Creative Writing: Learning From the Masters.



I am about halfway through the ibook, Creative Writing: Learning from the Masters.  The masters are Norman Mailer, Amy Tan, Earnest J Gaines, John Irving, Carol Shields, and Joyce Carol Oates.

I have read a couple of John Irving’s novels (The World According To Garp and Hotel New Hampshire) and seen at least three films adapted from his novels (the previous two plus The Cider House Rules). I have read one Norman Mailer novel (Tough Guys Don’t Dance) and seen the film that he directed of that novel. I have read The Best American Short Stories 1999 edited by Amy Tan (I loved her foreword where she said that a lot of the stories, which had all been previously published, she considered for the collection left her wondering what they hell they were about. So I am not the only one who is not afraid to admit they didn’t get a story.)

They all Started Young.   

All the masters started writing when they were young. And they all had success when they were young: publishing award winning novels, winning scholarships to exclusive schools, winning short story competitions. Their early success is not good news for me, unless I count a high school teacher reading a story I wrote to mine and at least one other class due to its cleverness, or my writing of skits that were performed in university revues.

A couple of the masters did stop writing for a while to raise a family or fight in a war.

Revision.

The ibook then got into the basics of writing. Nothing really new to me, until the section on revision came up. Revision is split into three very separate activities: redrafting, revising and then editing.

Redrafting.

Once a first draft has been completed it is time to redraft it. “Redrafting is the process of making broad sweeping changes to the major elements of a story.” When redrafting the novel an author should consider the key elements of their story: POV, plot structure, the purpose of all the characters and the major themes of the story. Is there too much or too little mounting tension? “Does the theme clarify a universal truth the reader can relate to?” Redrafting is a time to really think about the novel overall and cut and replace large chunks of it.

The novel I am currently writing is 175,000 words and will probably creep over 200,000 before I am finished. So redrafting will be all about cutting it back in size. In the redrafting stage I will be asking myself whether I need the long build up to the crew reaching their destination.  And then how (or if) to restructure and cut back on their time on the planet, which is crucial to the story as that is where the central character grows significantly.

Revising.

After redrafting it is time to revise. “Often when writers think they are redrafting their stories, they are actually revising them. Revision is the act of tackling the smaller issues around language, scene, flow and nuance.” I am one of those misguided writers.

In the revision stage for my current manuscript, one of the things I plan to do is remove a lot of dialogue and paraphrasing it.

Editing.

This involves the refinement of both content and structure. It is basically what I have come to call copy editing. Removing stray commas, getting rid of adverbs, changing say into said, removing overused words like “that” and “was”. Editing also involves making sure factual details are correct. Oh, faster than light travel ain’t possible, bummer. A second pair of eyes is recommending during the editing stage.

Creative Writing: Learning from the Masters is an ibook available from the Apple ibookstore section called itunes U.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review of Jonathan Franzen's Purity.

Image
Although this blog is mainly about science fiction, I sometimes read pure literature just to see what the other side is up. Jonathon Franzen is one of my favourite non-genre authors and here is a review of Purity, which I just finished reading.   Purity is literature with a plot. The plot revolves around secrets with the two main secrets being Purity’s search for the identity of her father, and the cover-up of a murder. The novel follows four main characters: Purity, Andreas Wolf, Tom and Leila. Purity is a recent university graduate in search of journalism job. She was raised by a controlling, but loving, mother who always got her own way and would argue for hours about the most trivial matters. Andreas Wolf is modelled on Julian Assange, complete with his own version of Wikileaks. Wolf was raised in East Germany and was a reluctant escapee when the wall came down as East Germany was a seemingly perfect place to keep his secrets. Tom is the owner and editor of an invest...
Read more

Review of The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, by Richard Flanagan

Image
The Living Sea of Waking Dreams is about a dying mother, Francie, and the efforts of her adult children to keep her alive, even though she wants to die. The children have lost the ability to communicate with each other, and are out to show they have the power, at least in the case of Anna and Terzo, to keep their mother alive. While Tommy, a failed artist who was looking after Francie, just acquiesces to the will of his other two siblings.  The novel is also about our dying planet, particularly from climate change, as animals go extinct We say we care, but do little to prevent the unfolding disaster. The novel is set in Tasmania while bushfires rage throughout that state and the rest of Australia.  Anna is the main protaganist, a successful architect, who rather than face her mother's pain, her crap relationship with her son, or the raging climate around her, retreats into social media. Frequently forwarding articles she has not read to her friends, showing how she avoids taki...
Read more

New Blog Look.

I have just updated the look of my blog. I am trying to create a consistent web presence online by ensuring that my blog, website and social media look the same and are connected.  This desire for a consistent web presence is a result of what I have learnt in my studies for a Bachelor or Arts (Internet Communications). I have just completed the first two subjects. One of the subjects, Web Communications, had us creating a new web presence, so I created a new blog on Wix, a new Facebook page, a new Twitter account, and joined Wattpad for the first time. As part of the assignment we were supposed to consistently style all the sites. The central node is here . The other subject was an Introduction to Internet Design. In that subject we had to create, from html and CSS code, a website. I choose to do one for author Graham Clements. For that website, I pretended that I had published four novels that are in reality only unpublished, and in need of redrafting, manuscripts. I am quite ...
Read more