Write

Articles about craft.

Fuck You, Clean Reader: Authorial Consent Matters

by

This post by Chuck Wendig originally appeared on his terribleminds site on 3/25/15. Note that it contains a lot of strong language, but as strong language and authorial consent are at the heart of this post we have not censored any of it in the title or excerpt here.

There exists a new app called Clean Reader.

The function of Clean Reader is to scrub the profanity from e-books.

Their tagline: “Read books. Not profanity.“

You can dial in how much of the profanity you want gone from the books.

Author Joanne Harris has roundly (and to my mind, correctly) condemned the app, and I would recommend you read about her and condemnation. I would further suggest you go on and read the email she received from the Clean Reader people and, more importantly, her response to that email. (Oh, also: check her tweets, too: @JoanneChocolat.)

I am an author where much of my work utilizes profanity. Because fuck yeah, profanity. Profanity is a circus of language. It’s a drunken trapeze act. It’s clowns on fire. And let’s be clear up front: profanity is not separate from language. It is not lazy language. It is language. Just another part of it. Vulgarity has merit. It is expressive. It is emotive. It is metaphor.

So, as someone with a whole pig wagon full of fucks at stake, let be be clear:

Fuck you, Clean Reader.

*cups hand to mouth*

Fuuuuuuck. Yoooooooou.

*fuckecho through the canyon of fucks*

Please let me condemn your app in whatever obscene gesture you find most obscene.

Let me unpack this a little.

When I write a book, I write it a certain way. I paint with words. Those words are chosen. They do not happen randomly. The words and sentences and paragraphs are the threads of the story, and when you pluck one thread from the sweater, the whole thing threatens to unravel — or, at least, becomes damaged. You may say, Well, Mister Wendig, surely your books do not require the profanity, to which I say, fuck you for thinking that they don’t. If I chose it, and the editor and I agree to keep it, then damn right it’s required. It’s no less required than a line of dialogue, or a scene of action, or a description of a goddamn motherfucking lamp. Sure, my book could exist without that dialogue, that action, that goddamn motherfucking lamp.

But I don’t want it to. That’s your book, not my book.

 

Read the full post on terribleminds.

 

Show or Tell: Should Creative Writing Be Taught?

by

This essay by Louis Menand originally appeared on The New Yorker on 6/8/09.

Creative-writing programs are designed on the theory that students who have never published a poem can teach other students who have never published a poem how to write a publishable poem. The fruit of the theory is the writing workshop, a combination of ritual scarring and twelve-on-one group therapy where aspiring writers offer their views of the efforts of other aspiring writers. People who take creative-writing workshops get course credit and can, ultimately, receive an academic degree in the subject; but a workshop is not a course in the normal sense—a scene of instruction in which some body of knowledge is transmitted by means of a curricular script. The workshop is a process, an unscripted performance space, a regime for forcing people to do two things that are fundamentally contrary to human nature: actually write stuff (as opposed to planning to write stuff very, very soon), and then sit there while strangers tear it apart. There is one person in the room, the instructor, who has (usually) published a poem. But workshop protocol requires the instructor to shepherd the discussion, not to lead it, and in any case the instructor is either a product of the same process—a person with an academic degree in creative writing—or a successful writer who has had no training as a teacher of anything, and who is probably grimly or jovially skeptical of the premise on which the whole enterprise is based: that creative writing is something that can be taught.

This skepticism is widely shared, and one way for creative-writing programs to handle it is simply to concede the point. The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop is the most renowned creative-writing program in the world. Sixteen Pulitzer Prize winners and three recent Poet Laureates are graduates of the program. But the school’s official position is that the school had nothing to do with it. “The fact that the Workshop can claim as alumni nationally and internationally prominent poets, novelists, and short story writers is, we believe, more the result of what they brought here than of what they gained from us,” the Iowa Web site explains. Iowa merely admits people who are really good at writing; it puts them up for two years; and then, like the Wizard of Oz, it gives them a diploma. “We continue to look for the most promising talent in the country,” the school says, “in our conviction that writing cannot be taught but that writers can be encouraged.”

 

Read the full essay on The New Yorker.

 

From the Internet to the Ivy League: Fanfiction in the Classroom

by

This post by Elizabeth Minkel originally appeared on The Millions on 3/25/15.

