Wordsmith Wisdom: Insights from Writers for Crafting Compelling Fiction

A long and winding road.

First, a word of advice from the blogger. When I began my writing career, I didn't focus on money or fame. My goal was to excel as a writer. To do this I used my local library and read nearly every book about writing, looking for pearls like the ones you find here. Some of these books I also purchased, forming a personal reference library.

There were other things I did, but that's a longer story and my aim here was to share a few of the insights I gleaned from a few of these personal favorites. 

On Writing Fiction
"Though the literary dabbler may write a fine story now and then, the true writer is one for whom technique has become, as for the pianist, second nature."
J. Gardner - The Art of Fiction 

"... whatever the genre may be, fiction does its work by creating a dream in the reader's mind."
J. Gardner - The Art of Fiction 

"Thus the value of great fiction, we begin to suspect, is not just that it entertains us or distracts us from our troubles, not just that it broadens our knowledge of people and places, but also that it helps us to know what we believe, reinforces those qualities that are noblest in us, leads us to feel uneasy about our faults and limitations."
J. Gardner - The Art of Fiction

"What the young writer needs to develop, to achieve his goal of becoming a great artist, is not a set of aesthetic laws, but artistic mastery."
J. Gardner - The Art of Fiction 

"One great inhibition and obstacle to me was the thought: Will it make money? But you find if you are thinking of that all the time, either you don't make money because the work is so empty, dry, calculated and without life in it. Or you do make money and you are ashamed of your work. Your published writing gives you the pip."
Brenda Uelland - If You Want to Write 

"It may feel more classy to imitate James Joyce... than All In the Family; but every literary imitation lacks something we expect of good writing: the writer seeing with his own eyes."
J. Gardner - On Becoming a Novelist 

"Detail is the lifeblood of fiction."
J. Gardner - On Becoming a Novelist

"The study of writing, like the study of classical piano, is not practical but aristocratic. If one is born rich, one can easily afford to be an artist; if not, one has to afford one's art by sacrifice."
J. Gardner - On Becoming a Novelist

"The main purpose of art... is this, that it tell the truth about the soul, revealing and giving expression to all the secrets one cannot say in simple words. ...Art is a microscope that the artist focuses on the secrets of his own soul, and that then reveals to men the secrets common to them all."
Tolstoy - diary note

"The real rewards of writing are serious and bitter as well as sweet. And they are private, not public.
W. Sloan - The Craft of Writing

"With Schopenhauer he (Thomas Mann) holds that the epic writer's aim should be to conjure up the richest possible inner life by means of a minimum of external action: 'Art consists in the writer's affecting our inner life most strongly with the least display of outer life; for the inner is essentially the object of our interest.' Thus every detail of Aschenbach's outer life is so chosen as to illuminate the deepest recesses of his mind and to furnish the richest symbolical meaning."
Von Gronicka, in a critique of Mann's Death in Venice

"The lifelong central theme of Mann's books has been an inquiry into the function of art and the artist, of culture and the intellectual in modern society."
Kahler

"And yet, we know how fatal the pursuit of liveliness may be: it may result in ...tiresome acrobatics. ... Flashy effects distract the mind. They destroy their persuasiveness; you would not believe a man was very intent on ploughing a furrow if he carried a hoop with him and jumped through it at every other step."
Katherine Anne Porter

"Sin is easier to write about than grace, I suppose, because the territory is so familiar and because, too, it is the nature of grace, when we receive it, to turn our eyes not inward, where most writers' eyes turn, but outward, where there is a whole world of needs to serve far greater than the need for another book."
F. Buechner - Then and Now 

"I have never produced anything good except by a long succession of slight efforts."
Andre Gide

"One should only become aware of the difficulties of a subject progressively and in the course of working at it; if one realizes them all at the outset, one loses heart."
Andre Gide "If it Die..."

"At least in conventional fiction, the moment we stop caring where the story will go next... the writer has failed, and we stop reading.
J. Gardner - The Art of Fiction 

"When the amateur writer lets a bad sentence stand in his final draft, though he knows its bad, the sin is frigidity: he has not yet learned the importance of his art..."
J. Gardner - The Art of Fiction 

"When virtuosity gets the upper hand of your theme, or is better than your idea, it is time to quit."
Katherine Anne Porter

"My most important piece of advice to all you would-be writers: when you write, try to leave out all the parts readers skip."

