I came across a brilliant idea in The Daily Writer a few days ago.
There’s the old saying isn’t there, write what you know. Yeah, ok, that’s boring and I don’t know much anyway. Well, actually…I’ve discovered I do! What about the 45 years of experience I have? All those little events throughout my life that I can use in my stories and novels? All I need to do is embellish the truth a bit, use my imagination 😉
So lets do a little experiment….what do I know about?
(I do love a mind map lol)
But what about one off experiences? What about the evening I spent at London Zoo with a picnic? Or the day I spent in Hay On Wye going round the book shops?
In The Daily Writer they suggest that I keep a file/folder/notebook of “experiences” that I can then draw on for use in my writing. What a great idea! Fred White recommends that you list them chronologically, ie:
“Experiences in Nature” “Holiday Experiences” “Religious Experiences”
I’d like to add a couple of my own to that list, but when I sit down to mull this over I’m sure I’ll be able to think of loads lol
Food Experiences Places of Interest Experiences
We all think our lives are so boring, but they’re not. If you were brought up on a farm you will have a wealth of info to draw on. Me, I was brought up in an inner city, and just thinking about it now I can list a handful of experiences that might, at some stage come in handy 😉
Oh dear, so that’s another notebook to add to the collection of the 10+ that I’m already using *snigger* 😉
So tell me, what’s a recent experience you’ve had that you could use to inspire a story?
Good morning! (or afternoon/evening depending on where you are and when you’re reading this 😉
I’m BACK! Did ya miss me? I’ve missed you guys 🙂
Ok, that’s enough lol….I guess I better tell you what I’ve been up to. I’ve had a pretty good 2 weeks to be honest. It was my birthday and i went stationery shopping, i went to the Romantic Novelists Summer Party (click the link for the photos including one which featured my red shoes! lol) and went to see RJ Ellory read from his new novel which isnt out for a few months (must buy that one!). I haven’t touched the WIP (Still), haven’t done much writing at all, although I did do a few prompts which was fun. Most of you know, I’m a huge fan of prompts and writing exercises to get the old creative juices flowing. I stumbled across Bonnie Neubauer’s website last week (she’s the lady who wrote The Right Brain Workbook) and here’s what she has to say about prompts:
“Because exercises (also known as prompts) remove the expectations and judgments you have about your own writing. The goal of an exercise is get you to write for the sake of writing so you can discover or rediscover the joy of writing. Exercises are all about filling the pre-allotted time or the pre-allotted space on the page. Do that, and you have met your goal. Nothing else matters. Not content, not plot, not characters, not spelling. And, to exceed your goal all you have to do is write one extra sentence.”
“Do enough exercises (The number is different for everyone; for me, it happens to be 2 exercises a day for 3 to 6 days), and you will find yourself excited about doing your ‘real’ writing. When this happens (and don’t force it), it’s totally okay to abandon the world of exercises and write what you want to write. Just remember that if you ever find yourself stalled, immediately put your regular writing aside and do some exercises. The exercises will relieve you of the pressure to produce and will once again, get your right brain primed to spew onto the paper without letting your left brain (the nasty editor) get in the way and stop you.”
And that’s what happened see….I fell out of love with writing, so I’ve been trying to claw my way back….and I think it’s working. I’ve missed doing prompts and I should never have stopped. As from today I’m taking Bonnie’s advice, and going back to committing to daily writing 🙂
So the coming week looks like this:
And how I’ve missed the structure of a ‘to do list’ because when I haven’t got one, nothing gets done.
You’ll see I’m working on another project. My second novel, entitled “Tangled” is what I’ve decided to submit to the RNA New Writers Scheme for critique, but it still needs some work. It’s complete, has a beginning, a middle and an end (go me!) but is only 52,000 words lol. The first novel (Still) is such a bloody mess that I really don’t know where to go next, so I’m putting it to one side (for the moment). There’s only so many times you can bash your head against that wall 😉
So I’m feeling pretty good, pretty confident and actually raring to get suck in! I’m hoping that my new pad from Paperchase will help.
Great post about self doubt here on Mandy Websters blog. Struck a nerve with me as its just how I’ve been feeling lately. Now, I’m off to turn a prompt into a ghost story 🙂
Ok, I know, I shouldn’t be here right? But I just had to get involved in Rebecca’s Meme, because I’ve been feeling a bit down (what? On a lovely relaxing break?) which I think has been induced by the looming birthday next week. It’s not that I’m scared of age, just that birthdays are bittersweet nowadays and the whole stressy writing business has taken its toll.
