Furor Scribendi WRITING FOR PUBLICATION MAY be both the easiest and the hardest thing you’ll ever do. Learning the rules—if they can be called rules—is the easy part. Following them, turning them into regular habits, is an ongoing struggle. Here are the rules: 1. Read. Read about the art, the craft, and the business of writing. Read the kind of work you’d like to write. Read good literature and bad, fiction and fact. Read every day and learn from what you read. If you commute to work or if you spend part of your day doing relatively mindless work, listen to book tapes. If your library doesn’t
Furor Scribendi WRITING FOR PUBLICATION MAY be both the easiest and the hardest thing you’ll ever do. Learning the rules—if they can be called rules—is the easy part. Following them, turning them into regular habits, is an ongoing struggle. Here are the rules: 1. Read. Read about the art, the craft, and the business of writing. Read the kind of work you’d like to write. Read good literature and bad, fiction and fact. Read every day and learn from what you read. If you commute to work or if you spend part of your day doing relatively mindless work, listen to book tapes. If your library doesn’t have a good supply of complete books on audio tape, companies like Recorded Books, Books on Tape, Brilliance Corporation, and the Literate Ear will rent or sell you a wide selection of such books for your pleasure and continuing education. These provide a painless way to ponder use of language, the sounds of words, conflict, characterization, plotting, and the multitudes of ideas you can find in history, biography, medicine, the sciences, etc. 2. Take classes and go to writers’ workshops. Writing is communication. You need other people to let you know whether you’re communicating what you think you are and whether you’re doing it in ways that are not only accessible and entertaining, but as compelling as you can make them. In other words, you need to know that you’re telling a good story. You want to be the writer who keeps readers up late at night, not the one who drives them off to ...
...more
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
