What is kosher here in terms of the rules of the forum if I were to post a link to a how-to book on writing fiction? We certainly would not want anybody committing libel. But if I find some how-to books, is it okay to post a link to for the purpose of getting any thumbs up or down from members here? (or should I just go by e.g. amazon review star ratings? The problem with that is sometimes there are so few.)
In our Resources subforum (link is at the top of the page) there's a category for Books on Writing. It's empty now - nobody has listed any yet - but you can put a link there. Members can discuss the book and rate or review it if they want.
It's like anything: there's no substitution for hard work. Courses will help - but not if you do a course then don't pick up your pen again afterwards. I know a lot of people who are addicted to CW courses (open university, etc), but they never get anywhere because without that external motivation they can't get down to work. My advice would be to try and write for an hour a day, minimum, 6 days a week - and more if you can (personally, I do minimum 2 hours a day, with Sunday off). That doesn't have to be sat at a desk churning out words - it can be critiquing other people's work, or reading craft books, or analysing novels you like.
The how-to ebooks i am studying right now are rated five stars on amazon kindle and are from a NY Times bestselling author of many novels, so I am feeling pretty trusting of the how-to author's wisdom/lessons. But I agree with you in that one must be careful who to trust for 'how-to' as well as feedback/critique. I once ran the first ten pages of a screenplay of mine past a writer who has written a blockbuster screenplay that sold for seven figures (he does script doctoring for A-list actors and producers for mid six figures) and he graded my writing 8/10; an unsold writer on a screenwriting forum graded that same sample of my writing 2/10; when I posted another sample of 'my' writing for that unsold writer to critique, he utterly trashed the writing, which in fact was a famous passage of screenplay from an Oscar winning screenplay that has been studied in many how-to books on screenwriting. Enough said.
don't put too much [or any!] trust in amazon star ratings, as they're merely an average of the number of stars awarded by anyone who wishes to post an opinion, which doesn't equal critical reviews by experienced and well-respected literary critics...
Not to mention that many star ratings are added by friends of the author, or even dummy accounts created by the author.
I get loads of emails from writers Digest since I joined - literally every day they email me trying to sell me a course...I've learned more about writing from Sol Stein On Writing than I have from any person or book or website put together. Fact.
i sniffed round one myself that promised of publication, i sent for their prospectus, but overall, i wasnt impressed by it, i think id learn more from experience and knowledge that that course
You can learn a bunch of things without attending a class/course/whathaveyou, you just have to be active, have a real fire burning for the thing you want to learn. People learn languages and instruments "on their own", so why not writing (or story-telling), too? Good luck! (and have fun!)
I dunno. There are a few things that I don't think people are taking into account. • Through history writers were trained. They worked at a newspaper, or in some way were mentored. Even now, if you look at the month's best seller list and then search on the authors, those who have a Wikipedia page overwhelmingly show some background that's more than them sitting down and saying, "I can do this." • If simply sitting down to write, or communing with others who have a like interest but no more training worked, wouldn't a lot more of us have books in the local Barnes and Nobel? A rejection rate in the publisher's office says that we're missing something important. • I know of no profession where the practitioner can declare themselves a professional, without having bothered to crack a book, take a course, or find a successful member of the profession for a mentor. • The history classes we took in grade school didn't make us historians. The math classes didn't make us mathematicians. Believing that our writing there give us the skills of the professional fiction writer seems less than logical. • The TV we watched didn't make us ready to write screenplays. Reading newspapers didn't make us journalists. Eating out doesn't make us chefs. Why believe that reading novels taught us the process? Of course, there are people who just happen to make the right decisions when they turn to writing. Given the number of ways to screw up a perfectly fine story, that seems a stupid way to approach the learning of any profession. Did they tell us how to handle dialog tags in school? No. Did they tell us the three things a reader wants to know when entering any scene? No. Do we learn why a scene almost always ends in disaster, or even what the difference is between a scene for film and one for the page? Hell no. And the list of "did they" to which the answer is no is endless. We all leave school with several things in common. 1. We believe that writing is writing and we know how to write. 2. We believe that people read for the story—plot in other words. 3. We believe that storytelling technique is storytelling technique, and since our friends tell us we tell stories well, that skill applies film, page, and stage storytelling. 4. We believe that given the above, if we have a good story idea, and are blessed with natural storytelling talent, we can, with practice, turn out prose an editor will be glad to receive. Each of the points above is in error: 1. Every one of the mediums used for storytelling imposes its own restrictions and strengths. If you don't know what they are you haven't a chance in hell of getting it right. We learned general skills in school, to prepare us to be responsible adults with a predictable and useful skill set. Employers expect us to write reports, essays, and letters, not fiction, so we learn nonfiction writing skills. 