INTRODUCTION:
On Becoming a Writer
Part One: Self-Editing
CHAPTER ONE:
A Philosophy of Self-Editing CHAPTER TWO:
Characters
CHAPTER THREE:
Plot & Structure
CHAPTER FOUR:
Point of View
CHAPTER FIVE:
Scenes
CHAPTER SIX:
Dialogue
CHAPTER SEVEN:
Beginnings, Middles & Ends
CHAPTER EIGHT:
Show vs. Tell
CHAPTER NINE:
Voice & Style
CHAPTER TEN:
Setting & Description
chapter eleven:
Exposition
chapter twelve:
Theme
Part Two: Revision
chapter thirteen:
A Philosophy of Revision
chapter fourteen:
Before You Revise
chapter fifteen:
The First Read-Through
chapter sixteen:
The Ultimate Revision Checklist
Character
Plot
The Opening
Middles
Endings
Scenes
Exposition
Voice, Style & Point of View
Setting & Description
Dialogue
Theme
The Polish
epilogue
The Trick That Cannot Be Explained appendix
Exercise Answers
index
[ ON BECOMING A WRITER ]
About ten years ago, losing all rationality, I decided to take up golf.
In those first couple of years I bought books and tapes and subscribed to the magazines. I was sure with enough study and practice I'd be shooting eighty soon.
Those of you who golf are laughing now. But I wasn't laughing. I also wasn't having fun. I thought the best course might be to chuck the whole thing and take up needlepoint.
What had happened was I'd pumped my head full of techniques and tips and reminders and visuals. And I was always trying to remember every one of them as I played. You know, like the twenty-two steps to perfect putting and the thirteen most important things to remember at point of impact.
Insanity.
Just before flinging my clubs into the Dumpster, I met a golf teacher named Wally Armstrong. Wally is well known for his teaching skills, using simple household items—like brooms and coat hangers and sponges—to implant the feel of various aspects of the game.
If you're thinking about the swing while you're playing, Wally says, you're lost. You'll tense up. You will find yourself in a labyrinth of theory, with no way out.
But if you have the feel ingrained, you can forget about all the technical stuff and just play. Your body, trained in the feel, does its thing.
Wally was right, and I've been enjoying the game ever since. I don't shoot below eighty yet, but I have fun and don't embarrass myself.
Or rarely, that is.
Now, it seems to me that writing good fiction is a lot like playing good golf. With the same dangers, too. There is no end of books and articles teaching various aspects of the craft. But if you are trying to think of them
all as you write, you'll tense up. You won't write, as Brenda Ueland puts it, "lively and rollickingly." Plus, it won't be any fun. You'll feel like throwing your pages in the Dumpster (okay, many writers feel this way anyway, but that's just an occupational hazard).
So what I want you to be able to do is feel your writing. When you sit down for a writing stint, don't think about technique. Just write. Let it flow. Later, you'll come back to it and revise. This book will show you how.
When you're not writing, keep learning the craft. Increase the storehouse of knowledge. Analyze your work with techniques in mind.
But when you're writing, write. Trust that the techniques you are learning will flow out naturally.
When they don't, you can learn to see where the problems are.
That's what self-editing and revision are all about. Learning, feeling, writing, analyzing, correcting, and making your writing better.
Over and over.
The rest of your life.
That's right. You're a writer, not someone who wants to write some books. You are a person of the craft, a dues-paying member of the club.
So pay your dues by doing the following:
1] READ
You can't be a great fiction writer without reading. A lot. All kinds of novels. And poetry and nonfiction.
Each time you read a book, the flow and rhythm of the writing implants itself in your brain. When it's good writing, when you respond to it, it goes in the good file. When it's not-so~good writing, you'll sense it and put in under bad.
You'll learn about plot and story construction and character building. Your storehouse will fill up and be ready for you when you're in need.
Be self-directed in your reading. In Plot & Structure I explained a process for learning plot so you'll begin to feel it in your marrow. Here's a brief recap:
• Step one: Get half a dozen novels of the type you want to write.
• Step two: Read the first book for pleasure and think about it afterward. What did you like about it?
• Step three: Now read the second book and take some time to think about it, too.
• Step four: Read the next four books in the same fashion.
• Step five: Now go back to book one and, on index cards, mark each scene. Number them, then give us the setting, what the scene is about, and what, if anything, makes you want to read on.
• Step six: Repeat this drill for the all the books.
• Step seven: Beginning with any stack of cards, go through them quickly, remembering the book, giving yourself a movie in the mind.
• Step eight: Do the same with the other stacks of index cards.
What this exercise does is burn plot and structure into your mind. Keep those cards and review them periodically.
With some modification, you can do the same thing for any aspect of the fiction craft. See #4 below. So read.
