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Sinking Into The Bog

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In my last post (“Inspired to Emulation—or Preparing to Jump“), I talked about The Rule of No Rules, and how reading other writers you admire will provide the best writing advice you will ever receive.

Not long after the post went up, one of my favorite novelists, Adrian McKinty—who writes brilliantly about Northern Ireland during the Troubles from the perspective of a Catholic detective serving in the overwhelmingly Protestant Royal Ulster Constabulary—posted the following letter on Twitter. He composed it to an aspiring author who had asked his advice on this whole writing business. This is what Adrian wrote in response (the recipient’s name has been removed for the sake of privacy ):

 

 

I’m tempted to end this blog post here, because I couldn’t possibly say anything as perfect, but that would be cheating, or lazy, or both. So instead, I’m going to talk a little about my writing process, and in so doing I ironically intend to prove that Adrian is absolutely right—there are no rules. (Incidentally — for more on Adrian and his truly wonderful books, visit his blog The Psychopathology of Everyday Life.)

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Reflections on the Next American Tragedy

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In a recent piece in Foreign Policy magazine (“The End of History is the Birth of Tragedy”), the authors, both professors of strategic studies who have served in government—i.e., members of the “Washington elite,” by some lights—argued that, “Americans have forgotten that historic tragedies on a global scale are real. They’ll soon get a reminder.” The article drew parallels between tragedy as an art form and public policy, so as a writer I was naturally intrigued. But although I found the … [Read more...]

Editing’s Eternal Verities

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A lot of what I do involves helping writers give readers what they expect, and what readers expect has changed over the years.  Many modern novels include sex scenes or language that would have gotten them banned sixty or seventy years ago.  Movies and television have made readers less patient with leisurely story development than they used to be. Even little things like tolerance for –ly adverbs has evolved over time. But it’s worth looking at the principles of storytelling seem to hold … [Read more...]

Birth vs. Battle

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Let me kick things off with blasphemy: Conflict is not the engine of story. Allow me to explain. The longer I teach, the more writing texts I seem to read, if only to find out if someone else has a clearer, simpler, or more insightful way of presenting the material. (To my chagrin, that’s often case. Fortunately, I'm not too so old a dog that I've forsaken new tricks.) In some of my recent reading, though, I’ve detected a bit of an uproar over the supposed centrality of conflict in our … [Read more...]