Voice

Pulitzer prizewinner, Junot Díaz, has a piece out today in the Huffington Post talking about his approach to creating strong narrative voices for his characters.  Good stuff!

Beginning Writers

Lazy me... 

Because I haven't had time to post anything new since the beginning of May (!!) I thought I'd offer up this earlier post from January 2010 concerning some of the common mistakes beginning writers tend to make.  Let me know if you've come across any others to add to this list...

A few years ago when I first started writing fiction -- and collecting all those books on the art, the craft, and the joy of writing it -- there was one thing I wanted to avoid more than anything else: making mistakes that only a beginning writer would make. As I read all those writing books a familiar phrase kept popping up over and over again: Beginning writers tend to… (just try googling that string -- it's literally everywhere) followed by a warning that concerned the dreaded something or other that only beginning writers tend to do… Panic set in so I decided to start a list.

This week I thought I'd share with you some of the things that beginning writers supposedly tend to do. The exercise, naturally, is to read over your work-in-progress and make sure you haven't done any of the naughty things on this list:

~

The Single Most Common Mistake:

Failure to recognize that the central character must act, not simply be acted upon, is the single most common mistake in the fiction of beginners. [John Gardner]

On Description:

Beginning writers tend to worry too much about overdoing it. I can't tell you how many times I've looked at a student's work and asked for more detail about this or that – a place, a person – only to be told, "I didn't want to overdo it." Novice writers, just getting their chops, need to worry more about saying enough. [Chris Lombardi, GWW]

Beginning writers tend to use insufficient detail and abstraction where what is needed is concrete detail. [John Gardner]

Beginning writers tend to skimp on the elements of setting and time, probably out of dreary memories of long descriptions they have read… But when atmosphere is well created, we do not experience it as description; we simply experience it. [Janet Burroway]

Beginning writers use this formulaic sentence all too often: "__________ filled the air."The blank can be fear, panic, the scent of cheese, the blare of a marching band. It's part of a larger tendency of description without detail. It's telling and not showing: "…gradually the aroma of coffee filled the air." Nothing fills the air. Do not, under any circumstances, use the  "______ filled the air" sentence structure. [John Dufresne]

On Character:

Beginning writers tend to forget about the "dynamics of desire" when they create fictional characters. They forget about that epiphany which needs to come "very near the beginning, where the sensual details accumulate around a moment in which the deepest yearning of the main character shines forth." [Robert Olen Butler]

Beginning writers tend to create passive central characters. Boy meets girl. Boy wants girl – good so far. Boy sits by phone waiting for girl to call – not so good anymore. You cannot write a successful story about a passive central character. And you wouldn't want to read one. [John Dufresne]

Beginning writers often try to write novels with a relatively passive protagonist who wants little or has largely given up wanting. I have met more than one writer who says that his character doesn't want anything -- he just wants to "live his life." That always brings to mind something Kurt Vonnegut said: "When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away even if it's only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time." [Sol Stein & Kurt Vonnegut]

Beginning writers have a reticence to use the simple expression: she cried. Instead, we're pummeled with dubious and unnecessary euphemisms: Hot tears leaked from her eyes. Hot tears sprang to her eyes, trickled down her cheeks. Quick tears sprang to her eyes. A single tear ran down her cheek. Big tears, heavy as hail, poured down her cheek. Better: She cried.  And there's no need to say She began to cry. You don't ever have to write the phrase She began anything. She either cried or she didn't. [John Dufresne]

Beginning writers tend to present a main character with a slew of characteristics, when one that is just right would do the job much more efficiently. [Sol Stein]

Beginning writers often have trouble motivating their character's actions. Unfortunately one mention on page sixty-eight isn't going to do it. This is one of fiction's major challenges: making readers understand a character's motives when those motives are not simple. The way you create such understanding is through patterns of incidents. No one occurrence will be enough. [Nancy Kress]

On Structure:

Beginning writers often pad their stories with unnecessary scenes. Study your scene list, trying to eliminate scenes or combine scenes. I've frequently been startled by how much a story can be sharpened by concentrating its events and emotions into the bare minimum of scenes. [Nancy Kress]

Beginning writers tend to use unnecessary flashbacks. While flashback can be a useful way to provide background to character or the history of events – the information that screenwriters call backstory – it isn't the only way. Rather, dialogue, brief summary, a reference, or detail can often tell us all we need to know. [Janet Burroway]

Beginning writers tend to lose sight of their own scenes, letting them drift into flashbacks like Arctic explorers into snowstorms, never to be seen or heard from again. [Peter Selgin, GWW]

Beginning writers tend to unravel the thread of the story instead of keeping it taut like the gut strings of a tennis racket. (Sol Stein).

