Category Books on Writing

  • Home
  • /
  • Category: "Books on Writing"

Novel & Short Story Writer’s Market

October 16, 2013 0 Books on Writing , Permalink 0

2014 Novel & Short Story Writer's MarketLet’s say that you’re a relatively new writer interested in writing and publishing fiction. Maybe you even have a manuscript ready to send out. A simple Google search will reveal millions of places that could potentially publish your work!

If this has ever been your experience, or if you’ve momentarily left “the game” and you’re looking to dust off your keyboard again, I’d like to add the recently updated 2014 Novel & Short Story Writer’s Market to my list of recommended Books on Writing.

The NSSWM is a resource for writers unlike any other I’ve seen.

It primarily features over 250 pages of listings for magazines, book publishers, literary agents, contests, and conferences.

 

It is also categorized by genre, so regardless if you write mystery, romance, or literary fiction, for example, you will find a list of options for yourself. It also features over a 150 pages of interviews with working editors and writers–and like A Labor of Love, it features articles on the craft of fiction and the business of getting published.

Purchasing one copy of this book should keep you busy for at least a couple of years. (I only purchase a new one every five years.) But it is another great resource for all writers to have.

I hope it helps you write your heart out!

 

Photo credit: BAM!

The Nature and Aim of Fiction

June 26, 2013 0 Books on Writing , , , Permalink 0

Cool Bumper StickerLike the driver of the car to the left, I love reading Flannery O’Connor’s work! Her short story collections, Everything That Rises Must Converge and A Good Man Is Hard to Find, are among the finest I have ever read. If you love short stories and you haven’t read either of these collections, you owe it to yourself to pick these up right now!

This week, I have an excerpt from her classic essay, “The Nature and Aim of Fiction.” (You can find it in full in her book, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, a posthumous collection of previously unpublished essays and lectures.)

 

In this essay, O’Connor discusses the art of “story-writing,” and by “story-writing” she means to include novels, novellas, short stories, short shorts–anything “in which specific characters and events influence each other to form a meaningful narrative.” However, like authors mentioned in my previous posts, O’Connor is concerned with writing from the senses. She says,

The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where human perception begins. He appeals through the senses, and you cannot appeal to the senses with abstractions.

O’Connor later examines a particular sentence from Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary:

Flaubert [shows] us Emma at the piano with Charles watching her. He says, ‘She struck the notes with aplomb and ran from top to bottom of the keyboard without a break. Thus shaken up, the old instrument, whose strings buzzed, could be heard at the end of the village when the window was open, and often the bailiff’s clerk, passing along the highroad, bareheaded and in list slippers, stopped to listen, his sheet of paper in his hand.’

The more you look at a sentence like that, the more you can learn from it. At one end of it, we are with Emma and this very solid instrument ‘whose strings buzzed,’ and at the other end of it we are across the village with this very concrete clerk in his list slippers. With regard to what happens to Emma in the rest of the novel, we may think that it makes no difference that the instrument has buzzing strings or that the clerk wears list slippers and has a piece of paper in his hand, but Flaubert had to create a believable village to put Emma in. It’s always necessary to remember that the fiction writer is much less immediately concerned with grand ideas and bristling emotions than he is with putting list slippers on clerks.

The best prose–regardless if it takes the form of a novel, novella, short story, or short short–originates from the senses, rather than from abstraction. If you found this post helpful, or if you have any ideas for what I should post in the future, please leave me a comment below.

Until next week, settle into your creative trance and write your heart out!

 

Photo credit: texturl / Foter.com / CC BY-NC-SA

Ron Carlson Writes a Story

May 29, 2013 0 Books on Writing , , , Permalink 0

Ron Carlson Writes a StoryIt’s finals week at Fullerton College! Before I  grade a tall stack of essays, I’d like to share the last of my three recommendations for books on writing.

In my previous post, I blogged about Robert Olen Butler’s From Where We Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction and the importance of the “creative trance” for writers (being in “the zone”).

Continuing this train of thought, I highly recommend another excellent book on writing, Ron Carlson’s Ron Carlson Writes a Story. In this book, Carlson walks us through his writing process, which culminates in his polished short story, “The Governor’s Ball.”

One of my favorite moments in the book comes when Carlson discusses writing as an inherently creative and imaginative activity. He writes:

To write a story is to stay alert and open to the possibilities that emerge as each sentence cuts its way into the unknown… If you get what you expect, it isn’t good enough.

(If you are writing what you expect, you are probably–to borrow from one of Robert Olen Butler’s phrases–“generalizing, analyzing, and abstracting,” and the work will ultimately fall flat.)

Carlson co-directs the graduate program in fiction at the University of California, Irvine, where he works with many promising and talented writers. He writes:

…one of the things I’ve been saying a lot in these past years is: solve all your problems through the physical world. That is, if you have a scene that’s stalled or muddled, go back into it carefully and write the next thing that happens in real time. Don’t think, but watch instead: occupy. Many times a story will get twisted when a writer knows where she wants to go, what irony or point she wants the story to achieve, and she’s got her eye on that goal and she can’t see or hear the opportunities that are arising in the current scene.

This ability to write from a “creative trance” or “the zone,” rather than stringing together plot points to support a story, is what seemingly defines the best literary fiction. And yet, I don’t think I’d be alone if I said that this approach to writing was intimidating. But it becomes absolutely necessary if

We want the story to be true. We don’t want it to have a point, theme, doctrine. If we write the story well, those things will emerge–we can’t prevent it.

Outer story is event, and event is there to serve and amplify and reveal character. This simply means that the trials your people confront will illuminate who they are. (50-51)

Let’s strive to write the kind of fiction that illuminates who our characters are by never failing to see or hear the opportunities that surround them. Write your heart out!