2. People read for entertainment, for the moment-to-moment reading pleasure. If you don't make the reader want to turn the page they won't. And if they stop reading before page three, who cares how great that story idea is? No one will see it. Entertain, don't inform. But how can we do that when all our training is fact-based and author-centric—inherently dispassionate? 3. Telling a story verbally is a performance skill, and useless on the page, where neither sound nor picture can be produced via the printed word. Each medium has learned skills. Your choice is to learn them or guess, and guessing seems not the quickest road to success. 4. Writing talent? All talent is untrained potential. No magic muse is going to whisper the secrets of scene and sequel in your ears. And I don't care how great your talent. If the only tool you own is a hammer everything is going to look like a nail. Here's the deal. If you want to become a writer you can certainly fumble around reinventing the wheel and guessing. Given that we all pretty much begin with the same skill-set and background, so far as writing training and the reading we're exposed to, we're all going to make the expected mistakes. When I had my manuscript critiquing service I saw the same thing over and over. The story from a new writer read either like a report, with events chronicled and lots of overview, or, it was a transcription of the author speaking the story aloud—often presented in first person with the author in a wig and makeup pretending to be the protagonist, at some unknown time after the story took place, recalling it. Neither worked because readers don't want to hear about the facts. It's reaction that gives those facts context. And that takes emotion-based and character centric writing, something not even discussed during our school days. But take a creative writing course? I advise against it because they're designed to give you a taste of all things. You spend time on poetry, nonfiction, and other elements you're not looking to learn. And because they do, you get only a taste. And structurally, they seem to spend a lot of time with the students critiquing each other's work. That's pretty much useless becausew what do they know? They read the book and might or might not have understood it. So at best you're getting amateur comments on your efforts. There are some good ones, but it's spotty and hard to predict. So why not take a professional writing course from someone recognized as one of the great teachers? It's free, and you can work at your own speed. Free is good. Right? Here's something that Holly Lysle said that resonated with me: “Michaelangelo did not have a college degree, nor did Leonardo da Vinci. Thomas Edison didn't. Neither did Mark Twain (though he was granted honorary degrees in later life.) All of these people were professionals. None of them were experts. Get your education from professionals, and always avoid experts.” You can get good advice here. Better then any site I've found, in fact. You can also get bad advice. Both are given by people who sincerely believe the advice is good. Both are trying to help. And because you haven't the the background both can sound perfectly reasonable. In short, you can't tell them apart. So why not go to the pros, and then discuss it with like minded people here? At least we know the advice worked for the one giving it, if we take our training from successful teachers and writers. So: head to your local free library and reserve a copy of Jack Bickham's, Scene and Structure. That will give you the vocabulary, the background, and an understanding of why things are done—and not done. You'll learn what questions to answer quickly, so as to give a reader context. You'll learn things like why a line like, "Susan smiled when Jack came into the room," won't fly with an acquiring editor (It shows the effect, the smile, before the cause. Susan can't smile and then be motivated to do so in the real world. So if you present it that way you can't be in Susan's point of view) And if that's not available, pick up a copy of Dwight Swain's, Techniques of the Selling Writer (on Amazon if it's not at the library). They won't make a pro of you, but they will give the nuts and bolts, and provide the necessary tools to give your talent wings. And if that takes too long, I have a batch of atricles in my blog, based on Swain's book. It's kind of a Swain lite.
JayG speaks great truths except, my two cents would be, get your education everywhere you find it, but I digress... I concur. Take advantage of all your sources of learning, be it in a profession other than writing, be it a life experience, be it writing classes or self taught expertise. The key is be open to learning, seek to learn, seek sources of learning.
I thought he meant here something like this: Don't ask a painting curator to teach how to paint, he can only tell how others paint. Ask the painter, he can't tell you what the painting is but how to do it. (In the sense he can't ravel you with tales and woes of brush strokes and the art of his generation as he is a painter at his basic point.)
I am one of the rare people on this forum who only began to write later in life. I bring the rich life of an incessantly curious explorer of the world first, to the world of writing second. I have a Master's Degree of formal education, a few extra years learning in that university wonderland. I also have the experience of a dozen very different jobs and a couple decades selling my expertise in a business I created. I have the experience of travels all over the world for weeks to months at a time, and life in 4 different states in the US. Then I decided to write. I've always thought about writing. I've always wanted to share my life. So now I've added to all that, seeking to learn everything I could about writing. For those writers who want to write and do nothing else, go for it. You can do it. Just don't stop learning, ever. But for those of us who filled our lives up with other things first and now want to write, we can do it too. I know how to learn. That's what I bring to the field.