I’d been thinking about this recently, after a session at Happy Club with Peter Jones (if you’ve not read How To Do Everything and Be Happy I highly recommend it!!!!) where we were making lists of things that made us happy and trying to find ways to incorporate those moments into our lives.
I went straight home, opened a brand new journal and wrote this on the first page.
I now have a journal dedicated to living the best life i can. So far I’ve written about 20 pages!
So thank you Rebecca, this is exactly what I needed right now.
Vikki’s How To Be Happy in 5 Easy Steps
1. Eat cake! Things are always better after cake 😉
2. Have hobbies and interests! Do things you enjoy – make the most of every moment!
3. Make sure there is ALWAYS someone who is pleased to see you! Friends and family are important.
4. Buy a new pair of shoes! Gorgeous new shoes always make us girlies happy 😉
5. Own a pet! Unconditional love, from a furry friend is just the best!!!!!!
Just writing those down has made me smile 🙂
So those are my 5 top tips on how to be happy, or what makes me happy. Now it’s your turn. Give me your 5 in the comments box…make me smile 🙂 And if you want to post this on your own blog, please link back to Rebecca’s and feel free to tag.
Well, that went quick didn’t it! A HUGE thank you to Alex Cavanaugh for hosting again this year. I know he had lots of little helpers, so thank you to them too! They all did a marvellous job! 🙂
So now it’s time to reflect…..
If you didn’t follow my A-Z posts let me just explain the concept. I decided, mad woman that I am, to showcase 26 writers, authors who I, as a novice unpublished writer, felt I could learn from. So each post consisted of a short bio (that was the hardest bit….I was pulling my hair out trying to condense Hemingway’s life down into a few short paragraphs! Lol), quotes about writing, and a video from YouTube. I hope anyone who read the posts took away something 🙂
What were the highlights of my April Challenge?
Everyday was a highlight really. I had a lot of new people visit my blog this year, first timers, bloggers who I had never encountered before. That was nice 🙂
What I learned?
Oh gawd…. LOADS! How could I not! Doing the research on each author was hard work, time consuming, but really interesting. I learnt so much! I also learnt that there are some authors that I haven’t read who I really need to lol, and I’ve added about 30 books to my wish list lol.
What changes I might make next time?
Next year (ha ha ha) I want to try to pick a subject that I don’t need to research so much. It’s been very time consuming.
What surprised me the most?
How many great books I hadn’t read lol, but also, the authors who I found most inspiring. It wasn’t Hemingway or Woolf, not Orwell or Steinbeck, no, the two authors who I most want to read, who most inspire me to write were John Updike and Richard Yates 🙂
Special bloggers I met or a post/posts that impressed me?
Ahhhhh, now this is easy! There was a certain blogger who must now be more worn out than I am lol…. Hunter Emkay’s posts about Writing were absolutely incredible! Interesting, visually as well as information wise, full of links and great writerly advice! I highly recommend that you go and check out her archive. I will be going back and reading them all again when I get chance 🙂
So that’s it! Another year over….I didn’t manage to read as many of the participants blogs as I should have done, there were just far too many this year 😦 But I did manage to visit about 500. Met some lovely new bloggers and had some great engaging comments. So a huge thank you to everyone who took the time to read my posts and comment, it was a fun month!
So if you didn’t take part this year will you be joining us next year? 😉
If you missed any of my ‘Author’ posts, click the A-Z 2013 Tab above where they will all be listed.
Richard Yates was born in New York in 1926 and much of his childhood was spent moving from town to town with his mother after his parents divorced. It was while he was at school in Connecticut that he became interested in writing and journalism.
He enlisted in the army during WWII and when he returned to New York after the war began working as a journalist and ghostwriter. But it wasn’t until 1961 that he published his first and most successful novel, Revolutionary Road.
His novels were autobiographical and he became a huge influence to other writers such as Raymond Carver. His realism and observations on mid 20th Century American life meant he was praised as the voice of a generation, but all of his work was out of print during his lifetime.
He spent the rest of his life writing novels, short stories and screenplays whilst teaching writing at various universities. He died in 1992 of emphysema and complications from mirror surgery.
When he died his work had virtually disappeared, and it wasn’t until a recent revival of interest and the subsequent release of the film version of Revolutionary Road (starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio) that Yates has now been introduced to a whole new generation of readers. A scary thought that such a great writer could disappear so easily.