 

From Where You Dream

May 22, 2013 0 Books on Writing , , , Permalink 0

From Where You DreamRobert Olen Butler’s From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction is the most helpful instructional writing text I’ve ever read.

It chronicles an actual writing workshop Butler taught for MFA candidates at Florida State University in 2002. Butler wore a mic while in class, one of his students transcribed the audio recordings, and Janet Burroway edited the manuscript. It’s structured into three parts: The Lectures, The Workshop, and The Stories.

Butler sees the writer as a literary artist, and as such, emphasizes that art must originate from our unconscious in the form of a creative trance. This art cannot and will not come out of thinking–what he refers to as “generalization, analysis, and abstraction.” He discusses this in detail in his first lecture of the book, “Boot Camp.” He correlates this creative trance as having similarities to the athlete’s zone:

Jackie Stewart, the great race car driver, said in his autobiography that when you drive a car really fast and really well, you don’t have a sensation of speed at all; things slow down around you, you can count the bricks on the wall at the next turn. Baseball players, when they are batting and in a streak, say they can count the stitches on the ball. They are in the zone, and that means they are not thinking at all. They call it muscle memory. But for you, it’s not muscle memory; it’s dream space, it’s sensory memory.

Athletes at all levels experience this, from dancers to runners. Some of my best moments on the golf course have come during stretches like this–and, coincidentally, my best writing, too.

For example, in 2002, while attending a writing workshop at Cal State Long Beach, on the night before one of my stories was due, I sat at my desk in front of my laptop. I already had a story ready, one I had “generalized, analyzed, and abstracted” for weeks. But something happened that evening. I slipped into this trance, and when I snapped out of it, two hours had passed, and I’d completed the first draft of a new story. I thought I had stumbled on some kind of strange mutant ability. Ha! But really, this is the kind of place you want to be in. And, as I’ve learned, it becomes more and more difficult to tap into this place as you continue to grow as a writer.

Butler ends “Boot Camp” on one huge difference between the athlete’s zone and the artist’s zone:

Let’s look at Michael Jordan in his later prime–let’s say his last season with the Bulls, when they once again won the world championship. When Michael received a pass at the top of the key in full flight and he left the ground, he defied gravity, floated through the air, let that ball roll off his fingertips and into the basket. Tongue unconsciously extended. When he did that, he had to be in the zone. He could not be thinking about what he was doing. But to make his zone exactly analogous to the art zone, you have to add this: every time he shoots, in order to make a basket Michael Jordan would have to confront, without flinching, the moment when his father’s chest was blown apart by the shotgun held by his kidnapper. You know that happened in Michael Jordan’s life. Well, Michael would have to confront that in order to make a basket every time. Without flinching. Now his zone is equal to the artist’s zone. And now you understand the challenge of being an artist.

I could go on and on, sharing my other favorite moments from the book, but I don’t want to cheapen the experience for you in any way. Nestled within its pages is a wealth of helpful, writerly advice. I mean, the stuff I just shared came from the first of his lectures!

Whether you are a beginning writer or an experienced one, From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction should be on your reading list. (If you haven’t read it already, of course.)

About a year ago, I emailed Robert Olen Butler to ask for clarification on the process of “dreamstorming,” a process he introduces in one of his later lectures, and he responded back to me quickly with extremely helpful feedback that has only furthered my progress as a writer.

What more can you ask from a book?

That’s all I have for this week. Until next time, write your heart out!

 

Letters to a Fiction Writer

May 15, 2013 8comments Books on Writing , , , , Permalink 0

Letters to a Young Fiction Writer

Recently, one of my students asked me if I could refer him to a few good books that would help him improve his stories. At the time, I remember referring him to Ron Carlson’s Ron Carlson Writes a Story and Robert Olen Butler’s From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction. (So as not to get off topic, I’ll blog about these two in future posts under this category.) But I’m not sure if I ever mentioned Frederick Busch’s Letters to a Fiction Writer.

Letters to a Fiction Writer was one of the first books I read on the craft of writing fiction and “the writing life.” I’ve read and reread dogeared passages from it through the years for comfort or inspiration. So it only seems appropriate that I’d share a quick overview of this book with you in hopes that you might be comforted and inspired by it, too.

In Rosellen Brown’s “You Are Not Here Long,” she writes:

The poem, the story, the novel in the hand, they succeed or fail on their own terms, by being fully what they intended to be or not–and ultimately what they wanted to be, how large, how challenging, how original, will be judged as well. Whether they sell–and if you write books, how well they sell–is so little correlated (if not inversely correlated) with quality that in the end it is only your sense of satisfaction that will define your success.

I find this particularly comforting, especially when I receive rejection letters or emails. Janet Turner Hospital addresses these rejections directly in “Letter to a Younger Writer Met at a Conference.” She writes:

When rejection slips or rotten reviews come in, I tell [students]: have one stiff drink, say five Hail Mary’s and ten Fuck-You’s, and get back to work.

LOL. I love that quote!

Lastly, in “To a Young Writer,” Joyce Carol Oates (one of my favorite writers) writes:

Don’t be discouraged! Don’t cast sidelong glances and compare yourself to others among your peers! (Writing is not a race. No one really ‘wins.’ The satisfaction is in the effort, and rarely in the consequent rewards, if there are any.) And again, write your heart out.

This last quote speaks to the theme of this entire blog. It’s my hope that you write the fiction that you need to write, the stories that come from somewhere deep down. Don’t let anyone or anything stop you! Write your heart out!

 

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox

Join other followers: