Matt has been sending me links.
We don’t always agree about… well, anything much, really, despite the fact that he’s allowed me to write on his blog. So today we disagree about links, in particular the one he posted for Nail Your Novel (Without Writing Craft You Are Just Mumbling).
I’m a mumbler, see. I believe it’s possible to write good fiction without having ever attended a creative writing class. Moreover, I think it self-evident that most of the works in the Western literary canon were written by authors who never even heard of a creative writing class. How, then, did those mumblers manage to produce plays and poems and, yes, novels, that are still widely read today?
There are clues in another link Matt mailed me, this time for the Writer’s Digest blog: What Writers Wish They’d Known Before Pitching. Go ahead and read that one—it’s not the standard www list of “10 Things You Should Know About Writing”. For a start, it has 12 items. More importantly, there is nothing on that list that wasn’t just as true in 1580 as it is in 2010.
Shakespeare, Dickens, Austen et alia wrote to sell. They wrote to precisely the same criteria as any modern author writing to sell. If they got it wrong, the poem remained unsponsored; the play remained unplayed; the novel, unpublished. And yet Dickens in his heyday was able to convince an editor to publish entire novels as weekly episodes in a newspaper, writing them on the fly and leaving his endings until he knew which way the reading public would like the fates to swing. Now there’s a bit of pre-Internet collaboration, if you will!
Matt’s getting more into the idea of script writing ever since he went to the Everyword workshop a month or so back. He wrote, “I have a lot of respect for Sokoloff… here she is on third acts”. I spotted that post too, and it’s very good and thoughtful advice—for screenwriters. Probably not such good advice for novelists, though, who have a much more subtle medium to contend with. Here’s another post about endings, this time aimed at those of us who don’t aspire to the silver screen. And I’ll confess, if you like, to being a tied-up-in-a-bow writer by nature. Just call me old-fashioned.
One post Matt and I did agree over was Joe Moore’s He Said, She Said, published on The Kill Zone. Back at primary school—oh, about a hundred years ago or so—we were always told to avoid the word “said” in our stories. I still notice when it’s overused and doesn’t work, simply because as a child I was told it was wrong. But I re-read Alan Garner’s Red Shift the other day and noticed only in the final pages that “said” was used throughout the book. What freedom!
Still on the theme of conflicting advice, Natalie Whipple smashed the entire “write what you know” school of thought with her blog post, Advice That Makes Me Twitch. At the other end of the scale, Jessica Digiacinto urged just the opposite as she explored ways of communicating grief without resorting to cliché. It’s a bit unfortunate that the next item I read following Jessica’s touching post happened to be How Long Does It Take For You To Fall Into A Black Hole?
And so on to the news. Oh alright, snippets of wwwfluff then.
Following the death of 104-year-old social networker Ivy Bean, the Twitterati have commented endlessly on the potential of Web 2.0 to free pensioners from social isolation. The Salon published a better piece than most on the phenomenon of grey surfing. From there it’s a bit of a muddy slither to the much less worthy, but funnier, story about 111-year-old Sogen Kato, the living Buddha who probably wasn’t.
This was the week the chap from BP got sent to Siberia (allegedly). It was also the week a group of Mormon girls from Los Angeles released their rather wonderful trailer for Jane Austen’s Fight Club. Did somebody mention the word “viral”?
And finally, a few unexpurgated sentences from Matt himself:
So the Pope has written a book for children. I’m sorry to say this prompted inappropriate jokes in my house at the expense of both Pontiff and church (related to the former’s wartime activities, and the latter’s unfortunate sexual track record). There may have been a running gag about homosexual woodland animals too, but really you had to be there.
