Forum / JANET'S TIPS:
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Ramon CollinsJan 11, 12:15amA couple of days ago, I ran across this on Janet Fitch's Blog and she's "a guy what knows":
10 Writing Tips That Can Help Almost Anyone by Janet Fitch
_______________________________________________Janet Fitch is the author of the Oprah's Book Club novel White Oleander, which became a film in 2002. She is a faculty member in the Master of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California, where she teaches fiction.
________________________________________________1. Write the sentence, not just the story:
Long ago I got a rejection from the editor of the Santa Monica Review, Jim Krusoe. It said: “Good enough story, but what’s unique about your sentences?” That was the best advice I ever got. Learn to look at your sentences, play with them, make sure there’s music, lots of edges and corners to the sounds. Read your work aloud. Read poetry aloud and try to heighten in every way your sensitivity to the sound and rhythm and shape of sentences. The music of words. I like Dylan Thomas best for this–the Ballad of the Long-Legged Bait. I also like Sexton, Eliot, and Brodsky for the poets and Durrell and Les Plesko for prose. A terrific exercise is to take a paragraph of someone’s writing who has a really strong style, and using their structure, substitute your own words for theirs, and see how they achieved their effects.
2. Pick a better verb:
Most people use twenty verbs to describe everything from a run in their stocking to the explosion of an atomic bomb. You know the ones: Was, did, had, made, went, looked… One-size-fits-all looks like crap on anyone. Sew yourself a custom made suit. Pick a better verb. Challenge all those verbs to really lift some weight for you.
3. Kill the Cliché:
When you’re writing, anything you’ve ever heard or read before is a cliché. They can be combinations of words: Cold sweat. Fire-engine red, or phrases: on the same page, level playing field, or metaphors: big as a house. So quiet you could hear a pin drop. Sometimes things themselves are cliches: fuzzy dice, pink flamingo lawn ornaments, long blonde hair. Just keep asking yourself, “Honestly, have I ever seen this before?” Even if Shakespeare wrote it, or Virginia Woolf, it’s a cliché. You’re a writer and you have to invent it from scratch, all by yourself. That’s why writing is a lot of work, and demands unflinching honesty.
4. Variety is the key:
Most people write the same sentence over and over again. The same number of words; say, 8-10, or 10-12. The same sentence structure. Try to become stretchy; if you generally write 8 words, throw a 20-word sentence in there, and a few three-word shorties. If you’re generally a 20-word writer, make sure you throw in some threes, fivers and sevens, just to keep the reader from going cross-eyed.
5. Explore sentences using dependent clauses:
A dependent clause (a sentence fragment set off by commas, don'tcha know) helps you explore your story by moving you deeper into the sentence. It allows you to stop and think harder about what you’ve already written. Often the story you’re looking for is inside the sentence. The dependent clause helps you uncover it.
6. Use the landscape:
Always tell us where we are. And don’t just tell us where something is, make it pay off. Use description of landscape to help you establish the emotional tone of the scene. Keep notes of how other authors establish mood and foreshadow events by describing the world around the character. Look at the openings of Fitzgerald stories, and Graham Greene, they’re great at this.
7. Smarten up your protagonist:
Your protagonist is your reader’s portal into the story. The more observant he or she can be, the more vivid will be the world you’re creating. They don’t have to be super-educated, they just have to be mentally active. Keep them looking, thinking, wondering, remembering.
8. Learn to write dialogue:
This involves more than I can discuss here, but do it. Read the writers of great prose dialogue–people like Robert Stone and Joan Didion. Compression, saying as little as possible, making everything carry much more than is actually said. Conflict. Dialogue as part of an ongoing world, not just voices in a dark room. Never say the obvious. Skip the meet and greet.
9. Write in scenes:
What is a scene? a.] A scene starts and ends in one place at one time (the Aristotelian unities of time and place–this stuff goes waaaayyyy back). b.] A scene starts in one place emotionally and ends in another place emotionally. Starts angry, ends embarrassed. Starts lovestruck, ends disgusted. c.] Something happens in a scene, whereby the character cannot go back to the way things were before. Make sure to finish a scene before you go on to the next. Make something happen.