It’s starting to feel like spring the morning that the Dinky, the shuttle that runs between Princeton Junction and Princeton University, deposits us on the edge of campus. There’s still plenty of snow on the ground, but the students milling past us are ambitiously channeling summer, bare arms and legs, flip flops and black and orange athletic gear. We’ve cut the timing a bit close, so my friend and I are frantically checking every single map on the path to East Pyne Hall, the site of our 12:30 class, English 222. The official course title is “Fanfiction: Transformative Works from Shakespeare to Sherlock” — essentially, a class I’d have given anything for as an undergrad.

To some extent, fanfiction has always had a place in the English classroom. The history of literature is one of reworking and retelling stories, especially prior to our modern conception of authorship. Popular media narratives often portray fan fiction — using someone else’s books, TV shows, films, or real-life personas, among other things, as the starting point for original fiction — as cringe-worthy scenes of sentimentality and/or sex between superheroes or vampires or all five members of a certain floppy-haired boy band. I and plenty of others have worked to ground the historically marginalized practice in “literary” precedent — favorite examples of authors explicitly refashioning others’ works include Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, both of which I first studied in a classroom.

 

Read the full post on The Millions.

 

The Shared Space Between Reader and Writer: A Case Study

by

This post by Brenda Miller originally appeared on Brevity on 1/17/15.

I often teach classes on the form of the “hermit crab” essay, a term Suzanne Paola and I used in our textbook Tell It Slant. Hermit crab essays adopt already existing forms as the container for the writing at hand, such as the essay in the form of a “to-do” list, or a field guide, or a recipe. Hermit crabs are creatures born without their own shells to protect them; they need to find empty shells to inhabit (or sometimes not so empty; in the years since I’ve begun using the hermit crab as my metaphor, I’ve learned that they can be quite vicious, evicting the shell’s rightful inhabitant by force).

When I teach the hermit crab essay class, we begin by brainstorming the many different forms that exist for us to plunder for our own purposes. Once we have such a list scribbled on the board, I ask the students to choose one form at random and see what kind of content that form suggests. This is the essential move: allowing form to dictate content. By doing so, we get out of our own way; we bypass what our intellectual minds have already determined as “our story” and instead become open and available to unexpected images, themes and memories. Also, following the dictates of form gives us creative nonfiction writers a chance to practice using our imaginations, filling in details, and playing with the content to see what kind of effects we can create.

I’ve taught the hermit crab class many, many times over the years, in many different venues. So, often it’s tempting for me to sit out the exercise; after all, what else could I possibly learn? But after just a minute, it becomes too boring to watch other people write, so I dive in myself, with no expectation that I’ll write anything “good.” In one class, I glanced at the board we had filled with dozens of forms. And my eye landed on “rejection notes.” So that is where I began:

 

Read the full post on Brevity.

 

Splat Goes the Hero: Visceral Horror

by

This essay by Jack Ketchum originally appeared on LitReactor on 5/2/12.

I wrote a book a while back called The Girl Next Door which opened with the line, “You think you know about pain?” Personally I’m no expert so far–knock on wood–though as a kid I had my share of broken bones and various other less than delightful body-surprises over the years: a cortisone shot into an inflamed tendon, my upper jaw peeled and scraped — did you know that pain can be a sound? — and a fall, stark naked, through the branches of a tree that left me looking like something out of 100 Days of Sodom. (Curious about that one? Too bad. You’ll have to wait for the story.)

But the point is that if you’re writing about violence, you’re writing about pain. Somebody’s pain. Maybe not yours but somebody’s. And my preference is to face it squarely. As honestly as possible and very much up close and personal.

I’ve noted this elsewhere but it bears repeating here: the great director Akira Kurosawa once said that the role of the artist is to not look away.
That pretty much defines what I try to do. There are plenty of ways to look away and bad writers at some point have found all of them. We’ll get to some of the more disastrous ways later but right now let’s just stick to violence.

Remember those old Hays-Office-era cowboy movies where everything is completely bloodless, where people get shot with a rifle that would stop a bear for god’s sake and fall down and die as neatly as Baryshnikov executes a tour j’ete?  Then along came Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch and blew all that away forever.  A little later, horror movies kicked some dirt over the grave.

 

Read the full essay on LitReactor.

 

In Fantasy Worlds, Historical Accuracy Is A Lie

by

This post by Tanya D originally appeared on BoingBoing on 3/23/15. Note that while the author is discussing video game world-building specifically, the same kind of argument applies to Fantasy novels as well.