Elmore Leonard

Dreams, Writing Advice and Existentialism

"It's the kind of sentence you put a star by and underscore, then kick to death."
--Statement from last night's dream

I had trouble falling asleep last night so I decided to get up and read a little more from Gordon Marino's The Existentialist's Survival Guide: How to Live Authentically in an Inauthentic Age. Marino was a guest speaker at The Magnolia Salon this past month at the Oldenburg House.

I'm fairly certain that the dream I had, even though I remember no real details, was directly influenced by my reading. The very last thing in the dream was the voice explaining something about writing and the story I was reading: "It's the kind of sentence you put a star by and underscore, then kick to death."

Here's where I believe that sentence came from. Gordon Marino, who has been director of the Hong Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College, has also been a lifelong boxing coach. His talk last month was about existentialism, so he really didn't get the opportunity to digress all that much about boxing (he did mention meeting Mike Tyson) but I'm sure he'd said enough to cause my subconscious mind to make a connection to Ernest Hemingway, who had himself written a couple short stories featuring boxers. (My favorite boxing story, however, is Jack London's A Piece of Steak.)

Most of us who write appreciate good sentences. Sometimes we highlight them in the books we own, and sometimes we make discreet, light-colored marks in them when they are a library book. Not that we make it a habit to efface public property, but it helps us find that sentence later so we can savor it again. Occasionally I even keep a list of page numbers on my bookmark so I can find those tasty morsels before returning them to the library.

So it was that in my dream my subconscious adopted this habit of marking sentences and combined it with Hemingway's somewhat pugilistic brutality to create an intriguing statement about writing.

Does it mean anything? I don't know, but it was interesting enough to write down and contemplate later.

* * * *

Just as Marino's book is about authenticity, this morning's monthly email from New York writer and PR guy Don Heymann also dealt with being authentic. (Full disclosure: I shared an apartment with Don my third year at Ohio U.) The title of his article is Keeping it real: Writing that's trustworthy and credible. Before launching his own business in 1985 Heymann was in corporate communications with three Fortune 500 companies. His articles on communication are always spot on and valuable. I have never missed a one. "Keeping it real" offers seven tips, not forty, each being brief and to the point. Check it out. And when you do, put a star by one of the sentences and apply it to your own writing.

Related Links
50 of the Most Beautiful Sentences in Literature
Gordon Marino's The Existentialist's Survival Guide
Another place to get Gordon's book: Zenith Bookstore

Meantime, life goes on all around you. Engage it.

The Best Writing Advice I Ever Got and Other Writing Tips

At some point in the past three years I discovered, or was discovered by, Quora. Quara is a question and answer site in which questions are asked and answered by members of a community. It's like Siri and Google in the sense that people ask questions, but it is like a massive international forum in that humans answer the questions and, like Reddit or other forums, humans upvote or downvote answers, and occasionally comment on them.

People who answer questions will then get asked more questions on that same theme, be it philosophy, religion, The Beatles or raising kids. I get asked a lot of questions about Dylan, blogging and writing. Here is one question that I was asked at the beginning of this year.

What was the most helpful, or most memorable writing advice book you've ever read?

The most memorable advice I ever got came from Sherwood Wirt’s book, You Can Tell The World. There were many useful insights in the book. When he died in 2009 I wrote a tribute to him on my blog titled Sherwood Wirt, R.I.P.

HERE is an excerpt, which I considered the most valuable in my writing career:

If we're to produce great work, we must know what great work looks like. The only way is to be a reader of great works.

“Darwin’s Origin of Species, Marx’ and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, Kierkegaard’s attacks on Hegel, Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street, Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Kafka’s The Trial, Camus’ The Plague and others.

“These books, the most influential of our time, deal primarily with the scientific challenge and loss of meaning in a mechanistic society. There has been no Christian work written since the novels of Dostoevsky that can honestly be said to match them in boldness, in documentation, in breadth and scope, in vision, in appeal to the human spirit, or in grasp of truth. C.S. Lewis is the only Christian entry in the field. The opportunities are wide open, and there is plenty of room at the top.”

EdNote: I have read dozens of books about writing over the past half century and there are useful pearls in most of them. So, my advice to you then is to gather them and save them so you can review them and share them.

* * * *

Since retiring in December, I have begun to find a renewed interest in writing fiction. I don't know how far I will run with it, but the pump has been primed, there's water flowing and I'm feeling nourished, refreshed, invigorated.

When I built my first website in the mid-90's one of my aims was to share my short stories. Three stories were translated into foreign languages, and one translated to film. The downside of all that is that when later I sought to publish these stories in literary magazines, I learned that "no previously published stories" included being published online. Alas.

