Now that is interesting. Maybe we should take a bit of a lesson from you guys and incorporate a story telling element. I mean, personally, our education system needs some restructuring anyway, as many students are not learning what they need for college anyway. So why not make the Core classes more comprehensive. In my experience, critical thinking begins to really take effect when students can make connections and translate what they learn to more than one hyper-focused area of study. I've learned more in this semester than in any one English class not just because I'm taking three English classes, but because I can apply what I learn to each area. What I learned from reading in Critical Reading and Writing transferred well to my Fiction Writing Workshop. And what I learned about Magic and Monsters and history in my 3rd English class, along with close reading skills, really helped me to create a frame about the writing and storytelling. Of course it took three English classes to do it, but they were entirely different courses. In Highschool it's like I had the same class 4 years in a row, just at different "intensity levels." >:/ But I'll stop my rant there. It's the whole reason I want to be an English teacher ha ha.
When I was earning my BScME while serving Uncle Sugar, we didn't have the creative writing classes on our curriculum. Of course it was a military driven course. When I came back stateside, I took a creative writing class at a community college where I was pursuing an arts degree too. The main teaching that sank in was "Write like you talk." Even as I watch this thread, that pops up because some people are long winded. If I am writing a text book on the nuclear gravitational aspects of quantum gravitation and singularities, it would be nearly impossible to do it any justice in less than 1500 pages. In fact I have to do just that before I'll be considered for some nutty professorship.
I wouldn't be so surprised, I didn't have creative writing classes in school either, and we're pretty close, at least geographically. Not to mention story structure, that you mention in a later post. I don't know anyone here that have had that kind of education in school. I think that can depend much on the school/teacher, how much they focus on that or if they do that at all. Many of them only teach the language and grammar and literature.
Personally, I'm not long-winded, I'm tersely-challenged. I also think "write how you talk" is quite possibly the worst writing advice I've ever heard, no matter who said it.
Wah? Y'all feel pragnant thar , son? @EdFromNY I've had mixed feelings about that advice. I think he truly meant to tell a story on paper the same as we'd tell it while speaking. I pretty much didn't change much I was doing, save for learning more about grammatical mechanics, and did a little shy of 4 points in his class.
So of all things Finland does not fall short in comparison to Sweden... *drum roll * It's creative writing in elementary and upper secondary education! I still find this hard to believe. Creative writing is one of the best tools for language education. Kids and adults alike love telling stories. And I'm not saying we receive intensive story-telling technique lessons over here either. Just basic stuff: this is how a piece of fiction differs from a news article, this is how you plot, this is how you write dialogue (considerably different in Finnish than in English, btw), what's a poem, let's write poems, let's read them out loud to others, jag dricker öl på en ö jag skriker 'å! Oj då!' när simmar jag i en å though sometimes it's a bit more refined than that, but junior high school poems in Swedish tended to contain the words 'beer' and 'island;' they go together so well. I probably wouldn't be writing fiction now without the help and support of my senior high Finnish teacher, and thanks to her I was at my most productive in senior high short story-wise (still couldn't get anything novel-sized started -- now it's the opposite!), though back then I still wrote in Finnish. Man, I must consider myself lucky, apparently
definitely not. I envy you for those classes, would have made schoolwork so much more interesting. nice song, haha.
