Posted by Nellie Ford on August 16, 2010
What is it that makes good writing stand out? The tone of good writing usually sounds like a person speaking in their natural voice. It sounds like someone you might know, speaking to you about something they love.
Good writing requires you to tread a careful line between empassioned seriousness and wild abandon. It’s a difficult skill to master, and needs to be learnt in a nurturing environment. A writing retreat in a beautiful and peaceful location can be the perfect place.
In creative writing, as well as poetry and memoir writing, what you write about is often of far less importance than the voice. How you do the telling is what the reader remembers, it’s what the reader falls into and looses themselves within. Plot and topic and setting are naturally important, but it’s the voice that lasts.
It has been said that we keep on reading a book that we’re enjoying not because we want to learn what happens next, but because the spell cast by the writer’s voice keeps us enthralled.
So, writing well is to write as if you are talking – the you that springs from deep inside. Your writing should be your own style that comes from within. But, despite how natural that might sound, finding your own voice isn’t easy. What can you do to help bring your authentic voice to the paper? This is where techniqe becomes important. Rhythm and cadence, sentence structure and the other basics of writing are usually what you will spend a lot of your time on at a writing retreat.
“Writing,” said John Updike, “is only reading turned inside out.” You learn most of what you need to know about how to write like no one but yourself by reading well. So you may often find yourself reading, as well as writing, in a masterclass.
And, you’ll probably find yourself dreaming at a writing retreat. “Writing is dreaming with a pen in its hand,” a quote from a writer and poet from Australia. So, when you go to your first writing retreat, make sure you take a pen and do some dreaming. Let the peace and quiet of the retreat take you to your dreaming place and find yourself way down deep. The writing will rise to the surface and your dreams will reach the paper.
Read more about creative writing retreats held in the paradise of Fiji. Miles from civilisation your writing will come to life. VisitParadise Courses and start work on your dreams.
Posted by Kristy Judge on July 2, 2010
Writing suspense fiction books is challenging and can also be very rewarding. If you have it in mind to write a suspense fiction book, then you probably have a favorite author or two who write them. If you research them and try to get an insight as to how they go about writing, you’ll probably find that there are a few basic similarities, but only in the mechanics of writing as a whole. Their unique style is something that really shouldn’t be copied. You should develop the one that’s inside of you.
If you look closely at your favorite author, and compare him/her with a few others, you’re going to find that creativity reveals itself in different ways in all of us. What you need to do is get a good basic idea of writing principles, and then fashion them into a style that belongs to only you, where you are able to let out your creative side, and it saturates the words that you put down.
Creativity is a different area of outlet for all people. Most creative people are affected by times and seasons. They have a bond with nature and the world and it’s workings that is unlike what others experience. They tend to notice things and have a different take on what they see. Creativity is the formation of the world is based upon. Rhythms, cycles, and forces drive the creative person and push them to find things within themselves that reflect what moves them in the outer world.
Creative people have intense moods that can be affected by weather or other people. Solitude doesn’t seem to bother them as much as it does others, because it’s here that they can tune in to their creative forces and find a unique kind of comfort there. They contemplate the creator, the long for something intriguing. Some will paint, some will build, and some will write. They must have an outlet for the feelings that swell up within them. So your writing should be a flow. You should learn to build the suspense, but also let yourself flow through your words.
For a lot of creative writers, ‘writing by the seat of their pants’, or ‘pantsing’, is their preferred method. This freewriting is simply done by forming an idea, jotting down a few notes, and taking off to wherever it lands you. You just ‘wing it’ until you finally have your first rough draft. It doesn’t have to be great as you’ll need to do some very heavy editing, but you’ll have the skeleton from which you can work.
Of course, this rough draft is more than just rough, it may even seem disastrous. But you need to get used to doing some tough editing when using this method. You’ll find a lot of things to simply throw away, but like digging for diamonds, you’ll find a few diamonds to polish and shine deep within the dirt. Think of this rough draft as the ball of clay that you need to grab before going to the potter’s wheel. From there, you can shape and mold it until it becomes a beautiful masterpiece.
Once the rough draft is in place, and you’re tweaking it, you’re going to run into places where the ‘exposition’ may give you some trouble. Don’t be discouraged, this happens with seasoned veterans as well. You have to give some thought as to where to reveal the plot, and where to give sample information that will cause your readers to come to their own conclusions. It can be a bit tricky, but makes the reading great.
Writing suspense fiction books creatively is one of the most rewarding challenges you’ll ever undertake. It can be an intense time of creativity venting, an outlet for the inner you that longs to be materialized into this world. And only you can do it. So pull up a chair, clear your head, and start writing. Write anything, until it begins to take you on a journey that has a wonderfully beautiful tale. Get it down on paper.
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Posted by qpen on May 12, 2010
Amazon.com Review
Musicians and artists might need talent to succeed, but writers don’t, says Jerry Cleaver in Immediate Fiction. Cleaver allows that talent is needed to win a National Book Award, say, but otherwise, any of us can do it. All we need is the ability to “develop and exercise sadistic license.” The operative word is conflict. As Cleaver puts it, “Happy lives make lousy novels…. If the characters are having a good time, the reader is not.” He takes the mystery out o (more…)
Posted by qpen on May 9, 2010
This digital document is an article from The Horn Book Magazine, published by Horn Book, Inc. on May 1, 1996. The length of the article is 1396 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.From the supplier: Skillful authors reveal the past to children by focusing on the details of character’s lives (more…)
Posted by David Artstone on
The chat room has changed the nature of conversation. What used to be the natural flow of thoughts from the unconscious to the conscious, up through the lungs, over the tongue, and out the mouth, has now been expanded to occasionally include the fingers. This has consequences for the way we as humans view noise, voices, words, and even the very nature of communication itself.
