Tips for Authors

tjamesmoss.author · Sun Oct 16, 2011 2:27 pm


	Bonnie Ferrante wrote: I love "The first 12 years are the hardest." Kind of makes me feel better.

I agree, the first twelve years are the hardest. Where was this when I was on year two?

soniat2 · Sat Oct 22, 2011 4:39 am

Earlier there were more people reading and few writers. Now it is the exact opposite! At least that is my contention. Everyone wants to write! God forbid, if you do not have the smarts to write original content, you help yourself to material that is available online (tons of it!) and rehash and publish!

Okay, coming back to what I do - yes, I reference other websites too - and flag points I like. I read with a one point focus on what I am supposed to cover in the article for my client. I make notes in a notebook - yes, I write with a pen on paper! Then I start to write - this time on my computer! I rarely go back to the articles I referred to. I never ever use any phrase or sentence from another website or book. That is the way I avoid plagiarism.

The last week i have just completed my academic essay. It was very nice experience to me, i want to wrote plagiarism free essays so I have been using that when I ran out of searches in copyscape

. Anyway thank you for sharing a good thread here..

Have a good day

R. LeBeaux · Sun Oct 23, 2011 11:05 am

Interbane: This is the first time I’ve seen this thread, I guess because you started it long before I found Booktalk and it was only recently revived with a couple of new comments. It is a great list of tips, and it was nice of you to take the time to consolidate them all for us. Even though I’ve read or heard almost all of these in one form or another, it’s always good to be reminded of them from time to time.

I have little to add, except perhaps to say that even the greatest of writers violate some of these rules occasionally. I was once instructed by a professor of creative writing in the following way (it was long ago, so this is not an exact quote):

“Rules are good. You should read as many as you can find, practice a little, then try to forget them (except for those of grammar and punctuation). If you concentrate on rules, it will impair your ability to write from your gut. Once you have finished and edited a draft, it is fine to go back over it again with all the rules in mind, but even then you should pick and choose among them, rather than try to employ them all. Remember, all the rules in the world will not make you a good story teller, and story-telling is the most important aspect of fiction writing.”

Other than that, there is one thing an author (can’t be sure, but I think it might have been John Irving) mentioned in a seminar I attended years ago that stuck with me. He said (again, not an exact quote):

“If you absolutely fall in love with a passage, paragraph or sentence, cut it out.”

This is similar to (though a little more harsh than) what Anne Enright said in her third tip:

“Only bad writers think that their work is really good.”

It is a painful practice, somewhat like cutting off a finger, but one I have used over and over, always to the benefit of the final product.

Oh, and speaking of cutting things, were I to write Anne’s tip, I would leave out the word “that,” since it adds nothing but four unnecessary letters.

Thanks again for putting all this together in one place for us.

Suzanne · Tue Oct 25, 2011 3:29 pm

I particularly find the rule on long descriptions of characters to be true. Many authors will spend page after page counting the hairs on the character’s heads when it is not necessary. What I find to be an effective way to introduce a character is through dialogue. A master of this is Annie Proulx. In her short story “Brokeback Mountain”, she described the two cowboy characters in only two sentences of prose, but through her dialogue I could picture them clearly, I could hear them and if I was careful, I could even feel the denim of their jeans.

Dialogue is an art, and if you can master it, you're golden.

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