Beginning writers tend to give far too much background, then compound this mistake by putting the background where it shouldn't go. (Evan Marshall)

On POV:

Beginning writers tend to shift viewpoint when it is both unnecessary and disturbing. In establishing the story's point of view, you make your own rules, but having made them, you must stick to them. Apart from the use of significant detail, there is no more important skill for a writer of fiction to grasp than this, the control of point of view. [Janet Burroway]

Beginning writers often avoid running straight at an image; that is, the needless filtering of an image through some observing consciousness. Vividness urges that almost every occurrence of such phrases as "she noticed" and "she saw" be suppressed in favor of direct presentation of the thing seen. [John Gardner] *More on "filtering" in the coming weeks…

On Dialogue:

Beginning writers tend to write dialogue that is too clear, believe it or not. When characters talk too precisely and respond exactly to what has been said, then the words are probably being put in their mouths by the writer. [John Dufresne]

Beginning writers think they know what a character needs to say, and so they don't listen to the characters. They don't want the character screwing up the plot they took so long to devise. And so the character isn't credible. [John Dufresne]

Beginning writers tend to have all of their characters talk the same – usually the way the writer does. (Russell Rowland)

On Voice:

Beginning writers often forget the importance of letting their raw voice lead the story. They start with the voice of the story, often some other writer's story, and hope it will yield powerful, original material. [Thaisa Frank & Dorothy Wall]

On Beginnings:

Beginning writers often [begin their stories] with strong feelings and ideas without having found the images to embody them. Don't begin with an idea, begin with people, preferably people in action. [Ursula Le Guin & John Dufresne]

On Endings:

Beginning writers sometimes say, "Well, I didn't want to tell what happened to the characters. I wanted to leave the book ambiguous and open-ended. I want readers to decide for themselves what happened." This is usually a response to a criticism that the story feels as if it "just stopped." Unfortunately, the "let-the-readers-decide-for-themselves" stance is usually a failed defense. Readers don't want to decide what happened to the characters. They want you to decide, on the dual grounds that you're the writer and that they've just read four hundred pages of your prose anticipating this very information you're now withholding. [Nancy Kress]

On First Drafts:

Beginning writers tend to want to dodge the drafting process and write the story immediately. [John Dufresne]

The novice writer sets unrealistic goals for what he may not acknowledge to be, but is in fact, the first draft. He undermines his effort by holding unrealistic expectations of his imaginative and organizing powers. And so he becomes discouraged when the people in his head are unrecognizable on the page. The beginning writer who has read a great deal is even more susceptible to this kind of dejection. [John Dufresne]

On Doing Writing Exercises (something beginning writers do well :-)

When the beginning writer deals with some particular, small problem, such as description of a setting, description of a character, or brief dialogue that has some definite purpose, the quality of the work approaches the professional. [John Gardner, The Art of Fiction]

When the beginning writer works with some sharply defined problem in technique, focusing on that alone, he produces such good work that he surprises himself. [John Gardner, The Art of Fiction]

Writing an exercise, the [novice] writer is in the ideal artistic state, both serious and not serious. He wants the exercise to be wonderful, so that his classmates will applaud, but he is not in the dark psychological set of the ambitious young novelist struggling to write down his existence as it is, with the ghost of the young James Joyce standing horribly at his back.[John Gardner, The Art of Fiction]

~

The following books are available to purchase online:

John Gardner, The Art of Fiction

John Dufresne, The Lie That Tells A Truth

Janet Burroway, Imaginative Writing, The Elements of Craft

Nancy Kress, Beginnings, Middles & Ends

Thaisa Frank & Dorothy Wall, Finding Your Writer's Voice

Evan Marshall, The Marshall Plan for Novel Writing

Sol Stein, Stein on Writing

Russell Rowland, Gotham Writer's Workshop

Robert Olen Butler, From Where You Dream

Peter Selgin & Chris Lombardi, Gotham Writers' Workshop: Writing Fiction: The Practical Guide

May is Short Story Month!

