Posts
Food Guy's laid out in Bronchitis-Land, so it's up to me to pull up the slack.
Again.
1.) You have to look at your words as if seeing them for the first time.
What's on the page is all your readers are going to see : not what you meant to say, not the images that were in your mind while you wrote them ... just your words.
What emotions do your WRITTEN words leave you with? Yes, I ended that sentence that way on purpose. See how I did that? Don't do it.
2.) If you humans want to succeed, you must have talent like Coleridge had.
More important, you must have the discipline of Michaelangelo. Coleridge wasted his talent in drugs. Leonardo wasted his in doing party favors for princes. I tried to tell them both, but no human listens to the wisdom of knowing eyes.
3.) Leave out the boring stuff.
You know what I mean. Pick up a book in the store at random. Slip into the middle and start to read. What do you see?
Big chunky, eye-boring paragraphs. Plaster paris descriptions of places I have no wish to be. Slides of cousin Merle's trip to Idaho. (You've seen one pair of potato eyes, you've seen them all.)
Blah-blah-blah.
The dialogue should be short, funny, something to bring up your eyes from the page and make you reflect on something that hit you like the memory of your first mistake in public.
There should be danger, love, or laughter ... on every page. Because it may be the only page the considering buyer will ever read.
4.) Like Hemingway told me : the most important gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector.
No shit.
While Food Guy was droning the Mormon Tabernacle of snores, I was reading Nathan Bransford first paragraph contest for laughs.
There was this one where a woman lay in this pit of dead bodies, looking up at a ton of rock and more human corpses about to drop on her. Did she swear and get the hell out of the way?
No, she laid there like Hamlet contemplating the state of the world where such a thing could happen.
Uh, excuse me, lady?
I understand depressed. I mean, I do live with Food Guy, and all. But if tons of rock and rotting bodies are about to crush this furry princess, I scramble the hell out of the way ...
and leave the hissing at life's pissiness for when I am safely out of the way, thank you very much!
5.) Your scenes must read true ... fake we can have by listening to the State of the Union address.
You humans read to live outside of yourselves ... in adventures where life makes sense, where you find fun, acceptance, and love. Life is only life ...
when it is real ... or seems real.
When characters are flat, prose puppets, made to do what you want them to do, not what real flesh-and-blood humans would do or say ...
the story seems flat like coke left out on the table a day, no fizz, no sparkle ... no readers.
6.) Last words of wisdom from the princess :
Good writing is true writing. If a human is making up a story, it will be true in proportion to the amount of knowledge of life he has and how disciplined he is. So that when he makes something up, it is as it would truly be.
The more a human learns of life, the better he or she will be able to imagine what a set of circumstances would feel or seem. Do it well enough, and the readers will get a feeling as if what they are reading actually happened.
Last : Write for yourself. And write for a person you know, living or dead, to make that person smile or be caught up in the wonder.
*) My paws are sore. That's all the wisdom you humans can handle. Oh, goody, Food Guy just turned over. The snoring assault has ended.
***
Again.
1.) You have to look at your words as if seeing them for the first time.
What's on the page is all your readers are going to see : not what you meant to say, not the images that were in your mind while you wrote them ... just your words.
What emotions do your WRITTEN words leave you with? Yes, I ended that sentence that way on purpose. See how I did that? Don't do it.
2.) If you humans want to succeed, you must have talent like Coleridge had.
More important, you must have the discipline of Michaelangelo. Coleridge wasted his talent in drugs. Leonardo wasted his in doing party favors for princes. I tried to tell them both, but no human listens to the wisdom of knowing eyes.
3.) Leave out the boring stuff.
You know what I mean. Pick up a book in the store at random. Slip into the middle and start to read. What do you see?
Big chunky, eye-boring paragraphs. Plaster paris descriptions of places I have no wish to be. Slides of cousin Merle's trip to Idaho. (You've seen one pair of potato eyes, you've seen them all.)
Blah-blah-blah.
The dialogue should be short, funny, something to bring up your eyes from the page and make you reflect on something that hit you like the memory of your first mistake in public.
There should be danger, love, or laughter ... on every page. Because it may be the only page the considering buyer will ever read.
4.) Like Hemingway told me : the most important gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector.
No shit.
While Food Guy was droning the Mormon Tabernacle of snores, I was reading Nathan Bransford first paragraph contest for laughs.
There was this one where a woman lay in this pit of dead bodies, looking up at a ton of rock and more human corpses about to drop on her. Did she swear and get the hell out of the way?
No, she laid there like Hamlet contemplating the state of the world where such a thing could happen.
Uh, excuse me, lady?
I understand depressed. I mean, I do live with Food Guy, and all. But if tons of rock and rotting bodies are about to crush this furry princess, I scramble the hell out of the way ...
and leave the hissing at life's pissiness for when I am safely out of the way, thank you very much!
5.) Your scenes must read true ... fake we can have by listening to the State of the Union address.
You humans read to live outside of yourselves ... in adventures where life makes sense, where you find fun, acceptance, and love. Life is only life ...
when it is real ... or seems real.
When characters are flat, prose puppets, made to do what you want them to do, not what real flesh-and-blood humans would do or say ...
the story seems flat like coke left out on the table a day, no fizz, no sparkle ... no readers.
6.) Last words of wisdom from the princess :
Good writing is true writing. If a human is making up a story, it will be true in proportion to the amount of knowledge of life he has and how disciplined he is. So that when he makes something up, it is as it would truly be.
The more a human learns of life, the better he or she will be able to imagine what a set of circumstances would feel or seem. Do it well enough, and the readers will get a feeling as if what they are reading actually happened.
Last : Write for yourself. And write for a person you know, living or dead, to make that person smile or be caught up in the wonder.
*) My paws are sore. That's all the wisdom you humans can handle. Oh, goody, Food Guy just turned over. The snoring assault has ended.
***
