Some people like listening to music, or writing in a public setting, or, like Brandon Sanderson, walking on a treadmill while writing. This also may be where your journal comes in. George R. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever.
You will suck. But remember The Gap. Practice will get you through it. But because you will suck, that practice is going to take an emotional toll on you. So write your story bird by bird, word by word, sentence by sentence. It will be painful and it will demotivate you. Simply get it down then make it better. Third, and again some people may disagree with me, but this is my experience: write short stories before novels.
You want to finish something and go through the full process of creating a story, through multiple drafts and edits. Get ten or so short stories under your belt.
Good books are made in the editing process. Write your first draft. Just get it out there. Trim or add here. Personally, I love to rewrite, as this is how many brain works. In total, I like 3 full rewrites, and I use this time to crystallize the story in my mind. Every time I rewrite it, I see the characters as more real, and the scenes as more vivid, and it makes the writing come across better. Okay, now that your story is exactly as you want it, print it off. Hand-edit it, line by line.
I find a new medium helps see it in a new light. Transfer that hand-edit back into a third draft your third rewrite. Next, read it out loud, and edit as as you go. Finally, clean up duty. For example, in my last novel I felt like I was using eyebrows or precipice too much. The best advice I can give is read a lot, read what you want to write, and study the books that produce something in you.
That can be good or bad. I want to read what not to do as well as what to do. I find reading about writing is one of the easiest ways to get over my writing anxiety. Armed with a little knowledge, I find my words flow a bit better. NOTE: some people can get addicted to reading about writing over writing.
The single most important thing you can do is write. Is it on dialogue, plot, character, voice, or something more general? I really do think this is a foundational text for any writer. The Anatomy of Story by John Truby. Save the Cat! Writes a Novel. Sense of Style by Steven Pinker. The Art of Fiction by John Gardner. A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver.
Nov Ian Canon. Those that think writing can be taught. The speech got attention, but the A. It eventually renamed itself the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, and it now has more than twenty-five thousand members. Around the time that Cassill delivered his renunciation, there were seventy-nine degree programs in creative writing in the United States.
Today, there are eight hundred and twenty-two. Thirty-seven of these award the Ph. They are the outside contained on the inside. Still, the creative-writing program, unsystematic or even anti-system as it might believe itself to be, is a system. People go in at one end and they come out the other, bearing like the Scarecrow a piece of paper with a Latin inscription, but also bearing unlike the Scarecrow the impress of an institutional experience.
McGurl suggests that these mantras encode shifting patterns of cultural assumptions—about identity, about work, about gender and class, and, of course, about what counts as good writing—and that they have had a big effect on the stories and novels that American writers have produced. As McGurl points out, the university is where most serious fiction writers have been produced since the Second World War.
It has also been the place where most serious fiction readers are produced: they are taught how to read in departments of literature. It does three things unusually well. First, it interprets works of fiction as what philosophers of language call illocutionary acts. The form of a Carver short story—ostentatiously brief, emotionally hyper-defended—expresses something. He notes that Carver once called Oates the most important writer of his generation.
Carver and Oates are both program products. She came out of the undergraduate creative-writing program at Syracuse, where she studied with Donald Dike, and she has spent most of her career teaching at Princeton, where Morrison, until her recent retirement, was also on the faculty. Carver started as a correspondence student in an outfit known as the Palmer Institute of Authorship.
Writing is a technology, after all, and there is a sense in which human beings who write can be thought of as writing machines. They get tooled in certain ways, and the creative-writing program is a means of tooling. But McGurl treats creative writing as an ant farm where the ants are extremely interesting. He never reduces writers to unthinking products of a system.
They are thinking products of a system. After all, few activities make people more self-conscious than participating in a writing workshop. McGurl thinks that this habit of self-observation is not restricted to writing programs. Constant self-assessment and self-reflection are part of our program. There are also flow charts and the like, diagrams suited to systems analysis.
And contemporary fiction does have many readers. McGurl argues that, far from homogenizing literature or turning it into an academic exercise, creative-writing programs have been a success on purely literary grounds. The system must be doing something right. And, as McGurl suggests, presenting a story in a writing workshop is a little like making a business presentation in a corporate workplace.
