tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-53783400573612095492024-03-13T06:25:29.320-07:00HOW 2 WRITEAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03257698200484702055noreply@blogger.comBlogger16125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5378340057361209549.post-9259618151850457882013-10-09T14:39:00.000-07:002013-10-09T14:39:06.829-07:00Five ProvocationsCreative writing students often hope that there's secret truth about how to write that will be revealed once they start their course, and that published writers possess the keys to the kingdom. But the sorry truth is that there is no secret, there is no magic formula, there is no mysterious How To Write Fiction book that will suddenly make it easy (apart from this one, of course!).<br />
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The fact is, there are no rules for good writing. Matters of taste and fashion apart, good writing these days can be as structurally conventional and yet deeply satisfying as Colm Toibin's rewarding look at Henry James in The Master or as original and ground-breaking as Ali Smith's anti-novel Hotel World. So, in the absence of a secret formula, here are five rules to provoke you into thinking again about what and how you are writing.<br />
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<strong style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">1. </strong>Try to avoid using adjectives and adverbs. Adjectives and adverbs are for lazy writers. (A quick reminder here: adjectives are descriptive words attached to nouns, like "lovely nouns" or "gorgeous nouns", and adverbs are attached to verbs.)</div>
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Well, adjectives might be necessary from time to time, but adverbs are definitely to be used as sparingly as harissa paste, she said brightly. She gazed longingly at his adverb-free piece of writing.</div>
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<strong style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">2. </strong>Avoid exposition. Don't explain things to us; we readers don't like to have things explained to us. We like to see things, we like to imagine things, we like to draw our own conclusions, we like to be illuminated, we like enigma and mystery. We don't like to be told what to think.</div>
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<strong style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">3. </strong>Use the words "seem" (and its evil cousins seemed and seems) and "just" carefully. Beginner writers just always seem to rely very heavily on these two words. Just is like a verbal tic, I think; we hear it in our heads, so we put it on the page. Just stop. Seemed, well, either something is like something else, or it isn't. Be definite. Be specific. Vagueness is your enemy (NB: Vagueness is not the same thing as enigma and mystery).</div>
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<strong style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">4. </strong>Don't repeat words ... unless you are going for a specific, repetitive style or voice, like Thomas Bernhard in his novel The Loser where we hear about Glenn Gould's genius, and the narrator's corresponding lack of genius, over and over again. Some writers appear to believe that because novels have lots of words in them, they can be lazy about word choices, patterns, and rhythms. Every word counts in a novel, as it does in a short story, as it does in a poem.</div>
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<strong style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">5. </strong>Try not to ignore the little voice in your head that says, "Oh, that doesn't quite work." A big part of learning to write (and this is an ongoing process) is figuring out the difference between the loud internal voice that says "THIS IS ALL RUBBISH AND YOU SHOULD NEVER WRITE ANOTHER WORD EVER AGAIN" and that somewhat quieter internal voice that says, "Hmm, that's not quite right, but let's pretend we didn't notice." Learn to trust your gut instinct - listen to that little voice, while ignoring the big pushy one.</div>
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The trick with writing well is to convince yourself you can do it, while at the same time telling yourself you can do it better. But you can do it better, and when you do it well, there is nothing more exciting.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03257698200484702055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5378340057361209549.post-5095682324917667932013-10-09T14:34:00.001-07:002013-10-09T14:34:17.289-07:00Writing for stand up<div style="background-color: white; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; color: #333333; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; margin-bottom: 13px; padding: 0px;">
In the early 90s I met Jimmy Tarbuck backstage at a show. I told him I was a struggling comic. "Good luck!" he said as he puffed on his cigar, "comedy is the hardest job in the world!"</div>
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I don't agree with Tarbuck. It's not as hard as being a fireman or a brain surgeon or in the SAS or (given that you work for 20 minutes a night and then get drunk), as hard as working in an office. Still, most people would rather eat their own liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti than perform stand-up comedy.</div>
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At its best, stand-up comedy is the purest and most immediate medium for comedy and possibly even self-expression. What other outlet allows you to have an idea in the afternoon and then try it out that evening to an actual audience?</div>
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The jokes, although important, are not in themselves enough. You need to be able to appear relaxed and confident, control the room, think on your feet, involve the audience without letting them steal focus from you, and adapt your style and material to dozens of different, difficult scenarios. The only way to gain these skills is to get up on stage and do gigs. As many nights a week as you can. Probably for at least five years.</div>
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All those things will come to you, if you have the right stuff. So if you're starting out, then what you need to concentrate on is your material. Most clubs have an open spot where an unpaid wannabe can do five minutes. The audience will be quick to judge you and you're trying to get booked, so start small. Write a five-minute script (don't overrun), with a punchline every 30 seconds, with your best three jokes at the start and another belter at the end. Make sure that the jokes are original. Make sure you know exactly what you're going to say. Practice and be prepared for failure.</div>
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Once you feel comfortable on stage you might have the confidence to try out stories or even to reveal your personal secrets. Be truthful and funny will come.</div>
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You will also find that you do a lot of your "writing" on stage. When you are in the zone you find you can leave behind the script and just chat. Inspiration strikes and you discover new avenues, even in well trodden routines.</div>
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Josie Long on writing for stand-up</h2>
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If you want to start writing stand-up, try not to feel like there are any conventions you have to subscribe to. There are no established rules as to what your show should contain.</div>
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Try to find your own voice. Think about what you find funny and what you would want to see if you were watching. It's not helpful to second-guess the audience's tastes in advance. It's better to take risks and perform material that may not work if it is something you genuinely think is hilarious. Everyone has bad gigs and through them you will develop and evolve as a performer.</div>
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All of that having been said, it's good to be economical with your material. Only use things you feel are essential. It's not just about enjoying yourself onstage, but about finding a way of conveying your sense of humour to other people.</div>
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Try as many different ways of writing as you can, and try to write as much and as often as possible. Don't decide against trying a joke because it doesn't fit the style you've chosen for yourself. Include any ideas for jokes you have.</div>
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Write at home on paper, steal your best conversations, do specific research, write by speaking out loud on your own, play writing games, take good ideas onstage then bat them around and improvise, note down things you see or are struck by ... you never know what will develop into a longer routine or piece.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03257698200484702055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5378340057361209549.post-34767900583113318472013-10-09T14:32:00.002-07:002013-10-09T14:32:59.946-07:00Writing Sketches<div style="background-color: white; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; color: #333333; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; margin-bottom: 13px; padding: 0px;">
You may be tempted to crack straight on with a sitcom, but start small. Containing an idea in a two-minute sketch will teach you about structure, establishing characters and how to write pithy, economical dialogue.</div>
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It is easy to put on a sketch show at your college, pub or on the internet. A producer will be happier to read a page or two rather than a whole script and there are radio and TV shows which are looking for shorter sketch material, which means you have a much better chance of selling your work.</div>
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I started my professional career writing topical sketches for the now defunct Radio 4 show Weekending. I actually pretty much loathed the programme, as it was rather formulaic and rarely biting. Yet I stayed for a year, serving an apprenticeship that taught me many skills: from the mundane business of how to format a script (for this and further advice see <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/writersroom" style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; color: #005689; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">bbc.co.uk/writersroom</a>) to technical tricks such as how to avoid clunky exposition like:</div>
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<strong style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">FX: </strong>Knock on door<br style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" /><strong style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">MAN: </strong>You asked to see me Prime Minister!</div>
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This opening establishes location and characters artlessly. You need to look for more subtle ways to inform the listener or you will lose their interest and respect. Don't treat them like they're stupid.</div>
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I soon learned that even though we were paid by the minute, that it was foolish to write 5 minute sketches. The show was only 25 minutes, so longer skits would be binned, while lightening gags might fill a gap. It was economical to be economical.</div>
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Now I prefer to stretch an idea as far as it will go, then a little further. If you can learn to write a blistering 60-second skit with four laughs, a beginning, a middle and an end, then everything else will be easy.</div>
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While Weekending is no more, there are plenty of sketch shows on radio and TV that invite outside contributions. If there are lots of writers' names in the credits, write a couple of sketches in an appropriate style (even if it's not your particular sense of humour), send them to the producer and you will probably get feedback.</div>
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Or you can set up your own sketch group and take a show to the Edinburgh Fringe or film it for YouTube. Try to make your own material as original as possible. When Stewart Lee and I began writing together at university, we set rules about things we wouldn't write about: celebrities, parodies of TV shows, political satire, all of which were in vogue. By limiting ourselves we came up with a lot of unusual ideas and created our own voice.</div>
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<strong style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Sketch writing tips</strong></div>
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<strong style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">·</strong> Keep an eye out for interesting real life characters. My driving instructor seemed overly critical of my inability to drive, given that that was the reason I was employing him, so I wrote a sketch about an instructor who berates his pupils for being non-driving idiots.</div>
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<strong style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">·</strong> Don't start with a catchphrase. It will seem forced and probably end up with you creating a one joke persona. Create the character, write some sketches and a catchphrase might present itself. Look at Al Murray the Pub Landlord. It's a multi-layered persona and the catchphrases "I was never confused", "rules is rules" and "glass of white wine for the lady" come out of the character rather than vice versa.</div>
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<strong style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">·</strong> Starting with a simple premise and exploring the consequences can be better than trying to conceive something outlandish. Monty Python's dead parrot sketch begins with the premise of a pet shop owner selling a customer a deceased bird. The genius is in the execution.</div>
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Exercises: Character comedy</h2>
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Watch a whole morning of daytime telly. Look out for an interesting character and then try and write a sketch about them. Don't try to parody the shows you have watched, just try to find a persona and then put them into a real life situation.</div>
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Many of the Little Britain characters were created this way.</div>
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Mitchell and Webb on writing sketches</h2>
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Make sure you have an idea before you start. It's no use sitting in front of a blank screen saying "right, it could be anything." "Anything" isn't a brief, it's a mental wilderness. You need to decide what you're going to write before you write it, and this is best done away from the winking cursor.</div>
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A sketch needs a premise, a core funny idea that is its reason to exist. As soon as a sketch begins, the audience looks for this premise and it needs to be apparent. Presenting a character? Make sure the funny thing about them is expressed early. Taking the piss out of some element of modern life? Present it at the beginning and quickly undermine it.</div>
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You need the element of surprise in comedy but, before that, you need to make people comfortable with where you are. There need to be, to quote the protesting philosophers from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, "rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty". So establish the setting first, make it clear why it's funny, throw in a surprise and get out. Ideally the last joke, or punchline, should be the best but the sad fact is there are more premises than punchlines. It's a great argument against intelligent design.</div>
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Sketch comedy doesn't benefit from the audience's loyalty to characters, it's only as funny as its last joke. But its advantage is that it can embrace any setting, subject or situation. Use these strengths by having lots of short and contrasting items. That way, if the audience doesn't like one sketch, you soon get the chance to win them over with something else.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03257698200484702055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5378340057361209549.post-68373384347672116722013-10-09T14:30:00.004-07:002013-10-09T14:30:44.874-07:00Style<div style="background-color: white; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; color: #333333; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; margin-bottom: 13px; padding: 0px;">
Competent, effective, functional, engaging journalistic writing can be learnt, and some advice has been provided in this online series. Brilliant writing for newspapers has a plus factor which is hard to define and is not achieved by many. It comes down to style. Keith Waterhouse puts it this way: "What is this style? Why do some stories have it and others not? It would be fruitless to try to define it - as Fats Waller said when asked for a definition of jazz, 'Lady, if you have to ask, I can't tell you.' Obviously it demands flair, plus professionalism - two commodities that have never been in short supply in popular journalism. It demands experience, a quality that can be taken for granted in Fleet Street. For the rest, it consists simply of choosing a handful of words from the half million or so samples available, and arranging them in the best order."</div>
