Writing Guides

Phew... bet you're glad you got THAT one off your chest, Mississippi! Must have been causing a bit of heartburn. Perhaps I should rephrase my sloppy writing there. I actually meant more or less what you said: that you can teach someone all the fundamentals, sure - sort of goes without saying, really - and you can develop any talent they have. But that's the vital thing. If the talent ain't there to be nurtured... I mean, I read music, I understand the principles of composition, I know about rhythm, melody and harmony, I know how a song is constructed, how chord progressions work, etc. Ask me to write a song, though... It ain't there. That's roughly what I meant. Can you teach someone to be a poet? Really? Can you? I've nothing against creative writing courses - I've done them myself, many times. I believe they can be very useful for a lot of people. But I'm reminded of a quote from Stephen King's book - not that I think of King as a particularly great writer. I think he has a lot of good stuff to say about writing, though: "You don't need writing classes or seminars any more than you need this or any other book on writing. Faulkner learned his trade while working at the post office. Other writers have learned the basics while serving in the navy, working in steel mills, or doing time in America's finer crossbar hotels. I learned the most valuable and commercial part of my life's work while washing motel sheets and restaurant tablecloths... You learn best by reading a lot and writing a lot, and the most valuable lessons of all are the ones you teach yourself." Well, okay, it sounds a bit flip - and he would say that, wouldn't he... but I'd more or less agree. Talent, determination, dedication... if they ain't there first, all the teaching in the world ain't gonna put them there. That's what I meant. Sorry it upset your day. Hope I've replied with due decorum and without seeming rude in any way. I'm sure you've gotten your voice back now. Over to you. Discussion's healthy. Anyone else want to come in and chuck a few insults at me? Go ahead. I've got a brass neck!

Yeah... I'd agree with you there, Archergirl. I've a soft spot for King because he was the guy who first got me interested in reading at 28 - I was a late starter. I loved all his earlier books and still have them. I just think he went a bit verbal vomit in later life (I would have said dia rear - but I can't spell it). Great? Well, I suppose if you're talking of commercial sales, then King and Rowling are great. Rowling is hugely imaginative and a great story-teller - but I don't care for her style. But even in the commercial sector, I think there are far better writers than both. I think King, on a good day, can be better than a lot of literary writers, too. Goldberg, yeah.... I dip in now and then. Can't ever see myself wanting to open a Spontaneous Writing Booth, though.

I always find a machine gun helps.

Hi Mississippi, I didn't really think you were rude or insulting - though 'don't be bloody silly' is not a bad attempt, and not really the style for an 'adult' forum. I can see that your style is, shall we say, forthright? Confrontational, possibly? Hmm... in the sphere of international diplomacy, I guess I'd make you more of a George Galloway or a John Prescott than a Kofi Annan. But we can't all be Kofi Annans, can we. Life would be a lot less interesting. All I WILL say is that I'm sure as hell glad you ain't a writing teacher. Okay, you might soon separate the gold from the coal, but you'd destroy a lot of self-confidence along the way. You'd stop a lot before they'd even gotten off of the ground - something that so easily could have happened to guys like Raymond Carver, whose work has so enriched our literature and understanding. It's the difference between demolishing someone's efforts and giving them encouragement to improve. I read a piece earlier in which the writer obviously had very little understanding of basic punctuation or spelling - but the work showed imaginative promise. I could have given her a blow-by-blow account of her technical deficiencies - which might have scared her away for life - or, as I did, suggest things that she could do to improve her grasp of these issues, whilst at the same time offering praise and encouragement for the effort she'd made. Part of that comes, I suppose, from my work as a teacher of adults with learning difficulties. Demolition jobs just make things so much harder. Maybe you might to like to have a nice cup of tea yourself - and smooth down some of those barbs on your pen. Nice talking to you, anyway. I mean it. Nothing wrong with keeping people on their toes.. just so long as they're capable of standing in the first place.

Ah, great stuff, guys. I think I feel the same now, Dr Jekyll. Just a note for Archergirl... sorry if my answer was flip. I think it's interesting - for me, at least - that the short story writers I most admire - Carver, Chekhov, Flannery O'Connor - are the ones who never planned their work. They just started with an idea, or a set of characters, or a situation, and followed it to see where it led. As one of them - I can't remember who - said: 'Sometimes, you have to get to the end of what you're writing to find out what you've written' - or words to that effect. Check out Carver's essays in 'Fires' - especially 'On Writing'; also, O'Connor's essay 'Writing Short Stories' (anthologised in many volumes). Also, a fabulous book to get hold of, if you haven't come across it, is 'The Story And It's Writer', edited by Ann Charters. A real treasure chest of the best short stories, plus critical essays, plus essays by many of the writers. It may not help you with your endings, but it's inspirational stuff.

Here’s a couple of quotes that you might find interesting. The first is from Flannery O’Connor’s essay ‘Writing Short Stories’, when she talks about writing ‘as an act of discovery.’ She’s discussing one of her more famous stories, ‘Good Country People’: “When I started writing that story, I didn’t know there was going to be a Ph.D with a wooden leg in it. I merely found myself one morning writing a description of two women I knew something about, and before I realised it, I had equipped one of them with a daughter with a wooden leg. I brought in a Bible salesman, but I had no idea what I was going to do with him. I didn’t know he was going to steal that wooden leg until 10 or 12 lines before he did it, but when I found out that this was going to happen, I realised that it was inevitable.” The other comes from Carver’s essay ‘Fires’. He’s talking about his story ‘Vitamins’: “I was in the middle of writing a short story when my telephone rang. I answered it. On the other end of the line was the voice of a black man, asking for a party named Nelson. It was a wrong number and I said so and hung up. I went back to my short story. But pretty soon I found myself writing a black character into my story, a somewhat sinister character whose name was Nelson. At that moment, the story took a different turn. But happily it was, I see now, and somehow knew at the time, the right turn for the story. When I began to write that story, I could not have prepared for or predicted the necessity for the presence of Nelson in the story. But now, the story finished… I see it is right and appropriate and, I believe, aesthetically correct, that Nelson be there, and be there with his sinister aspect. Also right for me is that the character found his way into my story with a coincidental rightness I had the good sense to trust.” I agree that talking of surprising oneself to surprise the readers sounds a bit pretentious and precious; a bit ‘Oh, let’s see where the muse takes me today.’ I’m not sure that what O’Connor and Carver describe is quite the same sort of thing, though. It’s that thing of ‘writing as an act of discovery’. That’s what I love about writing – even if it has led me up a few blind alleys!