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Tag: authors

  • March 15th, 2013 1:19am

    Writing Fiction by Janet Burroway

    Mechanics

    Significant detail, the active voice, and prose rhythm are techniques for achieving the sensuous in fiction, means of taking the reader past the words and the thought to feeling and experience. None is much use if the reader’s eye is wrenched back to the surface; for that reason a word or two ought to be said here about the mechanics of the written language. 

    Spelling, grammar, and punctuation are a kind of magic; their purpose is to be invisible. If the sleight of hand works, we will not notice a comma or a quotation mark but will translate each instantly into a pause or an awareness of voice; we will not focus on the individual letters of a word but extract its sense of whole. When the mechanics are incorrectly used, the trick is revealed and the magic fails; the reader’s focus is shifted from the story to its surface. The reader is irritated at the author, and of all the emotions he was willing to experience, irritation at the author is not one. 

    There is no intrinsic virtue in standardized mechanics, and you can depart from them whenever you produce an effect that adequately compensates for the attention called to the surface. But only then. Unlike the techniques of narrative, the rules of spelling, grammar, and punctuation can be coldly learned anywhere in the English-speaking world – and they should be learned by anyone who aspires to write. Poor mechanics read instant amateurism to an editor. Perhaps a demonstrated genius can get away with sloppy mechanics, but in that case some other person must be hired to fill in. Since ghostwriters and editors are likely to be paid more per hour for their work than the author, this would constitute a heady drain on the available resources of those who publish fiction. 

    I felt like this had to be posted. 

  • February 21st, 2013 11:26pm

    There is a myth loose on the land that trying to teach or learn how to write a story is some kind of fraud, like selling shares in the Brooklyn Bridge.

    I come to testify that this is false. You can do both. You most certainly can learn how to write fiction and you can teach it, too. The result will most likely be neither fame nor fortune, but rather the best kind of education there is.

    My experience conforms to the sow’s ear maxim. Intelligence is the essence of a good writer. If you don’t have that in some degree there is s slim chance of developing expertise at the short story or novel.

    — Janet Burroway – Writing Fiction; A guide to narrative craft

  • February 21st, 2013 5:39pm

    No writing is wasted. Did you know that sourdough from San Francisco is leavened partly by a bacteria called lactobacillus sanfrancisensis? It is native to the soil there, and does not do well elsewhere. But any kitchen can become an ecosystem. If you bake a lot, your kitchen will become a happy home to wild yeasts, and all your bread will taste better. Even a failed loaf is not wasted. Likewise, cheese makers wash the dairy floor with whey. Tomato gardeners compost with rotten tomatoes. No writing is wasted: the words you can’t put in your book can wash the floor, live in the soil, lurk around in the air. They will make the next words better.

    — Erin Bow (via writersrelief)

  • January 31st, 2013 11:48pm

    Imagine being sentient but not alive. Seeing and even knowing, but not alive. Just looking out. Recognizing but not being alive. A person can die and still go on.

    — Philip K. Dick – A Scanner Darkly (via bieberssi)

  • January 31st, 2013 5:15pm

    Science fiction isn’t just thinking about the world out there. It’s also thinking about how that world might be—a particularly important exercise for those who are oppressed, because if they’re going to change the world we live in, they—and all of us—have to be able to think about a world that works differently.

    — Samuel Delany (via likestepsonthemoon)

  • January 15th, 2013 1:07am

    In university courses we do exercises. Term papers, quizzes, final examinations are not meant for publication. We move through a course on Dostoevsky or Poe as we move through a mildly good cocktail party, picking up the good bits of food or conversation, bearing with the rest, going home when it comes to seem the reasonable thing to do. Art, at those moments when it feels most like art — when we feel most alive, most alert, most triumphant — is less like a cocktail party than a tank full of sharks.

    — John Gardner, The Art of Fiction  (via villa-rosie)