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Penultimate word to David Randall, whose Universal Journalist provides so much easily absorbed advice for the aspiring writer of journalism: "The pleasures of capturing something and pinning it down in words, your words, are immense. So too is the thrill of starting a piece with an assortment of disparate information and finding a pattern in it and new ideas about it as you write."</div>
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Last word to a much admired writer, who practises (daily in his parliamentary sketch) what he preaches, Simon Hoggart. Giving his own advice on writing in Writer's Market UK 2009, he says: "My advice would be to keep it simple. Dr Johnson said, about re-reading something you've written, 'Wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.' He was spot on. There is no substitute for clear, direct, straightforward writing. If you are Martin Amis you can get away with elaborate, stylised prose. If you aren't, you can't. The best journalism sounds like someone talking directly to you. It's not a school essay, so you don't need to begin with a long and ponderous introduction."</div>
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Hoggart provided two examples:</div>
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"Wrong: 'Philately has been described as the hobby for people who are too boring to be interested in beer mats. That is as may be. For me, it has always provided an agreeable and absorbing diversion.'</div>
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"Right: 'It was a second-hand shop in St Ives. I was leafing through the box of old postcards, and there it was: a 1932 Nyasaland Protectorate 2d yellow - without perforations. I thought my heart would stop ... '"</div>
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Write on!</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03257698200484702055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5378340057361209549.post-28034973562081686642013-10-08T14:24:00.001-07:002013-10-08T14:24:31.728-07:00Structure<div style="background-color: white; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; color: #333333; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; margin-bottom: 13px; padding: 0px;">
The contents page of a biography or memoir will give you an idea of the structure the author has used. Chapters in biographies are usually around 6-8,000 words in length but there are no hard and fast rules. The occasional short chapter can bring variety to the pace of the book. Some authors punctuate their chapters with short asides in which they pause from the main narrative to expand a particular theme without interrupting the narrative flow. Kathryn Hughes's The Short Life & Long Times of Mrs Beeton is laced with "interludes" in which she explores topics such as Mrs Beeton's awareness of the link between health and diet, and whether Mrs Beeton ruined British cooking. Each adds to the reader's knowledge of the period without causing the narrative drive to stall. Alternatively, you might prefer to weave themes into the central story.</div>
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<strong style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Cradle to Grave</strong></div>
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A biography typically starts with the subject's birth (it's surprising how many begin with a description of the weather) and continues in a roughly chronological order until their death. The advantage of this approach, which could equally apply to the history of a family, is that it is easy to follow. The downside is that it can appear plodding - especially if you're writing about someone who had an action-packed early life but whose later days were tame. One solution is to condense your treatment of the less exciting years but this can be difficult to achieve without making the book seem unbalanced. Alexander Masters turned the traditional form on its head in Stuart, A Life Backwards by telling the story in reverse chronological order.</div>
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<strong style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">A year in the life of ...</strong></div>
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Another approach is to focus on a distinct period, as James Shapiro does in 1599, A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. This was the year in which the playwright completed Henry V, wrote Julius Caesar and As You Like It and drafted Hamlet, but also a year of great excitement in England - an aging Queen faced the threat of invasion by Catholic Spain, rebellion in Ireland and intrigue at court. Shapiro's book marries both threads together to create an intimate picture of what life must have been like for Shakespeare and the influences that fed into his writing. Shapiro starts with the winter of 1598 and refers to events before and after 1599 to illuminate a single year.</div>
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This could work equally well for family history. The year 1948, for example, is significant for many families as it marked the arrival of West Indian immigrants on the ship Empire Windrush. Andrea Levy, herself the daughter of Jamaican immigrants, focussed on this one momentous year in her novel, Small Island.</div>
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Richard Benson, a journalist with The Face, based his book, The Farm, on notebooks he kept during the few weeks when he helped his parents to prepare the family farm in Yorkshire for sale after they reluctantly decided they could no longer afford to live there. Although the book focuses on a distinct period in time, he widens its scope to reflect back on his childhood, and the importance of the farm in his life.</div>
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<strong style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Group biographies and biographical pairings</strong></div>
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Writing about two or more people whose lives have a natural symbiosis can give the reader more for less. The subjects might share a similar background and context and the interaction between them will give the reader a deeper understanding of each.</div>
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This is especially true of family members and in particular siblings. James Fox's The Langhorne Sisters is both a group biography and a family history in which he uses letters and diaries to examine the lives of his great-aunts and grandmother who were born in Virginia, USA, but who made their mark on high society on both sides of the Atlantic</div>
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One of the advantages of group biographies is that there is usually at least one figure who is more flamboyant than the others. He or she can sweep the story along, carrying other characters, who may be less compelling, with them. Nancy Astor, who became the first woman to take her seat in parliament, fills this role in The Langhorne Sisters.</div>
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In some instances the rivalry and tension between the biographical subjects add a sense of drama to a joint biography whether the figures are Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes or the cousins Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots. Roland Huntford's joint biography of the polar explorers, Robert Scott and Roald Amundsen, The Last Place on Earth opens with a short description (less than a page) of the two men embarking on their expeditions before doubling back to outline earlier attempts to reach the South Pole and then jumping forward to look at Scott and Amundsen's biographical roots. His approach allows him to tell both their life stories at the same time as he recounts the race to the pole.</div>
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Another way of pulling together the lives of a group of people is to use a single event as a unifying theme. In A Night at the Majestic, Richard Davenport-Hines describes a famous dinner party at the Majestic Hotel in Paris in 1922 that was attended by Stravinsky, Joyce, Diaghilev, Picasso and Proust.</div>
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<strong style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Lucky dip</strong></div>
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The structure of Nigel Slater's memoir, Toast, appears to be little more than a bundle of headings, mostly connected to food and each evoking a 1960s childhood: "Spaghetti Bolognese", "Arctic Roll", "Butterscotch Flavour Angel Delight" (which starts with a list of ingredients: "Sugar, Modified Starch, Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil, Emulsifiers ...)" Each is no more than a few pages long. But, despite its apparent simplicity, the characters develop and the story unravels in a way that is far from haphazard.</div>
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Since Slater is a professional cook, recipes provide natural prompts but this is a format that could translate to other subjects. If your parents met through their shared passion for amateur dramatics you could use theatre programmes to tell their story. Or if you have a box full of old photos you could write commentaries to some of the pictures. As you progress you will find that themes start to emerge: the annual camping trip when your mother stayed at home, the different houses you lived in, or family celebrations.</div>
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<strong style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Chapter breakdown</strong></div>
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Once you've decided on a structure you will need a chapter breakdown outlining what you will cover in each chapter. This is a valuable way of helping you to organise your material and to assess the overall pace of your book. Are there sections that appear a little "flat" and where you might want to freshen up your writing with extra research so that you can inject some colour into the writing? Or perhaps you need to move material around. Does one chapter contain too many facts or maybe you've revealed too much of the story too soon? Expect your chapter breakdown to change and evolve as your book takes shape. A publisher or literary agent will want to see it, together with at least one sample chapter, as part of your book proposal.</div>
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A preface allows you to introduce your book and to tell the reader its scope and why you've decided to write it. This can be useful if you want to explain to younger generations why you've chosen to write a family history. A prologue gives you the chance to write an introductory scene - perhaps from a dramatic moment in the life you're about to write. The aim is to "hook" the reader but the danger in including a preface or prologue - or both - is that the reader doesn't quite know when the book proper has started.</div>
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Alexander Masters on structure</h2>
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I'm rotten at planning books. Certainly I was with my first book, and I don't seem to have improved with the one I'm working on now. I write in blobs a possible chapter here, a couple of paragraphs there - and pray that sooner or later it'll all fit together.</div>
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With Stuart, I messed up royally on the first attempt. I used the old-fashioned, orderly biographical structure: begin before the beginning, dole out 20 pages of ancestors until the hero appears, meander on through school etc. Somewhere about page 50 the subject finally does something interesting. Stuart said the result was "bollocks boring", and he was right. It bored me to tears. That type of structure reflected nothing of his character. Stuart was the opposite of orderly: a chaotic, outrageous, alcoholic sociopath who spent much of his adult life on the streets or in jail.</div>
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Stuart discovered the solution. Tear up the first version and write the book the other way round, ie backwards, "like a murder mystery": start from the point when we first met, then work back to his childhood to find out "what murdered the boy I was". Not only did this structure offer a strong drive to the story, the telling of it became unpredictable and erratic again, and exciting to write. All that plodding preparation vanished. At last, the structure reflected the man.</div>
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<strong style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">·</strong> Alexander Masters' Stuart: A Life Backwards won the Whitbread Award for biography in 2005</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03257698200484702055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5378340057361209549.post-2981808453135505092013-10-08T14:22:00.000-07:002013-10-08T14:22:32.396-07:00Choosing your subject<div style="background-color: white; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; color: #333333; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; margin-bottom: 13px; padding: 0px;">
You can't choose your relatives but you can choose which ones you write about. Deciding on whose lives you will research - whether as part of a family history or as a single biography - will depend on several factors. Ideally, your interests and skills should match theirs. If you want to write about a Nobel Prize winning economist but you failed maths GCSE you may struggle to appreciate their work. On the other hand, ignorance can be the ideal starting point from which to demystify a complicated subject.</div>
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Weigh up the type and availability of sources before choosing your subject. There should be enough material to allow you to get to know the person you're researching but not so much that it would take you your lifetime to read it. When Michael Holroyd was researching the life of George Bernard Shaw he began to think that Shaw, who wrote 10 letters every day of his adult life and had the benefit of shorthand and secretaries, could write more in a day than Holroyd could read. By contrast, if you're interested in an early professional footballer you may discover that he didn't write a single letter and you will have to find other ways of giving him a "voice" - perhaps by quoting from newspaper interviews or speaking to someone who knew him.</div>
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Much research can be carried out on the internet but you will still have to interview people, consult collections and probably make at least one trip to somewhere such as the National Archives (formerly the Public Record Office) in Kew or the Imperial War Museum in south London. How far you live from your main sources will affect the time and expense involved. If they are abroad both will rise and you may also face language difficulties.</div>
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<strong style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Copyright</strong></div>
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If you intend to quote extensively from a particular source don't wait until the last minute to see whether you will be granted permission. You may be refused or the price might be prohibitively high - in which case you will have to rewrite the book. The use of song lyrics, even if you want to use just one line, can be particularly expensive.</div>
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You can't quote a "substantial" part of a copyright work without permission but what constitutes "substantial" is open to debate. Four lines from a short poem might be "substantial", whereas several sentences from a novel would not be.</div>
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Letters belong to the recipient but the writer holds the copyright which is passed to their estate after their death. When travel writer Paul Theroux wrote a memoir about his one time friend, Nobel Laureate VS Naipaul he was only allowed to quote tiny amounts from Naipaul's letters to him and was not allowed to see his replies. He was, in effect, denied access to his own letters.</div>
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Whether a work is still in copyright depends on factors such as when the author died and their nationality. Most archives should be able to advise you on how to ask for permission to use material they hold or you can write to the publisher of a writer you want to quote. The Society of Authors publishes two useful guides: Copyright and Moral Rights and Permissions.</div>
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<strong style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">What's out there already?</strong></div>
