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“Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.”
~ E.L. Doctorow
When journalist-novelist Kathryn Lance interviewed Isaac Asimov for a Scholastic teen magazine she asked him at her editor's behest, "What is the purpose of science fiction?" He thought a moment, then said, "To accustom us to change."
"You must want to enough. Enough to take all the rejections, enough to pay the price of disappointment and discouragement while you are learning. Like any other artist you must learn your craft -- then you can add all the genius you like."
~ novelist Phyllis A. Whitney
"Literature nowadays is a trade. Putting aside men of genius, who may succeed by mere cosmic force, your successful man of letters is your skillful tradesman. He thinks first and foremost of the markets . . . "
~ George Gissing
So You Want to Write a Novel (a cartoon video by David Kazzie, hitting all the highlights of nonwriters' fantasies about making it big with an easy novel
The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott, a first novel by Kelly O'Connor McNees, reviewed by Carrie Brown (WashPost, Style, 4-28-10)
“I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.”
~ Ernest Hemingway
The Rock Bottom Remainders, the band of authors, on their annual tour (April 20-24, DC, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston). Read the blog. Original members were: Dave Barry,Tad Bartimus, Roy Blount, Jr., Michael Dorris, Robert Fulghum, Kathi Kamen Goldmark, Matt Groening, Josh Kelly, Stephen King, Barbara Kingsolver, Greil Marcus, Dave Marsh, Ridley Pearson, Joel Selvin, and Amy Tan.
To William Flesch, a professor of English at Brandeis University, "fictional accounts help explain how altruism evolved despite our selfish genes. Fictional heroes are what he calls 'altruistic punishers,' people who right wrongs even if they personally have nothing to gain. 'To give us an incentive to monitor and ensure cooperation, nature endows us with a pleasing sense of outrage' at cheaters, and delight when they are punished, Mr. Flesch argues. We enjoy fiction because it is teeming with altruistic punishers: Odysseus, Don Quixote, Hamlet, Hercule Poirot. 'It’s not that evolution gives us insight into fiction,' Mr. Flesch said, 'but that fiction gives us insight into evolution.'"
~ Patricia Cohen, Next Big Thing in English: Knowing They Know That You Know (NY Times 3-31-10) "I never completely forget myself except when I'm writing and I am never more completely myself than when I am writing."
~ Flannery O'Connor
"The writer is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do. The not-knowing is crucial to art, is what permits art to be made." ~Donald Barthelme
In an interview for Scholastic, Kathryn Lance once asked Isaac Asimov, "What is the purpose of science fiction?" He thought a moment, then said, "To accustom us to change."
“The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day when you’re rewriting a novel you will never be stuck.”
~Ernest Hemingway
“My writing is a process of rewriting, of going back and changing and filling in. In the rewriting process you discover what’s going on, and you go back and bring it up to that point. Sometimes you’ll just push through, indicate a scene or a character, leave a space, then go back later and fill it in.”
~Joan Didion
"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"
~ Mary Oliver
"There never was a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn't be. He is too many people, if he's any good."
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, in his notebooks
"People think that because a novel's invented, it isn't true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they cannot include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that."
~Anthony Powell
"Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass."
~ Anton Chekhov
"Substitute ‘damn’ every time you're inclined to write ‘very’; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be."
~Mark Twain
The Carver Chronicles, D.T. Max's long, fascinating 1998 story in the NYTimes Magazine about the effect (good and bad) editor Gordon Lish had on Raymond Carver's short fiction
"The writer who survives by teaching writing may discover, however, that his teaching hurts his art. Dealing day in and day out with beginning writers, he finds himself forced continually to think in analytical fashion about problems he would normally solve in other ways. To make his student see clearly what is wrong in his or her fiction, the writer-teacher has no choice but to work in a fully conscious, intellectual way. Every writer at some point must go through an analytical period, but in time he must get his own characteristic solutions into his blood, so that when confronted by a problem in a novel he's writing he does not consult his literary background. He feels his way to the solution."
~ John Gardner
"All you need to write a ghost story is put a ghost in it. For a detective story you need a plot."
~ P.D. James
“That is happiness: to be dissolved into something completely great.”
~Willa Cather
"The mystery story is two stories in one: the story of what happened and the story of what appeared to happen."
~ Mary Roberts Rinehart
"A good science fiction story is a story with a human problem, and a human solution, which would not have happened without its science content."