Richard Yates Quotes:
“Sometimes, in my more arrogant or petulant moments, I still think Revolutionary Road ought to be famous. I was sore as hell when it first went out of print, and when Norman Podhoretz made a very small reference to it in his book several years ago as an “unfairly neglected novel,” I wanted every reader in America to stand up and cheer. But of course deep down I know that kind of thinking is nonsense. After all, it did quite well for a first novel, much better than average: it got generally good reviews, got nominated for the National Book Award, later sold a great many copies in paperback and was widely translated and published abroad. It’s too bad that my second book, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, is out of print, but not at all surprising: most books of short stories disappear quickly, and at least mine had a few decent reviews and a paperback sale before it disappeared. What happened after those two books was my own fault, nobody else’s. If I’d followed them up with another good novel a few years later, and then another a few years after that, and so on, I might very well have begun to build the kind of reputation some successful writers enjoy. Instead, I tinkered and brooded and fussed for more than seven years over the book that finally became A Special Providence, and it was a failure in my own judgment, as well as that of almost everyone else, and was generally ignored. Now I feel I’m almost back where I started, with the added disadvantage of being middle-aged and tired. When this new book is done, it’ll be almost like publishing a first novel all over again.”
“I’m only interested in stories that are about the crushing of the human heart.”
“If my work has a theme, I suspect it is a simple one: that most human beings are inescapably alone, and therein lies their tragedy.”
“My characters all rush around trying to do their best, trying to live well within their known and unknown limitations. Doing what they can’t help doing, ultimately and inevitably failing because they can’t help being the people they are.”
“When a tough, honest writer can look squarely at all the horrors of the world, face all the facts, and still come up with a hard-won, joyous celebration of life at the end, in spite of everything, that can be wonderful… It’s a cop-out to say that our times are too hectic or frantic or confusing for good, traditional, formal novels to emerge. I think that’s just a cheap answer.”
The Richard Yates Story
Revolutionary Road Trailer
Yates put his own lack of success down to the fact that he wasn’t prolific as a writer, implying that if he had written more novels on a regular basis he would have been more successful. Even though he was described by Vonnegut as the 3rd greatest American novelist (after Hemingway and Fitzgerald) one of his books only sold 12,000 copies. So what was the problem? Publicity?
Virginia Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen in 1882 in London, to a father who was a well known Historian, author and founding editor of The Dictionary of National Biography.
Educated at home by her parents Virginia was surrounded by Victorian Literary society. Virginia resented the fact that her brothers attended Cambridge. The family spent summers in Cornwall, a place that had a profound effect on the young Virginia and the landscape was later to feature in some of her work.
Woolf had her first breakdown in 1897, but it’s generally believed that it was the death of her father in 1904 (her mother had died 9 years earlier) that brought on her first breakdown where she was institutionalized. After she was released she bought a house in Bloomsbury and it was there that she met the writers and artists known as The Bloomsbury Group.
She began writing professionally in 1900, initially for The Times Literary Supplement, but it wasn’t until 1915 that she published her first novel, The Voyage Out, which was published by her half-brother’s imprint. She went on to publish novels and essays to both critical and popular success. Most of her work was initially self-published through the Hogarth Press.
She suffered from depression her whole life and after recently completing the manuscript of her last novel, put on her overcoat, filled its pockets with stones, and walked into the river near her home, drowning herself in 1941. Her body wasn’t found for over 20 days.
Considered to be a major innovator in the English language, Woolf’s novels are highly experimental and she been described as one of the foremost modernists of the 20th Century.
The note she left for her husband read: “Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don’t think two people could have been happier ’til this terrible disease came. I can’t fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can’t even write this properly. I can’t read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that—everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer. I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been. V.”
My favourite Woolf quotes:
“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”
“Every secret of a writers soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.”
“Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.”
“Fiction is like a spiders web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all 4 corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.”
“The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind.”
“Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.”
“The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions. If this is agreed between us, then I feel at liberty to put forward a few ideas and suggestions because you will not allow them to fetter that independence which is the most important quality that a reader can possess. After all, what laws can be laid down about books? The battle of Waterloo was certainly fought on a certain day; but is Hamlet a better play than Lear? Nobody can say. Each must decide that question for himself. To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries. Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions-there we have none.”
Virginia talking about “craftsmanship” for the BBC:
Woolf’s best-known nonfiction piece is “A Room Of Ones Own” (1929) where she discusses the difficulties facing female writers, because men hold the legal and economic power. A Guardian Article from 2011 seemed to suggest that the world of fiction is still dominated by men…. What do you think?
Kurt Vonnegut Jnr was born in Indiana in 1922 into a family of Architects. He studied Chemistry at University but enlisted in the Army at the start of WWII. During the war he was a POW and was inprisoned in a building the Germans called Schlachthof Fünf (Slaughterhouse Five).