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<strong style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">·</strong> Consult the <a href="http://catalogue.bl.uk/F/?func=file&file_name=login-bl-list" style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; color: #005689; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">British Library catalogue</a> to see if any books have already been written about the person or topic you're interested in; check when they were written and who published them. If they appeared a long time ago or were published by a specialist press you have a greater chance of interesting a publisher in a new account.</div>
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<strong style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">·</strong> Do an online search for the name of the person you're interested in and make a note of sources to follow up, for example, archives, academic publications or appreciation societies.</div>
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<strong style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">·</strong> Check an online bookseller such as <a href="http://www.amazon.com/" style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; color: #005689; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Amazon.com</a> to see if any books about your subject are due to be published.</div>
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<strong style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">·</strong> If you want reassurance that no one else is working on the same subject contact the main sources or experts - for example, family members, copyright holders of material such as letters or diaries, or archivists - who may know. However, this is not foolproof and carries the risk of alerting a biographer in search of a subject.</div>
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<strong style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Is my idea commercial?</strong></div>
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If you want to get published consider how commercial your idea is before you devote the next few years of your life to it. Your grandchildren will probably enjoy reading your account of how their great-aunts and uncles survived in the poverty of 1930s Ireland because of their personal connection to the people you're describing. But the book is likely to be too similar to Frank McCourt's Pulitzer Prize-winning, Angela's Ashes to interest a publisher.</div>
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Likewise, finding a publisher for a biography of a well-known person is very difficult unless you have something new to say. Most publishers would be reluctant to commission a new biography of someone like Winston Churchill. However, if your father was Churchill's driver and kept a diary of his working life they might be interested in an account told from the chauffeur's perspective. Alison Light took a startlingly fresh approach to the Bloomsbury Set - a group which had been written about exhaustively and exhaustingly - in her book, Mrs Woolf & the Servants, The Hidden Heart of Domestic Service.</div>
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Conversely, "sales and marketing" (who have a huge say in whether a publisher commissions a book) are likely to be wary of a subject that no one has heard of. However, there are plenty of examples of individuals dragged out of obscurity to delight modern readers. Kate Summerscale became fascinated by Joe Carstairs when she wrote her obituary for the Daily Telegraph. When she started work on her biography very few people had heard of Carstairs, an oil heiress who dressed like a man, held records for speedboat racing in the 1920s, owned her own island and poured her affection into a rag doll. Summerscale told her story in such a compelling way that The Queen of Whale Cay became a bestseller.</div>
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Sometimes the quality of the writing is enough to secure publication. On paper Bad Blood by Lorna Sage, a memoir written by an academic about growing up in the 1940s in a bleak vicarage on the English/Welsh borders, may not sound compelling but it won the Whitbread Biography of the Year in 2001 and was praised for its lyrical writing and dark humour.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03257698200484702055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5378340057361209549.post-84787691788244100812013-10-08T14:16:00.002-07:002013-10-08T14:16:59.397-07:00Finding your voice<div style="background-color: white; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; color: #333333; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; margin-bottom: 13px; padding: 0px;">
As you start to write your style will emerge. Before you begin you should have some idea of how much of you will appear in the book. If you're writing a memoir nearly all of it may be written in the first person and yours may be the only viewpoint that the reader glimpses. Margaret Forster makes this change in emphasis explicit half way through her family memoir, Hidden Lives. Just before this she has been telling the story from her mother's point of view and describing her concern about her precocious child. Then the tone changes:</div>
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"It was at this time, in 1943, when I was five, that my own real memory begins, real in the sense that I can not only recall actual events but can propel myself back into them, be there again in my Aunt Jean's room-and-kitchen, standing by the window at the back of the Buildings, staring out at the outside staircase and the tops of the wash-houses, while behind me Jean asks me what is the matter ... So I can stop now, writing in the third person, stop retelling stories I was told about the years before I was born, about when I was under five, stop splicing oral history with local history and start instead letting my own version of family lore come into play. I am there, at the centre. What a difference it makes, how dangerous it is." (page 132-133, pbk)</div>
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"I" is less common in a biography - unless you want to incorporate a sense of a personal quest - but there is just as much scope to write about a person's life from different viewpoints. If you're writing about a singer you might describe how members of the band reacted to their decision to leave it or how a fan greeted the news.</div>
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<strong style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Pace</strong></div>
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Think of your subject's, or your family's, life as a series of dramatic peaks - such as when they went to war, moved to a new country or secured their first recording deal. Write in a way that builds up the momentum towards these peaks. Maybe your grandmother was a nurse tending wounded soldiers as they arrived at Dover following the evacuation of Dunkirk in the summer of 1940. At the same time your grandfather may have been stranded on a French beach, unsure whether he would make it home. His rescue and reunion with your grandmother provide two obvious peaks. It's your job to lead the reader towards these peaks by setting the scene and describing the mounting tension.</div>
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Avoid historical hindsight - the reader knows the evacuation of Dunkirk saved thousands of lives, that the Nazis lost the war and that it ended in 1945 but people who lived through those events did not have such knowledge. Don't reveal too much too quickly. The sentence "Grandmother arrived at the hospital where she would in two days' time be reunited with her future husband," robs your story of much of its tension.</div>
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<strong style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Dealing with gaps</strong></div>
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Most researchers hit a blank wall with at least one person who appears to have left few traces of their existence. Claire Tomalin wrote possibly her finest book about Nelly Ternan, the elusive mistress of Charles Dickens. In The Invisible Woman Tomalin teases out the story of an actress who was effectively written out of history books. The hunt gives the book the edge of a detective story and one in which Tomalin is scrupulously honest with her readers:</div>
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"Nelly now disappears from view completely, conjured into thin air. For four years she remains invisible ... At a guess, she has been living in France. It is only a guess. This is to be a chapter of guesses and conjectures, and those who don't like them are warned ..."</div>
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Later on in the same chapter she adds: "We have seen that there is no hard evidence that Nelly had a child; but there is too much soft evidence to be brushed aside entirely."</div>
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<strong style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">How creative can I be?</strong></div>
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It's useful to have a reader in mind, whether they're your grandson if you're writing a family history, or, if you're writing a biography, someone who enjoys the genre. Knowing your reader will help you to gauge the sort of language to use and what you will need to explain. To a teenager, for example, the "last war" might mean the Iraq War whereas an older person would assume you were referring to the second world war.</div>
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Just like a novelist, it's your task to paint a picture of events and to show, rather than tell. If your ancestors arrived in America by slave ship it's far more effective to show the reader what it felt like to be in the hold - to describe the heat, the smells and the noise in the cramped conditions - rather than simply to tell them that the slaves were transported by ship.</div>
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Very few biographers invent dialogue. Instead, they allow their subject's voice to emerge through letters, diaries or interviews. If you're writing a memoir or family history these sources may not exist or you may want to supplement quotations with impressions of what you remember them saying. Often it is more effective to paraphrase or to describe how they spoke, rather than trying to invent convincing dialogue. In Unreliable Memoirs, for example, Clive James describes the agony he suffered as a small boy when his class faced their regular spelling test.</div>
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"I remember not being able to pronounce the word 'the'. I pronounced it 'ter-her'. The class had collective hysterics. They were rolling around on the floor with their knees up."</div>
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Dialogue should be a stylised form of real speech - chat with the dull bits left out. In this extract from Toast, entitled Pickled Walnuts, Nigel Slater uses comments from his Dad and stepmother, Joan, to increase the reader's knowledge of their personalities and their marriage.</div>
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"One weekend when we attended a fete in a field by the river, Dad came back with a jar of pickled walnuts as big as the jars of sherbet lemons that stood behind the sweet counter in the post office. 'It will last us a year or two,' he said, bringing them in from the boot of the car.</div>
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'I don't know how you can eat the filthy things,' shuddered Joan, screwing up her nose like he had just handed her a jar of preserved dog poo.'" (Toast, page 207)</div>
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In Peter Ackroyd's biography of Charles Dickens he not only makes up dialogue for his subject but invents a meeting between himself and Dickens. Making things up is a risky business and not every editor will appreciate your originality. The critics attacked Ackroyd for his audacity - but his biography was a bestseller.</div>
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<strong style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Tony Benn: How to write a diary</strong></div>
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Those who write diaries use them in a number of ways: to record the day's events, to describe the people they have met, and to capture thoughts and emotions. An authentic diary tells the truth as the writer sees it at the moment when he or she writes.</div>
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Having written over 15m words since 1940 - a 68-year span - I know what a sweat it is to do it, and what pleasure it is to read it.</div>
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Experience has always been my greatest teacher and if I write at night I get two</div>
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bites at that experience - when the pressure is off and I can describe what has happened in perspective. Then, when I read it, I get a third bite at my experience.</div>
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The daily diarist has a different job to the memoirist or the autobiographer: a good political diary must above all be contemporary, accurate and include mistakes. Published diaries are often selective by necessity, but misjudgements must be included and it must be accepted that nothing is altered after the event. Diarists follow different principles: some being famous for their wit, some for their sexy revelations, some as an expression of the diarist's style.</div>
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In the post-Blair era we have been treated to many accounts from those who have now retired from active politics and wish to intervene to put the record straight - as they see it.</div>
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<strong style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">·</strong> Tony Benn's latest collection of diaries is More Time for Politics: Diaries 2001-2007</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03257698200484702055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5378340057361209549.post-20489721541193259772013-10-08T14:14:00.003-07:002013-10-08T14:14:46.790-07:00How Journalists write<span style="background-color: white; color: #666666; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 19px;">Journalism is about telling people what they didn't know, says today's tutor Peter Cole, and making them want to know it.</span><br />
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Journalists usually refer to what they write as stories. Not articles or reports, occasionally pieces, but stories. This does not apply only to reporters but to everybody in the editorial chain, from desk editors, copy editors, specialist and sports writers to the editor him or herself. Words published in newspapers, on air or online are stories.</div>
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Stories sound interesting; reports sound dull. To some, stories mean fiction: "Tell me a story, mummy". Stories are tall and short, made up and true. True stories are about what happened. We tell stories in conversation, recounting experiences and events in which we took part or observed. The crucial thing about a story is that other people want to hear it, because it is interesting or entertaining. Otherwise the storyteller is a bore.</div>
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So journalists write stories for their readers to tell them what is going on, to inform them, engage them, entertain them, shock them, amuse them, disturb them, uplift them. The subject matter will vary according to the nature of the publication and the intended audience. The good newspaper editor will have a clear idea of the sort of people who are reading it, and cater to their interests and preoccupations, sometimes their prejudices. And the paper will include that vital ingredient serendipity - the story you didn't expect, the "just fancy that", the absurdities as well as the travails of the human condition.</div>
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Journalism is basically a simple game. It is about finding things out and telling other people about them. The finding out requires a variety of skills because those in power often prefer that we know only so much. Journalism is about holding such people to account, exposing their humbug and hypocrisy, the abuse of their power. This includes the control it gives them over the flow of information, the ability to bury the bad news, to spin and obfuscate. Good journalists must ask the awkward questions and question the answers, must dig to unearth and then explain, making comprehensible that which authority, by intent or verbal inadequacy, has left confused, incomplete or plain mendacious. Incomprehensible journalism is quite simply bad journalism, and therefore pointless.</div>
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Ultimately there is only one purpose: to make the reader read the story. If they don't, what was the point of finding it out and telling it? This booklet picks up the story when the reader has reached the stage of deciding to address the story. That is not the same as reading it, or even reading a certain amount of it. They have just reached the first word, perhaps attracted by the picture, the extracted quote, or any of the other presentational devices used to drag the reader to the story. We have reached the stage where the reader is going to subject the story to the final test, reading some or all of it. This is about writing.</div>