10. Torture your protagonist:
The writer is both a sadist and a masochist. We create people we love, and then we torture them. The more we love them, and the more cleverly we torture them along the lines of their greatest vulnerability and fear, the better the story. Sometimes we try to protect them from getting boo-boos that are too big. Don’t. This is your protagonist, not your kid.
Wish you lots of inspiration and every delight,
Janet Fitch
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Sally HoutmanJan 11, 01:57amGood stuff it seems we should all know, but a concise refresher course. The difference, I think, between a *good* story and an *interesting* story. A lot of good writing just isn't that interesting to read.
The bar I set for myself (and occasionally reach) is never to be ordinary.
Thanks for this.
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Matthew RobinsonJan 11, 02:15amAnother suggestion for learning to write dialogue: read plays. Great ones. Pinter, Williams, Albee, Chekhov, Shawn, Wilson, Schenkkan, Beckett.
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John RileyJan 11, 03:28amGreat point, Matt. Each playwright you listed brings something different to the table.
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Marcus SpehJan 11, 09:40amAbout that dialogue writing thing...here's Ingmar Bergman's full length script of PERSONA (1966): http://bit.ly/11lR7mI — fulfills several of the points above; lots of unusual, brilliant dialogue, torturing all around, including self, and the opposite of cliche, except that Bergman's style itself has almost become a cliche...Another great source for both torturing and tortured dialogue, the best really, is any novel by Dostoevsky.
Doctor: Have you been to see Mrs. Vogler yet, Sister Alma?
Nurse: No, not yet.
Doctor: Let me explain her situation and the reason why you have been hired to care for her. Mrs. Vogler is an actress, as you know. During her last performance of Electra, she fell silent and looked around as if in surprise. She was silent for over a minute. She apologized afterward, saying she had got the urge to laugh. The next day the theater rang, as Mrs. Vogler had not come to rehearsals. The maid found her still in bed. She was awake but did not talk or move. This condition has now lasted for three months. She has had all sorts of tests. She's healthy both mentally and physically. It's not even some kind of hysterical reaction. Any questions, Sister Alma?
Well, then, you can go to Mrs. Vogler now.
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Janice D. SoderlingJan 11, 10:36amEven experienced writers will benefit by reviewing these guidelines now and then.
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James Lloyd DavisJan 11, 04:05pmI still believe the best school of dialogue is an open ear. Joan Didion? Master of dialogue? I'd of (sic) never guessed that one.
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Matthew RobinsonJan 11, 06:03pm
I would just consider Didion an overall master, not specifically toward any particular facet. Her novels are as brilliant as her essays, if not more so.
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James Lloyd DavisJan 11, 08:57pm
I agree, Matt, Didion is in a class by herself, brilliant, but abstract in tone. Her dialogue tends toward expressions of an altered reality, much like her settings... less than, say, someone like Vonnegutt, but clearly unique & identifiable.
It's hard to hold her up as a master of dialogue, I think, but that's my opinion, which carries the bias of my preference for realism, mixed with some of the unexpected twists that surprise and endear a reader.
Dialogue can be used to greater extent than most people attempt in longer fiction, but it gives life, involves the reader through a subversive mix of a tool bag that includes subtle, whispery hints & clues and the sudden tap of a ball pein hammer.... if that makes sense.
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Marcus SpehJan 13, 09:33pm
Came across this just now, worth quoting:
After thirty years of teaching a university course in something called advanced prose style, my accumulated wisdom on the subject, inspissated into a single thought, is that writing cannot be taught, though it can be learned—and that, friends, is the sound of one hand clapping. A. J. Liebling offers a complementary view, more concise and stripped of paradox, which runs: “The only way to write is well, and how you do it is your own damn business.”
from: James Epstein, Heavy Sentences, New Criterion June 2011, http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Heavy-sentences-7053
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Ramon CollinsJan 14, 01:53am
". . . writing cannot be taught, though it can be learned . . ."
Good one, Marcus. I studied art and the same thing applies. A prominent painter told me, "The creative act is the pursuit, then control, of the Happy Accident.
I find that quote true when I try to write, also. Sometimes a secondary character becomes the protagonist. (IF I keep an open mind)
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