Category Archives: Creative Process/Craft

Writers Who Don’t Read

09 Wednesday Mar 2022

Posted by in Creative Process/Craft, Reading as a Writer

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For over ten years I’ve written posts about the craft of fiction, every other Wednesday, here on this site. I have to believe I have written about the importance of reading at least once before over such a span. But I feel the need to write about this again. For once again I have met a writer who doesn’t read. 

It’s easy to say great writers are great readers. It’s a tidy quip and I’ve heard it often. But here’s the thing—it’s true! It’s not only true, but foundational. In fact, I don’t believe you can be a good writer unless you are an avid reader. Period.

How many great musicians don’t listen to music? How many sculptors don’t go to art museums? Yet, at least once a year I meet a writer who says they aren’t reading. In this most recent case the writer was concerned about executing key aspects of the craft—specifically, ensuring they didn’t overwrite, provide too much description or narrative in their stories. I spoke with them about the power of concrete and concise prose, the contract with the reader, and the beholder’s share. It was then I paused and asked about her reading habits. She said she’s not reading and knows she needs to. I thanked her for self-diagnosing, gave her the names of two novels that I thought would inform her work, and we wrapped up.

As a writer you must be pushing great sentences into your head as often and in as great a quantity as possible. Simply by knocking about in this crazy world, you are reading/hearing a great deal of terrible writing. This is unavoidable. Your writing depends on you growing in the craft. And reading is the primary way to do so.

A Change in Setting Revealed

12 Wednesday Jan 2022

Posted by in Creative Process/Craft, Writing Life

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In November I experienced A Change in Setting. I packed up my writing space––my table and chair, fifty boxes of books (and their bookcases), a filing cabinet, lamps, framed photos, and writerly what-have-you. As I did so, I didn’t know where I would resume my work. Where I would unpack was a mystery. I loaded all but a couple boxes of books and a messenger bag into a storage unit for several weeks, and waited. 

It is now January and I sit at that same writing table, in that same chair, in a different room.

My new writing space is in an upstairs bedroom off a loft living room. It has a cedar-lined window seat overlooking a quiet residential street. There is a tree just outside the window and past it the roofs of houses. Just beyond the roofs lays the practice range of a local golf course. Opposite my study, also off the loft, is my wife’s craft room, her dedicated space for creative work.

This new writing space isn’t yet set up. In one corner, along one wall, is my standing desk, where I do my day job. The other walls are lined with empty bookshelves. My writing table has been assembled and stands empty in the center of the room. Much organizing and setting of the room lies ahead. The bones of a sense of place lack flesh just yet.

But, the greatest mystery of this new place is in what work will be produced here. What writing will leave this place and go out into the reading world? This is the great unknown. My last writing space saw seventeen years of productivity, including five years of grad school and one novel. I could have predicted none of that. I trust this new space holds as much potential and, Deo volente, as many years. Here’s to what awaits the making.

That Flash of Delight

29 Wednesday Dec 2021

Posted by in Creative Process/Craft, Writing Life

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Writing is a slow-going effort. It’s a solitary and troublesome venture. What keeps a writer coming back to his chair day after day? There are as many motivations as there are writers. Some motivations are pure, some impure. Hopefully no one is seeking personal gain through writing. There are much more efficient paths than this scribbling of words. For most of us, the love of reading drove us to join the ranks of writers—a desire to be both a maker of stories AND a receiver of their gifts.

For this writer, and for others I know, a central joy of the craft is that moment when a realization is made about a work in progress. A connection within the story leaps off the page and you see a facet you’ve never seen before. It’s that moment when you, as your first reader, have a realization about the story and it takes on a life separate from your effort.

Earlier this month while researching and writing about the Passion, I spotted a parallel between the water being made into wine at the wedding in Cana and the moment at the crucifixion when wine is offered from the tip of a spear and moments later that same spear releases water from the side of the dying Messiah. All at once, the Good Friday narrative had another facet and gleamed more brightly than before.

