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Write what you like, then imbue it with life and make it unique by blending in your own personal knowledge of life, friendship, relationships, sex, and work.
Using plainspun humor as a brilliant counterpoint and never substituting cant for story,
Grisham’s openness and inability to do anything other than get right to the point.
Grisham, of course, knows lawyers. What you know makes you unique in some other way.
In my view, stories and novels consist of three parts: narration, which moves the story from point A to point B and finally to point Z; description, which creates a sensory reality for the reader; and dialogue, which brings characters to life through their speech.
first, because our lives are largely plotless, even when you add in all our reasonable precautions and
stark simplicity of a department store window display
For a suspense novelist, this is a great thing. I am, after all, not just the novel’s creator but its first reader.
The Dead Zone (and in all fairness, I must say I like that one a great deal).
Read
What if a young mother and her son became trapped in their stalled car by a rabid dog? (Cujo)
getting a restraining order, a document about as useful as a parasol in a hurricane, as many abused women will tell you.
was the smell, faint and fading, of Vitalis hair-tonic.
Description begins with visualization of what it is you want the reader to experience. It ends with your translating what you see in your mind into words on the page.
Thin description leaves the reader feeling bewildered and nearsighted.
Overdescription buries him or her in details and images. The trick is to find a happy medium.
I’m not particularly keen on writing which exhaustively describes the physical characteristics of the people in the story and what they’re wearing (I find wardrobe inventory particularly irritating; if I want to read descriptions of clothes, I can always get a J. Crew catalogue).
I tell you that Carrie White is a high school outcast with a bad complexion and a fashion-victim wardrobe,
Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.
Nor do I think that physical description should be a shortcut to character. So spare me, if you please, the hero’s sharply intelligent blue eyes and outthrust determined chin; likewise the heroine’s arrogant cheekbones.
good description usually consists of a few well-chosen details that will stand for everything else.
beginning to write, I’ll take a moment to call up an image of the place, drawing from my memory and filling my mind’s eye, an eye whose vision grows sharper the more it is used.
The use of simile and other figurative language is one of the chief delights of fiction—reading
Even if the result is mere clarity instead of beauty, I think writer and reader are participating
lit a cigarette [that] tasted like a plumber’s handkerchief”
good description begins with clear seeing and ends with clear writing, the kind of writing that employs fresh images and simple vocabulary. I began learning my lessons in this regard by reading Chandler, Hammett,
dangerous mood-swings, but I tried never to come right out and say “Annie was depressed and possibly suicidal that day” or “Annie seemed particularly happy that day.” If I have to tell you, I lose.
unlovely, which you observe in others (a guy who picks his nose when he thinks no one is looking, for instance).
because The Village Voice or The New York Review of Books says the novel is dead.
OSHA, MENSA, NASA, and Writers’ Guild guidelines, let me reiterate that it’s all on the table, all up for grabs.
Light in August (still my favorite Faulkner novel),
Yuk -no women is ever given her voice
Two examples of the sort of work second drafts were made for are symbolism and theme.
didn’t know what to write. Like Pilgrim in John Bunyan’s epic, I had come to a place where the straight way was lost.
Good fiction always begins with story and progresses to theme; it almost never begins with theme and progresses to story. The only possible exceptions to this rule that I can think of are allegories like George Orwell’s Animal Farm (and I have a sneaking suspicion that with Animal Farm the story idea may indeed have come first; if I see Orwell in the afterlife, I mean to ask him). But once your basic story is on paper, you need to think about what it means and enrich your following drafts with your conclusions. To
Just a little one, but it was enough for me. The truth is that most writers are needy.
most commercially successful stories and novels are fast-paced.
Forgot an entire character, as Raymond Chandler once did?
asked about the murdered chauffeur in The Big Sleep, Chandler—who liked his tipple—replied, “Oh, him. You know, I forgot all about him.”)
(kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings).
Formula: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft – 10%. Good luck.”
I’m afraid I’ve always been a natural putter-inner).
the first draft of a novel runs three hundred and fifty thousand words, I’ll try my damndest to produce a second draft of no more than three hundred and fifteen thousand…
The effect of judicious cutting is immediate and often amazing—literary Viagra.
Back story helps define character and establish motivation.