~ Theodore Sturgeon
"I think a little menace is fine to have in a story. For one thing, it's good for the circulation."
~ Raymond Carver
"If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster."
~ the late Isaac Asimov
"I always heard, 'Write about what you know.' I disagree. I say, write about what you love. You can always research the rest. If you're going to live with a character and a place for months on end, you'd better love them. And the passion comes through. Editors are looking for passion."
~ Stephanie Barron, author of the Jane Austen mysteries (starting with Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrove Manor)
"All my stories have been written with material that was gathered—no, God save us! Not gathered but absorbed—before I was fifteen years old."
~ Willa Cather
“The truth is that I do want I want to do,” novelist Walter Mosley told Clayton Moore, Mystery Strumpet on Bookslut. “If I want to write a political monograph, I write a political monograph and someone publishes it. No, it doesn’t sell like a traditional mystery, but I don’t care. I don’t write for that reason. If you want to make money, you should go into real estate, you know what I mean? If your love is writing books, that’s a passion that’s way outside of the umbrella of income.”
"It's not a good idea to try to put your wife into a novel . . . not your latest wife anyway."
~ Norman Mailer
"Perfection is finally attained, not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away."
~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
"The wastebasket is the writer's best friend."
~Isaac Bashevis Singer
Contemporary Latin American Short Stories, edited by Pat McNees
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E-mail Pat (pat at patmcnees dot com)
Dying: A Book of ComfortThis site built to support the book expanded into Illness and Recovery
Writers on Writing(complete archive of the NY Times series, writers exploring literary themes. Requires free membership.)
Letters of Note (fascinating letters, postcards, telegrams, faxes, and memos--that you were never expected to see)
Aha Moments (from the brilliant Mutual of Omaha campaign to record people's stories about moments of clarity, defining moments when they gained the wisdom to change their life)
TED: Ideas worth sharing Riveting talks by remarkable people, free to the world
Freelance National Anthem (Bill Dyszel, 4 minutes)
KeepMeOut (addicted to a website? bookmark this page and it will remind you to get back to work!)
Today's Front Pages (check out Newseum's U.S. map -- move your cursor across the map and see the front pages change)
Online Education Database150 resources to help you write better, faster, or more persuasively
Help a reporter out (HARO)(useful for reporters and for sources)
Paris Review "Writers at Work" Interviews (selections from 1953 on, a gift to the world, and with a single click you can view a manuscript page with the writer's edits)
The Onion (if the news is making you sick, try this approach)
Truth-o-meter (St. Petersburg Times, www.politifact.com)(St. Pete Times on whether, and how much, various notable people are telling the truth)
Fact Check (Annenberg sorts political truths from half-truths)
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Groups, sites, advice, and resources for fiction writers, editors, readers, and fans
(and in fiction these groups mix and mingle!)
• Links to sites, advice, and resources for fiction writers
• Critiquing and small writers groups
• Books for and about critiquing groups
• Organizations for fiction writers
• Books for fiction writers and editors
Links to sites, advice, and resources for fiction writers
The Adventures of Comma Boy by Keith Cronin (a comic strip for aspiring writers, agents, publishers, and publishing fantasizers, featured in Publishers Marketplace. Comma Boy archives here.
An Editor (Who Helped 'The Help') and an Agent Talk About Revision. Listen to Alexandra Shelley (editor of Kathryn Stockett's "The Help") and literary agent Eleanor Jackson discussing revision, publishing, and how to know when a book is 'finished' (on She Writes Radio).
Atwood's Rules for Writing Fiction
“You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there's no free lunch. Writing is work. It's also gambling. You don't get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but essentially you're on your own. Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don't whine."
~ Rule 7 of Margaret Atwood's Ten Rules For Writing Fiction (part of the wonderful Guardian collection of essays by many novelists.
Authors catch fire with self-published e-books .Carol Memmott, USA Today, 2-11, reports that young Amanda Hocking's self-published (digitally) young-adult paranormal novels are selling hundreds of thousands of copies through online bookstores.
Author Links for Mystery Authors (Mainely Murders bookstore's links)
Book Doctors. You've shown publishers your book proposal and samples and they've said, "You need to work with a book doctor." Here are links to some explanations of What Book Doctors Do. But then, how do you find a good book doctor? I know three of the editors who work with this group, and they've been editing manuscripts with a track record of success as books for MANY years: Independent Editors Group. There are many other fine book doctors.