I imagine this is what the detective feels when an unnoticed fact suddenly slips into place and transforms into a clue. Or when a patient reveals a close-held detail and the psychologist finds there was a hole in her understanding the shape of that very reveal. Or when a medical researcher is planning yet another protocol in a long-fought effort to treat a rare disease and spots a thread in the data that has slipped all previous notice.

Writers are not alone. It’s a universal of all crafts, of all pursuits. As it turns out, all of us crave that flash of delight.

My First Reader

15 Wednesday Dec 2021

Posted by in Creative Process/Craft, Role of the Writer, Writing Life

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My writing, when first born, is a very ugly baby. Seriously. You don’t see the first draft of anything. If you did you would say, “Mercy, Dave, that is a very ugly baby,” to which I would reply, “I know, this is what I tried to tell you in my 15 December blogpost.” But this doesn’t mean no one sees the ugly babies I produce. (Recognizing I’ve exhausted the metaphor I’ll now move on.) 

I have a first reader, a first editor, a collaborator who sniffs out the rotten and ill-wrought in my writing and ensures that I don’t single-handedly wreak creative havoc. She tells me if something is working and she tells me if it’s not. She knows what bad writing looks like and ensures that whatever leaves my desk––correspondence, reviews, novels, and, yes, blogposts—are of a quality that will avoid both my embarrassment and reader regret.

She has been doing this for twenty years. She’s read more bad writing than an adjunct community college composition professor. And she always does it willingly and thoughtfully. She has turned it into a labor of love. Thank you to my wife, CKM, for her support on and off the page. My work would have self-detonated long, long ago were she not looking over my shoulder. Thank her, dear reader; she is doing you a great deal of good.

The Low Survival Rate of Early Chapters

01 Wednesday Dec 2021

Posted by in Creative Process/Craft, Role of the Writer, Starting a Novel

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My current project imagines itself will one day be a full-length novel. Today it is 3500 words of metawriting (writing about the writing—we’ll call it an outline) and 4000 words of manuscript. Both are, as they should be at this stage of the effort, a wholistic mess. 

The manuscript contains chapter stubs that are trying to keep up with outline (which has run ahead, already in its second draft). A few of these chapters will survive, in one form or another, but most will not. They will morph into each other. Some will split apart. They will be reordered. Others will be cut. New, unforeseen chapters will appear between them. At some point a shape will emerge, the contours of plot will be revealed, and the novel writing will be fully underway. 

If this sounds like a sloppy process with many wasted words, I’ve communicated well. It has been said ten pages of prose must be written for every one finished page of manuscript. In my experience this is spot on. 3000 pages to get to a 300 page novel is about right. When I think back on the first draft of The Confessions of Adam, I’m not at all sure even a sentence of it survived to greet the reader. I can say with certainty that the opening of the novel is altogether different. For all of this, the reader should be grateful. They have missed nothing. The goal is to work until the prose peaks and then stop. The reader takes it from there. We can all be grateful for the low survival rate of early chapters. Our stories are better for it.

Waiting, A Writer’s Skill

03 Wednesday Nov 2021

Posted by in Creative Process/Craft, Role of the Writer, Writing Life

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There are many skills a writer needs. Many of them are obvious. All can be learned. Some are learned whether one plans to write creatively or not. They are not all needed at the beginning. Many are learned just in time, as the writer recognizes his need for them. This is the nature of learning to do creative work. Primary among these skills is the skill of waiting. While writing and waiting are done in parallel—they’d better be, if one is to achieve a body of work at all—the waiting the writer learns to do is just as present and persistent as the writing; it is a secondary craft. 

There is the waiting as manuscripts are read by beta readers and agents. Then there is the waiting while these same manuscripts are read by publishers—hopefully by several at a time. One’s creative work goes out the door and into this world of necessary critical readers and all the time the writer—still at home writing—has no idea how his work is fairing, whether it is being read or waiting to be read or if word on its future will arrive tomorrow, this week, next month. Or perhaps never. And if one is successful, there is the waiting as a book is created, as others practice and perfect their own literary and creative crafts. Waiting is a skill to be done well and done with intention. Good writing leads to waiting.

It is important to note that a writer does not wait to write. There had better not be waiting for inspiration or waiting for an idea. The writer fails if he waits until he has time to write. For if he does, he is no writer at all. These waitings lead nowhere. They are dead ends.