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Newspaper reading is different from reading a book. It is selective, does not involve commitment to the whole. Relatively little time is spent reading a daily newspaper. The newspaper reader, unlike the reader of the more literary novel, does not expect to invest effort in the endeavour. He or she will not read a sentence or paragraph a second time to be clear about what is being said. Confusion, more often than not, will mean abandoning the story altogether and moving on. Many newspaper readers skim, sample or get a flavour of a story rather than reading it through.</div>
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So journalistic writing is different from creative writing. Many young people think they would like to be journalists because they have "always loved writing" or started writing poems when they were eight. It is certainly not enough and may well be a barrier to success in journalism. The late Nicholas Tomalin famously wrote that "the only qualities essential for real success in journalism are rat-like cunning, a plausible manner, and a little literary ability." He included writing, but he placed it third and prefaced it with a diminutive. The writing matters; but don't think of it as art. Think of it as working writing, writing doing a job, writing that puts across information in a way that makes readers want to absorb it.</div>
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At a time when the vast majority of entrants to journalism have degrees - welcome because journalism in a complex world is an intellectual pursuit - it is worth pointing out that writing for newspapers is also very different from the academic writing of student essays. No time to produce a route map for the essay and reach the point somewhere near the end; the journalist must grab the attention at once.</div>
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It is difficult to write simply and engagingly, so that readers will keep reading; to explain so that all the readers understand, and want to. This is the task the writing journalist has.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03257698200484702055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5378340057361209549.post-12445628089031914042013-10-07T14:41:00.003-07:002013-10-07T14:41:57.873-07:00Characters and Viewpoint<div style="background-color: white; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; color: #333333; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; margin-bottom: 13px; padding: 0px;">
The main characters in fiction for children and teenagers tend, not surprisingly, to be children and teenagers, though it's not hard to find exceptions, such as Philip Pullman's Once Upon a Time in the North. To write convincingly, whether in first- or third-person, you need to position yourself inside the head of one or more characters. In Tom's Midnight Garden, we share Tom's thoughts all the way: his frustration at being cooped up, his interest in the old grandfather clock, his surprise at finding that the midnight garden is different from the daytime one.</div>
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One way of getting a sense of your characters as rounded human beings, rather than as cardboard cut-outs, is to build them through questions and answers. For example: What's in her pocket? Who does she dislike, and why? What's her best subject at school? Who would she most like to get a text message from? What's she most anxious about? and so on. And it's important to hear your character speaking, and to see his or her body language.</div>
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Adults will almost inevitably appear, but children's writers are adept at getting rid of them, or at least keeping them on the sidelines, so that the children have to confront their own difficulties. Health and safety consciousness can curtail the activities of children in present-day stories of the real world, which may account for the huge amount of fantasy published in recent years; in imaginary settings, child characters can be magicians, warriors, seers, time-travellers, or whatever the author wants them to be. Similarly, children in historical fiction can plausibly face huge responsibilities and go on dangerous journeys with only their own resources to depend on.</div>
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What's crucial is that the child characters are central to the action, and play a decisive part - they can't just have things happen to them. In Dogger, it's the children who sort out the problem - the outcome would be less satisfying if Dave's parents had swooped in to take charge.</div>
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In some settings, children - and adults - seem powerless. Continuing the tradition of stories about children caught up in war, oppression and persecution, the author Elizabeth Laird has written, with great success, novels featuring street children in Addis Ababa (The Garbage King), a Kurdish refugee (Red Sky in the Morning) and a Palestinian boy living in the Occupied Territories (A Little Patch of Ground). Importantly, Laird makes her child characters more than passive victims of persecution. Karim and his friends convert a patch of wasteland into a football pitch, defiantly raising a Palestinian flag; their game of football is unlikely to challenge Israeli dominance, yet the novel humanises the situation and engages the reader by showing us one boy's very ordinary aspiration.</div>
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Most important of all is that your readers must care about your character. Endow your hero or heroine with skill, beauty and undentable self-confidence and you risk alienating the reader. Flaws, self-doubts and weaknesses - in even the most spirited of characters, like Philip Pullman's Lyra - engage reader sympathy. Winnie-the-Pooh is endearing because he's well-meaning, but easily confused; Jane Eyre because she considers herself to be plain and unremarkable. Christopher in The Curious Incident ... is aware that his Asperger's syndrome marks him out as different, but makes us see people and events with his own logic and dogged determination.</div>
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A problem frequently seen in students' writing is viewpoint-hopping. Without realising, they've changed the point of view from paragraph to paragraph, or even from sentence to sentence, so reading the story feels like jumping in and out of various characters' heads. This is unsettling for the reader, and rarely works.</div>
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Of course you can use more than one viewpoint: children's fiction, like any other fiction, can have omniscient narrators, multiple narrators, unreliable narrators. There aren't any rules, but you should know what rules you've made for yourself, know when you're breaking them, and do so for good reason.</div>
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Michael Lawrence on what makes kids laugh</h2>
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Adults who haven't read any of my books about Jiggy McCue and his pals might imagine that they are relentlessly rude crowd-pleasers. With titles like The Killer Underpants, The Toilet of Doom and Nudie Dudie I can hardly blame them, but in fact I avoid extreme vulgarity, and scatological humour in particular. Kids love a little gentle rudeness, though, and this I do supply, because it appeals to me too. A good example is 'The Fellowship of Ancient Rights for Trees' in The Snottle. Jiggy refers to the organisation's members as 'FARTers', always emphasising the first syllable to irritate his mother. Well, isn't that what you would have done when you were 11 or 12?</div>
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I don't go out of my way to keep up with the times in these stories. Mobile phones, DVDs, famous film stars and so on are mentioned, but Jiggy's school experiences are essentially my own from over half a century ago. I base his lessons on the lessons that I remember so well. (Some of his teachers were my actual teachers - and yes, I use their real names). You might think that this would date the books, but children can't have changed much, as they write to me in droves to say how much like Jiggy's world theirs is. I find that rather pleasing.</div>
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<strong style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">·</strong> Michael Lawrence latest book is Jiggy McCue: Kid Swap (Orchard)</div>
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Lauren Child on how to illustrate a story</h2>
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There are millions of talented illustrators out there who would love to illustrate books for children. They are creative, they are original, they are skilful. And yet they have to suffer one rejection after the other.</div>
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I know, because for the first five years of my career, I was one of them. It was only when I realised that I could write my own books that I got my first manuscript accepted.</div>
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Normally, as an illustrator, you are taught to treat text with a lot of respect, reverence even. The books that you illustrate tend to arrive paginated, with the text already fine-tuned. But in a good picture-book, the pictures should be as important - if not more important - than the text. I never finish the text before I am done with the illustrations.</div>
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When you illustrate a story, don't try to show what the words are already telling you. You have to add something new. I try to do this by changing perspective, or by engaging with my characters' imagination. In one of my books, Charlie tells Lola that she has to go to bed "because all the birds have gone to bed". To which Lola replies: "But I'm not a bird". Rather than showing Lola in the kitchen, where the conversation is taking place, I showed Lola sitting in a bird's nest.</div>
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The simplest drawings of characters are the often the most successful: think of Miffy or Peanuts. But even the simplest human face has to show more than one expression over the course of your book. If you want your character to be liked, you have to give them an emotional inner life.</div>
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I always know when I see a good illustration: I get jealous. The tricky thing is that you have to actively resist the temptation to imitate the illustrators you like. Many publishers will pretend that they want your book to look "more like Quentin Blake" or "a bit like Shirley Hughes". But deep down they want to see something new.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03257698200484702055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5378340057361209549.post-13596804858515596202013-10-07T14:27:00.002-07:002013-10-07T14:27:46.688-07:00Why write at all?<span style="background-color: white; color: #666666; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 19px;">Writing for children is not an easy route to becoming published, today's tutor Linda Newbery explains why.</span><br />
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Books can change lives - we know that. And if you're lucky enough to write and publish books for children, there's the potential of changing young lives in various ways. Yours might be the book that turns a child on to reading, with a first experience of reading pleasure; maybe it's a favourite bedtime story, or the first book a child reads alone. It might give a child an absorbing new interest, or bring insight, reassurance, or the determination to confront a doubt or a fear. Yours might be the book that's loved literally to pieces, the story that's read and reread and almost known by heart. Your book, once published, will reach farther than you'll ever know.</div>
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These are powerful reasons for wanting to write for children, but let's get rid of some that aren't likely to get you far.</div>
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It can't be difficult - anyone can do it. No: anyone can't. This misconception hasn't been helped by the current crop of celebrities publishing children's stories. A household name certainly helps with the marketing, but most of us don't have that flying start. Shelves and tables in editors' and agents' offices sag under the weight of unpublishable stories sent in the belief that anyone can write for children.</div>
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I'm writing the next Harry Potter. You may think so; so do countless others. As Philip Pullman has put it, no one was looking for the first Harry Potter (nor for His Dark Materials). The best books often come as if from nowhere, not from an examination of market requirements. Publishers' lists reach at least two years into the future, and what you see as a hot trend may be nearing the end of its run.</div>
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I've written this short story and my friends say I should get it published. But why? You may be able to cook a reasonable pasta dish, but you don't therefore see yourself as rival to Gordon Ramsay or Nigella Lawson. Yet, for some reason, it's a common belief that any coherent piece of writing deserves publication. Publishing isn't a reward for effort; it's a business.</div>
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It must be an easy way to make money. It isn't. A recent survey by Mary Hoffman for the Society of Authors revealed that most children's writers earn less than the minimum wage. An exceptional few sell books by the million; most of those who make their living by writing have worked hard at it for years.</div>
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<strong style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">So why write for children?</strong></div>
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<strong style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">·</strong> Because you have the germ of an idea that might make a story, and you can't wait to explore it</div>
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<strong style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">·</strong> Because you've had such pleasure from living in other people's stories</div>
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<strong style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">·</strong> Because you love playing with words and ideas</div>
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<strong style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">·</strong> Because you can live inside the head of a child or teenager and be fascinated by what happens there</div>
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<strong style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">·</strong> Because inside your adult self there's a child's playfulness and sense of wonder</div>
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<strong style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">·</strong> Because you know that children's reading is so important that only the best you can offer is good enough.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03257698200484702055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5378340057361209549.post-38723069152585144582013-10-07T14:10:00.001-07:002013-10-07T14:10:07.334-07:00From Idea to Story<div style="background-color: white; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; color: #333333; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; margin-bottom: 13px; padding: 0px;">
"Where do you get your ideas from?" Every author who gives talks to children or adults has been asked this question hundreds of times, and of course there's no simple answer. Ideas are everywhere - the trick is to recognise a promising one when you get it, and not let go. Your starting point may be something that's happened to you, or to someone you know; a news item; a fear, or a dream; something from the past; a fascinating character; a painting or poem; and of course our heads are crammed full of ideas and images from books we've read, stories we've heard and films we've seen. Several of my own books have begun with a particular place or atmosphere: an intriguing old house (Nevermore), a wartime airfield (Flightsend), an out-of-season seaside resort (The Sandfather).</div>
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When a promising idea grabs hold of you, hang on to it and see if you can turn it into a story, or at least the beginning of a story. You can build on it by asking yourself questions and thinking of the answers. Who? When? Why? will get you started; then more and more questions will follow: But why doesn't he tell anyone? Who could possibly help her? Where have his parents gone? What's he hiding from? At this stage, it's a game: you haven't committed yourself to anything, and can enjoy playing around with ideas and possibilities. When you're ready, you can start making notes on the characters and their situations</div>
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Every story, whatever the genre, must involve conflict, and it's useful (though not necessarily at this early stage) to be able to convey the essence of your story in a single phrase. As the agent Carole Blake, author of From Pitch to Publication, puts it, any story can be boiled down to: What does the main character want, and what's stopping them from getting it? If there's no conflict, there's no story.</div>