Book Country (a place to discover, share, and sell fiction). At this interesting Penguin Books fiction-community site (read its revealing FAQ) you can sell your fiction eBooks and you can post chapters of genre fiction to be peer-reviewed.
Boxers, Briefs and Books. John Grisham's op-ed piece on what hard work writing is, one theme of the forthcoming collection Don’t Quit Your Day Job: Acclaimed Authors and the Day Jobs They Quit, ed. by Sonny Brewer (with stories by Grisham, Pat Conroy, Rick Bragg, and many other authors).
Center for Fiction launches Crime Fiction Academy (Launch date: Feb. 2012, Mercantile Library, New York City).
Deep point of view. Michelle Massaro offers four tips, on RT Book Reviews blog
Drawing Power (Bob Thompson's long Washington Post story on SPLAT! A Graphic Novel Symposium, or Prose Guy on "how this formerly ghettoized medium became one of the rare publishing categories that's actually expanding")
The Dreaded Synopsis by Jessica Faust (Q&A)
Esquire's 70 Greatest Sentences. Seventy lines that sparkle, invoke, provoke, or are just damn enjoyable to read. Both fiction and nonfiction, including: "But at three o'clock in the morning, a forgotten package has the same tragic importance as a death sentence, and the cure doesn't work--and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.
--F. Scott Fitzgerald, "Pasting It Together," 1936
Everything You Need to Know About Writing Successfully: in Ten Minutes (Stephen King's now-classic article, which appeared in The Writer in 1986, reprinted on the Great Writing site).
Found in Translation, Times op-ed piece by novelist Michael Cunningham (author of The Hours) on translations into a foreign language, and on how he learned that all writing is "a translation from the images in the author’s mind to that which he is able to put down on paper."
Free downloadable e-books on writing, from Michael Allen:
On the Survival of Rats in the Slush Pile by Michael Allen: http://www.kingsfieldpublications.co.uk/rats.PDF
The Truth about Writing ("an essential handbook for novelists, playwrights, and screenwriters" by Michael Allen, free on Scribd):http://www.scribd.com/doc/17414179/The-Truth-about-Writing
How to Write a Short Story That Works (by Michael Allen, via Scribd)
http://www.scribd.com/doc/18092726/How-to-Write-a-Short-Story-that-Works
Discovered through John Kremer's Book Marketing Tip of the Week: http://www.bookmarket.com/
Ghostwriting, Part I: The Ballad of Michael Gruber (who has long been the ghostwriter for Robert Tanenbaum, the trial lawyer turned NY Times Bestselling writer). See also Part II: Motivations and Agendas, and Part III: Why do it in the first place?. Posted on Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind (Crime fiction, and more--on hiatus, but old posts are still there and check out the great links, bottom left).
Harlequin's foray into vanity publishing of romance novels. Paid subscribers to Publishers Lunch Deluxe got a useful summary of Harlequin's "Harlequin Horizons" self-publishing enterprise, an effort to make money from the romance writers it doesn't publish by selling them vanity publishing services. Sharp rebukes from writers and writers' organizations included an announcement from Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA), which, concerned that the new 'self-publishing' venture's "sole purpose appears to be the enrichment of the corporate coffers at the expense of aspiring writers," declared that "NO titles from ANY Harlequin imprint will be counted as qualifying for membership in SFWA." Bestselling novelist Nora Roberts, in one of 799 responses to a story on the Smart Bitches, Trashy Books blog, wrote: "Vanity press is called vanity for a reason. You’re paying for your ego. That’s fine, dealer’s choice. But it’s a different matter when a big brand publisher uses its name and its resources to sell this as dream fulfillment, advertises it as such while trying to claim it’s not really their brand being used to make money on mss they’ve rejected as not worthy of that brand in the first place."
Heaven Help the Christian Writer (Kathryn Lively, Fiction Forum, 1-20-08, with links to interest to Christian romance readers and writers)
How to Break the Rules. Cameron McClure of the Donald Maass Literary Agency posts Kurt Vonnegut's 8 Rules of Writing and Elmore Leonard's rules, and gives examples of writers who have successfully broken some of the rules. Her blog, Book Cannibal, is about fiction.
How to Sell a Book? Good Old Word Of Mouth (read or listen to Lynn Neary, NPR, 9-10-10 on the launching of Emma Donoghue's novel Room, from which NPR posts an excerpt.)