No. When I attended schools they hadn't yet water down the course work or decided to pander to unjustified self esteem. I've looked at the resource materials for the high school creative writing courses. The kindest thing I call them is crap. Their exercises are, almost universally calling for the author-centric and fact based writing we're given in first grade, which is a nonfiction technique and designed to inform, not entertain. One that caught my eye asked the student to imagine that they were in the room where the Declaration of Independence is being signed, and to describe how they feel. That's a report, because in fiction the goal is to make the reader feel as if they're in the room. And that takes an entirely different set of compositional skills, none of which are part of the grade school curriculum. Think back to that course and ask yourself if they talked about the role of a scene goal, or the three things a reader wants to know on entering any scene. Think back to the time spent discussing the structure of a scene, the nature of the sequel, and why a scene so often ends in disaster. If they spent even one second on it, it's more than most such courses do. And who grades your work? Except in a very few instances someone who knows nothing about the publishing industry and what it takes to sell a manuscript. You say she was a writer. Does that mean she had a book in your local bookstore, or that she was trying to write and sell a novel? Just what I said. All of our schooldays training is in reporting facts in an author-centric way. So half the new writers think of themselves as the camera and "explain" the story. They tell what they see happening and then explain the significance. We're told what the character said and did, and how they feel. We're given overviews of the situation. And that's boring because the reader isn't looking to be informed on what they would see were they there, and what it means. They want to experience the protagonist's life. They want to make the same decisions as the protagonist for the same reasons, with the protagonist's reaction acting as a mesuring stick to calibrate their own response. They want to know what the protagonist sees as important enough to react to, not what the author visualizes. Readers want to live the story in real time, as the protagonist. They don't want to hear that the protagonist smiled. They want to be made to smile. And that takes a character-centric and emotion, not fact-based approach. The difference is that as long as the author is talking about the protagonist the POV is that of the author. The other half of new writers provide a transcript of themselves speaking the story. But that's another subject. I submit to you that if the creative writing course wern't worthless I wouldn't have to be explaining this, because it's really basic information, covered in any decent book on writing technique.
I like The Modern Writer's Handbook. I found most any course I took wasn't worthless. It may be one or two bits of advice that stood out and struck a bell. What I've been seeing is that too many armchair literary experts don't truly know what readers want. It's like software users. They don't know what they want, but they definitely know what they don't want. The best a software developer can do is offer a salad bar.
@JayG so you checked the cr.writing courses curicullum IN FINNISH?? and Swedish?! You are my hero... and btw, a high-school or an academic course is 15% about resources: interaction, sharing of ideas, comparing notes (and meeting girls), that's why you should've taken every course you ever could. There are but a few things you can't teach yourself. Like, if you take a Kamasutra book and masturbate alot over it - it's never going to be first-class love-making (thou you would probably say it is). And @JayG I love the fact you moved from "every scene ends in disaster" to "scenes often end in disaster" progress, boy!
@JayG You probably didn't read everything I said about the subject. You didn't specify in your original post (what creative writing entails varies), so I asked. Turns out there're some creative writing assignments, but kids are taught to report. But since it was a bit unclear (the definition of "report" in your context was fuzzy), I also asked for clarification, but it left me feeling like "maybe I should just shut up" for some reason, but at least you did as you should and ended the scene in disaster Oh well, maybe it's just me. But: Worthless! Worthless! Actually, this subject is so OT I won't be getting into it in this thread in great detal, but I do disagree that it's worthless. Basic ed is not there to make you a mathematician, chemist, historian etc. so obviously it's not there to make you a professional writer. I didn't ask "didn't you have professional writing courses in high school/elementary school?!" By the way, I know the curriculum through-and-through, and can provide proof that creative writing is being taught (exercises are up to the teacher to decide) and is required in our curriculum. Thing is, over here teachers have a lot of leeway when it comes to how the pupils meet the requirements. I'm afraid to ask what exactly you mean by this... Your answer might be that obviously my unjustified self-esteem got pandered or else I would know what you mean. They did (bolded), but we didn't read entire books about the subject (sadly we didn't discover a cure for cancer in biology class either). But at the same time whatever they taught was worthless and if they had spent even one second on the things you listed, I possibly couldn't have asked you to clarify what exactly you meant by reporting instead of involving readers. Color me confused. No, they don't teach 12-year-olds how to sell a manuscript. Why would/should they? All they do is ignite the spark to write and enhance our understanding of fictional works. Published, but alas, the publishing industry is different around here. Smaller. You might even come across a published novel in which readers enter the scene and only learns one or two things, and still that novel wins the coveted Finlandia-prize. I do sometimes wish I wasn't a linguistic transgender and felt like I belonged to the body of a Finnish speaker and writer. I agree, of course. But it seems to me readers treat stories less uniformly than the books you parrot lead us to believe (doesn't mean I don't appreciate you sharing your knowledge about the industry and story-telling rules with us). Or else readers wouldn't be gobbling down Twilight, Harry Potter, or 50 Shades, for example.
Interesting tiff. Not sure what all this has to do with the anticipated length of a project, which was the question originally posed by @Duchess-Yukine-Suoh, though.