The mythical realms of Dragon Age grow beautifully with the telling, including their representation of Earthly minorities. Even so, something’s missing…

I’d like to welcome you to Thedas, a fantastical place lots of us have lived in since BioWare’s Dragon Age: Origins launched in 2009. The borders of this lush fantasy world have sprawled ever outward through the release of Dragon Age II, and welcomed ever more players. With the most recent game, Dragon Age: Inquisition we can end up a leader, whether we’re a human, an elf or a dwarf.

But though almost anything’s possible within Dragon Age‘s beloved world of Thedas, something feels off. Although Dragon Age is a fantasy roleplaying game, Thedas is overlaid with a faux-European sociopolitical landscape — and that means there are few people of color among its citizenry. Why do the sinister old arguments of “historical accuracy” still apply to this fantasy world?

Elves, magic, dragons, shapeshifting and ancient powers of world destruction are somehow totally believable, but the idea that brown people might exist is somehow not. My colleague MedievalPOC‘s blog uses art, history and other resources to regularly debunk the broad but rarely-questioned misconception that only white people were around in medieval times. So if we know brown folks definitely existed in actual Medieval Europe, why are they absent from a made-up fantasy world only loosely inspired by Medieval Europe? Where are the brown folks in Dragon Age‘s Thedas?

 

Read the full post on BoingBoing.

 

The Woman Who Froze in Fargo: where is the line between fact and fiction, and just how strong is it?

by

This article by Mike Powell originally appeared on Grantland on 3/18/15. While the piece focuses on two films, it certainly provides food for thought for any novelists who write fact-based fiction, or who work within a ‘this is a true story’ trope.

The new movie ‘Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter’ tells the story of a Japanese woman on a quest for riches who was lured to the brutal cold of the Midwest by a Coen brothers film. The woman was real, even if the story isn’t entirely true. And it’s been told before, by a documentarian. So where is the line between fact and fiction, and just how strong is it?

n November 2001, an unemployed Japanese travel agent named Takako Konishi was found dead outside Detroit Lakes, Minnesota. Nobody knew Konishi was a travel agent, or what she was doing in Detroit Lakes, only that she was young, pretty, and far from home.

About a week earlier, she had checked into a Holiday Inn in Bismarck, North Dakota. The morning after she arrived in Bismarck, a man had seen her wandering around a landfill and offered help. Konishi didn’t speak English, so the man took her to the police, where Konishi showed officers a crudely drawn map of a tree and a road and started repeating a word that soon everyone came to hear as “Fargo.”

Fargo: A city nearly 200 miles east of Bismarck on the border of North Dakota and Minnesota, best known for a 1996 Coen brothers movie in which a car salesman hires two men to kidnap his own wife for ransom. Things go wrong (things always go wrong in Coen brothers films) and one of the men ends up killing the other with an ax after an argument about a 1987 Cutlass Ciera, but not before the ax victim buries the ransom in a briefcase in the snow.

A story about Konishi emerged: Here was a woman who had traveled a very long way under the great misunderstanding that the movie Fargo was real. Only one of the officers at the Bismarck Police Department had seen the movie, which, incidentally, opens with a title card that reads: THIS IS A TRUE STORY.

 

Read the full article on Grantland.

 

The Difference Between “Flawed” Characters and “Too Dumb to Live”

by

This post by Kristen Lamb originally appeared on her blog on 3/9/15.

Which is more important? Plot or character? Though an interesting discussion—sort of like, Could Ronda Rousey take a Klingon with only her bare hands?—it isn’t really a useful discussion for anything other than fun. To write great fiction, we need both. Plot and characters work together. One arc drives the other much like one cog serves to turn another, thus generating momentum in the overall engine we call “STORY”.

If we goof up plot? Readers/Audiences get confused or call FOUL. Watch the movie Ouija for what I am talking about *shakes head*.

Goof up characters? No one cares about the plot.

New writers are particularly vulnerable to messing up characters. We drift too far to one end of the spectrum or the other—Super-Duper-Perfect versus Too Dumb to Live—and this can make a story fizzle because there is no way to create true dramatic tension. This leaves us (the frustrated author) to manufacture conflict and what we end up with is drama’s inbred cousin melodrama.

If characters are too perfect, too goody-goody and too well-adjusted? If they always make noble, good and professional decisions? Snooze fest.