How to Write a Synopsis (Nathan Bransford,8-30-07)
How your book's setting can affect sales (interesting blog on A Writer's Assistant)
The Institute of Children's Literature publishes a useful newsletter ($20 a year) for children's book writers, but also provides many useful articles and transcripts free onlne, at Rx for Writers (a topical index for articles and transcripts on writing for children) In Their Own Words? Maybe (Julie Bosman, NY Times, 6-1-11). There is an understanding among publishers, editors and agents that ghostwriters are behind many novels by celebrities. Says Bob Gottlieb, “It’s a way to extend the footprint of the celebrity.”
Joyce Carol Oates (FORA.tv video of her speaking at Book Passage) about her novel The Gravedigger's Daughter, much of which is based on her grandmother, Blanche Morningstar. She speaks of setting as being almost like a character.(51 minutes)
Konrath Ebooks Sales Top 100k (A Newbie's Guide to Publishing, 9-22-10). One writer's good news on self-e-pubbed genre novels!
I Do Believe in Literature. What Does It Mean to Be Someone Else? (Jeff Maehre, Talking Writing, 3-7-11)
National Novel Writing Month (NaNo). Write 50,000 words in a month(November), submitting your words online (scrambled) periodically; nonfiction writers try this popular event to indulge their fantasy that they have a novel in them, and they often do! Whether it's publishable is another thing, but just writing the thing is a kick and gets the creative juices flowing. NaNo has a page of advice with suggestions for revising: I Wrote A Novel, Now What?, NaNo FAQs, and info about Script Frenzy, an April challenge to write 100 pages of original scripted material in 30 days (screenplays, stage plays, TV shows, short films, and graphic novels all welcome).
Novel rejected? There’s an e-book gold rush! (Neely Tucker, Washington Post, 5-6-11). "In the winter of 2010, the cheerfully effervescent romance novelist Nyree Belleville suffered the same fate as many a scribe — she was dropped by her publisher. The most any of her 12 spicy romances, penned under the name Bella Andre, had earned was $21,000." She got the rights to her novels back and began self-publishing. "Here’s what her first quarter looked like: 56,008 books sold; income, $116,264....There is no good comparison for what’s happening in the frontier world of self-published e-books, because there has never been anything like it in publishing history."
On Writing, and Wasting Your Substance (Charles J. Shields, A Biographer's Notebook, 5-18-11). This is on Charles's Kurt Vonnegut blogsite, but it is really about whether novelists manage their creative energy best by socializing or by isolating themselves--and his focus is on David Markson, who did too much of one and then perhaps too much of the other).
Orbit Short Fiction. Hachette's new program, described by Publishers Weekly as Orbit Selling E-Book Short Stories (PW, 4-19-11)
Paris Review interviews (you can click on "view a manuscript page"):
• James Baldwin, The Art of Fiction No. 78 (interviewed by Jordan Elgrably)
• Russell Banks, The Art of Fiction No. 152 (interviewed by Robert Faggen)
• Louis Begley (interviewed by James Atlas)
• Anthony Burgess (The Art of Fiction No. 48) interviewed by John Cullinan
• Italo Calvino (interviewed by William Weaver, Damien Pettigrew)
• Malcolm Cowley, The Art of Fiction No. 70 (interviewed by John McCall)
• Margaret Drabble, The Art of Fiction No. 70 (interviewed by Barbara Milton)
• James Ellroy (interviewed by Nathaniel Rich)
• E. M. Forster, The Art of Fiction No. 1 (interviewed by P. N. Furbank & F. J. H. Haskell)
• Paula Fox (interviewed by Oliver Broudy)
• Henry Green, The Art of Fiction No. 22 (interviewed by Terry Southern!)
