award-winning writing | Painting With Light

Posts Tagged ‘award-winning writing’

Who Said Write What You Know?

July 13, 2014

Write What You Know
Personally, I think that’s bogus advice without more explanation, but being told “don’t write what you know” might panic new writers, for two reasons:

First, like most of us, the very nature of our life experience necessarily means we know an awful lot (or think we do).

I’ve met indie authors who are still teenagers, some who are war veterans, professional actors, former psychiatric patients … and a few who are certified geniuses.

They are all endlessly interesting people and their lives are indeed brimming with uniquely compelling experiences.

Second, again like most of us, we’ve been encouraged for as long as we can remember to write that way. We’ve been told over-and-over by well-meaning, if misinformed, articles and teachers: Write what you know.

I don’t know the origin of that logic. A lot of folks attribute it to Hemingway, who is often quoted as saying:

“From all the things you know, and all those which you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing, truer than anything true and alive.”

But I don’t think he’s saying “write what you know.”

Check it out again. I think he’s really saying stories aren’t about actions or things directly from your life.

Stories are inventions drawing upon experience of all kinds … some directly from life, some inferred from the good writing of others, and still others dredged up from our well of imagination.

Stories are things and actions unto themselves.

Write what you know. Without the further explanation that it’s the invention you bring to your writing that’s the difference between fiction that matters only to those who know the author, and fiction that … well … matters, is no explanation at all.

That’s a shame, because it’s only the characters we create … those constructions of imagination that transcend our biases, agendas, memories and egos, that can stand the test of time.

Remember
For your characters to actually seem like people, you have to give them traits your readers can identify with for the story to work. All of your readers have experienced love, fear, hate, envy or curiosity, just as you do.

You may have your characters believe their ailments are caused by evil spirits, but they still should feel the same pain, fear and anxiety we all do, if you want them to be believable.

When you write, trust your powers of empathy and invention. Trust the examples of authors you love to read and trust that your craft, when braided with compassion, will produce stories that matter … both to you and to readers you may never meet.

So, take what you know and filter it through your imagination … and through the knowledge you’ve gleaned in your own reading, research and life experience.

The next time you hear “write what you know,” you’ll realize you know an awful lot about what matters most in a story’s success.

It’s only waiting to be shaped by your imagination.

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I recently received the Kirkus Review for my novel REICHOLD STREET: Skillfully written and emotionally charged!
Read the full review here.

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You can find my books as eBooks or paperback on Amazon, or at Barnes & Noble. You’re also invited to visit my web site, BROKEN GLASS, or like my Book of Face page. You can also follow my shorter ramblings on The Twitter.

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Tags:award-winning author, award-winning writing, indie writers
Posted in Award-Winning Fiction, Storytelling | 4 Comments »

What Rules Do You Follow?

June 29, 2014

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Sometimes It’s Hard to Know
The wealth of advice available (including in this blog), may seem overwhelming at times to a new indie author.

Think about some of the things you’ve been told are literary no-nos. Prepositions at the end of sentences. Split infinitives. Double negatives. Sentence-beginning conjunctions. Sentence fragments. Run-on sentences. Poor dialogue attribution.

If you’re at all like me, you’ve already read Strunk & White’s Elements of Style, and the AP Stylebook. When you read them, the whole writing process often seems to boil down to a series of dos and don’ts that must be followed at all cost.

In a sense, all of what you’ve been told is true. The absolute worst thing you can do is scoff at the rules and decide they don’t apply to you … because no matter how amazing your writing is, you need to understand the basic guidelines for your craft.

The reason? The person reading your work expects you to.

Reader Expectations
All readers have certain expectations, and these expectations all tend to fall in line with the rules. Now, does that mean amazing, rule-bending things won’t happen or can’t be done?

Not at all.

One of the interesting things you discover, the more you read, are the many fabulous writers who choose to either ignore, or at least bend, the rules.

They’ve already made that great literary leap of faith. Elmore Leonard, the famous Michigan crime writer, once said: “I try to leave out the parts readers skip.”

You may also have heard of Cormac McCarthy. He’s a brilliant author who’s written some wonderful books like The Road and Blood Meridian. He’s also famous for using almost no punctuation, sometimes to the point his books become difficult to follow.