So, the productive writer waits. He waits after and while he writes. And he learns another skill—not to focus on the waiting, but to focus on the work.

The Beholder’s Share*

06 Wednesday Oct 2021

Posted by in Contract with the Reader, Creative Process/Craft, Qualities of Good Fiction

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The idea is this: part of the meaning or significance of a work of art is provided by the viewer. The viewer of the work, by the act of consuming the work, is granted a share of the art’s intent. There is a creative co-op that occurs between the artist and the audience.

In the Westside Writers Workshop, the writing workshop I facilitate, we have begun to use this term when we speak of our written work. We ask ourselves, what is the beholder’s share? How will a reader engage with this piece of writing? What will they take away from it, what will they make their own? How does the writing leave room for the reader to engage?

Creative writing may be started, but it isn’t finished in solitude. A written story is finished in public, out in the wild, where readers take it in, internalize, and share in it. This is when the work is finished, when it has found harbor with a reader. Readers complete books. Readers complete stories. 

*‘The beholder’s share’ is a term from the art world. Coined by Austrian art historian Alois Riegl and popularized by another Austrian-born, British art historian, Ernst Gombrich.

Speakeasy

25 Wednesday Aug 2021

Posted by in Creative Process/Craft, Writing Life

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A writer has several needs that must be met in order to practice his craft. He needs a physical place that is solely his where he can go and write, a small circle of other trusted writers who can call him out when he’s writing poorly and encourage him when he’s writing well, and a reading life that supports his craft by consistently injecting good sentences into his head.

But there’s one more thing a writer needs, and that’s a forum in which to connect with readers.

A local bookstore is ideally that forum, and I’m delighted to have, for the first time in over twenty years, an indie bookstore here in my town.

Speakeasy Books and More is cozily located just off the square, and Tommy Vickers is a friend to local authors and readers. Central to his mission is a local authors’ shelf. He is scheduling book releases, readings, and book groups. He is committed to making Speakeasy a place where people who love story can find each other.

Bookstores in other cities have filled this need for me from time to time, but now I truly have a local bookstore, a home base. A hole has been properly filled in my writerly life. And I am grateful.

Fist

11 Wednesday Aug 2021

Posted by in Contract with the Reader, Creative Process/Craft, Reading as a Writer

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It has happened twice now, toward the end of the final draft of a project. There it is, a glaring typo discovered at the beginning of the story. A typo that has been there all along––or at least for several drafts––but completely overlooked.

We were very close to finalizing the galleys of The Confessions of Adam when it was discovered, in the first chapter, instead of referencing the trunk of a landmark tree, there was referenced a tree truck.

And once again, just a few weeks ago, a beta reader, at this late stage in my current project, found––in the preface–– that the word first had been written as fist.

The point here is you must engage beta readers and editors. Both of these were found by such collaborators. Neither was found by me, my publisher or my agent. And in the case of Confessions, most had poured over the manuscript, some of us many, many times.

Being the author, you will become utterly blind to such errors. Your brain will determine what is on the page instead of your eyes. Your only hope is collaboration with others before your manuscript is out in the wild and such mistakes are found by readers. For readers miss nothing.

Fire

28 Wednesday Jul 2021

Posted by in Creative Process/Craft, Qualities of Good Fiction, Technicalities

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I am finishing a late draft of my current long-form project. The setting of the story is agricultural, pre-electricity. The family uses open flame for light. A couple of days ago, I was working on edits to the manuscript when I realized I had all the elements needed but had fully missed an opportunity for tension, conflict, and story.

A fire.

For some mysterious reason it had never dawned on me that a fire should occur in the story. I thought I’d mined the story line for all the tension it could offer, but in doing so I’d overlooked an obvious option.

Now there’s a fire. 

And now that it’s occurred, it’s hard to imagine the story without it. The conflict opened up another facet of characterization––for more than one character––and gave the reader another reason to turn the page.

What opportunities for conflict or tension are you overlooking in your current story? It could be as simple as taking the existing elements of the world you’ve built and letting them naturally interact.