This is a special time of year for literature buffs thanks to Dan Wickett over at the Emerging Writers Network who declared May "Short Story Month" a few years back. If you google "Short Story Month" you'll find journalists and bloggers of all stripes devoting the entire month to celebration of the short story.  To see what all the fuss is about you might check out the Emerging Writers Network where it all began.  Or visit Matt Bell's Blog where you'll find links to many other participating sites-- some discussing the craft itself; others posting, critiquing, and reviewing both classic and contemporary short stories.  Some folks are posting a short story online every day in May while others are planning to celebrate by writing stories themselves -- one for every day of the month  -- yes, thirty-one first drafts in thirty-one days!

While I love the idea of writing a short story a day, I'm just not sure I could hack that.  Seems an impossible task for someone who writes as slowly as I do.  Instead, I plan to celebrate by reading a short story a day (much easier!) and working on the second draft of a story I've already written.  

Later this week I'm hoping to post an exercise specifically tailored to the short story, but for now...

I must get my hands on a copy of The Turning by Booker Prize nominee Tim Winton --  I hear his linked stories are "painful, raw, and eloquent." In other words... just my cup of tea!

Leslie

The Art of Description: Architecture

Ah! I just discovered a new writing book that I want to share with you! Love, love, love this one! Actually, it’s not really new—it’s been quietly hiding in my bookcase these last few years, sandwiched between equally wonderful, but louder books like Sol Stein’s How to Grow a Novel and The Art of Fiction by Gardner.  It wasn’t until I literally hit a wall in my writing (I needed just the right word to describe the siding on a certain building) that I even remembered buying the book.

The Describer’s Dictionary by David Grambs is not intended to replace your thesaurus or dictionary but as the author says,  it's “for anybody needing quick access to just the right vocabulary for conveying in words some sort of picture. “ 

The book is divided into categories ranging from “Things” (shapes, patterns and edges; surfaces and textures; light and color, etc.) to “People” (skin and complexion; mouths, lips, and teeth; noses, ears, and jaws; voices; looks and tacit expressions, etc.) Other broad categories include: Buildings and Dwellings; Earth and Sky; and Animals. 

What I really love about this book is that Grambs doesn’t just give us lists of words, but actual excerpts  from literature, in which the technical terminology augments lovely, descriptive prose. These excerpts from the masters correspond to each separate category.  In the “Buildings and Dwellings” section alone Grambs offers seventy-one (!!) different examples from literature.   Here are just a few:

The Radley Place jutted into a sharp curve beyond our house.  Walking south, one faced its porch; the sidewalk turned and ran beside the lot.  The house was low, was once white with a deep front porch and green shutters, but had long ago darkened to the color of the slate-gray yard around it.  Rain-rotted shingles drooped over the eaves of the veranda; oak trees kept the sun away.

From To Kill a Mockingbird, by HARPER LEE

It sat on a shelf between our lane and the creek, a little higher than the rest of the bottomland,  Its board-and-batten sides and its shake roof were weathered silvery as an old rock.  To me it has an underwater look—that barnacled silveriness, the way three big live oaks twisted like seaweed above the roof, the still, stained, sunken light.

WALLACE STEGNER, All the Little Live Things

The architects of the Knox Building had wasted no time in trying to make it look taller than its twenty stories, with the result that it looked shorter.  They hadn’t bothered trying to make it handsome, either, and so it was ugly: slab-sided and flat-topped, with a narrow pea-green cornice that jutted like the lip of a driven stake.

RICHARD YATES, Revolutionary Road

Built of butter-yellow sandstone blocks hand-hewn in quarries five hundred miles eastward, the house had two stories and was constructed on austerely Georgian lines, with large, many-paned windows and a wide, iron-pillared veranda running all the way around its bottom story.

COLLEEN MCCULLOUGH, The Thornbirds

Through my glasses I saw the slope of a hill interspersed with rare trees and perfectly free from undergrowth.  A long decaying building on the summit was half buried in the high grass; the large holes in the peaked roof gaped black from afar; the jungle and the woods made a background.  There was no enclosure or fence of any kind; but there had been one apparently, for near the house half-a-dozen slim posts remained in a row, roughly trimmed, and with their upper ends ornamented with round carved balls.

JOSEPH CONRAD, Heart of Darkness

DAVID GRAMBS: The Describer’s Dictionary: A Treasury of Terms & Literary Quotations

HARPER LEE:   To Kill a Mockingbird

WALLACE STEGNER:   All the Little Live Things

RICHARD YATES:   Revolutionary Road

COLLEEN MCCULLOUGH:   The Thornbirds

JOSEPH CONRAD:   Heart of Darkness

The Cover Design of Your Next Novel

Check this out:
Where the Cover of Your Favorite Novel Comes From
From “The Atlantic” online magazine.  By Charlotte Strick, art director of Faber & Faber, Inc. and of the paperback line at Farrar, Straus and Giroux.  She is also the art editor and designer of The Paris Review.

