Geoffrey Storm

[Geoffrey_Storm]

“The Art of Fiction”

A captivating work. He hits all the basses for young writers. I enjoyed reading it as a sort of checklist for me, But I could imagine reading it as a highschooler might be a little daunting I wasn’t really into writing.

 

He focuses a lot on what the reader will think of what is on the page. These are very important points to hear for early writers, as they tend to only read/approach their work from their own pov, creating a disconnect with readers.

 

As the title would suggest, he is very focused on the ART of writing. Which is true and important not to forget, but could also be argued that to succeed as a writer, one must comply to rules far more strict than simply wrapping a bridge in brown bags and calling it art. If you were to write a completely avant garde novel, it’s likely no one will “get” it, and it would fall to the abyss of novels like it that didn’t spark enough hold enough people’s attention to rise to the top.

 

He talks much of the intuition of creativity, but I belong to the camp that believes creativity can only be honed, not taught. Some people are just inherently more creative than others. In MANY different ways, as there are many ways to be creative. For instance, a brilliant writer does not a brilliant composer make.

 

The exercises are great for beginners and veterans alike to keep the mind fresh and churning out ideas.

 

“However stupid he may be in his real life, he never cheats in writing.” Great line. The writer must always respect his reader. This is why I like writing YA, because so often YA writers dumb down their writing to “fit” their audience, where as I hold young adults with a higher respect (since I was one not too long ago) and strive to push the limits of the genre to a higher level. They understand more than people give them credit, but more importantly, “adult” issues (at least the exciting ones), are also very interesting to them.

 

 

“The Writing Life”

“Do not hurry, do not rest.” This is great advice to any writer, and something I try to live by as regularly as I can. I think it fits in with Hemingway’s rule to never stop writing for the day when you don’t know what comes next, because then you’ll be stuck for a looong time.

 

Annie takes a different approach to a dissertation on writing from Gardner. She actually speaks in beautiful pros, which isn’t always as clear or direct as Gardner (since his was for younger readers) but it is, nonetheless, more enticing and enjoyable to read.

 

I would most certainly recommend this to ANY writer that has not read it because it teaches 2 fold, first through direction of the text, and then comes the realization that she’s also teaching by example with her prose. It’s one big rumination. Brilliant.

 

I love, love, love that she believes no writer can write a novel worth reading in less than a year and sometimes it takes up to ten. This obviously speaks to me because I’ve been writhing for 13 years. Granted, I’ve also become an adult in that time so that set me back and caused me to completely gut the 11-year-old attempts at story telling. But still I think there’s a stigma to works that take a VERY long time to complete, and while there is the threat of the writing going stale, as long as the author is improving, learning more about his characters, and their HEART is still in it, I think these seasoned novels make up a very special corner of the industry, with the richest, most developed worlds.

 

She also warns against rewriting passages vs, scrapping it and basically writing it from scratch at a new angle because simply rewriting locks the prose into an outdated pattern that just doesn’t fit the narrative any longer. This is something I’ve only recently discovered in the past few years, when I kept wondering why my old stuff just wasn’t getting any better!

 

 

“Write Away”

Elizabeth’s book reads somewhere in between Annie’s and Gardner’s. It reads like an anecdote, like she’s sitting right across from me. Along the same lines, she makes a great comparison to literature and gossip, saying that we analyze character in our every day lives and that is why literature is so popular because this analyzation and gossip is extremely entertaining to us.

 

“Human character is the greatest puzzle,” and “writers who focus on social issues only do literature an injustice.” This is a fantastic caution for every writer!

 

I too believe beginning with character is so, ultra, important. And like she says, you don’t need to get your idea for the novel about character, but you need to begin using your ideas by molding them around character as opposed to the opposite. “Story is Character.”

 

I like that she identifies talent, passion, and discipline as the keys to publication. It’s simplifying like this that makes a titanic subject more comprehensible.

 

She also takes great care in her settings, saying this is truly where your story will bloom, if not originate completely. I also like that she advocates for much research, something novice writers tend to overlook.

 

Something I did notice that was unlike the Novel Writing Program at Author Salon is that she advocated for the 3-act system as opposed to the 6-act, of which I prefer the 6-act. It really helped me see clearly the plot points and reversals that were buried in my text and brought them out to highlight them not only in my writing but of course in the even more crucial synopsis… JK . . . (kind of).

 

 

“Writing the Breakout Novel”

I’m kind of a fanboy of Donald Maass. I actually read this book a few years ago, junior year in college, when I really started to take writing seriously. It really gave me a lot of hope. It showed me that the years I spent writing were not in vein, and that I accidentally/instinctually adapted many of the tropes of my genre all by myself, without ever realizing it; similar to speaking English without truly understanding the rules of grammar while still making sense. He taught me how to expand upon character traits or plot points of which previously there only existed shadows. And I completely gutted the entire middle of the book as I realized it meandered with no sense of agency or destination. And this is where I learned the importance of TENSION ON EVERY PAGE.

 

Mass took me from being an avant garde “writer,” to being an author in only a few months it seemed. Utilizing my newfound tools I went on to rewrite my ENTIRE book, scrapping almost every word and only holing on to the idea and the setting. My characters were too flat and needed to be expanded upon. But their voices remained, kind of like old friends, making me comfortable with them, allowing for their dialogue to come as easy as my own voice. I’d say 75% of what I wrote after reading this book is still intact in my MS today.

 

Some time after that I attended the conference that lead me to this fine establishment, where I grew leaps and bounds as a writer, fixing up that last 25% and more that I never realized existed.

 

Then the day came when I actually got to meet Donald at another conference I attended. And there he helped to fill the final missing piece to Progeny of Gods: the protagonist’s developing internal struggle and its relation to his weakness over the course of his arc. He told me to search inside of myself and draw out the one thing I could never tell anyone and to then give that darkness to Tucker. At first I was hesitant, but as he explained I realized Tucker had it in him all along, it only needed to be awakened.