Category Archives: From the Mouths of Experts

How to Write a Great Story – 8 Tips From Kurt Vonnegut

Posted by Madd_Fictional on

6a00d8341bf7f753ef00e54f8d08d58833-800wi

  1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
  2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
  3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
  4. Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.
  5. Start as close to the end as possible.
  6. Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them-in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
  7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
  8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Neil Gaiman’s 8 Rules of Writing

Posted by Madd_Fictional on

  1. Write
  2. Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.
  3. Finish what you’re writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.
  4. Put it aside. Read it pretending you’ve never read it before. Show it to friends whose opinion you respect and who like the kind of thing that this is.
  5. Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.
  6. Fix it. Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.
  7. Laugh at your own jokes.
  8. The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it ­honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.

Chuck Palahniuk Shares13 Writing Tips

Posted by Madd_Fictional on

https://i0.wp.com/static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Film/Pix/pictures/2008/10/21/lee_palahniuk460.jpg

1. The egg timer method.  Two years ago, when I wrote the first of these essays it was about my “egg timer method” of writing.  You never saw that essay, but here’s the method:  When you don’t want to write, set an egg timer for one hour (or half hour) and sit down to write until the timer rings.  If you still hate writing, you’re free in an hour.  But usually, by the time that alarm rings, you’ll be so involved in your work, enjoying it so much, you’ll keep going.  Instead of an egg timer, you can put a load of clothes in the washer or dryer and use them to time your work.  Alternating the thoughtful task of writing with the mindless work of laundry or dish washing will give you the breaks you need for new ideas and insights to occur.  If you don’t know what comes next in the story…  clean your toilet.  Change the bed sheets.  For Christ sakes, dust the computer.  A better idea will come.

2. Your audience is smarter than you imagine.  Don’t be afraid to experiment with story forms and time shifts.  My personal theory is that younger readers disdain most books – not because those readers are dumber than past readers, but because today’s reader is smarter.  Movies have made us very sophisticated about storytelling.  And your audience is much harder to shock than you can ever imagine.

3. Know the purpose of the scene. Before you sit down to write a scene, mull it over in your mind and know the purpose of that scene.  What earlier set-ups will this scene pay off?  What will it set up for later scenes?  How will this scene further your plot?  As you work, drive, exercise, hold only this question in your mind.  Take a few notes as you have ideas.  And only when you’ve decided on the bones of the scene – then, sit and write it.  Don’t go to that boring, dusty computer without something in mind.  And don’t make your reader slog through a scene in which little or nothing happens.

4. Surprise yourself.  If you can bring the story – or let it bring you – to a place that amazes you, then you can surprise your reader.  The moment you can see any well-planned surprise, chances are, so will your sophisticated reader.

5. When you get stuck, go back and read your earlier scenes, looking for dropped characters or details that you can resurrect as “buried guns.”  At the end of writing Fight Club, I had no idea what to do with the office building.  But re-reading the first scene, I found the throw-away comment about mixing nitro with paraffin and how it was an iffy method for making plastic explosives.  That silly aside (… paraffin has never worked for me…) made the perfect “buried gun” to resurrect at the end and save my storytelling ass.

6. Use writing as your excuse to throw a party each week – even if you call that party a “workshop.”  Any time you can spend time among other people who value and support writing, that will balance those hours you spend alone, writing.  Even if someday you sell your work, no amount of money will compensate you for your time spent alone.  So, take your “paycheck” up front, make writing an excuse to be around people.  When you reach the end of your life – trust me, you won’t look back and savor the moments you spent alone.

7. Let yourself be with Not Knowing.  This bit of advice comes through a hundred famous people, through Tom Spanbauer to me and now, you.  The longer you can allow a story to take shape, the better that final shape will be.  Don’t rush or force the ending of a story or book.  All you have to know is the next scene, or the next few scenes.  You don’t have to know every moment up to the end, in fact, if you do it’ll be boring as hell to execute.

8. If you need more freedom around the story, draft to draft, change the character names.  Characters aren’t real, and they aren’t you.  By arbitrarily changing their names, you get the distance you need to really torture a character.  Or worse, delete a character, if that’s what the story really needs.