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<strong style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">·</strong> Macbeth: What does Macbeth want? To be King of Scotland. What's stopping him? There's already a king, with two sons as his heirs.</div>
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<strong style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">·</strong> Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy: What does Gabriel Oak want? To marry Bathsheba Everdene. What's stopping him? She becomes a woman of property, and falls in love with the wrong man.</div>
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<strong style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">·</strong> Tom's Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce: What does Tom want? To explore outside, instead of spending the summer holidays cooped up in his aunt and uncle's flat. What's stopping him? He's in quarantine for measles, and expected to stay indoors.</div>
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A story is driven by the facing and resolution of the central conflict. Too early a resolution means that all tension is lost. Too easy or convenient a solution means that the story won't convince. Let's look in detail at a 32-page picture book, Dogger by Shirley Hughes. What does Dave want? To be reunited with his favourite toy, Dogger. What's stopping him? ...</div>
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In the opening pages, we're shown how important the toy dog is to Dave. His sister Bella sleeps with several bears tucked up next to her; Dave has Dogger with him in bed. No other toy will do. The first crisis comes when Dogger is dropped in the street while Mum and the children buy and eat ice-cream cornets. At bedtime, when Dave can't find Dogger, the whole family is involved in searching; but the toy can't be found.</div>
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Next day, at the school fete, Dave is unhappy, missing Dogger. Meanwhile, Bella's enjoying herself, coming first in a race, winning a raffle prize. Dave is jealous, because his sister's having such a good day while he's miserable. Then he sees Dogger, sitting on the back of the toy stall, with a price-tag. Dave hasn't got enough money, so he runs to find Bella. Now the second crisis: as they hurry back to the stall, a little girl has bought Dogger and is walking away with him.</div>
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The resolution doesn't come immediately; we have to see the possibility of Dave being parted with his toy forever. Bella offers to buy Dogger back, but the girl refuses - she's paid, and now he's hers. Dave is distraught, crying as the girl marches off with Dogger. The answer doesn't arrive out of the blue, either - it's already been built into the story and is there in the pictures. Bella is clutching a big teddy-bear, her raffle prize. Although we know that Bella likes bears, she offers to swap the teddy for her brother's toy; the girl agrees, preferring the brand-new bear to battered old Dogger, and everyone's happy. The final picture shows Bella in bed with her row of bears, and Dave tucked up with Dogger. The story is expertly paced and dramatised, and we've seen the swings of resentment and affection between brother and sister. Needless to say, Shirley Hughes' illustrations give character, warmth and charm to a story crafted from the stuff of ordinary family life.</div>
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Try applying this simple what does he/she want formula to novels you've read recently, or to films, and then to the story you're thinking of writing. The dilemma set up, and its resolution, give you the main thrust of the story. In a picture book like Dogger, one plot strand is enough; in a novel for juniors or older, more will be going on. If, for example, your central character is a keen footballer desperate to be picked for the local team, there can be scenes at home and at school, perhaps involving a division of loyalty or clash of responsibility, so that the football detail isn't overwhelming.</div>
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Sometimes writers, especially inexperienced ones, come to a halt simply because they've lost sight of where the story is going. Authors vary tremendously in the amount of planning they do - some like to know exactly how the story will unfold, and have a chapter-by-chapter plan; others prefer to gather their ingredients, then let the story develop, leaving room for surprises. There's no right or wrong way, of course, but when you embark on a story for the first time you're more likely to feel confident if you can always see where to go next. This route can be plotted via stepping stones (see panel above) - you don't need to plan every detail, but at least you know what the next major episode will be.</div>
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Julia Jarman, author of Hangman and Peace Weavers, says that writing a novel is like making a film, "but you're taking charge of every aspect of it. The casting, costumes, locations, dialogue, special effects, pacing - everything, and you do it all with words." If you think of your unfolding novel as a film being privately screened inside your head, it will help you to establish the setting with enough but not too much description, like the mise-en-scène of film, and to vary the pace of the narrative. For instance, a scene that consists mainly of people talking can be followed by one that develops the plot through action or a shift in location, or moves more quickly through time. Some writers plan through storyboards, another way of thinking in filmic or dramatic terms.</div>
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Nicola Davies on how to write non-fiction for children</h2>
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Writing non-fiction won't get you onto any literary high tables, but it is still a noble calling: your words could instill lifelong curiosity in your readers. Start with thorough research; don't skimp because it's "only for kids" - it'll make your writing superficial.</div>
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Once you have assembled everything, be prepared to cut. Don't worry that you aren't telling your readers everything. It's better to tell them one thing they'll remember than ten things they'll forget. The most basic information can be interesting for young children; how a foot makes a print in sand is more exciting to a two year old than the geology of the beach. And don't be scared to say what is not known - it's important that children see knowledge as an ongoing project that they could contribute to.</div>
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Lists don't make readable books, so find a narrative thread to string your information on. One way to do this is to describe what your book is about in one word. I found my book about blue whales was about "bigness", but my turtle one was actually about "memory".</div>
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Make sure you use the right language for your audience. Translating complex information into words that children can understand takes time and lots of thinking. Use examples from the child's world to help. Always remember that the only way writing non-fiction differs from fiction is that you don't have to make up anything up. Keep your writing rich and interesting..</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03257698200484702055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5378340057361209549.post-60500742693984588662013-10-07T13:58:00.003-07:002013-10-07T13:58:38.891-07:00What's the story<span style="background-color: white; color: #666666; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 19px;">Producing a novel should be fun even though it's difficult, says writer Robert Harris. And while there are guides to help you along the way, fundamentally it's all down to you.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;">Writing a novel - unlike operating a piece of heavy machinery, say, or cooking a chicken - is not a skill that can be taught. There is no standard way of doing it, just as there is no means of telling, while you're doing it, whether you're doing it well or badly. And merely because you've done it well once doesn't mean you can do it well again. The whole process is a mystery, devoid of rules or fairness.</span><br />
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That doesn't mean that guides like this are without value. On the contrary. Having the urge to write a novel, especially if you've yet to be published, is like having a medical condition impossible to mention in polite company - it's a relief simply to know there are fellow-sufferers out there.</div>
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<a name='more'></a>In the 20 years that I've been writing fiction, three pieces of published wisdom, each offered by an eminent American novelist, have helped me along. The first was from John Irving, who maintains that any writer who embarks on a novel without knowing how it is going to end is a fool and a knave. A novel, he argues, recounts something that has already happened; therefore you cannot just make it up as you go along. This practical approach had a profound effect on me: indeed, it enabled me to complete my first novel, Fatherland which, in classic rookie fashion, had trailed to a baffled halt somewhere around page 50.<br />
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The second was from a 1995 interview with EL Doctorow: "You have to find the voice that allows you to write what you want to write ... It's a writer's dirty little secret that language precedes the intentions." On the face of it, this contradicts Irving ("I don't begin with a plan," insists Doctorow), but actually they are both saying the same thing, which is that the shape and style of a novel is determined by the thought you give it beforehand: that the way you approach your material is at least as important, maybe more important, than the material itself. This process of settling on an angle of attack may take months, even years of frustration and false starts, during which many writers - and certainly most writers' families and friends - believe the author may be going slightly mad.</div>
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Have courage, and remember the words of my third authority, Philip Roth, in 2003. "Over the years," he observed, looking back on his career on his 70th birthday, "what you develop is a tolerance for your own crudeness. And patience with your own crap, really. Belief in your crap, which is just 'stay with your crap and it will get better, and come back every day and keep going'."</div>
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To these three dictums, Polonius-like, I can add a few more. Don't try to write too much in a single session. One thousand words a day is quite enough. Stop after about four or five hours. Remember that most writing is done in the subconscious ("the boys in the basement," as Stephen King calls his unseen helpers) and that inspiration is only a posh word for ideas. Pace yourself, get some recreation, avoid tiring yourself out. Cut your manuscript ruthlessly but never throw anything away: it's amazing how often a discarded scene or description, which wouldn't fit in one place, will work perfectly later. Resist the temptation to show off your research (one of Tom Stoppard's maxims is, Just because it's true doesn't mean it's interesting). Be economical: Noel Coward's definition of good writing was the art of conveying something in as few words as possible .</div>
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Finally: enjoy yourself. "A writer who hates the actual writing,' Raymond Chandler once observed, "who gets no joy out of the creation of magic by words, to me is simply not a writer at all." That's the essence of being a novelist, and if you don't feel a surge of recognition on reading those words, it might be advisable to do something else.</div>
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<strong style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">·</strong> Robert Harris is the author of several bestselling historical novels, including Fatherland, Archangel and Pompeii. His most recent book is the political thriller The Ghost (Arrow Books).</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03257698200484702055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5378340057361209549.post-71518880772450236212013-10-06T08:20:00.001-07:002013-10-06T08:21:57.190-07:00How to Write A Book - The Honest Truth By Scott Berkun <div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #4b4846; font-family: rooney-web, sans-serif; font-size: 0.9em; line-height: 1.5em; padding: 0px 0px 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">
Every author I know gets asked the same question: <strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">How do you write a book?</strong></div>
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It’s a simple question, but it causes unexpected problems. On the one hand, it’s nice to have people interested in something I do. If I told people I fixed toasters for a living, I doubt I’d get many inquires. People are curious about writing and that’s cool and flattering. Rock on.</div>
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But on the other hand, the hand involving people who ask because they have an inkling to do it themselves, is that writing books is a topic so old and <a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+write&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS212US212" style="-webkit-transition: 0.5s ease; border: 0px; color: #048587; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: 0.5s ease; vertical-align: baseline;">so well trod</a> by <a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=writers+on+writing&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS212US212" style="-webkit-transition: 0.5s ease; border: 0px; color: #048587; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: 0.5s ease; vertical-align: baseline;">so many famous people</a> that anyone who asks me, with the serious intent of discovering secret advice from my small brain and limited writing experience, is hard to take seriously.</div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Here’s the short honest truth</strong>: 20% of the people who ask me are hoping to hear this –<strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Anyone can write a book</strong>. They want permission. The truth is you don’t need any. There is no license required. No test to take. Writing, as opposed to publishing, requires almost no financial or physical resources. A pen, paper and effort are all that has been required for hundreds of years. If <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltaire" style="-webkit-transition: 0.5s ease; border: 0px; color: #048587; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: 0.5s ease; vertical-align: baseline;">Voltaire</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquis_de_Sade" style="-webkit-transition: 0.5s ease; border: 0px; color: #048587; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: 0.5s ease; vertical-align: baseline;">Marquis de Sade</a> could write in prison, then you can do it in suburbia, at lunch, at work, or after your kids go to sleep.</div>
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If you want to write, kill the magic: a book is just a bunch of writing. Anyone can write a book. It might suck or be incomprehensible, but so what: it’s still a book. Nothing is stopping you right now from collecting all of your elementary school book reports, or drunken napkin scribbles, binding them together at kinkos for $20, slapping a title on the cover, and qualifying as an author. Want to write a good book? Ok, but get in line since most pro authors are still trying to figure that out too.</div>
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Writing a good book, compared to a bad one, involves one thing. Work. No one wants to hear this, but if you take two books off any shelf, I’ll bet my pants the author of the better book worked harder than the author of the other one. Call it effort, study, practice, whatever. Sure there are tricks here and there, but really writing is a kind of work.</div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Getting published</strong>. 30% of the time the real thing people are asking is how do you find a publisher. As if there wasn’t a phone book or, say, an Internet-thingy where you can look this stuff up. <a href="http://www.writersmarket.com/" style="-webkit-transition: 0.5s ease; border: 0px; color: #048587; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: 0.5s ease; vertical-align: baseline;">Writers-market</a> is literally begging to help writers find publishers. Many publishers, being positive on the whole idea of communication, put <a href="http://www.oreilly.com/oreilly/author/index.html" style="-webkit-transition: 0.5s ease; border: 0px; color: #048587; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: 0.5s ease; vertical-align: baseline;">information on how to submit material on their website</a>. And <a href="http://www.writers.net/agents.html" style="-webkit-transition: 0.5s ease; border: 0px; color: #048587; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: 0.5s ease; vertical-align: baseline;">so do agents</a>. The grand comedy of this is how few writers follow the instructions. That’s what pisses off all the editors: few writers do their homework.</div>