2] RECORD YOUR OBSERVATIONS
When I was first trying to figure out this writing thing, I got very excited every time I spotted something in a novel that worked. Or got a technique from a writing book that made a little lightbulb go off in my head.
Whenever I learned something I'd jot it down. Sometimes on paper, sometimes on a napkin, whatever was handy. I still have a stack of these notes, carefully preserved in a large envelope. I look at them from time to time just to get my juices flowing again.
For example, here's one of my early notes, with the heading "READ ON TECHNIQUES!"
1] Action, peril, chase, jeopardy—then leave the scene before resolution. (See Watchers by Koontz, chapter one.)
2] Mention a portent, then cut to another scene. (See The Dead Zone by King, end of first scene.)
3] Hint—pull back.
4] The moment of decision, then leave the scene.
I still get a charge out of this. I was trying to learn how to write a novel readers couldn't put down, and these were like finding gold nuggets.
Make a habit of recording the things you learn, every time something comes through. Don't let any insight slip away.
3] ASSIMILATE
When you learn a technique from a writing book that looks promising, practice it. Write a scene that uses the technique. Get it out of your head and onto the page.
When you do this, you're assimilating the information. It's going from information to transformation, making you into a better writer. It soaks into your memory, the way a golf technique
that's felt soaks itself into your muscles.
You will know, absolutely, that your writing is getting better and better. It's an intoxicating feeling. As Ray Bradbury has said, stay drunk on writing so reality doesn't destroy you.
4] CONTINUE TO LEARN
Don't ever stop your growth process as a writer. Even after publication.
No, especially after publication. You want to keep publishing, and you do that by trying to make each new book a little better than the last. So improve.
In fact, be systematic about improving. Create your own "plan of attack" for strengthening your work.
Several novels into my career I stepped back and assessed where I was in my writing. I knew I was strong on plot but felt I wasn't strong enough on character. I wanted to go deeper with my story people. So I sat down and created a plan, with these steps:
• Pick several novels with unforgettable characters.
• Locate the character sections of the best writing books on my shelf.
• Read and analyze the above over several weeks. Take notes.
• Analyze and structure the notes, and compare to my own characters.
• Create characters for my next book using the principles learned.
Even after you get to #1 on the New York Times best-seller list, don't stop learning. One writer I know who reached that level still went to a seminar led by a famous editor, simply because he didn't want to rest on his laurels. His level of success has increased since.
HOW TO USE THIS BOOK
In Part I: Self-Editing, we will be covering a broad range of fiction technique, with exercises—a sort of writing boot camp.
Now, whole books have been written on the subjects covered in each of the chapters. For that reason, the material here is not intended to be comprehensive. My purpose is to explain and illustrate the most important aspects of each, the things that must be imagined so you don't have to think about them.
Beginning writers will therefore find this an essential overview of the craft of novel-length fiction. It is a compendium of the items that are non-negotiable in writing a solid novel. Do these things, and the chances of your selling a novel increase enormously.
If you're a more advanced writer, you can also use this book. Think of it as a giant checklist. Use it for brushing up on certain areas, strengthening technique, rethinking an approach. Do the exercises the way you might do the morning crossword puzzle. Every little bit helps.
And all writers will benefit from Part II, which offers a systematic approach to revising the novel.
I have used both novel and film examples in this book because there is much about the elements of story that are common to both, and sometimes more people have seen the film than read the book.
My advice? Read more books and see more movies. And think about what's happening each time. That's how you get better.
Let me leave you with a credo from one of my favorite writers, the late John D. MacDonald. He was popular in the latter part of his career for the Travis McGee series. But I prefer the string of paperback originals he wrote in the 1950s. He managed to rise above the backwaters of this industry through sheer writing ability.
He was once asked what he looked for in a story, and his answer is a fitting one for all writers, in whatever genre. This is from the introduction to MacDonald's short story collection The Good Old Stuff:
First, there has to be a strong sense of story. I want to be intrigued by wondering what is going to happen next. I want the people that I read about to be in difficulties—emotional, moral, spiritual, whatever, and I want to live with them while they're finding their way out of these difficulties.
Second, I want the writer to make me suspend my disbelief.... I want to be in some other place and scene of the writer's devising.
Next, I want him to have a bit of magic in his prose style, a bit of unobtrusive poetry. I want to have words and phrases really sing. And I like an attitude of wryness, realism, the sense of inevitability. I think that writing—good writing—should be like listening to music, where you identify the themes, you see what the composer is doing with those themes, and then, just when you think you have him properly identified, and his methods identified, then he will put in a little quirk, a little twist, that will be so unexpected that you read it with a sense of glee, a sense of joy, because of its aptness, even though it may be a very dire and bloody part of the book.
So I want story, wit, music, wryness, color, and a sense of reality in what I read, and I try to get it in what I write.