9. Use all types of speech.  There are three types of speech – I don’t know if this is TRUE, but I heard it in a seminar and it made sense.  The three types are:  Descriptive, Instructive, and Expressive.  Descriptive:  “The sun rose high…”  Instructive:  “Walk, don’t run…”  Expressive:  “Ouch!”  Most fiction writers will only use one – at most, two – of these forms.  So use all three.  Mix them up.  It’s how people talk.

10. Write the book you want to read.

11. Get author book jacket photos taken now, while you’re young.  And get the negatives and copyright on those photos.

12. Write about the issues that really upset you.  Those are the only things worth writing about.  In his course, called “Dangerous Writing,” Tom Spanbauer stresses that life is too precious to spend it writing tame, conventional stories to which you have no personal attachment.  There are so many things that Tom talked about but that I only half remember:  the art of “manumission,” which I can’t spell, but I understood to mean the care you use in moving a reader through the moments of a story.    And “sous conversation,” which I took to mean the hidden, buried message within the obvious story.  Because I’m not comfortable describing topics I only half-understand, Tom’s agreed to write a book about his workshop and the ideas he teaches.  The working title is “A Hole In The Heart,” and he plans to have a draft ready by June 2006, with a publishing date set in early 2007.

13. Just keep working. Another Christmas window story.  Almost every morning, I eat breakfast in the same diner, and this morning a man was painting the windows with Christmas designs.  Snowmen.  Snowflakes.  Bells.  Santa Claus.  He stood outside on the sidewalk, painting in the freezing cold, his breath steaming, alternating brushes and rollers with different colors of paint.  Inside the diner, the customers and servers watched as he layered red and white and blue paint on the outside of the big windows.  Behind him the rain changed to snow, falling sideways in the wind.

The painter’s hair was all different colors of gray, and his face was slack and wrinkled as the empty ass of his jeans.  Between colors, he’d stop to drink something out of a paper cup.

Watching him from inside, eating eggs and toast, somebody said it was sad.  This customer said the man was probably a failed artist.  It was probably whiskey in the cup.  He probably had a studio full of failed paintings and now made his living decorating cheesy restaurant and grocery store windows.  Just sad, sad, sad.

This painter guy kept putting up the colors.  All the white “snow,” first.  Then some fields of red and green.  Then some black outlines that made the color shapes into Xmas stockings and trees.

A server walked around, pouring coffee for people, and said, “That’s so neat.  I wish I could do that…”

And whether we envied or pitied this guy in the cold, he kept painting.  Adding details and layers of color.  And I’m not sure when it happened, but at some moment he wasn’t there.  The pictures themselves were so rich, they filled the windows so well, the colors so bright, that the painter had left.  Whether he was a failure or a hero.  He’d disappeared, gone off to wherever, and all we were seeing was his work.

Dorothy Parker On Writing

Posted by Madd_Fictional on

  1. “It’s easier to write about those you hate — just as it’s easier to criticize a bad play or a bad book.”
  2. “If you’re going to write, don’t pretend to write down. It’s going to be the best you can do, and it’s the fact that it’s the best you can do that kills you.”
  3. “I hate writing, I love having written.”
  4. “All those writers who write about their childhood! Gentle God, if I wrote about mine you wouldn’t sit in the same room with me.”
  5. “Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.”

10 Screenwriting Tips From Billy Wilder

Posted by Madd_Fictional on

1. The audience is fickle.
2. Grab ‘em by the throat and never let ‘em go.
3. Develop a clean line of action for your leading character.
4. Know where you’re going.
5. The more subtle and elegant you are in hiding your plot points, the better you are as a writer.
6. If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act.
7. Let the audience add up two plus two. They’ll love you forever.
8. In doing voice-overs, be careful not to describe what the audience already sees. Add to what they’re seeing.
9. The event that occurs at the second act curtain triggers the end of the movie.
10. The third act must build, build, build in tempo and action until the last event, and then—that’s it. Don’t hang around.