Rough Terrain

Attention struggling, would-be novelists!
Click to listen to a few choice words of wisdom from JCO.
I expect to replay this clip many times over in the coming difficult months...

Leslie

Click here to watch the program in its entirety.

Writing a Party Scene/ Creating a Crowd

Your character might be driving a carful of kids and dogs to the annual family clam dig, or he might be wandering through Munich's town square at Oktoberfest—either way, the challenge for the writer is the same in both instances: how to introduce multiple people in the same scene.  Most novels (and many short stories) probably have at least one scene in which the main character is but one of many.   There's almost always a group get-together of some kind or another—a family meal, a party scene, a dash through a crowded airport.  

This morning I began working on a scene from my novel in which a group of five guys shows up unexpectedly at my protagonist's front door.  Only one of the five are important to my story (and to my protagonist) but  the fact that that this visitor arrives with an entourage is significant.  My first attempts at writing this scene were not very successful.  When I focused on introducing the significant visitor first, the other four almost disappeared entirely. On the other hand when I attempted to keep the other four characters in view, the focus veered clumsily away from the conflict between my two main characters.

           

With a little research I discovered the answer to my dilemma in Janet Burroway's Writing Fiction, A Guide To Narrative Craft:

“Sometimes it’s necessary to introduce several or many people in the same scene,  and this needn’t present a problem, because the principle is pretty much the same in every case, and is the same as in film: pan, then close-up.  In other words, give us a sense of the larger scene first, then a few details to characterize individuals.... We will believe more thoroughly in large numbers of people if you offer example images for us...." 


"If you begin by concentrating two long on one character only, we will tend to see that person as being alone."

Pan, then close-up.  Pan the five guys who show up at my protagonist’s door, then focus the camera on the two who matter most.  Sounds pretty simple. 

But what if I want to write a large dinner party into my story? How do I juggle all those guests, their comings and goings, their different groupings, and snippets of conversation?

According to Burroway the same technique is used for both:  pan first, then zoom in for the close up.  But if the scene goes on for several pages or an entire chapter how do we keep the crowd from disappearing after that initial "pan"?  In that case a single pan at the beginning of the scene will not be enough to keep the reader aware of (and believing in) the crowd we've created around our main characters. We will need to zoom in and out more than just the one time at the beginning of the scene.  In The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst, the reader follows protagonist Nick Guest as he arrives at a very large party: 

Drinks were being served on the long terrace, and when he came out through the French windows there were two or three small groups already laughing and glowing.  You could tell that everyone had been on holiday, and like the roses and begonias they seemed to take and hold the richly filtered evening light.  Gerald was talking to a somehow familiar man and his blonde-helmeted wife; Nick knew from his smiles and guffaws that he was being recklessly agreeable.  None of his particular friends was here yet, and Toby was still upstairs with Sophie, interminably getting dressed.  He took a flute of champagne from a dark-eyed young waiter, and strolled off into the knee-high maze of the parterre.  ...The curlicue of the path brought him round to a view of the house again, but the waiter had moved off, and instead he saw Paul Tompkins ambling towards him.

Later, when the guests are seated for dinner, we drop into the middle of a conversation between Nick and the two people sitting beside him, then pan out briefly to get a glimpse/feel of the room as a whole, before finally returning to the close-up conversation between the three:

"So what's he like?" said Russell.  "Her old man.  What's he into?" He glanced at Catherine, across the table, before his eyes drifted back down the room to Gerald, who was smiling at the blonde woman beside him but had the fine glaze of preoccupation of someone about to make a speech.  They were in the great hall, at a dozen tables.  It was the end of dinner, and there was a mood of noisy expectancy. 

            "Wine," said Nick, who was drunk and fluent, but still wary of Russell's encouraging tone.  He twirled his glass on the rucked tablecloth.  "Wine.  His wife…um…"

            "Power," said Catherine sharply.

            "Power…" Nick nodded it into the list.  "Wensleydale cheese he's also very keen on.  Oh, and the music of Richard Strauss--that particularly."

