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

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

Write a Story, Part II: Setting & Emotion

***This post is the second in a series of eight.  From now through September I'll be posting weekly exercises designed to take our short stories from rough draft to finished "masterpiece"(or as close as we can get ;-) with the help of the late John Gardner and a host of other well-known authors and teachers.  Click here for Part I ***

There’s a famous writing exercise you’ve probably heard of, an exercise in technique that the late John Gardner developed to explore links between character emotion and setting. There are four parts to it.  Here’s one of them:

“Describe a building as seen by a man whose son has just bee killed in a war.  Do not mention the son, war, death, or the old man doing the seeing; then describe the same building, in the same weather and at the same time of day, as seen by a happy lover.  Do not mention love or the loved one.”

I’d like to tweak this exercise to help me develop the setting in my own story.  It would be easy to write only one side of this exercise.  The happy lover’s point of view, for instance, if that’s an emotion that works for your story.  But it’s helpful, I think, to write the contrasting POV as well, to write both extremes in order to really understand the setting's "dramatic potential".  In my story my POV character, Victoria, arrives with her family at a Christmas tree farm in the country, the setting where most of my story will take place.  She’s irritable and on edge, angry with her husband for ruining a day that is supposed to be joyful, playful, and fun. I think it will help me develop the setting and character if I explore how different her interpretation of the tree farm would be were she to be happy instead, and thinking about how much she can't wait to make love to Tom as soon as the tree is up and decorated. 

The Christmas tree farm is an important part of my story--almost as important as one of my main characters (if not, the story might as well take place somewhere else). So instead of just describing the tree farm as if it were a photo or a painting, I want to use Gardner’s exercise to set the mood of the story, to anchor the reader in time and place, to move the story forward, and most importantly, to reveal something about Victoria’s character and the whole family dynamic.

As Janet Burroway writes: “Our relation to place, time, and weather, like our relation to clothes and other objects, is charged with emotion more or less subtle, more or less profound.  It is filled with judgment mellow or harsh.  And it alters according to what happens to us….  Imagine experiencing a thunderstorm when in the throes of a new love: the rain might seem to glitter, the lightning to sizzle, the thunder to rumble with anticipation.  The downpour would refresh and exhilarate, nourishing the newly budding violets.  Then imagine how the very same storm would feel in the midst of a lousy romantic breakup: the raindrops would be thick and cold, almost greasy; the lightning would slash at the clouds; the thunder would growl.  Torrents of rain would beat the delicate tulips to the ground.”

Take a look at this passage from Louis L’Amour’s novel, Hondo (used as an example of “how to weave character, landscape, and action” in Writing Fiction Step by Step by Josip Novakovich):

Novakovich writes:  “L’Amour creates suspense while giving us the setting from the perspective of his protagonist; the setting not only helps us get into the story, it also helps us experience the character’s mood (tension, vigilance)…. if L’Amour simply described how the southwestern landscape looks every summer, he’d create no suspense. His fiction would be reduced to a travelogue.” (Novakovich).

John Gardner: The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers
Josip Novakovich: Writing Fiction Step by Step
Janet Burroway: Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft

Write A Short Story:  

Part I: Introduction

Part II: Setting & Emotion  

Part III: Character Motivation & Change

Part IV: Story Shape

Part V: Dialogue

Part VI: Authenticating Detail & Description

Part VII: Tension & Reader Anticipation

Part VIII: Plot

29 Mistakes Beginners Make

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 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… Yikes! 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]

This bunch is just a sampling, I'm sure.  Email me and let me know if you come others in the writing classes you take and the books you read.  When we have twenty more, we'll post a followup. 

Leslie

~

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