Sam Shepard On Writing

Posted by Madd_Fictional on

1. The great thing for me, now, is that writing has become more and more interesting. Not just as a craft but as a way into things that are not described.

2. I think without writing I would feel completely useless.

3. I’ve heard writers talk about ‘discovering a voice’, but for me that wasn’t a problem. There were so many voices that I didn’t know where to start.

4. My first job was with the Burns Detective Agency. They sent me over to the East River to guard coal barges during these god-awful hours like three to six in the morning. It wasn’t a very difficult job — all I had to do was make a round every fifteen minutes — but it turned out to be a great environment for writing. I was completely alone in a little outhouse with an electric heater and a little desk.

5. I’m a writer. The more I act, the more resistance I have to it. If you accept work in a movie, you accept to be entrapped for a certain part of time, but you know you’re getting out. I’m also earning enough to keep my horses, buying some time to write.

10 Remarkable Quotes From Arundhati Roy

Posted by Madd_Fictional on

Suzanna Arundhati Roy (born 24 November 1961) is an Indian author and political activist who is best known for the 1998 Man Booker Prize for Fiction winning novel The God of Small Things (1997) and for her involvement in environmental and human rights causes.

1. To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget.

2. I do what I do, and write what I write, without calculating what is worth what and so on. Fortunately, I am not a banker or an accountant. I feel that there is a time when a political statement needs to be made and I make it.

3. Torture has been privatized now, so you have obviously the whole scandal in America about the abuse of prisoners and the fact that, army people might be made to pay a price, but who are the privatized torturers accountable to?

4. Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.

5. That’s what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.

6. The secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won’t. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again.

7. The American way of life is not sustainable. It doesn’t acknowledge that there is a world beyond America.

8. The [Booker] prize was actually responsible in many ways for my political activism. I won this thing and I was suddenly the darling of the new emerging Indian middle class – they needed a princess. They had the wrong woman. I had this light shining on me at the time, and I knew that I had the stage to say something about what was happening in my country. What is exciting about what I have done since is that writing has become a weapon, some kind of ammunition.

9. Smells, like music, hold memories.

10. I’m trained as an architect; writing is like architecture. In buildings, there are design motifs that occur again and again, that repeat — patterns, curves. These motifs help us feel comfortable in a physical space. And the same works in writing, I’ve found. For me, the way words, punctuation and paragraphs fall on the page is important as well — the graphic design of the language.

Why C.S. Lewis became a writer

Posted by Madd_Fictional on

“What drove me to write was the extreme manual clumsiness from which I have always suffered. I attribute it to a physical defect which my brother I both inherited from our father; we have only one joint in the thumb. The upper joint (that furthest from the nail) is visible, but it is a mere sham; we cannot bend it. But whatever the cause, nature laid on me from birth an utter incapacity to make anything. With pencil and pen I was handy enough, and I can still tie as good a bow as ever lay on a man’s collar; but with a tool or a bat or a gun, a sleeve link or corkscrew, I have always been unteachable. It was this that forced me to write.

I longed to make things, ships, houses, engines. Many sheets of cardboard and pairs of scissors I spoiled, only to turn from my hopeless failures in tears. As a last resource, I was driven to write stories instead; little dreaming to what a world of happiness I was being admitted. You can do more with a castle in a story than with the best cardboard castle that ever stood on a nursery table.”

—– From Surprised By Joy: The Shape of My Early Life

Mark Twain’s 9 Tips for Living an Extraordinary Life

Posted by Madd_Fictional on

1. Approve of yourself. “A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.”

2. Your limitations may just be in your mind. “Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.”

3. Lighten up and have some fun. “Humor is mankind’s greatest blessing.”

4. Let go of anger. “Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.”

5. Release yourself from entitlement. “Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.”

6. If you’re taking a different path, prepare for reactions. “A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.”

7. Keep your focus steadily on what you want. “Drag your thoughts away from your troubles… by the ears, by the heels, or any other way you can manage it.”

8. Don’t focus so much on making yourself feel good. “The best way to cheer yourself up is to try to cheer somebody else up.”

9. Do what you want to do. “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did so. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”