and look, as well as from the knowledge that I don't want to push things too quickly through to climax; if I do, it won't mean anything. Everything has to be earned, and it takes a lot of work to earn."

—Peter Straub

—No. 70—

"If you're writing for a magazine or a newspaper, then you're a guest. It's as if you're a guest violinist in some great conductor's orchestra. You play to his rhythm, to his audience. You're invited in and he edits you and tells you what he wants. On the other hand, when you're writing a book, the only reason you're writing it is to say it your own way, in your own words, and tell the story the way you see it."

—Teddy White

—No. 71—

"There's really a shortage of good freelance writers. … There are a lot of talented people who are very erratic, so either they don't turn it in or they turn it in and it's rotten; it's amazing. Somebody who's even maybe not all that terrific but who is dependable, who will turn in a publishable piece more or less on time, can really do very well."

—Gloria Steinem

PUBLISHING

—No. 72—

"One of my agents used to say to me, 'Mack, you shouldn't submit anything anywhere unless you [would] read it aloud to them.' "

—MacKinlay Kantor

—No. 73—

"If you have the story, editors will use it. I agree it's hard. You're battling a system. But it's fun to do battle with systems."

—Bob Woodward

—No. 74—

"Publishers want to take chances on books that will draw a clamor and some legitimate publicity. They want to publish controversial books. That their reasons are mercenary and yours may be lofty should not deter you."

—Harlan Ellison

—No. 75—

"I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent he would be wise to develop a thick hide."

—Harper Lee

—No. 76—

"The most important thing is you can't write what you wouldn't read for pleasure. It's a mistake to analyze the market thinking you can write whatever is hot. You can't say you're going to write romance when you don't even like it. You need to write what you would read if you expect anybody else to read it.

And you have to be driven. You have to have the three D's: drive, discipline and desire. If you're missing any one of those three, you can have all the talent in the world, but it's going to be really hard to get anything done."

—Nora Roberts

—No. 77—

"It's wise to plan early on where you'd like to go, do serious self-analysis to determine what you want from a writing career. … When I began, I thought I'd be comfortable as a straight genre writer. I just kept switching genres as my interests grew. I've since been fortunate that—with a great deal of effort—I've been able to break the chains of genre labeling, and do larger and more complex books. But it's difficult, and few people who develop straight genre reputations ever escape them."

—Dean Koontz

—No. 78—

"Inevitably, you react to your own work—you like it, you don't like it, you think it's interesting or boring—and it is difficult to accept that those reactions may be unreliable. In my experience, they are. I mistrust either wild enthusiasm or deep depression. I have had the best success with material that I was sort of neutral about …"

—Michael Crichton

—No. 79—

"There's no mystique about the writing business, although many people consider me blasphemous when I say that. … To create something you want to sell, you first study and research the market, then you develop the product to the best of your ability."

—Clive Cussler

—No. 80—

"A cop told me, a long time ago, that there's no substitute for knowing what you're doing. Most of us scribblers do not. The ones that're any good are aware of this. The rest write silly stuff. The trouble is this: The readers know it."

—George V. Higgins

—No. 81—

"If you can teach people something, you've won half the battle. They want to keep on reading."

—Dick Francis

READERS

—No. 82—

"I don't care if a reader hates one of my stories, just as long as he finishes the book."

—Roald Dahl

—No. 83—

"Always remember the reader. Always level with him and never talk down to him. You may think you're some kind of smart guy because you're the great writer. Well, if you're such a smart guy, how come the reader is paying you? Remember the reader's the boss. He's hired you to do a job. So do it."

—Jay Anson

—No. 84—

"In truth, I never consider the audience for whom I'm writing. I just write what I want to write." "

—J.K. Rowling

—No. 85—

"I don't believe one reads to escape reality. A person reads to confirm a reality he knows is there, but which he has not experienced."

—Lawrence Durrell

—No. 86—

"Write out of the reader's imagination as well as your own. Supply the significant details and let the reader's imagination do the rest. Make the reader a co-author of the story."

—Patrick F. McManus

—No. 87—

"The critics can make fun of Barbara Cartland. I was quite amused by the critic who once called me 'an animated meringue.' But they can't get away from the fact that I know what women want—and that's to be flung across a man's saddle, or into the long grass by a loving husband."

—Barbara Cartland

—No. 88—

"You better make them care about what you think. It had better be quirky or perverse or thoughtful enough so that you hit some chord in them. Otherwise it doesn't work. I mean we've all read pieces where we thought, 'Oh, who gives a damn.' "

—Nora Ephron

—No. 89—

"We all tell a story a different way. I've always felt that footsteps on the stairs when you're alone in the house, and then the handle of the door turning can be scarier than the actual confrontation. So, as a result, I'm on the reading list from age 13 to 90."

—Mary Higgins Clark

—No. 90—

"To gain your own voice, you have to forget about having it heard. Renounce that and you get your own voice automatically. Try to become a saint of your own province and your own consciousness, and you won't worry about being heard in The New York Times."

—Allen Ginsberg