Elements of Style – F.C. MALBY

Questions From New Writers

I met an aspiring write yesterday, who asked lots of questions about the craft of writing, and wondered whether beginning a novel was a viable option after quitting a high-flying city job. I remember asking similar questions, back in 2007, when I moved abroad and gave up a teaching job that I loved. Moving from London to Vienna stirred up all sorts of ideas in my mind and, as I said to the person yesterday, there is something about moving to a different place, and living in a different culture, that somehow frees your mind and inspires lots of creative ideas. There are lots of questions from the writing community on Twitter today and, if you follow the hashtag #WritingCommunity, you’ll see many of these. There are so many questions and so many good books to you to get you started, and to help hone your craft.

My first piece of advice to anyone wanting to begin writing is to read widely, both within and outside your genre, especially outside your genre – it’s easy to just focus on what you want to write – and read as much as you write, spend as much time reading as you do writing.
Read as many books on the craft of writing that you can get your hands on. Find your local library, as there are lots of useful books that you can borrow. You don’t need to buy them all, or do a book swap with another writer. I’ll add some of the books that I’ve found helpful at the end of the post. It’s by no means an exhaustive list.
Sign up for writing courses. The Avon Foundation have lots of wonderful writing courses and many authors offer course, as well. Learn as much as you can.
Don’t be afraid to experiment. You may be fiction writer – a poet, a novelist or a short story writer – or you might prefer creative non-fiction writing (memoir, autobiography/biography, essays, literary journalism, journaling, or topics like food or travel writing, self-development, art or history). Within fiction there are so many genres; read as widely as you can.
Don’t give up. You will have hard days were you want to quit. It will get hard. If writing was easy, there would be many more authors with published work. Even the most gifted writers hit a wall at some point. Push through it.
Set yourself targets, if this works for you. When I began, I sat down to write from 9am – 6pm (with breaks) and gave myself 3 months to get around 35,000 down on paper. After this length of time, I would assess whether or not I had enough to continue and a good enough story to write a whole novel. It worked, I kept going, and I finally finished my first book.
Find a writing partner or a writing group. If you can’t, or it doesn’t suit you, tap into the writing community online. Twitter is a good place to start and will be really helpful, in terms of keeping up to speed with the industry. It’s a great way of networking, finding support, and following publishing trends. I have been contacted by authors, readers, editors, agents and publishers this way. It’s invaluable.

These are some of the books that have helped me along the way, although, Meander, Spiral, Explode is a new acquisition, so I’ll write a review when I’ve read it. Which books have helped you? Can you recommend any others?

Warning: Structural Work Needed – Plotting Your Novel

I drove past a beautiful old building this morning with incredible detail around the windows. When I looked again, the inside had been completely demolished and was being gutted and restored. From the outside it was a beautiful picture of fine architecture and decadence, an eye-catching building which stood out from the rest, but from the inside there was nothing, just rubble and empty space.

It was a strange sight in some ways and it reminded me of building a novel and the differences in how writers construct their work. I have spoken to people who work in any one of the following ways:

– Inside Out Model – Beginning with the bare bones, getting the story down onto paper, and then going back and layering it with detail and links, flashbacks and subtle hints of what is to follow.

– Outside In Model – Constructing the outside, the look and feel, the genre, narrator, tense, style and character of the novel, and then working inwards to develop the structure, the chapters and the story arc.

– Scatter Graph Model – Starting to write chapters, in no particular order, filling in the gaps as and when the inspiration strikes. This method is often discouraged by agents and editors as it is less structured but some of the most creative writers work this way.

– Sprint Runner Model – Beginning in great detail with a clear idea of your central character, racing through the first 1,000 words or so and then drifting as you get further into the plot, not being sure where the novel will end. Instead of it being a slower and more steady pace throughout, the writing decreases in speed as the ideas thin out.

– Foregone Conclusion Model – Knowing exactly how the novel will end, much like a science experiment with an expected outcome, but struggling to begin or sagging in the middle.

These are just some of the many ways in which authors work and there are many cross-overs in their method. I was impressed by Will Self’s ability to do away with chapters completely in his Booker Prize Shortlisted novel, Umbrella. He is not the first author to do this and I am sure he won’t be the last. Some authors prefer fine structure, plotting meticulously before beginning a single sentence, then there are those who are somewhere in between.

There is no right or wrong way to plot a novel and to construct a story, although there are books which tell you otherwise. You have to experiment with what works. Every writer has a preferred way of working and it changes and develops with time.

I’ll leave you with some interesting quotes from the various writing handbooks:

“A basic structural design underlies every kind of writing. Writers will in part follow this design, in part deviate from it, according to their skills, their needs, and the unexpected events that accompany the act of composition. Writing, to be effective, must follow closely the thoughts of the writer, but not necessarily in the order in which those thoughts occur.” The Elements of Style, Strunk and White

“Very few writers really know what they are doing until they’ve done it. Nor do they go about their business feeling dewy and thrilled. They do not type a few stiff warm-up sentences and then find themselves bounding along like huskies across the snow.” Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott

“Writers of literary and much mainstream fiction usually begin by imagining a character…some writers can’t help starting out with a theme that obsesses them. They imagine characters whose lives might involve the theme, or they work out a plot first. If their allegiance is to character, their theme-based story has a better chance of survival.” Stein On Writing, Sol Stein

“If there are no rules, or none worth [the writer’s] attention, where is the beginning writer to begin?” The Art of Fiction, John Gardner

9 Books on Reading and Writing

Taken from Brain Pickings (via kobo writing life) which is a really good website on what’s out there in relation to creativity, thinking, culture and art. These books are highly recommended. I have read most of them and would especially recommend Elements of Style and On Writing.

		1The Elements of Style Illustrated – marries Maira Kalman’s signature whimsy with Strunk and White’s indispensable style guide to create an instant classic.
		2Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott – the 1994 classic is as much a practical guide to the writer’s life as it is a profound wisdom-trove on the life of the heart and mind.
		3On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, Stephen King – part master-blueprint, part memoir, part meditation on the writer’s life.
		4Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You, Ray Bradbury – Bradbury shares not only his wisdom and experience in writing, but also his contagious excitement for the craft.
		5The War of Art: Break Through the Block and Win Your Inner Creative Battles, Steven Pressfield — a personal defense system of sorts against our greatest forms of resistance. “Resistance” with a capital R, that is.
		6Advice to Writers, Jon Winokur – From how to find a good agent to what makes characters compelling, it spans the entire spectrum from the aspirational to the utilitarian.
		7How to Write a Sentence, And How to Read One, Stanley Fish – an insightful, rigorous manual on the art of language that may just be one of the best such tools sinceThe Elements of Style.
		8Ernest Hemingway on Writing, Larry W. Phillips – a collection of the finest, wittiest, most profound of Hemingway’s reflections on writing, the nature of the writer, and the elements of the writer’s life.
		9How to Read a Book, Mortimer Adler & Charles van Doren – from basic reading to systematic skimming and inspectional reading to speed reading, the how-to’s apply as efficiently to practical textbooks and science books as they do to poetry and fiction.