Again. Bad decisions make great fiction.

 

Read the full post on Kristen Lamb’s blog.

 

How to Develop a Bestselling Book Idea

by

This post by Penny C. Sansevieri originally appeared on PR Toolkit on 8/21/14. Note that it is geared to writers of nonfiction.

With so many people jumping on the publishing bandwagon, it’s clear that anyone can write and publish a book these days. But there’s a difference between writing a book versus writing a book that will sell. Once you understand how to use keywords and research to your advantage, you can create a bestselling book, in particular, a book that will be a hit on Amazon. Here’s what you can do:

 

Where can you find ideas?

It starts with keywords. There are people who understand Search Engine Optimization to such a degree that they write books based on the most popular keywords that were top searches in Google. Why? Because those keywords are proven sellers. I don’t recommend this as a strategy for your book, but it does illustrate how important it is to write on a topic that already generates interest. This approach can help you resolve the following issues for your own book:

Book topic: You want your book to respond to the needs and questions of your audience. What do they want to know? How can you help them achieve their goals? You might not have to completely overhaul your original idea, but you can tweak your focus to respond to readers’ needs. And, since book production is a much faster process these days, you can respond to hot topics and trends quickly.

 

Read the full post on PR Toolkit.

 

How I Became An Indie Author: Helen Harper

by

This article by Helen Harper originally appeared on the ALLi self-publishing advice blog on 3/4/15.

It Shouldn’t Happen to an English Teacher

Everyone makes mistakes. Career-wise, one of my biggest was to step into a temporary Deputy Head position at the international school where I was teaching English. Five years ago it was a small start-up, and I took the job knowing that I’d have to retain all my responsibilities as head of department, as well as teaching, and the new requirements of senior management. The upshot was that for eight months, I didn’t have a day off. I worked weekends, holidays, evenings … all I did was work. And by the time May rolled around, I was burnt out and had nothing left to give. I needed something else.

 

Bored? Then Write a Novel…

There was nothing I wanted to watch on television. I’d been working so hard that I had few friends. And I couldn’t find any books I wanted to read – so instead I wrote my own.

Every evening I’d come home, grab a bite and write. I didn’t tell a soul about it. I was lost in the fantasy world of Mack Smith, a young woman living with a pack of shapeshifters in rural Cornwall. It was a little bit like being a superhero. By day I taught English, and by night I transformed into a crime-fighting, ass-kicking heroine! Sort of, anyway.

 

Read the full article on the ALLi self-publishing advice blog.

 

The Utility (and Trappings) of the Novel Outline

by

This post by Jamie Kornegay originally appeared on Writer’s Digest on 2/12/15.

I’ve been selling books for more than fifteen years and learning to write novels even longer. Of all the author readings and Q&A sessions I’ve hosted (and attended), one of the most common questions among beginning writers, even curious readers, is this: Do you start with an outline?

You’ve heard the pros and cons. An outline helps organize your thoughts and prevents you from spinning your wheels and traveling down dead-end storylines. The flipside, of course, is that constructing an outline boxes you in and limits the possibility of discovery, which is the most creative and rewarding part of writing.

First, it’s important to note that there are no ironclad rules to novel writing. Every writer works differently and stumbles upon his or her preferred method through trial and error. The novel, rather than writing advisers, should tell you what it needs.

The traditional term paper outline, with its Roman numerals and letters, is helpful to organize a finite amount of information, but a novel is more amorphous. I couldn’t begin to collect a novel’s potential in an outline, though I certainly understand the impulse. There’s something terrifying about the blank page and its stark white emptiness. What could you put there that anyone would want to read?

 

Read the full post on Writer’s Digest.

 

The Delivered Story; The Interpreted Story

by

This post by David Baboulene originally appeared on his The Science of Story blog on 1/20/15.

Whenever you absorb a story, you are actually experiencing *two* stories. Or at least, two versions of the same story. This is well accepted in academia, and was first documented by the Russian Formalists in the 1920s, (Victor Shlovsky, Vladmir Propp et al) who called the first version the Syuzhet and the second version the Fabula. Great words, but let me try to simplify it to what can help a writer deliver better story today.

The first version is the delivered story. All the tangible sensory stimulation you receive from having the story communicated to your eyes and ears. So, in a film, this includes the music, images, dialogue, action, character behaviours, the poster, the trailer, the reviews you read, the blog-post, your knowledge of the star’s personal life – everything that contributes to what you think about the story.

