Topics | Writers on Writing | Recommended Writers' Blogs

Novels of Migration and Travel

You can set a story anywhere. In my experience, write-what-you-know straightjackets the imagination. Write what you don't know; write what you dream about, what you long to know; write your passion. We write for the same reason we read, to get new experience, new understandings, new ways to look at the world. If you're worried you don't know enough, calibrate your protagonist to your level of knowledge; make her a traveler; make him an outsider. What you know is emotional; it will come out in any setting. And you might surprise yourself by what you know in a different place.

Contracts with Readers

The opening of a book or a story establishes an implicit contract with the reader: this is what you're going to read; this is how I'm going to tell it. The contract teaches the reader how to read the books, what to expect, it's the instruction manual for the story. Though the guidance is tacit, it is crucial to get it right; if you open with anything else, no matter how catchy or dramatic, the reader will miss the essence of the book, for they will be looking for what isn't there, not what is. So write your beginning last, like everyone else. Understand that wherever you started is probably not the real beginning.

Interiority: Depth

Many writers believe that thought is the equivalent of an abstraction and therefore to be avoided, but the ongoing inner processes of a character include the everyday babble of appetites, images, sensations, yearnings, and are what drives action in every scene. Interiors can be written in the same vivid, sensory language as anything else; they use scene, dialogue, color, realism, plot. One -third of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses is a dream sequence, but other than the frame, the dream has the same drama as any other part of the plot. Show, don't tell, applies to the interiors of your characters.

Exteriority: Scope

Scope is all those things that extend the range of a work of art. Generally, scope is made up of everything we forget to include or think is boring: finances, work, politics, shopping, philosophy, science. But made vivid, like Tolstoy (all of the above) in Anna Karenina, Andrea Barrett (science) in Voyage of the Narwhal, Milan Kundera (politics) in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Don DeLillo (grocery shopping) in White Noise.

Coming Soon...

The Expansive First Person

Omniscience

On Reviewing

On Workshops

Writers' on Writing

Susan Vreeland on revision:

"Remove the narrative commentary on what you've just written. It's just distrust of yourself. Let the details and actions speak the conclusions. Play it off the money. Don't draw the conclusions for the reader. Don't explain every nuance. The abstractions are just notes to yourself."

Recommended Writers' Blogs

http://www.thefictive.com

http://www.wordstrumpet.com