Go thou and do likewise.
Keep working. Don't wait for inspiration. Work inspires inspiration. Keep working.
-Michael Crichton
[ A PHILOSOPHY OF SELF-EDITING ]
You may be able to write wonderful sentences. The words may sing as they ping and pong off each other.
But if that's as far as it goes, you haven't written fiction. You've written poetry. Nothing against poetry. I like it. But if you're going to write a novel, you have to know what goes into a successful, full-length narrative.
Train to be your own editor. Do the exercises in this book to help you fully understand and appreciate the essentials of fiction.
As you practice, what you learn gets implanted into your writer's mind.
This is how unpublished writers become published.
There is no other way, unless you want to self-publish.
However, 99.9 percent of self-published authors need to learn how to self-edit better. If this book helps you in that regard, I will be happy. So will the people who occasionally buy self-published books.
Self-editing is the ability to know what makes fiction work, so when you actually write (as in a first draft) you're crafting salable fiction. You learn to be your own guide so you may, as Renni Browne and Dave King put it in Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, "See your manuscript the way an editor might see it—to do for yourself what a publishing house editor once might have done."
In the revision section of the book, further refinements for these topics are given as they might come up in the process of review. Revision requires a systematic approach to the whole when you have a full manuscript and have to fix it. And all manuscripts have to be fixed.
Putting it all together, by doing the self-editing exercises and writing and revising your work, you'll be operating on all cylinders. Your writing chops will sharpen, and there will be days you'll wake up with that great feeling that you know what you're doing.
At the very least you will know more than you did a month or even a year before.
Never stop this process.
THE WRITING LIFE
Before we move on, let's consider a few items that recur in the writing life. These are mainly mental preparations for self-editing to keep you from deciding, a year from now, that you haven't got what it takes.
Look, if you want to be a writer, write. Don't ever stop. I mean it. Even if you can only peck out a hundred words a day (anybody can peck out a hundred words in a day—and if you say you can't then you really don't have what it takes so quit now).
Don't quit. It's very easy to quit during the first ten years. —Andre Dubus
Here are a few things to think about:
THE FREEZE
Once upon a time the housekeeper for Marcel Proust, the famous novelist and author of Remembrance of Things Past, happened into Proust's study. Instead of finding the master at his writing table, she saw him writhing on floor in what looked like a fit of apoplexy. Screaming, she ran to him. But he sternly told her to get out and leave him alone. It turns out he was in agony over what single word to write next in his manuscript.
Marcel had, perhaps, the worst case of writers block in history. Fortunately for literature he found that right word, and the next, and the next. And though he often seemed in torment as he wrote, he did manage to leave behind a masterpiece.
We all have times in our writing when the words get stuck, or the story we're writing just won't get going again.
Sometimes, we sit at our desks and fail even to get an idea. Time doesn't fly, but drags, like Igor shuffling across the mad scientist's laboratory. If it gets real bad, we may think we're characters in an actual horror movie called The Block That Would Not Die.
The most important thing to remember at this point is not to give in to despair. All creative people have moments when the flow dries up. So know this: It can, and will, be overcome. But first we have to recognize the roots.
In The Courage to Write, Ralph Keyes identifies three primary causes of writer's block:
1] Can I pull it off? In other words, now that I've told the world I'm going to be a writer, can I deliver something people won't want to wrap fish in?
2] Page fright, the fear of sitting before a blank page. As John Steinbeck once said, "I suffer as always from the fear of putting down the first line."
3] That naked feeling. What will others, especially my mother, really think of me once I've finished what I'm writing?
In addition to these, I sometimes find myself fighting another bugaboo, the Perfectionist Syndrome. Naturally I always want to write my best, but when putting down words I can be stopped dead in my tracks if I try to make every sentence perfect before moving on. (This, I think, is what Proust suffered from.)
There is another form of writer's block. Let's call it the freeze. It occurs when you look at the mess you've created and have no idea what to do next.
Here are a few things that will help:
• Warm up before you write. Say you're working on a novel, and you are about to begin your daily stint. Do some simple, free association writing drills just to get your creative juices flowing. One exercise, suggested by Natalie Goldberg, is to "keep your hand moving" for ten minutes. That is, write without stopping to edit for ten straight minutes. Start with the sentence "I remember ..." and just GO. Let the writing take you on any tangents you wish. The object is not to write anything to publish (though ideas often come from this exercise). The aim is to get into a creative state of mind.
Another exercise, from Leonard Bishop's Dare to Be a Great Writer, is to write a page-long sentence. Take an aspect of your story—a character sketch or scene—and write a sentence that goes for a whole page without using any punctuation and employing as many techniques as you like (dialogue, flashback, description). This exercise will help free you from artificial constraints when you start your writing.
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