In a book, of course, the written words are the total sensory stimulation. Here is, allegedly, the shortest novel ever written:

“For Sale. Baby’s Shoes. Never Worn.”

In this case, the total delivered story is just those six words (and whatever else you might overlay if you know it was (allegedly) written by Ernest Hemingway).

 

Read the full post on The Science of Story.

 

Five "Show Don't Tell" Danger Zones

by

This post by Diana Hurwitz originally appeared on The Blood Red Pencil on 3/5/15.

Showing is illustrated through actions and interiority rather than the author telling us how the character is reacting and behaving.

Telling often involves adverbs and adjectives. Look for bland descriptive words like: attractive, dumb, embarrassing, fabulous, fascinating, handsome, hilarious, mad, powerful, pretty, smart, stunning, stupid, tired, and ugly. Telling is fertile ground for clichés. Make it fresh.

Here are five danger zones to watch out for.

 

1. Action: Don’t tell us what a character does; describe what constitutes the action.

Telling: Dick worked hard.

Showing: Dick wiped the sweat from his face with his sleeve. He lifted the axe and swung: thunk, swipe, thunk. The chunk of wood sheared into small pieces. Each blow reverberated through his shoulders and back.

Telling: Jane walked quickly through the aisles, tossing in items without looking at them.

 

Read the full post on The Blood Red Pencil.

 

The Weird Agonies And Little-Known Science Of Wordnesia

by

This article by Matthew J.X. Malady originally appeared on Slate on 3/4/15.

One hour and seven minutes into the decidedly hit-or-miss 1996 comedy Black Sheep, the wiseass sidekick character played by David Spade finds himself at an unusually pronounced loss for words. While riding in a car driven by Chris Farley’s character, he glances at a fold-up map and realizes he somehow has become unfamiliar with the name for paved driving surfaces. “Robes? Rouges? Rudes?” Nothing seems right. Even when informed by Farley that the word he’s looking for is roads, Spade’s character continues to struggle: “Rowds. Row-ads.” By this point, he’s become transfixed. “That’s a total weird word,” he says, “isn’t it?”

Now, it’s perhaps necessary to mention that, in the context of the film, Spade’s character is high off nitrous oxide that has leaked from the car’s engine boosters. But never mind that. Row-ad-type word wig outs similar to the one portrayed in that movie are things that actually happen, in real life, to people with full and total control over their mental capacities. These wordnesias sneak up on us at odd times when we’re writing or reading text.

Here’s how they work: Every now and again, for no good or apparent reason, you peer at a standard, uncomplicated word in a section of text and, well, go all row-ads on it. If you’re typing, that means inexplicably blanking on how to spell something easy like cake or design. The reading version of wordnesia occurs when a common, correctly spelled word either seems as though it can’t possibly be spelled correctly, or like it’s some bizarre combination of letters you’ve never before seen—a grouping that, in some cases, you can’t even imagine being the proper way to compose the relevant term.

 

Read the full article on Slate.

 

Once Upon a Time…

by

This post by Lee Kofman originally appeared on Writers Victoria on 1/20/15.

The beginning of yet another year makes me think about other beginnings – those first pages, paragraphs, sentences, words that pull readers into our tales. How do we make them sing?

Most obviously, banality is the enemy of good writing. Yet in many openings of published and unpublished works I read clichés creep in, often because of the current fashion to begin stories mid-scene, where characters are ‘doing’ something. Such an opening can be effective of course, yet scene-writing – with its focus on the action – lends itself to clichés. How many books begin with someone staring out of the window at a meadow, or running for their lives, or tracing something cool with their finger? We can get away more easily with such descriptions in the middle, but to entice intelligent strangers to stick with our stories we need to work harder.

Think of this beginning:

‘In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. “Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”’

This is the opening of ‘The Great Gatsby’, hailed by some critics as ‘the perfect novel’. Here we are at once plunged not into the action, but into the mind of the narrator who confides something urgent to us, thereby immediately creating intimacy with the readers. Moreover, this start hints at a dramatic narrative to do with moral dilemmas around our tendency to both judge and empathise, and the problem of social inequality. In short, these first sentences suggest that this novel is going to be one of substance, and do so without pomposity. This suggestion is conveyed by the measured voice of a sympathetic narrator.

 

Read the full post on Writers Victoria.