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The sticking point for most wanna-be published authors is, again, the work. They want to hear some secret that skips over the hard parts. Publishers are rightfully picky and they get pitched a zillion books a day. It takes <strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">effort</strong> to learn the ropes, send out smart queries, and do the research required to both craft the idea for a book, and then to propose it effectively. So while writing is a rejection prone occupation, even for the rock-stars, finding a publisher is not a mystery. In fact the whole game is self-selective: people who aren’t willing to do the leg-work of getting published are unlikely to be capable of the leg-work required to finish a decent manuscript.</div>
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But that said – it’s <a href="http://www.lulu.com/" style="-webkit-transition: 0.5s ease; border: 0px; color: #048587; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: 0.5s ease; vertical-align: baseline;">easier today to self-publish than ever</a>. Really. But again, this requires work, so many prefer to keep asking writers how they got published instead of just doing it themselves. I self published my last book, and <a href="http://www.scottberkun.com/blog/2011/confessions-of-a-self-published-author/" style="-webkit-transition: 0.5s ease; border: 0px; color: #048587; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: 0.5s ease; vertical-align: baseline;">you can read what I learned from it here</a>.</div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Being famous and wealthy</strong>: Now this is the kicker. About 50% of the time the real thing people want to know is how to become a famous millionaire rock-star author dude. As if <strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">a)</strong> I qualified, <strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">b)</strong> I could explain how it happened, or <strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">c)</strong> I’d be willing to tell.</div>
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First, this assumes writing is a good way to get rich. Not sure how this one started but writing, like most creative pursuits, has always been a less than lucrative lifestyle. Even if a book sells well, the $$$$ to hour ratio will be well below your average corporate job, without the health benefits, sick days, nor the months where you can coast by without your boss noticing. These days people write books <strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">after</strong> they’re famous, not before. And if the only books you read are bestsellers, well, you have a myopic view of the publishing world. Over <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Books_published_per_country_per_year" style="-webkit-transition: 0.5s ease; border: 0px; color: #048587; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: 0.5s ease; vertical-align: baseline;">100k books are published in the US annually</a>, and few sell more than a few thousand copies, and what causes books to sell may have little to do with how good a book is. Either way, to justify the effort you’ll need reasons other than cash.</div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Discouraged yet? Good. Here is the upside:</strong> I love writing books. I love reading books. I love the entire notion that people can make things up in their mind and then make them real on a page, for the pleasure or utility of someone else. That’s just awesome. If you like writing, if you enjoy the bittersweetness of chasing words into sentences, then you might love writing books too, despite, or even because of, everything I said above. If so, get to work – <strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">now</strong> :)</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03257698200484702055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5378340057361209549.post-62835317454155686482013-10-06T08:01:00.000-07:002013-10-06T08:01:00.001-07:00The Snowflake Method For Designing A Novel<div style="background-color: #fcfdfd; border: 0px; color: #3b3b3a; font-family: 'Open Sans', arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.4em; margin-bottom: 1em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<strong style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Writing a novel is easy</strong>. Writing a good novel is hard. That’s just life. If it were easy, we’d all be writing best-selling, prize-winning fiction.</div>
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Frankly, there are a thousand different people out there who can tell you how to write a novel. There are a thousand different methods. The best one for you is the one that works for you.</div>
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<strong style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">In this article</strong>, I’d like to share with you what works for me. I’ve published six novels and won about a dozen awards for my writing. I teach the craft of writing fiction at writing conferences all the time. One of my most popular lectures is this one: How to write a novel using what I call the “Snowflake Method.”</div>
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<strong style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">This page</strong> is the most popular one on my web site, and gets over a thousand page views per day, so you can guess that a lot of people find it useful. But you may not, and that’s fine by me. Look it over, decide what might work for you, and ignore the rest! If it makes you puke, I won’t be insulted. Different writers are different. If my methods get you rolling, I’ll be happy. I’ll make the best case I can for my way of organizing things, but you are the final judge of what works best for you. Have fun and . . . write your novel!</div>
<b><span style="font-size: large;">The Importance of Design</span></b><div>
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<strong style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Good fiction doesn’t just happen,</strong> it is designed. You can do the design work before or after you write your novel. I’ve done it both ways and I strongly believe that doing it first is quicker and leads to a better result. Design is hard work, so it’s important to find a guiding principle early on. This article will give you a powerful metaphor to guide your design.</div>
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<strong style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Our fundamental question is this:</strong> How do you design a novel?</div>
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For a number of years, I was a software architect designing large software projects. I write novels the same way I write software, using the “snowflake metaphor”. OK, what’s the snowflake metaphor? Before you go further, take a look at <a href="http://math.rice.edu/~lanius/frac/koch/koch.html" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #3181b0; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">this cool web site</a>.</div>
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<img alt="snowflake image" class="alignright size-full wp-image-745" height="275" src="http://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/snowflake-image.gif" style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.701961); border: 0px; float: right; height: auto; margin: 5px 0px 15px 15px; max-width: 100%; outline: 0px; padding: 0.75em 0px; vertical-align: bottom;" title="snowflake image" width="266" />At the top of the page, you’ll see a cute pattern known as a snowflake fractal. Don’t tell anyone, but this is an important mathematical object that’s been widely studied. For our purposes, it’s just a cool sketch of a snowflake. If you scroll down that same web page a little, you’ll see a box with a large triangle in it and arrows underneath. If you press the right-arrow button repeatedly, you’ll see the steps used to create the snowflake. It doesn’t look much like a snowflake at first, but after a few steps, it starts looking more and more like one, until it’s done.</div>
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<strong style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The first few steps</strong> look like this:</div>
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<a href="http://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/snowflake-iteration.gif" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #3181b0; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><img alt="snowflake iteration 1" class="size-full wp-image-747 alignleft" height="44" src="http://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/snowflake-iteration-1.gif" style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.701961); border: 0px; float: left; height: auto; margin: 5px 15px 15px 0px; max-width: 100%; outline: 0px; padding: 0.75em 0px; vertical-align: bottom;" title="snowflake iteration 1" width="43" /><img alt="snowflake iteration" class="size-full wp-image-746 alignleft" height="49" src="http://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/snowflake-iteration.gif" style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.701961); border: 0px; float: left; height: auto; margin: 5px 15px 15px 0px; max-width: 100%; outline: 0px; padding: 0.75em 0px; vertical-align: bottom;" title="snowflake iteration" width="44" /></a></div>
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<img alt="snowflake iteration 3" class="size-full wp-image-748 alignleft" height="50" src="http://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/snowflake-iteration-3.gif" style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.701961); border: 0px; float: left; height: auto; margin: 5px 15px 15px 0px; max-width: 100%; outline: 0px; padding: 0.75em 0px; vertical-align: bottom;" title="snowflake iteration 3" width="44" /></div>
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<img alt="snowflake iteration 4" class="size-full wp-image-749 alignleft" height="52" src="http://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/snowflake-iteration-4.gif" style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.701961); border: 0px; float: left; height: auto; margin: 5px 15px 15px 0px; max-width: 100%; outline: 0px; padding: 0.75em 0px; vertical-align: bottom;" title="snowflake iteration 4" width="45" /></div>
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<strong style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">I claim that that’s how you design a novel</strong> – you start small, then build stuff up until it looks like a story. Part of this is creative work, and I can’t teach you how to do that. Not here, anyway. But part of the work is just managing your creativity — getting it organized into a well-structured novel. That’s what I’d like to teach you here.</div>
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<strong style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">If you’re like most people,</strong> you spend a long time thinking about your novel before you ever start writing. You may do some research. You daydream about how the story’s going to work. You brainstorm. You start hearing the voices of different characters. You think about what the book’s about — the Deep Theme. This is an essential part of every book which I call “composting”. It’s an informal process and every writer does it differently. I’m going to assume that you know how to compost your story ideas and that you have already got a novel well-composted in your mind and that you’re ready to sit down and start writing that novel.</div>
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<span style="color: #3b3b3a; font-family: Open Sans, arial, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><span style="line-height: 21px;"><b>The Ten Steps of Design</b></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #3b3b3a; font-family: Open Sans, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;">But before you start writing, you need to get organized. You need to put all those wonderful ideas down on paper in a form you can use. Why? Because your memory is fallible, and your creativity has probably left a lot of holes in your story — holes you need to fill in before you start writing your novel. You need a design document. And you need to produce it using a process that doesn’t kill your desire to actually write the story. Here is my ten-step process for writing a design document. I use this process for writing my novels, and I hope it will help you.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #3b3b3a; font-family: Open Sans, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;"><b>Step 1)</b> Take an hour and write a one-sentence summary of your novel. Something like this: “A rogue physicist travels back in time to kill the apostle Paul.” (This is the summary for my first novel, Transgression.) The sentence will serve you forever as a ten-second selling tool. This is the big picture, the analog of that big starting triangle in the snowflake picture.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #3b3b3a; font-family: 'Open Sans', arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;">When you later write your book proposal, this sentence should appear very early in the proposal. It’s the hook that will sell your book to your editor, to your committee, to the sales force, to bookstore owners, and ultimately to readers. So make the best one you can!</span></div>
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<span style="color: #3b3b3a; font-family: 'Open Sans', arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;">Some hints on what makes a good sentence:</span></div>
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<span style="color: #3b3b3a; font-family: 'Open Sans', arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;">Shorter is better. Try for fewer than 15 words.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #3b3b3a; font-family: Open Sans, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;">No character names, please! Better to say “a handicapped trapeze artist” than “Jane Doe”.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #3b3b3a; font-family: Open Sans, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;">Tie together the big picture and the personal picture. Which character has the most to lose in this story? Now tell me what he or she wants to win.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #3b3b3a; font-family: Open Sans, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;">Read the one-line blurbs on the New York Times Bestseller list to learn how to do this. Writing a one-sentence description is an art form.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #3b3b3a; font-family: Open Sans, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;"><b>Step 2)</b> Take another hour and expand that sentence to a full paragraph describing the story setup, major disasters, and ending of the novel. This is the analog of the second stage of the snowflake. I like to structure a story as “three disasters plus an ending”. Each of the disasters takes a quarter of the book to develop and the ending takes the final quarter. I don’t know if this is the ideal structure, it’s just my personal taste.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #3b3b3a; font-family: 'Open Sans', arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;">If you believe in the Three-Act structure, then the first disaster corresponds to the end of Act 1. The second disaster is the mid-point of Act 2. The third disaster is the end of Act 2, and forces Act 3 which wraps things up. It is OK to have the first disaster be caused by external circumstances, but I think that the second and third disasters should be caused by the protagonist’s attempts to “fix things”. Things just get worse and worse.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #3b3b3a; font-family: 'Open Sans', arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;">You can also use this paragraph in your proposal. Ideally, your paragraph will have about five sentences. One sentence to give me the backdrop and story setup. Then one sentence each for your three disasters. Then one more sentence to tell the ending. Don’t confuse this paragraph with the back-cover copy for your book. This paragraph summarizes the whole story. Your back-cover copy should summarize only about the first quarter of the story.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #3b3b3a; font-family: Open Sans, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;"><b>Step 3)</b> The above gives you a high-level view of your novel. Now you need something similar for the storylines of each of your characters. Characters are the most important part of any novel, and the time you invest in designing them up front will pay off ten-fold when you start writing. For each of your major characters, take an hour and write a one-page summary sheet that tells:</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #3b3b3a; font-family: Open Sans, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;">The character’s name</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #3b3b3a; font-family: Open Sans, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;">A one-sentence summary of the character’s storyline</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #3b3b3a; font-family: Open Sans, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;">The character’s motivation (what does he/she want abstractly?)