Throughout the scene the author reminds us again and again that Nick and his friends are not alone in a bubble but part a crowd seated at “a dozen tables.”  He accomplishes this by having Nick pan the room every now and then giving us the opportunity to glimpse other guests at distant tables, and to interpret their gestures and hear snippets of their conversations. We hear the group laughter and even catch a peek of the servants watching from the gallery above. In between these occasional faraway glimpses we return to focus up-close on Nick’s thoughts, his immediate surroundings, and his conversations with those beside him:

            Nick pushed his chair back to get a clearer view of Gerald, and also of Toby, who had colored up and was looking round with a tight grin of apprehension…  Nick grinned back at him, and wanted to help him, but was powerless, of course.  He was blushing himself with the anxiety and forced eagerness of awaiting a speech by a friend….

           

            Through the generous laughter Nick caught Toby's eye again, and held it for two or three long seconds, giving him perhaps a transfusion of reassurance.  Toby himself would be too nervous to listen to his father's speech properly, and was laughing in imitation of the others, not at the jokes themselves…. Nick surveyed the room, and was reminded of a college hall, with Gerald and the more influential guests elected to the high table.  Up in the arcade of the gallery one or two servants were listening impassively, waiting only for the next stage of the evening. There was a gigantic electrolier, ten feet high, with upward-curling gilt branches opening into cloudy glass lilies of light.  Catherine had refused to sit under it, which was why their whole table had apparently been demoted to this corner of the room. If it did fall, Nick realized, it would crush Wani Ouradi.  He began to feel a little anxious about it himself….

             

            Nick glanced round, in a little shrug of amusement, and saw that the waiter from Madeira, was standing in the doorway behind him, following the proceedings with a vacant stare… He saw that Catherine was stuffing things into her bag and flashing irritable looks at Russell, who mouthed, "What?" at her, and was getting irritable in his turn.  "So, Toby," Gerald said, raising his voice and slowing his words, "we congratulate you, we bless you, we love you: happy birthday!  Will you--all--please raise your glasses: to Toby!"

            "Toby!" the overlapping burble went up, followed by a sudden release of tension in cheers and whistles and applause--applause for Toby, not for the speaker, the heightened, unreal acclaim of a special occasion, amongst which Nick lifted his champagne glass with tears in his eyes, and kept on sipping from it to hide his emotion.  But Catherine had jumped her little gilt chair back from the table and hurried out, past the waiter, who followed her for a second, to see if he could help.  Then Nick and Russell stared at each other, but Toby was getting to his feet, and Nick was damned if he was chasing after her this time, he really did love Toby, more than anyone in this high magnificent room, and he was going to be with him as he spoke. 

I apologize for butchering Hollinghurst’s beautiful prose in that excerpt.  Didn’t mean to take a machete to it, but the scene goes on for some time and I just wanted to give you a gist of what he accomplishes there.  I’m sure you have your own favorite party scenes by authors you love.  Francine Prose, author of Reading Like A Writer has a few of her own: the ballroom scene in Anna Karenina;  “the wild party that winds through so many pages of William Gaddis’s The Recognitions;” and her favorite ( I think): the party scene in James Joyce’s short story “The Dead.” 

Janet Burroway: Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft
Francine Prose: Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them
Alan Hollinghurst: The Line of Beauty

Happy 2011: First Draft: The Year of Writing Dangerously

* UPDATE (1/28/11):  Just finished a draft of chapter two :-)  Onward!

Now that the holidays are over, or almost over (the Christmas tree still needs to come down and the ornaments put away) I have an overwhelming urge to write again.  How about you? Are you feeling it too? All of a sudden I'm feeling very strong, very brave. I suppose the start of a new year does that to people. In the New Year we give ourselves permission to set aside old fears and strike out in uncharted directions, boldly and unwaveringly, with not so much as a glance behind at the year that was.  That's how the New Year starts out anyway, but in recent years, by the end of that first week in January, the old fears return, sneaking up on me like they always do to yank me off course -- back to my old course, that dreaded path of debilitating self-doubt.  Have I confessed to you my terror of writing a first draft?

“The first draft is definitely the hardest,” says author, Joyce Carol Oates, “like hacking one's way through a thick jungle with something like a butter knife.”

Evidently, I’m not the only one who fears the first draft. Author Will Allison, interviewed for “Writers Ask" (a Glimmer Train publication), describes the humbling experience:

“The most difficult part for me is getting a first draft down on paper.  I’m not being modest in saying that my first drafts are total garbage.  It’s especially hard with a novel—hard to write poorly for so many pages and still think of oneself as doing something worthwhile.  I’ve gotten to the point where I tell myself that I’m not even writing, I’m just ‘sketching,’ dumping raw material on the page.  That helps take the pressure off.  In the end, it’s really just a big leap of faith, believing that it will all eventually amount to something.”

