Robert Bruce offer some good advice on writing, illustrating it with reference to Sherlock Holmes singular focus on crime solving. “Choose. Focus. Become an idiot.“
Robert Bruce offer some good advice on writing, illustrating it with reference to Sherlock Holmes singular focus on crime solving. “Choose. Focus. Become an idiot.“
I really liked this article. “Practice brutal focus”! I’m always puzzled by the number of people who want to be writers without working on it every day.
Jim Wight’s memoir of his father, The Real James Herriot, goes into great detail about how his dad spent years studying writing, churning out bad stories, taking every writing class offered by his local community college and getting rejected over and over again before finally putting out the first half of All Creatures Great and Small published in England as, If Only They Could Talk.
I especially liked one example he gave of the difference between an early draft and the later published work. I can’t find the exact quote at the moment, but the early version was dry and passive, “Sigfried drove into the farmyard and then asked, ‘Where is my P.M. knife?'” The later version told of gravel spraying from the tires followed by Sigfried rummaging around in the boot of his car yelling out in an irritated voice,”Where did that Post Mortem knife go?” and then describing the kind of knife he needed to the farmer.