After the war he continued his studies at University, but switched to Anthropology and worked as a reporter at The City News Bureau of Chicago. His first short story appeared in print in 1950 and his first novel in 1952, but through the 60’s the structure of his work changed. He enjoyed experimenting with the structure of his novels and this is most apparent in Breakfast of Champions.
Vonneguts novels had science fiction themes but have been widely read by fans of other genres. In 1997 he announced his retirement from writing fiction but continued to write for the magazine In These Times, articles ranging from observations on a trip to the post office to contemporary US politics.
He taught and lectured in English at Harvard and died in 2007 after a fall down the stairs where he suffered massive head injuries.
In ‘Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction’ Vonnegut listed eight rules for writing a short story:
1. “Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.”
2. “Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.”
3. “Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.”
4. “Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.”
5. “Start as close to the end as possible.”
6. “Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.”
7. “Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.”
8. “Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.”
“Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen, or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?”
“Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armour and has attachked a hot fudge sundae.”
“Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.”
“Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule, do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.”
Kurt Vonnegut – the shape of the story – EXCELLENT – If you haven’t already seen this you really should 🙂
Vonnegut continues after the 8 Rules Of Writing by saying that these rules are broken by many well known, and much read authors. So how do they get away with it? Learn the rules then break them seems to be the general advice, but then you’re also told that as a new writer you should conform to the standard way things are done or an agent or publisher won’t touch you with a barge pole *slumps* lol. Do you stick to the rules or get pleasure in breaking them?
John Hoyer Updike was born in 1932 in Pennsylvania and it was his mother’s own attempts to be a published writer that inspired him to do the same.
He graduated from Harvard with a degree in English but his early ambitions to become a cartoonist led him to study Art at Oxford University. When he returned to the US the family moved to New York and it was there that his writing career began, initially as a full time member of staff at The New Yorker. He wrote poetry and short stories that were published in the magazine, and later this work was published in book form as short story collections.
His connection with The New Yorker (a relationship that continued many years after he left their employment) gave him access to readers and enabled him to publish his first novel in 1960, Rabbit – Run, the first in a series of 6 books. Updike enjoyed working in series and produced 5 during his lifetime. He worked in a wide array of genres, including fiction (30 novels and 17 short story collections), poetry, essays, a play, and a memoir. He won many awards including two Pulitzer Prizes.
Often compared to Nabokov, his style of writing was described as “rich” and carefully crafted. The constant theme of his work was religion, sex, America and death. He wrote nostalgically about small town America.
He died in Massachusetts in 2009 of lung cancer at the age of 76.
Updike was a Literary Critic and in one of his Essays he lists his personal rules for criticism.
1. “Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.”
2. “Give enough direct quotation — at least one extended passage — of the book’s prose so the review’s reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.”
3. “Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy précis.”
4. “Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.”
5. “If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author’s œuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it’s his and not yours?”
“To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser. Do not accept for review a book you are predisposed to dislike, or committed by friendship to like. Do not imagine yourself a caretaker of any tradition, an enforcer of any party standards, a warrior in any ideological battle, a corrections officer of any kind. Never, never … try to put the author “in his place,” making of him a pawn in a contest with other reviewers. Review the book, not the reputation. Submit to whatever spell, weak or strong, is being cast. Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys of reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.”
My favourite Updike quotes:
“Creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity. Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.”
“A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens.”
“Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another days progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper.”
“It’s always a push to get up the stairs, to sit down and go to work. You’d rather do almost anything, read the paper again, write some letters, play with your old dust jackets, any number of things you’d rather do than tackle that empty page, because what you do on the page is you, your ticket to all the good luck you’ve enjoyed.”
“To the young writers, I would merely say, “Try to develop actual work habits, and even though you have a busy life, try to reserve an hour say–or more–a day to write.” Some very good things have been written on an hour a day. . . . So, take it seriously, you know, just set a quota. Try to think of communicating with some ideal reader somewhere. Try to think of getting into print. Don’t be content just to call yourself a writer and then bitch about the crass publishing world that won’t run your stuff. We’re still a capitalist country, and writing to some degree is a capitalist enterprise, when it’s not a total sin to try to make a living and court an audience. “Read what excites you,” would be advice, and even if you don’t imitate it you will learn from it. . . . I would like to think that in a country this large–and a language even larger–that there ought to be a living in it for somebody who cares, and wants to entertain and instruct a reader.”
John Updike interview (do watch this…he reads an extract from one of his stories…..WOW! I want to write like that!!!!)