There should be a different thread, yeah. Sorry about the hijackage. Let's say it's relevant cos Dutchess is still in school?
@EdFromNY International level read rage? I'd be more concerned about the length where critique is concerned than with the avid reader. Often the latter are dynamic readers. In here we hope to get input from dynamic writers. This is the 21st Century. The news around the planet would rightfully declare this the hijack age...
Well, I don't think it was necessarily your doing. Somehow, I suspect she has her own definite views on that. @DrWhozit - personally, I'd be more concerned about length at the end of a project than at the beginning.
i agree -my story will likely be about 400 pages or more, and i read books in the 800-page range every time i go into the library. and those are usually in a long series, but then your story is in the romance genre, correct? Fantasy isn't limited to size so much as that genre, so you may want to do more research, or even split up all those stories inside your book into lots of little ones.
@EdFromNY R. Buckminster Fuller was periodically needing to write presentations. He was criticized for exhaustively long writs. He changed that and broke his proposal work down to smaller, "bite size" subjective structure. He was criticized for the writs being too much like poetry. He learned that he had to be concerned about not only length, but style from the get go. The average American, these days, has the ability to take in about 8 words at a time. Writing and doing math are similar. There is a level of about 25% that are much worse than that. There's a level of about 25% that is well above that. Now that's 21st Century America, not the whole planet. Write for any of those audiences, but know what that audience can handle. When I write, I do so for the upper quarter of intellect. It must be believable and accurate. I don't worry about length at all. If someone actually reads something I wrote, even a portion posted for critique, and makes it all the way to the end and saying something meaningful about it, they are more remarkable than the other 75%.
As somebody else mentioned, I wonder too how the OP knows how long the novel is going to be. Maybe you're over estimating it? I'm with Ed here, and say write it first, then worry about the lenght. And the best of luck!
I think that might be a bit different from writing a novel. I know any time I've done presentations, I've known exactly to whom I was presenting, exactly what their expectations were, and therefore exactly what I needed to present (and usually how much time I had to work with). Writing a novel is a much less exacting proposition. One isn't ever exactly certain where one is going until one gets there. I'm not sure how the math would actually work out, but conceptually I'd agree with that. As has already been pointed out by others in this thread, a first-time novelist seeking to be published via traditional means has to be concerned about length, because publishing houses do not usually look at mss that exceed a certain length. My point was that concerns about word count are best left until later in the project, certainly after the first draft has been completed.
This really has derailed, hasn't it. I'm sorry for my part in that. Even so, I think the discussion has brought up some interesting and worthy points for anyone's consideration. When it come's to fiction writing, I think this is some of the best advice to help writers change from an expository paradigm: I read 16 stories from my classmates and 14 of them suffered from being dry and telling. That's when it really clicked for me and I realized the difference between writing in scene and simply reporting. There is a time and a place for both in fiction, but in scene writing should be the vastly higher percentage depending on what kind of feel you are going for. @Duchess-Yukine-Suoh , I don't think I ever answered your question, soooo... When it comes to writing a long book, it may definitely turn away publishers or agents if your new. However, if it's a page turner and they love it, they might be willing to work with you on possibly dividing it into smaller bites. Up until recently, publishing houses broke all long books into smaller volumes, usually published in threes. As for actually writing it, My best suggestion is not to think about length while writing. Think about beginning, middle and end, and tell the full story. Much of the length will work itself out through revision anyway. What matters is that the core of the story is told, and trying to fit it into a length can be limiting. I wouldn't think of length (which is usually measured in word count btw) until I've told the story and thinking of ways to retell it. Until then, plan and write.
One would think that if the HS CW courses are effective we would see more successful writers under twenty. As for me, I didn't need them. I've been selling my work using the techniques presented in most commercial fiction courses. In fact, I have a new one (As Falls an Angel) in editing, and due out through Double Dragon pretty soon. I hope those creative writing courses you espouse so strongly had the same results for you.