I don't think anyone is saying that one can just decide to be a writer and voila! they're on the bestseller lists. There's learning involved, but the amount and thrust of that learning depends on many factors.
Just to add to the discussion that I completed an MA in Creative Writing (at Brunel) this year. It was a hard year, but I believe my writing has improved immeasurably from working one-to-one with so many professional writers, many of whom were pretty famous novelists (Will Self, Fay Wheldon). So if you can do some structured teaching, then you definitely should!
Yes it is possible, as far as I'm concerned. But that does not negate the value of training in the craft/trade, only the means by which one trains. The creative writing class I'm in is fairly useless because my instructor has a one-track mind and does little in the way of teaching the craft. You can become a great writer without formal classes, but you must, then, devote your time to learning the trade. Start with the basics, by which I mean master basic grammar and structure. Then learn a thing or two about style and variation. Get in touch with other writers and ask questions. Read a lot and write a lot. If you can find a mentor to help you bolster your own skills, you will improve tremendously. And once you learn enough, you can improve yourself (that is not to discredit the value of peer reviews and editors; they are essential). Just being here on the forums, I've learned so much--not just about my own writing, but about writing in general. I started questioning things I never thought of before, and have used (or wasted) plenty of time researching construction at the macro and micro levels. That's when I found out some things are intuitive, and others are not. You'll also find that many of the "rules" are mainly conventions and guidelines. There are enough that must be rigidly followed, but some are flexible, once you know what you're doing. One of my favorite quotes is, "Learn the rules like a pro so you can break them like an artist." Altogether, learn as much as you can, then keep learning. Read widely, write regularly, and never give up. You may not learn certain theories without a formal class setting, but there are many ways to learn the tools. Writing is not science. It's not about theory, it's about what works in practice. The thing to keep in mind is that many people think they know the best method to becoming a great writer--though some have the cred to back them up. Take the best of what you can from everyone, and then forge your own path. Good luck!
I think some people just enjoy tearing things apart rather than actually helping. A guy once begged and begged me to read his chapter. I hated it and told him so in a nice way, telling him what I disliked and why etc. He then sent me rewrites of the same chapter twice more, without even asking if I was willing to read anymore (I wasn't, as I found the writing intolerable). I obliged him anyway, wanting to be helpful, I still didn't like it but it had certainly improved. When I met him, he begged and begged and begged me to keep reading and I just said, "No. I'm clearly not your audience because whatever style you're writing in doesn't suit me. There's no point. I will continue to dislike it, and it will crush your confidence, when perhaps I was just the wrong reader for you." Then guess what. Said guy begged and begged and begged me to send him my first chapter. I really, really didn't want to because I already knew we wrote vastly different styles, and given everything I hated in his writing, I knew in my gut he'd hate mine. Anyway, he sent feedback on my chapter - guess what sorts of things he said? He inserted "Inelegant" at various places (without any further comment), highlighted the words "him" and "he" at random intervals that I could make neither heads nor tails of and without a single comment on why he even highlighted it. He objected to my saying "He opened his chest" because apparently it is unclear if he opened a wooden box or if he physically tore open his ribcage... (and apparently I shouldn't have used "his". I should've used "the"). Inelegant, inelegant. Then he emails me to say, "Oh you could've done SO much better!" Needless to say, I took it as his revenge for my disliking his work and nothing else. Some people just want to hate, because they can't stand it that you're better.
jayg... how can you presume to speak for everyone?... even if i happen to be the only one here that you certainly do not speak for, as i am not one of your 'we' and did not leave school with those beliefs, that still negates your 'we all' claim, doesn't it? when i left school: 1. i had proof that i knew how to write, from grades and awards, but i was not so naive as to believe that 'writing is writing'... and, having edited our hs newspaper for 3 years, i had ample proof that all writings/writers are not created equal... 2. i didn't presume to know what others read for... was intelligent enough to know people are also not created equal and from knowing what other students' motivations were [for the sex, action, violence, romance, a favorite character, et al.], certainly did not believe everyone read fiction for the settings, characters--and yes, the plot/story--as i did... 3. i was also intelligent enough to not believe that merely being able to tell a story well meant that person could also write one well... 4. is moot, since i did not accept any of the above as a 'given'... ...i don't think i can be the only one who doesn't fit that 'we all' so don't you think it would be a good idea to change it to 'some of us'?
my advice for writing is only this.. have something to say. meaning: i really am not a fan of writing on a blank sheet of paper, i always start with a seed or kernal of an idea that had already existed.
And I forgot to add (because it came up before), I don't mean if one is a writer from youth on, they can't also have a lifetime of experiences as well. I only mean that is the path I took.