In this new form of typed communication, reality is not quite as sturdy as it used to be. When you’re talking to someone face to face, you can see them, you know exactly who they are, where they are, and what they’re doing. If they want to make a nonverbal point they can use facial expressions or wave their arms.
In a chat or instant message application the rules of reality don’t exist. This can in many ways make it harder to communicate. In chat you can’t hear the inflection in their voice, see the expression on the other persons face, or even tell whether they are paying attention or not. They aren’t really there, no reality, you are talking into the void, and are answered only by the silence of words floating back at you from cyber space.
However this lack of reality actually gives you some leeway in communicating that you don’t get from a face to face interaction. In the void, with nothing but words and symbols to go by, you are completely free to write anything you like. Its like having a book, with you and your friends as the characters. You can type that you are sitting on a cloud, or battling a dragon, or anything you want, and without the restraints of reality to keep you grounded, there is no one to say you are wrong.
In most chat situations you will have some constraints. People wont believe you if you say your sitting on the moon. However depending on the creativity and imagination of the people you are talking to, this freedom from rationality may start to loosen over time.
One of the major results of this situation is that people are developing more of a symbolic understanding of the world than they ever have before. In any age before this one life was lived primarily in the 3d world of objects and people. Now more and more, people go online to a world that is as wide open as an empty book, and rather than finding the same stale characters that the writer placed their years before, they are finding other living humans, all of them rich and complex characters with histories and lives and the ability to respond.
This is causing people to grow up less grounded in reality. That is a fact which is both positive and negative. On the one hand these children are not learning to deal with the nuts and bolts of the real world as much. However it also means that they are growing up with a greater understanding of creativity, symbolism, and a fiercer passion for art than any generation before.
This article was written by Jim Slate on behalf of http://www.Rolepages.com – RolePages is a web 2.0 fictional social community where members are encouraged to sign up as fictional characters. The goal is to create a community based on collaborative storytelling which reaches across forums, blogs, chat, profiles, and even into third party media such as twitter and Facebook.
Posted by qpen on May 6, 2010
This digital document is an article from The Mississippi Quarterly, published by Mississippi State University on September 22, 1993. The length of the article is 8945 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.From the supplier: The character of Judge Holden in Cormac McCarthy’s ‘Blood Meridian’ i (more…)
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Posted by qpen on May 3, 2010
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Posted by qpen on April 30, 2010
This digital document is an article from International Fiction Review, published by Thomson Gale on January 1, 2005. The length of the article is 860 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.Citation DetailsTitle: Stephen Harris: The Fiction of Gore Vidal and E.L. Doctorow: Writing the Historica (more…)
Posted by qpen on April 24, 2010
THE CRAFT OF FICTIONTo grasp the shadowy and fantasmal form of a book, to hold it fast, toturn it over and survey it at leisure–that is the effort of a criticof books, and it is perpetually defeated. Nothing, no power, will keepa book steady and motionless before us, so that we may have time toexamine its shape and design. As quickly as we read, it melts andshifts in the memory; even at the moment when the last page is turned,a great part of the book, its finer detail, is alrea (more…)
Posted by qpen on April 21, 2010
“Speaking in the Past Tense participates in an expanding critical dialogue on the writing of historical fiction, providing a series of reflections on the process from the perspective of those souls intrepid enough to step onto what is, practically by definition, contested territory.” — Herb Wyile, from the Introduction The extermination of the Beothuk … the exploration of the Arctic … the experiences of soldiers in the trenches during World War I … the foibles of Ca (more…)
Posted by qpen on April 19, 2010
From Publishers Weekly
The faculty of the Gotham Writers’ Workshop-which now has 6,000 students not only in New York City but around the world (with online classes)-use an original approach in this how-to: Raymond Carver’s classic story “Cathedral” (reprinted in the book) serves as a basis for their discussion of technique. The contributors are not household names, but all are published authors of fiction. Chapters touch on all the essentials: character development, pacing, dialo (more…)
Posted by qpen on April 18, 2010
Writing convincing historical novels requires thorough research and attention to detail. This book explores the skills needed for setting a story in its historical context, from characters, setting and plot, to the prevailing attitudes, beliefs and imagery of the chosen period.
(more…)
Posted by qpen on April 12, 2010
A bestseller through six editions, Writing Fiction by novelists Janet Burroway and Elizabeth Stuckey-French explores the elements of fiction, providing practical writing techniques and concrete examples. Written in a tone that is personal and non-prescriptive, this book encourages writers to develop proficiency through each step of the writing process, offering an abundance of exercises designed to spur writing and creativity. The text Writing Fiction also integrates diverse (more…)
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Posted by qpen on April 10, 2010
During her many years of teaching introduction to fiction courses, Ann Charters developed an acute sense of which stories work most effectively in the classroom. She also discovered that writers, not editors, have the most interesting and useful things to say about the making and the meaning of fiction. Accordingly, her choice of fiction in the first edition of her The Story and Its Writer was as notable for its student appeal as it was for its quality and range. And to compleme (more…)
Posted by qpen on April 8, 2010
Review
‘…an easy-to-follow guide providing step-by-step instructions…’ (Writers Forum, December 2009).
A complete guide to writing and selling your novel So you want to write a novel? Great! That’s a worthy goal, no matter what your reason. But don’t settle for just writing a novel. Aim high. Write a novel that you intend to sell to a publisher. Writing Fiction for Dummies is a complete guide designed to coach you every step along the path fr (more…)