There are many reasons why it is. First, most of the students in the class really don't want to be there, and have no interest in writing fiction. It's either a required course or something that sounded like it would be easier than whatever else was available. This places a huge drag on progress since everyone is required to participate. Add to that, most undergrad CW courses are taught by grad students. My son in law recently took an undergrad CW course and it was a waste of time. Like most, the students were expected to read a few chapters on writing fiction/poetry/etc., then, with no more then what they got from the book write a short story/poem/etc. Then the class, not the teacher, critiqued the work, roundtable style, as if they had a clue of what they were talking about. He got the best marks in class, but only because he showed me the assignments and I helped edit them into reasonable shape. His story/poetry/etc. garnered praise from the teacher, but the critiques from the students—which filled most of the class time, were given by people who had no idea of what the elements of a scene are, and still thought the term POV refers to which personal pronouns the author chose to use, so the advice given had no connection to actual writing technique. In other words, they pretended to be writers. Most of them left the class believing they learned how to write fiction and poetry, but had learned nothing. And that's pretty representative of every creative writing course I've seen so far. There may be some taught by skilled writers, but I've not seen any. And in high school CW it's worse. The teacher, no matter how knowledgeable is constrained to teach to the syllabus on a day-by-day basis. And you can bet that it wasn't created by (or even edited by) someone who wrote commercial fiction for a living. Here they have none, in any subject. Were you to stand in the hallway of an elementary school, with third grade classes on both sides of the hall, you would hear nearly the same words coming from both classrooms on any given day. It's a crime, and the repercussions of that are going to haunt us, but it is how it is on most major school systems in the US. Nor do they teach them the compositional techniques of writing fiction for the printed word. The goal of public education if to make all adults self-sufficient and literate, with a good set of the general skills employers require. Public education was established because business needed a standardized education in their employes, to make them interchangeable and easily trainable to that business's needs. In the case of writing it's nonfiction compositional skills that are taught. Why? For the same reason they're not taught dentistry or engineering. They're professions, with their own set of craft, useful only to people practicing that profession. For the writing professions there are different compositional skills for stage, screen, fiction for the page, journalism, tech-writing, and verbal storytelling. They're different because the medium and the goals are different. But damn few public school teachers are even aware of that. Most believe that writing is writing. Choose stories at random on any writing site and you'll see the same nonfiction writing style in the majority of what's posted because in spite of those CW classes the students graduate with only nonfiction compositional skills. And having been asked to write fiction using them changed that not at all, other then to cause them to believe they already have the necessary skills. We don't leave high school with even a smattering of scriptwriting or playwright training, in part because no one in the school is a scriptwriter. Neither are the English teachers fiction writers. And in evidence I offer the fact that there are damn few successful writers who were able to sell their work on graduating high school, something that should happen more often if the CW courses actually worked. On the other hand, Jim Butcher, who wrote The Dresden Files, and Codex Aleran series, was selling his work by junior year in the Oklahoma University's Commercial Fiction course. And he's far from alone. Let me quote the opening lines of one of those books I "parrot." It was written by a professor of commercial fiction writing: “Mention words such as structure, form, or plot to some fiction writers and they blanch. Such folks tend to believe that this kind of terminology means writing by some type of formula or predetermined format as rigid as a paint by numbers portrait. Nothing could be further from the truth.” That was the first two paragraphs of the book you claim treats all stories uniformly. They're the words of a man who sold seventy-five novels and spent decades teaching commercial fiction writing. I respectfully suggest that before you disparage a given book you take the time to at least read the introduction.
@JayG You give good advice, but you seem to be under the impression that everyone is trying to write "commercial fiction" and sell book after book after book. Many people here just want to learn the writing skills to produce something of quality, something they can be proud of and that readers will accept. Your advice is good and the books are great. What I'm saying is that your advice may be more well received if you consider looking through their lens and tailoring your comments in a less matter-of-fact sort of way. I know this is not your intent, but personally, your comments come across as slightly condescending. I'm not looking to contradict you, I'm just giving you something to think about. Think of it as considering your audience here on the forums.
Well said Andrae! Ninety percent of what I write I post on sites like fictionpress.com or Blogger simply because I love to write and tell a story. I'm not looking to get commercially published because I believe "the business" acts kind of like a censor and almost forces you into a mold that sometimes baits you to tell a story well outside the bounds of what you originally wanted. (BTW read my signature!)
