Ernest Hemingway was one of the great american authors. His slick, straight-forward and meaningful prose serves as direct contrast to flowery and purple prose, and it was this quality in his writing that earned him the Nobel Prize of Literature and a seat among the classic writers of the past. Reading Hemingway feels like stripping away everything that isn't basic and primordial. It's like studying the fundamentals, like reading raw feeling and thinking. His style serves as a great example of profound yet concise expression. And as such, I find his advice for writers to be invaluable. Here are a few snippets it: Pace yourself. Take the time to sit down every day and put your thoughts into words, But finish when you still know what is going to happen next in your story. Don't write until you burn yourself out and run out of ideas, but rather stop while you're still excited and let your subconscious mind work on it. Next day, when you sit down to write again, you'll start at a point in the story that you're excited about, and the words will flow more easily onto the page. Write, and then re-write. However, before jumping back into the story at the point you left off, take some time to go over what you wrote the day before. This serves to refresh your memory as to the mood and setting of your earlier scenes, so that the continuation is coherent with what you already wrote. Edit as you re-write. As you go over what you wrote the day before, take out everything that is extraneous and leave only the best. Stephen King also refers to this as "killing your darlings." Everything that is not pertinent to the storyline has to go, no matter how fond you are of the way you structured a sentence or the words you used to describe that scenery. Don't be afraid to move sentences around, as well. Look for the best structure in all the paragraphs you write, but make sure they are meaningful and add to the story instead of slowing it down with unnecessary fluff. When you're cutting things out that would be great in any other story but are not pertinent to the one you're writing, you know you're doing a good job. Once a week go over your entire story, from the beginning until where you left off. This is important because you need to see your story as a whole every so often, and edit and re-write as necessary. Doing this is what makes your story all of one piece. Don't underestimate how much work this can be... but it's also probably the most necessary thing to do. This way you become more familiar with your story, as well. You get to know it better, and can even get inspired to connect different ideas within the story and make it even more rich and ineresting. Read the classics. The truly great writers of the past were great for a reason. You shouldn't compare yourself to any existing writer, because we don't know whether his or her work will outlast the passing of time or not. Classic works, however, have already stood the test of time. Read them often, and learn from them. Feel free to compete with them, if you'd like. It's a good standard to measure yourself up against. This way you'll also know which ideas have been executed well by other artists. A writer who doesn't read the classics isn't really an educated writer, and his work will suffer for it. Don't think of yourself as being talented. We'll never know whether we are talented writers or not, no matter how much praise or how much criticism we receive. So instead of focusing on that, focus on your creative work and becoming a better story-teller and writer in your appreciation every day. Conclusion... A-lot of this advice is technical. But writing well is a very technical process. The important thing is to find a balance between feeling inspired by your story and also working to refine it as you go along. Writing, re-writing and editing should be done simultaneously according to Hemingway. It takes more time, but it's worth it. Many writers work on their first draft without looking back at what they have written, and if that works for them and they'd rather not look back, then that's up to them. But there's a reason one of the great american writers worked this way. This advice can help you become not only more disciplined in your writing, but also more familiar with it and more involved and invested in you own story. So we invite you to look over these tips, think about them, and implement what works for you. Happy writing!
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About five years ago a new trend took over the publishing industry. It was called NEW ADULT. For those of you unfamiliar with this trend, "New Adult" was a new age category for readers approximately 18-25 years of age. The characters of said books were usually within this age range as well.
The category was initially intended as a stepping stool between the Young Adult category for readers age 12-18 and the adult category for readers age 18+. The reasoning behind New Adult was that many readers (myself included at the time) appreciated the distinction between between the "adulthood" of your late teens / early twenties and the other type of adulthood, the one that sets in after you hit 25 and have a more stable life and bigger responsibilities (for most of us at least). Because let's face it, the "adulthood" of your college years is not the same "adulthood" of your post-college working years. And literature should be able to reflect that. Or at least, that was the hope. When New Adult took off, I was very excited. To be honest I envisioned a ton of new fantasy books with characters between this age range. I thought it would be very interesting to mix the elements of fantasy with the mindset and viewpoint of characters in their early twenties... which are adults but have not wholly figured things out yet and may still be grappling with issues like dealing with new responsibilities and the like. This translated into a fantastical setting might yield something interesting. I envisioned New Adult science fiction. New Adult dystopia. New Adult historical. New Adult contemporary. I envisioned a whole new world of possibilities... because that's what an age category is, right? It's a category to fit in a whole bunch of genres. Just like there is YA fantasy, YA sci-fi, YA dystopia, and adult fantasy, sci-fi, etc... There should have been New Adult everything. But that was not how our poor fledgling New Adult was treated. Because you see, what sparked off the New Adult trend was a couple of bestselling self-published romance books. So naturally, literary agents and publishers of the industry decided to buy and publish ONLY (or mostly) New Adult romance, because they wanted to capitalize on the trend. Their vision didn't extend to beyond this or to what the category could become. So from its begginings New Adult was not treated as an age category, but as a genre. Or rather, as a sub-genre... of Romance. Obviously in a couple of years the market became saturated with New Adult, which became equivalent to "Romance between people in their early twenties", and the trend died off completely. The Age Category, which was never treated as such, was effectively killed. My urban fantasy book The Sun Child (CLICK HERE TO VIEW) features a 22 year old protagonist grappling with the morality behind having the power to heal and kill others at will. In my mind this is a perfect example of one of the many ways New Adult could have expanded as a category, but didn't, because of a short-mindedness that spread within the industry. So I label my book Adult for commercial purposes, though I would have liked to label it New Adult. And that's the sad story of how the publishing industry botched New Adult. |
AuthorYggdrasil Publishing House... Where Story Comes Alive. Archivesposts |