Yet his writing works.

That’s because there are two ways to break a rule: knowingly and unknowingly. Mere ignorance of a rule is not an adequate excuse for breaking it, and you can’t use an exception to the rule as a basis for how things should be done.

Not without a lot of practice and a thorough understanding of your craft. For that, you not only have to write … you have to read.

One of my favorite authors, Ray Bradbury, is famously quoted as saying “There are worse crimes than burning books; one of them is not reading them.”

I like to paraphrase that and say one of the worst sins an author can commit is not bad grammar or sloppy spelling … it’s failing to understand what might be done, before he/she writes at all.

Show; Don’t Tell
You’ve heard me spout about this before, because it’s the one writing rule I think you should keep. Stephen King advocates it, but he was far from the first to do so.

You’ll find the famous quote by Anton Chekhov (Russian playwright and master of the modern short story; 1860-1904) as the basis for my writing web site, Broken Glass: “Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”

Ernest Hemingway was also an advocate. He encouraged writers to create vivid scenes through action and dialogue, allowing the reader to interpret significant details.

If there is a proper caveat to any of that, it’s to be careful about becoming so consumed by “showing” that your characters lose all of their emotional nuance.

You most certainly want the reader to become involved with your characters; to believe in them as people. It’s hard for readers to do that when there’s no indication at all of what’s going on in the minds of those characters.

Write What You Know
Before I call a halt to my entry today, I thought I should mention this “rule” as one of those you most certainly can bend. The write-what-you-know adage does not mean you should limit your fiction to only your personal life experiences.

Read and research voraciously. Be open to the strange and unfamiliar. Then use your experiences, both real and visceral, as a springboard into another era, another moment in time or into the mind of your character.

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Just received my Kirkus Review for REICHOLD STREET: Skillfully written and emotionally charged! Read the full review here.

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Tags:award-winning author, award-winning writing
Posted in Award-Winning Fiction, Storytelling | 5 Comments »

How Do You Excite Readers?

June 24, 2014

An excellent question.

Regardless of the genre in which you write, the best way to make your stories come alive is to write exciting, clear, descriptive prose and believable dialogue.

If that sounds like work, I suppose you could always try what I described in my last post. Grab a bare live electric wire … and hope you live to tell someone about it. It was definitely exciting.

However, it’s not something I would recommend.

I was fortunate to have only brushed the bare wires, not grab them … which could have created a whole different and, in my view, quite unwelcome outcome.

My brush with electrical stupidity didn’t mean the big nasty that electrocution could be … it just threw me to the ground and caused me to make a complete tear of the rotator cuff ligaments in my left shoulder.

The orthopedic surgeon figures with a couple hours of surgery, six weeks of immobility and months of rehabilitation, I’ll be something (hopefully) approaching normal again.

Given my history of normal, that could scare some people.

I’ve been through a similar scenario once before and remember the weeks of discomfort it meant. I’m not looking forward to it. The good news is I recovered … and I can now tell when the weather is going to change by the ache in my arm.

I also once broke the elbow in the same arm, trying … and failing … to prove I could still play football with seventeen-year-olds. I can’t, but at my age that’s not a bad thing. Is it?

I figure with this latest injury I’ll at least now have the weather-change info in stereo.

Unfortunately, it also means my writing and typing process is considerably slowed. I’ll be forced to type with only my right hand. I know for many this isn’t a problem. I’ve seen some of you type, and you’re only using a couple of fingers anyway.

But for me it’s a real problem. I wanted to get the third book of my Reichold Street trilogy published before the end of the year. Certainly by the first quarter of 2015.

And I do know how to type, so this slows me down considerably. I’ve already thought about recording my thoughts and transcribing them later but, while this is a good way to review my work, I find it cumbersome to begin that way.

Perhaps I should use this time to do some of the things I’ve been meaning to do … like go to book-signings, visit reading groups, talk to classrooms and generally get out and hobnob with some of the folks I’d like to reach with my books?

Perhaps I could do a reading for some of them and talk about how I come up with ideas?

Without both arms to gesture with as I talk, I’ll effectively be whispering … but, perhaps, they’ll pay more attention that way.

What do you think?

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