• Graham Greene (interviewed by Simon Raven and Martin Shuttleworth)
• Shirley Hazzard (interviewed by J.D. McClatchy)
• P. D. James, The Art of Fiction No. 141 (interviewed by Shusha Guppy)
• Ha Jin (interviewed by Sarah Fay)
• Norman Mailer, The Art of Fiction No. 193 (interviewed by Andrew O'Hagan)
• Bernard Malamud (The Art of Fiction No. 52, interviewed by Daniel Stern)
• Javier Marias (interviewed by Sarah Fay)
• William Maxwell, The Art of Fiction No. 71 (interviewed by John Seabrook)
• Mary McCarthy, The Art of Fiction No. 27 (interviewed by Elisabeth Sifton)
• Thomas McGuane, The Art of Fiction No. 89 (interviewed by Sinda Gregory, Larry McCaffery)
• Toni Morrison, The Art of Fiction No. 134 (interviewed by Claudia Brodsky Lacour, Elissa Schappell)
• V. S. Naipaul, The Art of Fiction No. 154 (interviewed by Jonathan Rosen, Tarun Tejpal)
• Kenzaburo Oe (interviewed by Sarah Fay)
• Grace Paley, The Art of Fiction No. 131 (interviewed by Jonathan Dee, Barbara Jones, Larissa MacFarquhar)
• James Salter (interviewed by Edward Hirsch)
• Jorge Semprún (interviewed by Lila Azam Zanganeh)
• Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Art of Fiction No. 42 (interviewed by Harold Flender)
• Wallace Stegner, The Art of Fiction No. 118 (interviewed by James R. Hepworth)
• William Styron, The Art of Fiction No. 5 (interviewed by Peter Matthiessen and George Plimpton, 1958) plus a second interview 40 years later: William Styron, The Art of Fiction No. 156, plus a Letter to an Editor (1953)
• Gore Vidal (interviewed by Gerald Clarke)
• Elie Wiesel (interviewed by John S. Friedman)
• P.G. Wodehouse (interviewed by Gerald Clarke)
• Tobias Wolff (interviewed by Jack Livings)
Philip Roth Goes Home Again. Scott Raab's article for Esquire, based on an interview with the novelist in the town that provided the setting for so much of his fiction, is a Notable Narrative, as featured on Nieman Storyboard: Esquire goes home with Philip Roth (5-27-11)
Place and setting. This is covered well in many books; here are a few items you can read online:
• The Significance of Place: An Interview with Barbara Henning (Rafael Otto interviews the poet-novelist for Not Enough Night)
• Robert Caro on the Power of Place (Andrea Pitzer's report on his talk at the Compleat Biographer conference, for Nieman Storyboard)
• How Your Book's Setting Can Affect Sales (blog item on A Writer's Assistant)
A reader's advice to writers: A word to the novelist on how to write better books by Laura Miller (Salon.com, 2-23-10). For example: "There's a reason why Nick Carraway is the narrator of "The Great Gatsby" while Gatsby himself is the protagonist. Desire is the engine that drives both life and narrative." And: "When you hear someone complain that 'nothing happens' in a work of fiction, it's often because the central character doesn't drive the action."
The Reality of a Times Bestseller (Lynn Viehl's frank and fantasy-destroying tale of what happened when her Darkyn novel, Twilight Fall, made the NY Times top 20 mass market bestseller list), followed up by More on the Reality of a Times Bestseller (9-6-09).
Reusable cover art. Sarah Johnson's site showing how certain art gets used and reused for covers on historical novels (and Diane Ackerman's A Natural History of Love, hardcover edition). Art directors: your secret is out!
Revision as essential for writing a good novel:
"My pencils outlast their erasers." ~ Vladimir Nabokov
• How Books Get Finished: Editor And Agent Talk About Revision. Listen to independent editor Alexandra Shelley and literary agent Eleanor Jackson discuss what it takes to get a book from first draft to "finished" book. (She Writes radio, 6-20-11). Excellent on process.
• "Beginners," Edited: The Transformation of a Raymond Carver Classic (a fascinating feature on The New Yorker 12-24-07). The original draft of “Beginners” is compared with the final version of the story, retitled “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” edited by Gordon Lish, and published in a collection of the same name by Alfred A. Knopf.
Roundup of writers' blogs, especially writers of genre fiction (Patti Struble, The Writer's Bump, links to a lot of genre writers' blogs along right)
Should writers hire editors? (Writer Beware's excellent links, including some of these:
• Should You Pay Someone to Edit Your Work? (Nathan Bransform, agent-turned-author, 10-5-09)
• Should I Hire a Freelance Editor? (agent Rachelle Gardner, 3-25-10)
• Should You Hire a Professional Editor? (Jane Friedman, Writer Unboxed, 3-19-10)
• The Doctor Will See You Now (book doctor Lisa Rojany-Buccieri on what book doctors can and cannot do)
• What to Expect from a Professional Critique (Margot Finke)
See more such pieces on Writer Beware links.