If you're a writer of fiction, one of the best teachers of writing (in my opinion) is the late John Gardner. I strongly recommend The Art of Fiction and On Becoming a Novelist. Here are a few quotes from these two books, followed by a couple final words of advice for writers.

On Writing Fiction: Insights from John Gardner

"Papa"

"Though the literary dabbler may write a fine story now and then, the true writer is one for whom technique has become, as for the pianist, second nature."
The Art of Fiction


"... whatever the genre may be, fiction does its work by creating a dream in the reader's mind."
The Art of Fiction


"Thus the value of great fiction, we begin to suspect, is not just that it entertains us or distracts us from our troubles, not just that it broadens our knowledge of people and places, but also that it helps us to know what we believe, reinforces those qualities that are noblest in us, leads us to feel uneasy about our faults and limitations."
The Art of Fiction


"What the young writer needs to develop, to achieve his goal of becoming a great artist, is not a set of aesthetic laws, but artistic mastery."
The Art of Fiction


"It may feel more classy to imitate James Joyce... than All In the Family; but every literary imitation lacks something we expect of good writing: the writer seeing with his own eyes."
On Becoming a Novelist

"Detail is the lifeblood of fiction."
On Becoming a Novelist


"The study of writing, like the study of classical piano, is not practical but aristocratic. If one is born rich, one can easily afford to be an artist; if not, one has to afford one's art by sacrifice."
On Becoming a Novelist


* * * *

"The main purpose of art... is this, that it tell the truth about the soul, revealing and giving expression to all the secrets one cannot say in simple words. ...Art is a microscope that the artist focuses on the secrets of his own soul, and that then reveals to men the secrets common to them all."
Tolstoy - diary note


"The real rewards of writing are serious and bitter as well as sweet. And they are private, not public."
William Sloan, The Craft of Writing

"One great inhibition and obstacle to me was the thought: Will it make money? But you find if you are thinking of that all the time, either you don't make money because the work is so empty, dry, calculated and without life in it. Or you do make money and you are ashamed of your work. Your published writing gives you the pip."
Brenda Uelland - If You Want to Write

* * * *

If you feel called to be a writer.... "Don't give up the fight."

The Biggest Barrier To Accomplishing Your Writing Dreams

"There is a difference between interest and commitment. When you're interested in doing something you do it only when it's convenient. When you're committed to something, you accept no excuses, only results." 
~ Ken Blanchard

I recently began reading a book about sobriety by Jack Canfield (co-author of the Chicken Soup series) and Dave Andrews. What's interesting about this book are the multitude of little thought-gems and practical insights that apply to things much larger than cutting back from drinking. The book is actually a 30-day project and the full title of the book is The 30-Day Sobriety Solution.

In chapter one the authors strive to pound home the idea that unless you are 100% committed you will fail. As I read this I couldn't help applying its message to many other aspects of life, including careers, and especially writing. Here's a section from the paragraph following the Ken Blanchard quote above:

This rule means that once you are 100% committed, there are no exceptions and no renegotiating. Not only does this rule make life easier and simpler, it frees you from inner conflict. Instead of debating over and over about whether you will or won't do something, like drinking, your decision is already made. The real power and value from this comes from all the energy you can now redirect to focus on what you actually want to create and accomplish in your life.

Over the course of a lifetime of writing I have met numerous people who told me, "I've been told my life should become a book." In most cases their stories really are remarkable and should be recorded and shared. These people know they are not writers, but have been led to believe they had a story to tell. And then there are the people who have told me they were planning to write The Great American Novel or some other important book they had inside them. One friend, who has never written a paragraph of fiction in his life, said he was going to quit his job, go to Florida and sit on a beach for four months to write his novel. Ha ha ha.

Writing is not the easiest occupation and it's far from the most lucrative. That doesn't mean you should not pursue a writing career. It may be that you want to simply improve one of the most important skills that apply to any career, the ability to translate jumbled or abstract ideas into concrete prose, into words that actually convey the nebulous notions in your head and heart. It ain't easy. Or I should say, it's not easy to do well.

The authors' next paragraph brings it home, though.

However, the moment your commitment drops to 99%, you open the door for the internal debate to begin, and when it comes... this is a debate that usually ends in a rationalization...

Right there, that's the problem, whether it's a relationship, a dream or an addiction of any kind, it's the rationalizing we do that brings us down.

Do you really want to be a writer? Or do you just tell yourself that and make excuses. Maybe it doesn't matter whether you write or not. Maybe you just like researching things. Or you like the feeling that is associated with saying you are going to be a writer.