I’ve found my research on John Updike really inspiring, probably more than any of the Authors I’ve researched so far. I’m not sure why. The only book of his I recognize is The Witches of Eastwick, and even then, it’s only the film version I know. I LOVE his advice to young writers, about developing a work habit. I’ve tried to do that, but just recently, been a bit lapse. But it’s the whole idea of writing series that interests me. It seems very common nowadays with Fantasy and Crime Fiction, but you don’t often see it in other genres, or am I wrong there?
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born in 1892 in South Africa but at the age of 3, when his father died, the family returned to England, settling in Birmingham.
Initially home schooled by his mother he could read by the age of 4 and write fluently shortly after. He loved to read and enjoyed the fantasy and fairy books of Andrew Lang and George MacDonald.
In 1911 Tolkien went on a holiday to Switzerland where he hiked in a party of 12 through the mountains. This adventure was to inspire him as he penned Bilbo Baggins journey across the Misty Mountains.
He graduated from Oxford University in 1915 with a first class honours degree in English Language and Literature but it wasn’t until the end of WWI that he took his first job, working for the Oxford English Dictionary.
But it was whilst working as a professor back at Oxford (a position he took in 1925) that he wrote The Hobbit (a story he had written for his children – published in 1937) and started work on The Lord Of The Rings. During WWII he was offered work for the British Government as a code breaker, but never served as one.
The Lord of The Rings was published in 1954 and took him 10 years to write. He originally intended it to be a children’s story (like The Hobbit) and although a sequel, it soon developed a darker and more adult theme as he wrote.
In 1959 Tolkien retired. The income from his books by this stage so profitable that he regretted not retiring earlier. Tolkien never liked to sign his books and subsequently, the rare signed copies that exist set high prices.
British adventure stories, European Mythology and his Catholic beliefs heavily influenced Tolkien. He said himself that “The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like ‘religion’, to cults or practices, in the imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism.”
After his wife’s death he returned to Oxford, where the University gave him rooms and died there in 1973 at the age of 81, a year after receiving an OBE from The Queen.
“If you’re going to have a complicated story you must work to a map; otherwise you’ll never make a map of it afterwards.”
“I am dreading the publication, for it will be impossible not to mind what is said. I have exposed my heart to be shot at.”
“Being a cult figure in one’s own lifetime I am afraid is not at all pleasant. However I do not find that it tends to puff one up: in my case at any rate it makes me feel extremely small and inadequate. But even the nose of a very modest idol cannot remain entirely untickled by the sweet smell of incense.”
“It is the job that is never started that takes longest to finish.”
1968 interview with Tolkien.
We often forget that Tolkien wrote anything other than The Hobbit (100 million copies sold) and Lord of the Rings (150 million copies sold), but he has a large body of work including poetry. all of his work has a similar theme and was influenced by his interests. I’m finding with my own writing there is a “theme” developing, stuff that I’m interested in comes up time and time again, but there are certain subjects that interest me that I haven’t used….yet. Do you find that all your work has a similar theme, inspired by something you’re interested in?
John Ernst Steinbeck Jnr was born in 1902 in rural California and spent his childhood summers working with migrant workers on ranches, which later supplied him with the material for his novels.
At the age of 23, after leaving University with no degree, he travelled to New York where he took odd jobs while trying to write. But returned home after being unable to find someone to publish his work.
His parents gave him free lodging and loans so that he could continue to write but it wasn’t until his first commercially successful novel (Tortilla Flats in 1935) that he was able to build his own home.
Subsequent successes, Of Mice and Men, Grapes of Wrath (which has now sold over 15 million copies) and East of Eden guaranteed his place amongst the American literary greats and his work is now a constant feature on school curriculums across the globe.
The Nobel Prize for Literature, which he received in 1962 described his work as “realistic and imaginative writing, combining as it does sympathetic humor and keen social perception.”
He died of heart failure in New York at the age of 66.
My favourite Steinbeck quotes:
“Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.”
“If you are using dialogue – say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech.”
“Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise I say ignore the bastard.”
“In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.”
“The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.”
“You see this book is finished and it is a bad book and I must get rid of it. It can’t be printed. It is bad because it isn’t honest. Oh! The incidents all happened but — I’m not telling as much of the truth about them as I know. I’ve written three books now that were dishonest because they were less than the best that I could do. One you never saw because I burned it the day I finished it.”
Steinbecks Nobel Prize Acceptance speech:
I don’t know about you, but the thought of burning a whole novel ive written, just because I wasn’t happy with it, makes me feel almost faint! Lol. But it got me thinking just how many great writers over the years (pre computers) would have just thrown their work in the bin! 😦 Ive kept absolutely everything ive written since I took up writing (but I did burn some journals a few years ago because they were full of unhappy times). Have you kept everything or are you happy to throw it away?
The View Outside 