</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #3b3b3a; font-family: Open Sans, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;">The character’s goal (what does he/she want concretely?)</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #3b3b3a; font-family: Open Sans, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;">The character’s conflict (what prevents him/her from reaching this goal?)</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #3b3b3a; font-family: Open Sans, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;">The character’s epiphany (what will he/she learn, how will he/she change?</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #3b3b3a; font-family: Open Sans, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;">A one-paragraph summary of the character’s storyline</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #3b3b3a; font-family: Open Sans, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;">An important point: You may find that you need to go back and revise your one-sentence summary and/or your one-paragraph summary. Go ahead! This is good–it means your characters are teaching you things about your story. It’s always okay at any stage of the design process to go back and revise earlier stages. In fact, it’s not just okay–it’s inevitable. And it’s good. Any revisions you make now are revisions you won’t need to make later on to a clunky 400 page manuscript.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #3b3b3a; font-family: 'Open Sans', arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;">Another important point: It doesn’t have to be perfect. The purpose of each step in the design process is to advance you to the next step. Keep your forward momentum! You can always come back later and fix it when you understand the story better. You will do this too, unless you’re a lot smarter than I am.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #3b3b3a; font-family: Open Sans, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;"><b>Step 4)</b> By this stage, you should have a good idea of the large-scale structure of your novel, and you have only spent a day or two. Well, truthfully, you may have spent as much as a week, but it doesn’t matter. If the story is broken, you know it now, rather than after investing 500 hours in a rambling first draft. So now just keep growing the story. Take several hours and expand each sentence of your summary paragraph into a full paragraph. All but the last paragraph should end in a disaster. The final paragraph should tell how the book ends.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #3b3b3a; font-family: Open Sans, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;">This is a lot of fun, and at the end of the exercise, you have a pretty decent one-page skeleton of your novel. It’s okay if you can’t get it all onto one single-spaced page. What matters is that you are growing the ideas that will go into your story. You are expanding the conflict. You should now have a synopsis suitable for a proposal, although there is a better alternative for proposals . . .</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #3b3b3a; font-family: Open Sans, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;"><b>Step 5) </b>Take a day or two and write up a one-page description of each major character and a half-page description of the other important characters. These “character synopses” should tell the story from the point of view of each character. As always, feel free to cycle back to the earlier steps and make revisions as you learn cool stuff about your characters. I usually enjoy this step the most and lately, I have been putting the resulting “character synopses” into my proposals instead of a plot-based synopsis. Editors love character synopses, because editors love character-based fiction.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #3b3b3a; font-family: Open Sans, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;"><b>Step 6)</b> By now, you have a solid story and several story-threads, one for each character. Now take a week and expand the one-page plot synopsis of the novel to a four-page synopsis. Basically, you will again be expanding each paragraph from step (4) into a full page. This is a lot of fun, because you are figuring out the high-level logic of the story and making strategic decisions. Here, you will definitely want to cycle back and fix things in the earlier steps as you gain insight into the story and new ideas whack you in the face.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #3b3b3a; font-family: Open Sans, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;"><b>Step 7) </b>Take another week and expand your character descriptions into full-fledged character charts detailing everything there is to know about each character. The standard stuff such as birthdate, description, history, motivation, goal, etc. Most importantly, how will this character change by the end of the novel? This is an expansion of your work in step (3), and it will teach you a lot about your characters. You will probably go back and revise steps (1-6) as your characters become “real” to you and begin making petulant demands on the story. This is good — great fiction is character-driven. Take as much time as you need to do this, because you’re just saving time downstream. When you have finished this process, (and it may take a full month of solid effort to get here), you have most of what you need to write a proposal. If you are a published novelist, then you can write a proposal now and sell your novel before you write it. If you’re not yet published, then you’ll need to write your entire novel first before you can sell it. No, that’s not fair, but life isn’t fair and the world of fiction writing is especially unfair.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #3b3b3a; font-family: Open Sans, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;"><b>Step 8)</b> You may or may not take a hiatus here, waiting for the book to sell. At some point, you’ve got to actually write the novel. Before you do that, there are a couple of things you can do to make that traumatic first draft easier. The first thing to do is to take that four-page synopsis and make a list of all the scenes that you’ll need to turn the story into a novel. And the easiest way to make that list is . . . with a spreadsheet.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #3b3b3a; font-family: 'Open Sans', arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;">For some reason, this is scary to a lot of writers. Oh the horror. Deal with it. You learned to use a word-processor. Spreadsheets are easier. You need to make a list of scenes, and spreadsheets were invented for making lists. If you need some tutoring, buy a book. There are a thousand out there, and one of them will work for you. It should take you less than a day to learn the itty bit you need. It’ll be the most valuable day you ever spent. Do it.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #3b3b3a; font-family: 'Open Sans', arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;">Make a spreadsheet detailing the scenes that emerge from your four-page plot outline. Make just one line for each scene. In one column, list the POV character. In another (wide) column, tell what happens. If you want to get fancy, add more columns that tell you how many pages you expect to write for the scene. A spreadsheet is ideal, because you can see the whole storyline at a glance, and it’s easy to move scenes around to reorder things.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #3b3b3a; font-family: 'Open Sans', arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;">My spreadsheets usually wind up being over 100 lines long, one line for each scene of the novel. As I develop the story, I make new versions of my story spreadsheet. This is incredibly valuable for analyzing a story. It can take a week to make a good spreadsheet. When you are done, you can add a new column for chapter numbers and assign a chapter to each scene.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #3b3b3a; font-family: 'Open Sans', arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;"><b>Step 9)</b> (Optional. I don’t do this step anymore.) Switch back to your word processor and begin writing a narrative description of the story. Take each line of the spreadsheet and expand it to a multi-paragraph description of the scene. Put in any cool lines of dialogue you think of, and sketch out the essential conflict of that scene. If there’s no conflict, you’ll know it here and you should either add conflict or scrub the scene.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #3b3b3a; font-family: 'Open Sans', arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;">I used to write either one or two pages per chapter, and I started each chapter on a new page. Then I just printed it all out and put it in a loose-leaf notebook, so I could easily swap chapters around later or revise chapters without messing up the others. This process usually took me a week and the end result was a massive 50-page printed document that I would revise in red ink as I wrote the first draft. All my good ideas when I woke up in the morning got hand-written in the margins of this document. This, by the way, is a rather painless way of writing that dreaded detailed synopsis that all writers seem to hate. But it’s actually fun to develop, if you have done steps (1) through (8) first. When I did this step, I never showed this synopsis to anyone, least of all to an editor — it was for me alone. I liked to think of it as the prototype first draft. Imagine writing a first draft in a week! Yes, you can do it and it’s well worth the time. But I’ll be honest, I don’t feel like I need this step anymore, so I don’t do it now.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #3b3b3a; font-family: Open Sans, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;"><b>Step 10)</b> At this point, just sit down and start pounding out the real first draft of the novel. You will be astounded at how fast the story flies out of your fingers at this stage. I have seen writers triple their fiction writing speed overnight, while producing better quality first drafts than they usually produce on a third draft.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #3b3b3a; font-family: 'Open Sans', arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;">You might think that all the creativity is chewed out of the story by this time. Well, no, not unless you overdid your analysis when you wrote your Snowflake. This is supposed to be the fun part, because there are many small-scale logic problems to work out here. How does Hero get out of that tree surrounded by alligators and rescue Heroine who’s in the burning rowboat? This is the time to figure it out! But it’s fun because you already know that the large-scale structure of the novel works. So you only have to solve a limited set of problems, and so you can write relatively fast.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #3b3b3a; font-family: 'Open Sans', arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;">This stage is incredibly fun and exciting. I have heard many fiction writers complain about how hard the first draft is. Invariably, that’s because they have no clue what’s coming next. Good grief! Life is too short to write like that! There is no reason to spend 500 hours writing a wandering first draft of your novel when you can write a solid one in 150. Counting the 100 hours it takes to do the design documents, you come out way ahead in time.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #3b3b3a; font-family: 'Open Sans', arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;">About midway through a first draft, I usually take a breather and fix all the broken parts of my design documents. Yes, the design documents are not perfect. That’s okay. The design documents are not fixed in concrete, they are a living set of documents that grows as you develop your novel. If you are doing your job right, at the end of the first draft you will laugh at what an amateurish piece of junk your original design documents were. And you’ll be thrilled at how deep your story has become.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #3b3b3a; font-family: 'Open Sans', arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;">Over the years, I’ve taught the Snowflake method to hundreds of writers at conferences. I’ve also had this article posted here on my web site for a long time, and the page has now been viewed over 2,400,000 times. I’ve heard from many, many writers. Some people love the Snowflake; some don’t. My attitude is that if it works for you, then use it. If only parts of it work for you, then use only those parts.I write my own novels using the Snowflake method. Make no mistake — it’s a fair bit of work. For a long time, I did it the hard way, using Microsoft Word to write the text and Microsoft Excel to manage the list of scenes. Unfortunately, neither of those tools knows about the structure of fiction. Finally, I realized that it would be a whole lot easier to work through the method if the tools were designed specially for fiction.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #3b3b3a; font-family: Open Sans, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;">So one day I decided to create that software. I wanted something that would automate every step that could be automated. The result was a commercial software package I call Snowflake Pro. It makes my own Snowflaking incredibly easier, and it’s now doing the same for zillions of other writers.</span></span></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03257698200484702055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5378340057361209549.post-44997862565585684222013-10-06T07:50:00.001-07:002013-10-06T07:55:56.930-07:00Essential Advice for Beginning Writers: An Interview with Kerri Majors<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<strong style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Kerri Majors</strong> is the editor and founder of <a href="http://www.yareview.net/" style="background-color: transparent; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; border: 0px; color: #4a7e97; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="YARN">YARN, the Young Adult Review Network</a>, an online literary journal of YA short stories, essays, and poetry. As if this role doesn’t keep her busy enough, she is also the author of <a href="http://www.writersdigestshop.com/this-is-not-a-writing-manual-u0789?lid=wdbkblog081613-thisisnotawritingmanual-rr" style="background-color: transparent; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; border: 0px; color: #4a7e97; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="This Is Not a Writing Manual"><em style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">This Is Not a Writing Manual</em></a>, a refreshing and candid memoir geared toward young writers. In it, she shares her own trials-by-fire, successes, disappointments, and thoughts on the writing life. This is the perfect book to share with the young writer in your life, and there are plenty of pearls of wisdom and<a href="http://www.writersdigestshop.com/unleash-your-creativity?lid=wdssl" style="background-color: transparent; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; border: 0px; color: #4a7e97; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" title=" inspiration"> inspiration</a> for writers of all ages, beginners and veterans alike.</div>
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I sat down with Kerri to chat about what it means to be a writer, what makes for stand-out, top-notch fiction, and the writing mistakes she sees in her role as a fiction editor.</div>
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<em style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><strong style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">—by Rachel Randall, Managing Editor of Writer’s Digest Books</strong></em></div>
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<strong style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Why did you decide to write<em style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> This Is Not a Writing Manual</em>?</strong></div>
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I never-ever-EVER thought I would write a book like this. In fact, I used to resist even reading books like this one—until I finally broke down and read Anne Lamott’s amazing <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Bird by Bird</i>, which made me laugh and cry with recognition. Reading her book, then assigning it to my students for many years, began to break down my barrier to “writing books.”</div>
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Then I started running YARN and getting more and more immersed in the teen and YA writing community, and I began to see a real need for a book like TINAWM—a kind of mentor book like <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Bird by Bird</i> had been for me as an adult writer, but a book that would be specifically for young writers (14- to 24-year-olds), to let them know that they were not alone on the long road of the writing life.</div>
