Manual For Fiction Writers by Block, Lawrence (classic books to read .TXT) 📗

this writing anyway, stealing the time from other courses. When you take a writing course you're expected to devote a certain amount of time to writing, and that's often useful, just as the need to produce assignments on demand is an inordinately valuable discipline.

Most writing courses involve the submission of manuscripts which are read aloud to the class, by the instructor or the individual authors, after which they are subjected to group criticism. I hope someone improves on this format soon. Prose is not written to be read aloud, and the effect of a short story so presented has little to do with its effect in print. Even with these limitations, writing courses can be very valuable for you, less for the criticism you'll receive from others than for the opportunity you'll have to observe what doesn't work in other people's writing.

This is an important point. The best and easiest way to learn writing by reading consists of exposing yourself to large doses of inferior amateur work. It's easier to spot a flaw than comprehend the reasons an unblemished piece is flawless. Nothing helped my own writing like a few months of work reading unsolicited manuscripts at a literary agency. Every day I worked my way through mountains of swill; at night I sat at home writing, and I knew what mistakes to avoid in my own work.

Try to read your classmates' efforts in manuscript. Seeing beats hearing when it comes to teaching yourself how prose and dialogue work on the page. And take criticisms of your own work, from fellow students or instructors, with a generous splash of soy sauce. Shrugging off their sass will prepare you for the task of ignoring the carping of editors and publishers in years to come.

Whether you take many writing courses or not, I hope you'll do as much writing as possible during your college years. As far as what you ought to write, well, that depends on you.

Prospective writers, in and out of school, approach the profession from different circumstances and with different goals. Some have a particular perspective which they want to be able to render in fiction. Others want first and foremost to establish themselves as writers; just what they wind up writing is a secondary consideration.

If you're of the first sort, the best advice I can give you is to avoid listening to any advice, mine included. You already know, on some intuitive level, what it is that you want to do. Go ahead and do it, at your own pace and in your own way. Take all the time you need for your writing and let its form and content be whatever proves most suitable and natural to you.

As far as commercial considerations are concerned, don't be concerned with them. It is exceedingly rare that anything produced by a college writer has any objective value, either commercially or artistically. While you may prove a happy exception, it's not terribly likely that anything you turn out in the next four years will make you rich and famous. This is a very good thing for you. It means you ought to consider yourself completely free from commercial requirements, at least for the time being.

But maybe your main interest lies in satisfying commercial requirements. Maybe you want chiefly to become a writer, a professional wordsmith. This needn't mean that what you write will be of less artistic value. It's more a question of where you're coming from as a writer.

When I was your age?and you can't imagine how I hate the sound of that phrase?all I wanted to do was get published. I wanted to see my name in print and on checks. I already knew that a writer was the only thing worth being and I was impatient to go ahead and officially become one.

If you find yourself similarly obsessed, perhaps some advice might not be amiss. First of all, write as much as possible. The more active you are the quicker you'll get into the habit of developing ideas and encouraging them to hatch into stories.

Study the markets. I think it's possible to become market-oriented without cheapening yourself as a writer. I don't think you should try to teach yourself to write confessions or juveniles or whatever because you know there's a market for them. Instead, read a lot of different kinds of magazines until you find some that contain the kind of stories that you think you might enjoy producing, and might be proud of at the same time. You'll never do good work in a field you can't enjoy as a reader and respect as a writer.

Act like a pro. Learn the proper format for your manuscripts and use it when you type them. Submit things. Send out the pieces you write, send them out over and over again. I literally papered a wall with rejection slips my first two years in college, and if nothing else it established my own self-image as a writer, albeit not a terribly successful one. I suppose it also helped me get used to rejection. And then one wonderful day an editor asked me to revise a story, and he subsequently bought it, and all that acting as if paid off. All of a sudden I was a professional writer.

Most campuses offer a variety of literary and journalistic activities?the college newspaper, the literary magazine, that sort of thing. Students