writing-craft

The blazing fire makes flames and brightness out of everything thrown into it.

Writing is a lifelong disease. Once contracted, the only prescription is to write constantly in whatever form to express your condition, in whatever construction to carry your words beyond you.

You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander.

Novels institutionalize the ruse of eros. It becomes a narrative texture of sustained incongruence, emotional and cognitive. It permits the reader to stand in triangular relation to the characters in the story and reach into the text after the objects of their desire, sharing their longing but also detached from it, seeing their view of reality but also its mistakenness. It is almost like being in love.

As Borges has taught us, all the books in the library are contemporary. Great poems are like granaries: they are always ready to enlarge their store.

Very early on, near the beginning of my writing life, I came to believe that I had to seize on some object outside of literature. Writing as a sylistic exercise seemed barren to me. Poetry as the art of the word made me yawn. I also understood that I couldn't sustain myself very long on the poems of others. I had to go out from myself and literature, look around in the world and lay hold of other spheres of reality.

I__e learned that the creative life may or may not be the apex of human civilization, but either way it__ not what I thought it was. It doesn__ make you special and sparkly. You don__ have to walk alone. You can work in an office _ I__e worked in offices for the past 15 years and written five novels while doing it. The creative life is forgiving: You can betray it all you want, again and again, and no matter how many times you do, it will always take you back.

People should know better than to be an ass in front of writers. We immortalize things. Lots of things. And we take liberties with character descriptions.

It is sometimes the minor, not the major, characters in a novel who hold the author's affection longest. It may be that one loses affection for the major characters because they suck off so much energy as one pushes them through their lives.

There are a lot of ways for a novelist to create suspense, but also really only two: one a trick, one an art.The trick is to keep a secret. Or many secrets, even. In Lee Child__ books, Jack Reacher always has a big mystery to crack, but there are a series of smaller mysteries in the meantime, too, a new one appearing as soon as the last is resolved. J.__. Rowling is another master of this technique _ Who gave Harry that Firebolt? How is Rita Skeeter getting her info?The art, meanwhile, the thing that makes __ride and Prejudice_ so superbly suspenseful, more suspenseful than the slickest spy novel, is to write stories in which characters must make decisions. __reaking Bad_ kept a few secrets from its audience, but for the most part it was fantastically adept at forcing Walter and Jesse into choice, into action. The same is true of __reedom,_ or __y Brilliant Friend,_ or __nna Karenina,_ all novels that are hard to stop reading even when it seems as if it should be easy.

That's what we storytellers do. We restore order with imagination. We instill hope again and again and again.

Does Carthage even have forests? Did Virgil know for sure or was it just convenient for his story? Virgil was a professional liar. This would not be the only place where he pruned the truth until it was as artificial as an espaliered pear tree against a wall, forced into an expedient shape and bearing the demanded fruit.

I realized that my life of late had consisted of far too much dialogue and not enough exposition. I imagined an angry, bespectacled English teacher slashing his pen through the transcript of my life, wondering how someone could possibly say so much and think so little.

Suspense doesn__ always have to be about physical danger. Making the reader worry is a universal concept that can be applied to any story.

Backstory is like a flavour you can__ quite pick, lurking in the layers of a curry. You know it__ there and it enhances the flavour, but it__ intangible and fleeting. Use it sparingly!

Treat backstory like a pungent spice. I say this to encourage you to picture a jalapeno pepper that can set your mouth on fire, every time you even think about adding backstory into your book. What you need is subtlety.

Delayed gratification hints that something terrible is going to happen, and then delays the resolution. It__ that interval between the promise of something awful and it actually happening, where suspense resides.

The fictive is an emormous territory it turns out, its boundaries vague, and there is little certainty about where it begins and ends.