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I tried to think back to the questions and dreams I had as a high school and college-age writer, and then I tried to address those concerns (I also canvassed some writer friends so that I wouldn’t just gaze at my navel the whole time). I wanted to offer a balance of very practical advice (like how to find a job that will pay your rent and feed your soul, and how to schedule writing into a busy life), and also emotional support (like how to deal with the jealousies inherent in writer-writer friendships, and how to put an astounding amount of rejection into perspective).</div>
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<strong style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Have you always self-identified as a writer? </strong></div>
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It’s funny, but when I moved to New York City after college to intern at the Guggenheim Museum, I was totally convinced I was going to become a curator and dabble in writing on the side. It was my parents who knew I would wind up writing a book, and that in order to do it I’d have to devote my heart, soul, and time to it.</div>
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They were right and I was wrong, no doubt because they had watched me write and write and write and write for years, and they knew it was in me in a way even I didn’t know yet. Though I would flirt with other careers, writing always pulled me back, again and again. Eventually I got my MFA in fiction, and choosing to get an actual degree in writing kind of put a stamp of permanence and authenticity on my aspirations.</div>
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So, no, I didn’t always identify myself as a writer. But others did.</div>
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In terms of identifying myself as a writer at cocktail parties, and other public events—that didn’t come until much later, even after the MFA. It didn’t really come until I had a book contract in hand. Before that, it was always, “I’m a professor … and a writer,” or “I’m an editor … and a writer,” or “I’m a mom … and a writer.” Now it’s, “I’m a writer, and I also edit and teach. And I also have a beautiful daughter … <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Now where did she go???”</i></div>
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<strong style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">What do you think it takes to be a Writer with a capital <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">W</i>?</strong></div>
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At cocktail parties or in your own mind?</div>
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At cocktail parties, it’s probably the book contract, I’m not going to lie. Without the contract, I always thought it was more honest to say “I’m an editor/professor/mom, and I’m also working on a book.” It goes back to <a href="http://www.writersdigest.com/online-editor/writing-is-it-a-hobby-or-a-job" style="background-color: transparent; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; border: 0px; color: #4a7e97; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="Writing: Is It a Hobby or a Job?">that hobby/job debate you guys kindly excerpted from my book</a>. It’s more than a hobby, it’s work, but without the contract, it’s not a job either.</div>
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In my own mind, I was a Writer for many years. Writing was always in me, and it was always the thing I was dying to tell someone about myself, after explaining what it was I actually did for a living.</div>
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Here is one major thing: You have to be a Writer in your own mind before you’ll ever be a Writer at cocktail parties. You have to take your aspirations and craft seriously, or you’ll never get anywhere.</div>
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<strong style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">After reading the book, some of the essays almost seem like therapy for the young writer. Did you deal with some of your inner “writing” demons while working on the book?</strong></div>
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Oh, yeah. The most haunting chapters are the two about “Hating Your Best Friend” and “Hating Yourself.” Those chapters were included in my book proposal, but I had no idea how I was actually going to write them until events unfolded, and I wrote a kind of journalistic rant that served as a first draft. Those were the chapters I fretted over the most.</div>
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So yeah, fessing up to my less attractive emotions (envy, hate, self-loathing) was not fun, but I hope other writers will benefit from reading about my experiences. I don’t think I can prevent anyone from feeling those bad things; rather, I hope I can help writers feel less alone when they do feel them.</div>
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<strong style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> You’re privy to a lot of fiction submissions through your role as editor of YARN. What really “wow’s” you in a piece?</strong></div>
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A strong voice and/or unique story that really zings off the first page. One that really blew me away last year was “<a href="http://yareview.net/2012/11/zig-to-the-zag/" style="background-color: transparent; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; border: 0px; color: #4a7e97; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Zig to the Zag</a>”—the rapper-poet voice is just so spot-on and one-of-a-kind, plus there is mystery (what happened to the purse?) from the first page. But another story with a quieter voice and awesome-from-the-get-go story also blew me away, and won an award from the SCBWI: “<a href="http://yareview.net/2013/05/swimming-naked-wins-scbwi-magazine-merit-award/" style="background-color: transparent; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; border: 0px; color: #4a7e97; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Swimming Naked</a>.”</div>
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YARN has published many other excellent stories, but those two always stand out in my mind as “slush” submissions that immediately grabbed hold of me and didn’t let go. That’s also key—a great first page is one thing, but keeping up the voice and story for another 5 or 15 pages is tough, and essential.</div>
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<strong style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> And what is the number-one mistake people make? </strong></div>
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I don’t think there is <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">one</i> I can name. I mean, the most common mistake is “boring writing.” But boring can mean so many things: lackluster prose, seen-it-before plot, cliché characters, not enough action, too much introspection … the list goes on, and each writer’s brand of “boring” is going to be specific to their<a href="http://www.writersdigestshop.com/facts-on-file-guide-to-style?lid=wdssl" style="background-color: transparent; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; border: 0px; color: #4a7e97; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" title=" writing style"> writing style</a>and habits.</div>
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The only way to avoid “boring” is to workshop your work in classes or writing groups that will give you honest feedback and help you target places that need help. Writers need to find readers they admire and trust, whose feedback they are willing to take. If they do, their writing will not be boring … at least not eventually, after lots of practice.</div>
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<strong style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">What do you think are the top three essential qualities to a good piece of fiction? </strong></div>
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Voice, character, story. Not in that order. All three are equally important.</div>
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<strong style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">What do you wish a more experienced writer had told you when you were first starting out?</strong></div>
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In the book, I talk about the advice I got as a young writer, and I am grateful to have gotten one key piece of advice early, when I was in college: “Don’t do anything that will kill your creative writing.” Simple to say, hard to follow.</div>
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In addition to that, I wish an experienced writer I really trusted and admired could have handed me a great Malcolm Gladwell essay called “<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/10/20/081020fa_fact_gladwell" style="background-color: transparent; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; border: 0px; color: #4a7e97; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Late Bloomers</a>,” which talks about the difference between artists who find success early and those who find it late. I think it might have set my mind at ease when I discovered that I was not, in fact, Jonathan Safran Foer.</div>
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In conjunction, I wish that a more experienced writer could have sat me down and told me that no matter how much talent I had, success was probably going to take a long time. Publishing moves slowly. It’s highly subjective. It takes a long time to hone your craft. And all of that is okay. Maybe even desirable.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03257698200484702055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5378340057361209549.post-17782147839138317932013-10-06T07:32:00.000-07:002013-10-06T07:38:34.490-07:00How to write a novel in 30 days <span style="background-color: white; color: #666666; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 19px;">Writing a novel can be daunting. But introducing structure to the process can help you maintain momentum over the course of a month without hampering creativity</span><br />
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The outline you'll complete using the 30-day method will become a snapshot of your novel. After finishing a full outline, you should feel you've got the makings of an entire book (your story should feel complete, solid, exciting and satisfying) and you should be desperate to start writing the book itself.</div>
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This first draft outline is the equivalent to the first draft of a manuscript. Because you've revised it so thoroughly, it will read with all the completeness and excitement of a finished novel. Using this outline to write the first draft of your book (which, in almost all cases, will be the final draft, needing only minor editing and polishing) should be so easy you might even feel a little guilty about it. All the hard work will already have been done creating the outline.</div>
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Throughout this guide we'll work on the assumption that the first draft of your book isn't a fully completed draft in the traditional sense, but is instead a comprehensive outline – your first, whole glimpse of the book and a snapshot of what it will be once finished. The outline you create over the next 30 days will become the foundation upon which your entire novel will come to rest. This method is a way to lay out the full course of the story as it flows from beginning to end.<br />
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Your commitment to the 30-day method</h2>
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Despite its flexibility, the 30-day method requires a great deal of commitment from you as a writer. The first thing you need to become a productive writer is self-discipline. This method will give you that in spades – if you're willing to dedicate yourself to it. Not everyone will be able to complete a first draft outline in exactly 30 days on their first try, but that doesn't mean you'll never be able to do it. This method, like all methods, requires a sufficient amount of practice. The more you use it, the more time and effort you'll eventually shave off your outlining schedule. In the future, you may even notice it takes you considerably less time to write the first full draft of your book.</div>
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Does it mean you've failed if it takes you 90 days instead of 30? Of course not. If you need more (or less) time to perform certain steps in the process, you can adjust your schedule easily. But this method will probably make you work harder than you've ever worked before.</div>
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Some will enjoy the challenge; others will use the method while setting their own deadlines for each step. And others still won't be willing to allow their muse to be harnessed in this way. Find what works for you over the long term, not simply for the moment. Even if you find the next 30 days difficult, persevere – it will get easier with experience.</div>
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Understanding the 30-day method schedule</h2>
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Keep in mind that each of the six stages identified in this method has its own day-to-day schedule. These individual schedules are discussed at length at the start of each corresponding chapter. Don't worry if you need to allow yourself an extra day or two for some tasks. As you become more familiar with the method, you'll find it easier to stay on schedule.</div>
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The first steps to creating a comprehensive outline are very rough — each building on the previous one. The preliminary outline you create in stage one won't contain everything. You'll just be getting your basics down at this point. With each step, you'll be developing more details about every aspect of the book, and your outline will grow to reflect that.</div>
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As you're writing the first full draft of your book, you'll also be re-evaluating your outline periodically, as your story takes on a life of its own and moves in directions you might not have planned. You won't stop evaluating the strength of your outline until the book is complete.</div>
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Creativity and outlines</h2>
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Writers who haven't tried an outlining system have many questions about the process. Is it possible for an outline to be flexible? Can it take into account my individuality as a writer? Can I continue to be creative using an outline? Can I use an outline for writing any <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/fiction" style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; color: #005689; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" title="More from guardian.co.uk on Fiction">fiction</a> genre? Will using an outline reduce the number of rewrites I have to do? Will using an outline mean it will take me less time to complete a project from start to finish? Won't setting goals clip my wings, rather than allow me to spread them?</div>
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Authors tend to be suspicious, at best, of outlines. Despite this, many are looking for a method that can give them direction – a method that embraces an individual's way of working but takes away none of the joy of creating. They want something that will streamline the process and make them more productive, so they're not surrounding themselves with half-finished projects and manuscripts in need of major revisions.</div>
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An outline can be flexible, can be so complete it actually qualifies as the first draft of the novel. It can make it possible for writers like you to achieve more with less work, reducing the number of drafts required for each project – even to the point of creating just one draft.</div>
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Instead of viewing an outline as an inflexible, unchangeable hindrance, think of it as a snapshot of a novel – one that captures everything the novel will eventually contain, but on a much smaller scale. This snapshot can be adjusted and rearranged until it's smooth and strong. By revising a comprehensive outline of your novel, rather than the novel itself, you can revise 50 to 100 pages, instead of four times that.</div>
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Without robbing you of the joy of your craft, this guide will teach you how to become a systematic, self-disciplined, productive author – no matter your genre or level of experience. The 30-day method takes into account that you're an individual and may have your own methods of getting from A to B, while helping you to clarify your vision of the story before you begin writing your first (and possibly final) full draft. No more wasted time or endless overhauls and revisions. The clearer your vision of the story before you start actually writing it, the more fleshed out your story will be once it makes it to paper.</div>
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