I'm not saying you should not be a writer. What I am saying, however, is that if you have been talking about writing a book for five, ten, twenty or more years and have not done it, then you're just not committed. Total commitment is the only way to accomplish something hard. Either you're all in or you're out.

Yesterday I read a news item about Tuesday's passing of Phil Chess, co-founder of the influential Chess Records, and it reminded me of a story I read in Keith Richards' autobiography Life.  Richards stated that when he, Mick Jagger and another friend discovered the blues through Chess Records they didn't just listen to the music, they locked themselves up in an apartment until they learned how to play it. That is, they made a commitment. They were so committed, Richards states, that they didn't even allow one another to have girl friends. Their music was their life. Until they could play the music they loved, nothing else mattered.

If you're serious about writing the book you've been talking about all your life, it's time to prove it by making the 100% commitment necessary to move forward. It's a commitment that involves sacrifices, but it's worth the rewards.

Meantime, life goes on. Where do you see yourself five years from now? 

Advice for Autobiography Writers from the Pen of Mark Twain

In 2011 I found myself thoroughly entertained by The Autobiography of Mark Twain (Volume One), an audiobook narrated by Grover Gardner. This past week I discovered Volume Two of Twain's autobiography and am proceeding through its many discs as I commute to and fro from the office. Gardner is an award-winning audiobook narrator, and Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) is one of the great figures to have appeared on the American literary scene, so it's a good marriage and a more than satisfying diversion.

In Volume Two Twain devotes quite a bit of ink to his older brother Orion (ore-ee-on), firstborn of the seven Clemens children, only three of whom attained adulthood. Orion was the first and only Secretary of the Nevada Territory, his highest achievement after which he attempted and failed at a variety of other endeavors, ultimately being supported by his brother.

As backstory I should note that when Mark Twain wrote his autobiography he actually dictated it. Also, he insisted that it not be published till 100 years after his death so that he could be absolutely honest with hurting anyone's feelings. Many of the stories about Orion are less than flattering, but his brother was long gone by the time the 21st century rolled around. Twain himself passed away in 1910, allowing this work to finally be released to the public.

What follows is some advice he gave to his brother with regards to writing an autobiography.

About 25 years ago, along there somewhere, I suggested to Orion that he write an autobiography. I asked him to try to write the straight truth in it, that he refrain from exhibiting himself in creditable attitudes exclusively and to honorably set down all the incidents of his life which he had found interesting to him, including those which were burned into his memory because he was ashamed of them.

I said that this had never been done, that if he could do it his autobiography would be a most valuable piece of literature. I said I was offering a job which i could not duplicate in my own case but I would cherish the hope that he might succeed with it. I recognize now that I was trying to saddle upon him an impossibility. I have been dictating this autobiography of mine daily for three months. I have thought of fifteen-hundred or two thousand incidents in my life of which I am ashamed of, but I have not gotten one of them to consent to go on paper yet. I think that that stock will still be complete and unimpaired when I finish these memoirs, if I ever finish them. I believe that if I should put in all or any of those incidents I would be sure to strike them out when I came to revise this book.

Orion wrote his autobiography and sent to me, but great was my disappointment, and vexation, too. In it he was constantly making a hero of himself exactly as I should have done and am doing now. And he was constantly forgetting to put in the episodes which placed him in an unheroic light.

I knew several incidents of his life which were distinctly and painfully unheroic, but when I came across them in his autobiography they had changed color. They had turned themselves inside out and were things to be intemperately proud of. In my dissatisfaction I destroyed a considerable part of that autobiography...

* * * *

A few reminders about Friday happenings in the Northland.

There's an art opening and reception for Scott Murphy at The Red Herring tonight from 6:00-9:00 p.m. The exhibition will feature works both new and older. If you can't make it to the opening you'll want to go out of your way to catch Murphy's paintings some evening after work.

Love Your Local Artist takes place at the Superior Public Library beginning at 5:30 p.m. A great "first stop" after work, unless you wish to run home and change into your evening attire first. This is the fifth year for this event.


Ellen Sandbeck's Bravissimo Kickstarter Party is from 4:00 - 8:00 p.m. at 2532 East Fourth Street, Duluth.

Opening reception for Ryan Tischer's new photography show, Beyond Light, will be from 6:00-9:00 at the Washington Gallery.

Open Mic Poetry at Pineapple Arts from 7:00-9:00 p.m.

For music, you can catch the Jane Gang at the Keyport (Voted #1 by the Reader readers) at 5:00 p.m. tonight, and the Fractals at 8:00 at the Clyde. For info on other bands, find a Transistor and/or Reader.

Meantime, art goes on all around you. Engage it.