The Stiletto Gang (blog in which mystery writers Evelyn David, Marilyn Meredith, Maggie Barbieri, Rachel Brady, Misa Ramirez, Susan McBride and guests bring mystery, humor, and high heels to the world)
The 10 Highest-Paid Authors (Dirk Smillie, Forbes, 8-19-10). By Smillie's account the top 10 earning authors all write fiction: James Patterson, Stephenie Meyer,Stephen King, Ken Follett, Danielle Steel, Dean Koontz, Janet Evanovich, John Grisham, Nicholas Sparks, J.K. Rowling--includes income from books, film rights, television, gaming deals, etc.
Ten Rules for Writing Fiction. Inspired by Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing, the Guardian asked several authors for their personal dos and don'ts. Read what Elmore Leonard, Diana Athill, Margaret Atwood, Roddy Doyle, Helen Dunmore, Geoff Dyer, Anne Enright, Richard Ford, Jonathan Franzen, Esther Freud, Neil Gaiman, David Hare, PD James, and AL Kennedy (part 1)and Hilary Mantel, Michael Moorcock, Michael Morpurgo, Andrew Motion, Joyce Carol Oates, Annie Proulx, Philip Pullman, Ian Rankin, Will Self, Helen Simpson, Zadie Smith, Colm Tóibín, Rose Tremain, Sarah Waters, Jeanette Winterson (part 2) have to say.
This is NOT Feminine Tosh: Writing Meaningful Fiction. Listen to three novelists--Meg Waite Clayton, Carleen Brice, and Ellen Sussman--discuss writing and publishing fiction of substance (She Writes Radio)
TVTropes. A wiki/catalog of the tricks of the trade for writing fiction. "Tropes are devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members' minds and expectations."
The Very Rich Indie Writer. Eli James, on the Novelr blog (about reading, writing and publishing Internet fiction), lists monthly sales figures for Amanda Hocking and other Internet novelists, to show that you don't have to be traditionally published and don't have to be an A-list famous to sell a lot of e-books.
Victoria Strauss Stacey O'Neale interviews the YA Fantasy author, who maintains the popular Writer Beware website (www.writerbeware.org).
Writer Races to Victory From Way Off the Pace. Novelist Jaimy Gordon was a long shot for the National Book Award for fiction, with her novel Lord of Misrule, which won. "To write a novel that was even remotely commercial...she had to get out of Providence, where even to think of such a thing was considered a sell out..." Janet Maslin describes the novel as "so assured, exotic and uncategorizable, with such an unlikely provenance, that it arrives as an incontrovertible winner, a bona fide bolt from the blue."
Writing Strong Women. Various interviews with novelists who create strong women characters (BlogTalkRadio)
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Critiquing groups (and critiquing) for fiction
Just a start on this topic:
• How to Critique Fiction (Victory Crayen)
• Writing Groups: Fiction Writers Wanted (Margo L. Dill's photo-essay on critique-nics and shop talks
• Are you happy with your critique group? and Critique Groups, Part 2 (Suzie Quint, Falling in Love with Romance blog)
• Choosing Critique Groups (Meredith Efken's Fiction Workbench).
• Critique Groups and Writers' Groups (WritingWorld.com), part 3 of Fundamentals of Fiction
• On finding those pesky critique groups (Advanced Fiction Writing, which suggests that pre-published authors also check out Freshman, Sophomore, Junior, Author!
You can find leads to many more by merely googling "fiction critique groups." How did you find your critique group, and is there one you recommend? Here are a few we found online (and know nothing about, so this is NOT a recommendation):
• Critters Workshop, a member of the Critique.org network of workshops for creative endeavors
• Historical Fiction Writers Critique Group
• Maryland Writers' Association critique groups
BOOKS FOR AND ABOUT CRITIQUING GROUPS
• Writing Alone and with Others by Pat Schneider (among other things, including providing writing exercises, describes the widely used Amherst Writers and Artists workshop method)
• Writing Alone, Writing Together: A Guide for Writers and Writing Groups by Judy Reeves (full of practical advice and insights)
• The Writing & Critique Group Survival Guide: How to Make Revisions, Self-Edit, and Give and Receive Feedback by Becky Levine
• Coffee and Ink: How a Writers Group Can Nourish Your Creativity (by the Monday Night Writers Group, with writing prompts for creative writing groups)
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Organizations for Fiction Writers
• American Christian Fiction Writers (ACFW)
• American Crime Writers League (ACWL), crime fiction and true crime
• Asian American Writers' Workshop (holds a short story contest)
• Authors Guild, a nonprofit American organization of and for published authors, a strong advocate for authors' rights. Among benefits: Sitebuilder (a template for creating your own website), legal services, BackinPrint.com, listing in the directory of member websites .
