Writers of the Future announced a free online writing workshop resulting in over 1,000 sign-ups in the first 72 hours from over a dozen countries. I hope viewers will be encouraged to write, and to write better. There are great stories as yet unwritten; I hope the viewers of this course will write them so I can read them.” — Orson Scott Card When Writers of the Future announced a free online creative writing workshop […]
Are you right in the middle of writing the great [insert the name of your country here] novel? Like William Zinsser (On Writing Well) says (and — spoiler alert! — this is one of the bits of great advice we find in a recent Thought Catalog piece), “If writing seems hard, it’s because it is hard. It’s one of the hardest things people do.” But if you disregard Zinsser’s advice, you’ll find a bunch more […]
She is, of course, aiming her comments at screenplays, but “storytelling guru” Bobette Buster has advice for anyone trying to tell a story in a compelling, meaningful way. In a piece for SSN called “How to Ignite Audience Word-of-Mouth Through Story, No Matter the Genre,” Buster writes: Zeitgest is an essential component in storytelling. Zeitgeist is often translated as “spirit of the age.” But I read that Einstein once translated it as, really meaning “ […]
Though authors are often encouraged to kill their darlings, there are times when even those responsible for the work want nothing to do with it. io9 pulls out some terrific examples in “10 Great Authors Who Disowned Their Own Books,” which more or less amounts to the same thing. Many of these will surprise you as will some of the reasoning behind each author’s desire to wish the book gone. For instance, Ian Fleming tried […]
Are creative writing courses worthwhile? Not according to Hanif Kureishi, an English professor at Kingston University whose debut novel, The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) won the Whitbread first novel prize. Speaking at the Independent Bath Literature festival last Sunday, Kureishi said: “A lot of my students just can’t tell a story. They can write sentences but they don’t know how to make a story go from there all the way through to the end without […]
There’s more to Ernest Hemingway’s prose than brevity, clarity and active language. But those are the things that Hemingway App will help you with. In other words, it’s a fun starting point on an edit, but it won’t make you a literary genius. That said, Hemingway App is awesome and has an interface so simple and easy to use, it might have been designed by the master himself. Dump a chunk of text into the […]
Avoiding serious suckage should be any writers Job One. Sure, there is so much that is important. So many things to do and not do to create work that seems real to the reader. Things to elevate your words and lift your characters off the page. But before you get anywhere near any of that you need to start with the basics: making sure your work doesn’t suck. Ernest Hemingway was very good at creating […]
And speaking of writing tips, bestselling mystery author and former journalist Betty Webb recently offered some no-nonsense general advice for those who are considering becoming writers. The biggest take away here: writing is hard work and, as I’ve often said before, if it isn’t hard, you’re probably not doing it right. Here are some of Webb’s thoughts: If you’re meant to be a writer, you are already writing a minimum of 10 hours a week. […]
One way or another, Blake Bailey has thought a lot about writing. His biographies of famous writers have thus far gotten him a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Book Critics Circle Award, the Francis Parkman Prize, and nominations for the Pulitzer and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Bailey has written about Cheever, Yates and last fall, Philip Roth told the New York Times that Bailey was at work on his biography. Meanwhile, Bailey’s own newest […]
What will top fiction editors be looking for in 2013? An interesting article on the Andrew Lownie Agency’s blog talks to several of the top editors of fiction in the United Kingdom… and comes up with not much that is new. Unsurprisingly, editors are mostly looking for good books and strong stories. Transworld’s Sarah Adams says, “Forgive the clichés, but I’m looking for compelling storytelling, quality writing and a killer concept that taps into our […]
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