                                                                                                                                            

My fear of the first draft has not been completely paralyzing, thank goodness.  I've somehow managed to write complete drafts of a fair number of short stories and a sizable chunk (about 3/4) of a 300-page novel, but those "rough" drafts have come at an excruciatingly slow pace. By now I should have completed five novels!

So what is it about writing a first draft that so terrifies some of us? Favorite mentor and author, John Dufresne, answers that question in The Lie That Tells The Truth:

“Writing a first draft isn't easy.  It takes perseverance to write a story, it takes that and more to write a first draft.  It takes faith and grit, boldness and resilience.  It takes poise and good fortune.... You must have the courage to allow yourself to fail.  The first draft is where the beginning writer most often finds himself stuck, discouraged, doomed. ”

Faith, grit, boldness! You won't abandon me this time. Not this year. This year things will be different! 

The first step to recovery is understanding one's weaknesses. Here, Dufresne describes the troubled novice (me!) to a tee, and how it is we manage to foul things up for ourselves:

“ [The novice writer] makes mistakes.  He sets unrealistic goals for what he may not acknowledge to be, but is in fact, the first draft.  He undermines his effort by holding unrealistic expectations of his imaginative and organizing powers." [me!] "And so he becomes discouraged when the people in his head are unrecognizable on the page, when the intense emotion he felt in real life is unrealized in what he writes." [me!] "The beginning writer who has read a great deal is even more susceptible to this kind of dejection.  She knows that the García Márquez story she just read did not flounder the way hers seems to.  She loses confidence and hope, becomes intimidated by the magnitude of the problem that is the nascent story, is humbled by her vaulting ambition.  [me, me, me!] "What had seemed like an exciting and noble undertaking now seems foolish and impossible.  What she doesn't understand is that García Márquez wrote five hundred pages to get those seventeen. ”

So what advice does Dufresne have for us novices? Those who struggle like me to get that first draft out of our head and onto the page? It's not perseverance and hope I lack, of that I'm certain.  I've been working on this novel for almost five years now and I'm still excited about it, still determined to see it through to completion. 

“Do not write beyond what the first draft is meant to accomplish.  Do not demand or expect a finished manuscript in one draft. (Any writer who tells you he wrote his story in a draft is a liar or a loafer.) The worst thing you can do in writing a first draft is to let your critical self (the boss) sit down at the writing table with your creative self.  The critic will always stifle the writer within.  And you aught not to be worried about your style or the music of the prose or your word choice-- you make the best word choice you can for now, knowing it'll get better later.  Don't even worry about the flow of the plot.  You're trying to settle into this new community you've moved to, trying to get to know the people who live there. ”

“If you're having trouble, that means you're thinking.  You're being logical, critical. You can freewrite on any emotion, on any character, on any place.  If you're stuck, write your character's name on the top of a blank page and freewrite for five, ten, or however many minutes you need to prime the pump. ”

To minimize "first draft" anxiety, Joyce Carol Oates has taken to writing her drafts in long hand using scrap paper. "It's a wonderful way to write, very casual,’ she says. "You don't feel that it's anything too important or too significant.” ["Albany Magazine Stories," Spring 1995, University of Albany] 

Perhaps my favorite bit of Dufresne "first draft" advice is the little exercise that follows this post, which can be applied to trouble spots in the second draft as well-- not to mention the third, tenth and fifteenth. I've also listed two others, one from prolific novelist and short-story writer, Joyce Carol Oates; the other  from Associate Professor of English at the University of New Mexico, Gregory Martin.  Have fun and good luck!

After this post I'll be taking a vacation from blogging in order to freewrite the first three chapters of my old novel (drastically changed story!)  I hope you'll join me in this endeavor and write your own first draft of a novel (or like me, the first draft of a drastically changed novel). It would be comforting to know there are others out there struggling to accomplish the same thing.

Hope to see you back here soon!

Leslie

~
Will Allison:  interviewed for “Writers Ask" (a Glimmer Train publication)
John Dufresne: The Lie That Tells A Truth
Gregory Martin: Gregory Martin: Associate Professor of English, UNM: http://www.unm.edu/~gmartin/
Joyce Carol Oates: interviewed for Albany Magazine Stories, University at Albany, Spring 1995