Read Like A Writer

There are two ways to learn how to write fiction: by reading it and by writing it. Yes, you can learn lots about writing stories in workshops, in writing classes and writing groups, at writers' conferences. You can learn technique and process by reading the dozens of books like this one on fiction writing and by reading articles in writers' magazines. But the best teachers of fiction are the great works of fiction themselves. You can learn more about the structure of a short story by reading Anton Chekhov's 'Heartache' than you can in a semester of Creative Writing 101. If you read like a writer, that is, which means you have to read everything twice, at least. When you read a story or novel the first time, just let it happen. Enjoy the journey. When you've finished, you know where the story took you, and now you can go back and reread, and this time notice how the writer reached that destination. Notice the choices he made at each chapter, each sentence, each word. (Every word is a choice.) You see now how the transitions work, how a character gets across a room. All this time you're learning. You loved the central character in the story, and now you can see how the writer presented the character and rendered her worthy of your love and attention. The first reading is creative—you collaborate with the writer in making the story. The second reading is critical.


John Dufresne, from his book, The Lie That Tells A Truth: A Guide to Writing Fiction

Header

Liquid Story Binder XE by Black Obelisk Software

Disable Copy Paste

Amazon Quick Linker

Plotting Short Stories for Beginner Writers

Plotting Short Stories for Beginner Writers

 

By Robert Wilson Neal (1914)


Excerpt from Short Stories in the Making: A Writers' and Students' Introduction to the Technique and Practical Composition of Short Stories, Including an Adaptation of the Principles of the Stage Plot to Short Story Writing

To the beginner, one caution must be emphatically given about the plot in the plot story. It must not be overcrowded with either incident or action. True, it will be complicated; but all plots are that. This means no more than that it includes some element that checks, or stops, or changes, the otherwise plain course of the action. Without such an obstacle, there could be no conflict, no crisis, no uncertainty about outcome and result. In the short story that emphasizes plot, the number of such complicating influences tends to increase rapidly. But at their most numerous, they must not be so many that they congest the story, cramp the action, interfere with the just development of characterization, or require a total amount of setting out of proportion to the other narrative elements. Nor must ancillary incident overflow either the plot it supplements or the other bounds of proportion. In other words, even the plot story must not be all plot and incident; there must be an adequate proportion of the other fiction elements.

Also see:

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)