The unexpected result of combining a history of creative fiction writing with a history of education and management theory is a kind of slide show of postwar American life. On the contrary, university creative-writing courses situate writers in the world that most of their readers inhabit—the world of mass higher education and the white-collar workplace. Sticking writers in a garret would isolate them.
Putting them in the ivory tower puts them in touch with real life. Creative-writing courses did not suddenly spring into being in A course called Verse Making was available at Iowa in , and from to George Pierce Baker taught a drama workshop at Harvard, the first graduate writing course in the country; Thomas Wolfe took it. In , Schramm was replaced by Paul Engle, a prodigious creative-writing proselytizer and cultural Cold Warrior, who made Iowa into a global power in the field.
Engle eventually brought writers from seventy countries to study at Iowa. There was a surge in creative-writing degree programs after the Second World War.
As is the case with most new developments in higher education, changes in funding were responsible. Bill—provided forty-eight months of tuition for veterans who enrolled in colleges and universities. More than two million veterans, a much bigger number than anticipated, took up the offer, and by the government had spent more money on tuition and other college costs than on the Marshall Plan.
The key requirement of Title II was that the tuition assistance be used only for study in degree or certificate programs, which is why creative-writing courses grew into degree-granting creative-writing programs. In the nineteen-sixties, the universe of higher education underwent a fantastic expansion. Between and , enrollments doubled and more professors were hired than had been hired in the entire previous three hundred and twenty-five years.
Most of the growth was in the public sector. At the height of the expansion, between and , new community-college campuses were opening in the United States at the rate of one every week. That new way must include "metafiction," an important postmodern device that allows novelists to write the criticism of their own fiction while creating the fiction itself. The reasons metafiction has become important in our time are another large topic that could lead the class to fruitful discussions.
A third explanation for the self-consciousness here is at once more personal and more cultural. The narrator of Ambrose's story is a writer trapped inside his story, unable to come to its end. He is a blocked writer. In a number of works, Barth fictionalizes the writer's block he apparently suffered after the two gigantic novels of the early s. Self-consciousness and writer's block may belong to a single vicious circle; each may lead to the other.
Barth takes writer's block as his theme so often that one suspects it represents more than a personal event--no matter how engrossing such "autobiographic" episodes may be to readers primarily interested in "real life. In giving up the conventional mimesis of realism, Barth, however, elects the contrary powers of what, in Chimera , he terms the Principle of Metaphoric Means, "the investiture by the writer of as many of the elements and aspects of his fiction as possible with emblematic as well as dramatic value" Chimera This device leads to an additional motive for Barth's frequent dramatizations of the blocked writer.
Such writers may be metaphors for something important in our culture. Students in class discussion may want to explore possible referents for the metaphor by asking themselves what aspects of American or Western culture appeared especially "blocked" in , a year that, it turns out, may stand roughly as the midpoint of the Cold War.
What is there about contemporary culture that it has lost its ability to move forward in the progressive fashion that the Enlightenment, Positivism, and modern scientific thinking once promised? Students may then move to the possibility that every individual is a potential writer, that each of us lives out a script that someone else will write for us if we do not write it ourselves, that many women and men seem caught, like the narrator of this story, in scripts they do not want and whose end they cannot find.
The next step would be to explore the degree to which the devices Barth employs, including metafiction, parody, Metaphoric Means, and elsewhere myth and fantasy, could be used to frame the stories of blocked lives, to liberate one from such narratives, and to write more promising life scripts. In short, can Barth's postmodern approach free up blocked lives or replenish a stymied, possibly exhausted culture?
If not, might the attempt to do so still comprise a tragic gesture with a touch of the heroic in it? Students could then weigh the elements of parody, satire, and muted tragedy in Barth's story.
Consideration of Metaphoric Means as a global device leads to a careful reconsideration of every aspect of the story, including seeming authorial mistakes. If in the postexistential world we are all writers, then not only must we watch how we dot our i's and cross our t's, but how we drop our apostrophes. For example, the narrator mentions "Peter and Ambrose's father" but speaks of "Ambrose's and Peter's mother.
It may appear that Barth's audience is made up of other writers, critics, and writing teachers. If we are, however, to write our way out of the doomed? The risks Barth takes indicate he arrived on the literary scene when the success of T. Eliot and James Joyce in having critics prepare an audience for their difficult texts inspired him to trust that time would provide readers for his works.
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