• The Center for Fiction (NYC, The Mercantile Library)
• Chick Lit Writers of the World (a special-interest online chapter of Romance Writers of America -- all sub-genres from spicy to inspirational to young adult to paranormal)
• Colorado Springs Fiction Writers Group (CSFW)
• Council of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP's) links to resources for writers
• Crime Fiction Organizations & Conventions (Overbooked's list, for writers, editors, and fans)
• Crime Writers' Association (CWA), UK
• Crime Thru Time (History mystery discussion list, Yahoo! discussing history, culture, authors and mysteries)
• Crime Writers of Canada
• Dear Author(bloggers/readers/reviewers who love genre fiction, especially as e-books)
• Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) (to facilitate and promote the writing, publishing, and reading of literature in electronic media)
• Erotica Readers & Writers Association (site contains material intended for adults)
• Fiction Forum (where fiction lovers come to play)
• Historical Fiction Network (HFN)
• Historical Fiction Online (forum to discuss historical romance, historical mystery, historical fantasy -- by author, by era, by country/continent -- with book reviews by members)
• Historical Novel Society (a community for authors, readers, agents, and publishers)
• Historical Romance Club
• Historical Writers' Association (for professional writers of historical fiction and nonfiction, founded by members of the Crime Writers' Association)
• Horror Writers Association (HWA)
• International Thriller Writers (ITW). Read ITW's history
Association (HWA)
• Malice Domestic (May convention saluting the traditional, especially "cozy," mystery, where fans buy books from enthusiastic, often new, writers) and The Usual Suspects (the Malice Domestic newsletter); Malice Domestic awards.
• Mayhem in the Midlands (May crime fiction conference sponsored by Omaha Public Library)
• Murder Must Advertise (free e-mail discussion list about how to promote new mysteries)
• Mystery Writers' Forum (threaded bulletin board)
• Mystery Writers of America (MWA)
• Novelists, Inc, the only writers organization devoted exclusively to the needs of multi-published novelists -- of all genres. "The average Ninc member has sixteen published novels."
• PEN American Center (Poets, Essays, & Novelists -- a global literary community, providing particular support in countries where literature is not so free)
• Poets & Writers(nonprofit organization for poets and fiction writers, site with useful searchable database, among other features)
• Romance Writers of America (RWA) Romance Writers alert! In slow economy, romance writers steam to success. "More than 78 million Americans read at least one romance novel in 2008, according to the Romance Writers of America, up by almost 100 percent since 1998. Meanwhile, total U.S. publisher revenue was essentially flat, up just 1 percent in 2008. Nine out of 10 readers are women."~ Richard Mullins, Tampa Tribune, 8-16-09
• Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA)
• SFF Net and SFF Net People Pages
• Sisters in Crime ("SinC into a good mystery"). Check out local chapters.
• Society of Children's Book Writers & Illustrators (SCBWI)
• Western Writers of America (WWA) (freelance writers of Western fiction and nonfiction).
Place and Setting. You'll find wonderful material on this topics in several books on fiction writing. Here are a few items you can read online:
• The Significance of Place: An Interview with Barbara Henning (Rafael Otto interviews the poet-novelist)
• Robert Caro's speech on the power of setting (Andrea Pitzer's report for Nieman Storyboard 5-24-11)
• How Your Book's Setting Can Affect Sales (blog entry on A Writer's Assistant)
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Books for Fiction Writers and Editors
• Afterwords: Novelists on Their Novels by Thomas McCormack (Norman Mailer, Reynolds Price, Mary Renault, Mark Harris, Louis Auchincloss, John Fowles, Truman Capote, Anthony Burgess, William Gass, Wright Morris, Ross Macdonald, and others). McCormack, with whom I worked early in both our careers, was a legendary fiction editor who built St. Martin's Press into a major American publishing house.
• The Art of Dramatic Writing: Its Basis In The Creative Interpretation Of Human Motives by Lajos Egri
• The Art of Time in Fiction: As Long as It Takes by Joan Silber
• The Art of the Novel by Milan Kundera
• Aspects of the Novel by E.M. Forster. A classic, lively "witty and opinionated" discussion (based on lectures given at Cambridge)of the fiction of Austen, Dickens, Fielding, Lawrence, Woolf, and others, noted especially for his discussion of "round" and "flat" characters.
• Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction by Charles Baxter
• Characters, Emotion & Viewpoint: Techniques and Exercises for Crafting Dynamic Characters and Effective Viewpoints by Nancy Kress
• Characters and Viewpoint (Elements of Fiction Writing) by Orson Scott Card
• The Fiction Editor, The Novel, and the Novelist by Thomas McCormack
• The Fire in Fiction: Passion, Purpose and Techniques to Make Your Novel Great by Donald Maass
• The First Five Pages: A Writer’s Guide to Staying Out of the Rejection Pile by Noah Lukeman
• From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction by Robert Olen Butler (ed. Janet Burroway)
• Hooked: Write Fiction That Grabs Readers at Page One & Never Lets Them Go by Les Edgerton
• How to Write a Damn Good Novel by James N. Frey (especially the chapter on dialogue)
• Imaginative Writing: The Elements of Craft by Janet Burroway
• The Making of a Story: A Norton Guide to Creative Writing, ed. Alice LaPlante (how writers create -- for serious writing students and teachers)
• Making Shapely Fiction by Jerome Stern (for advanced writing students -- excellent short-essay glossary, and useful material on "shapes," storytelling archetypes, such as The Journey and The Gathering)
• Narrative Design: Working with Imagination, Craft, and Form by Madison Smartt Bell
• Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing by Margaret Atwood
• No More Rejections: 50 Secrets to Writing a Manuscript that Sells< by Alice Orr (more useful than its gimmicky title suggests)
• The Novel and Short Story Writers Market by Lauren Mosko
• 101 Best Beginnings Every Written: A Romp Through Literary Openings For Writers And Readers and 101 Best Scenes Ever Written by Barnaby Conrad
• On Becoming a Novelist by John Gardner (a classic on the writing life -- a good gift for an aspiring novelist)
•••• On Writing by Stephen King (autobiography plus advice, stressing character and situation over plot, and above all saying to write and read a lot)
• The Passionate, Accurate Story: Making Your Heart's Truth Into Literature by Carol Bly (encouraging writers to move beyond "technically competent stories to ones that are morally, politically, and emotionally deep")
• Plot and Structure: Techniques And Exercises For Crafting A Plot That Grips Readers From Start To Finish by James Scott Bell. (His LOCK theory: to have a gripping plot you must have a lead, who must have an objective; there must be confrontation and the ending must have "knockout power."_
• Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction (2nd edition) by Patricia Highsmith
• Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative by Peter Brooks
• Revising fiction: A handbook for writers by David Madden (185 practical techniques for improving your story or novel -- using archival drafts by great writers to show how essential revision is to the best writing)
• Revision And Self-Editing (Write Great Fiction) by James Scott Bell
•••• Self-Editing for Fiction Writers: How to Edit Yourself Into Print (2nd ed.) by Renni Browne and Dave King. Two professional editors share their wisdom and good and bad examples of important techniques: show and tell, characterization and exposition, point of view, the mechanics and sound (characters' voice) of dialogue, interior monologue, rhythm, variations in paragraph length, repetition, proportion, sophistication, and voice. Several people have recommended this as a primer on fiction writing.
• Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, essays by Umberto Eco, author of The Name of the Rose
• So, Is It Done? Navigating the Revision Process, hosted by Janet Burroway (DVD)
• Steering the Craft: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Navigator or the Mutinous Crew by Ursula K. Le Guin
• Stein on Writing by Sol Stein (subtitle: A Master Editor of Some of the Most Successful Writers of Our Century Shares His Craft Techniques and Strategies)
• Techniques for the Selling Writer by Dwight Swain
• This Year You Write Your Novel by Walter Moseley (for novices)
• Word Painting: A Guide to Writing More Descriptively by Rebecca McClanahan
•••• Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft (7th ed.) by Janet Burroway (another classic)
• Writing the Breakout Novel and Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook by Donald Maass (how to create "a powerful sense of time and place, larger-than-life characters, a high degree of tension, good subplots, and universal themes," elements needed to take a novel to the bestseller list). See also the novelist-turned-agent's The Fire in Fiction: Passion, Purpose and Techniques to Make Your Novel Great
• Writing Romance Fiction for Love and Money by Helene Schellenberg Barnhart
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"I've never thought about myself in terms of a career. ... I don't have a career, I have a typewriter."
~ Don DeLillo
"My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel - it is, above all, to make you see. That - and no more, and it is everything."
~ Joseph Conrad, preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus
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