Brevity comments on a New York Review of Books essay which criticizes memoir-writing. The complaint comes out: “Are you coming into the house of narrative through the back door because the back door is where the money is?” While Brevity gives its own argument against this complaint, I have to ask why a talented writer who can make money from a book shouldn’t try to? If it’s true that memoirs is just money-making non-fiction, why shouldn’t a good writer work on one? (via Books, Inq.)
Category Archives: Writing
Recommendations for the Grammar Lover
We want to write well, even if no one can define well for enough English speakers for very long. For this year, however, there are a few grammar book recommendations from Robert Lane Greene. He notes, “There’s nothing wrong with holding grammar in high regard, but much of the high dudgeon around it is more than a little bit of bunk. These books help you approach writing and speaking not with anxiety or frustration, but humility and wonder.”
100 Things
Author Alexander Chee has 100 observations on writing a novel.
“8. It is like having imaginary friends that are the length of city blocks. The pages you write are like fingerprinting them, done to prove to strangers they exist.
9. Reading a novel successfully is then the miracle of being shown such a fingerprint and being able to guess the face, the way she walks, the times she fell in love incorrectly or to bad result, etc.”
There are 100 such things. (via Jane Friedman)
The Best Time To Write
Stewart O’Nan on writing between other responsibilities: “Some days I’d get a sentence. Some days I’d get two sentences. Some days I wouldn’t get anything. Use your time, steal the time, manage the time somehow.” (Thanks to Ed Champion)
Bad Writing
From the latest World Magazine, Emily Belz writes in “Illegal Vacancy”:
When [Robert] Seiple first became ambassador in the Clinton administration, he said he wrote an op-ed on the importance of religious freedom: It had to be approved by 51 people. Once it got through, he said it was a “limpy wimpy rag. Who wants to work in that kind of environment?”
Just one of many ways bad writing sees the light of day. Our friend Loren Eaton points to this post with a trailer for a documentary on bad writing and common misconceptions about being a writer.
Champion's Books For Writers
Ed Champion is a remarkable reader, critic, etc. (feel free to add to the list of how remarkable he is), and in this interview he recommends books for writers.
Ultimately, a novelist’s job — irrespective of whether she is writing speculative fiction or hard realism — is to understand how human behavior emerges from systematic consequence. If you can generate an atmosphere based on systematic consequence, then your novel will likely feel “real” even if it is set in a land populated by dancing elves or talking fruit.
For plot structure, “read Richard Stark.” For great openers, Burgess, Cain, and Murray have good examples.
Don Miller on The Church's Voice in Your Head
Relief Journal links to questions asked by author Don Miller on how people in church affect your creativity. It may be helpful to have specific people, not just “the church,” critiquing our work, but Miller still makes fair points.
Writing Is Like Driving Sheep
C.S. Lewis on those who are born to write and how writing is like driving sheep down a road. “If there is any gate open to the left or right the readers will most certainly go into it.”
Fairy Tale as Crime Fiction Contest
John Kenyon has a short story contest announced on his blog, Things I’d Rather Be Doing. He calls for stories that update a fairy tale as crime fiction. This could be pretty good. Many fairy tales would make crime stories without any alteration at all. Snow White has at least two counts of attempted murder. Another story with Snow White and Rose Red has stalking, bribery, and a manhunt. Rumpelstiltskin has kidnapping. Many of them have what amounts to drug abuse.
Not to mention gnomes, the scariest, most wicked creatures in the whole forest. If you see a tiny cone-shaped hat while walking in the woods, don’t wonder, don’t call out, don’t get out your camera. Just run. Run like you’ve never run before.
Schultz' Writing Notes
Greg Schultz talks about writing a bit on Ploughshares’ blog.
Craft can be counterproductive. I’ve already registered my suspicions about how-to advice on the craft of writing in a previous post. One problem with the axioms (“show, don’t tell”) and diagrams (Freytag’s triangle, below) of craft is that they turn the act of writing on its head. Freytag’s triangle, for example, is much more effective as a tool of analysis than one of instruction. It can be useful to study a completed story through the lens of the triangle. However, when taken as instruction, Freytag’s triangle, like most craft advice, is more hindrance than help. Like a cookie-cutter, it stamps the uncooked dough. The resulting story, built to satisfy preconceived notions of craft, is likely to have about the same resemblance to real life as a gingerbread man has to a living, breathing person.