Craft and Craft Resources

How Droll Is That? Shopping for a new book? The author will have put her most work into the first lines and the last. Pay attention, and perhaps you’ll buy the book you want. Pay attention and perhaps your own first lines will become the immediate link to your best reader. Don't follow (a Writer's Digest) Formula. This Isn’t Kansas Anymore Let the reader think they are in the regular universe, and then throw in a shock so that they are disoriented and asking, Where the hell

Consider the First Lines This is not one of those formulaic pieces of advice where you are exhorted to include two or four or five key elements in your first sentence in order to have a winning start to your book. Writers Digest tells you to use direction, (no static) characterization, distinctive voice, and basic plot (conflict), but then, they are into pat answers. Instead, there is a list of examples that could be used as deep reads—how did the author do that? First lines

Consider the First Line

Geek With Exploding Brain Literary Devices 101 Resource: www.literaryterms.net The Big Four: Metaphor – conditional equivalence. Henry II was a mighty lion. Simile – so, as, like, than Aphorism – a concise, terse, laconic, or memorable expression of a general truth or principle Analogy – Peter De Vries, comparing the unknowable universe to a safe, wrote, “The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination. But the combination is locked up in the safe." Next Rank Tool

Why Are They Just Sitting There? Every writer goes down to the DoItYourself for story ideas. For some, it’s the obituaries DIY, for some it’s the Police Blotter DIY, but they come home with a notebook of nuts and bolts, a hammer, a trowel. But then for all writers, it’s observation that provides the lumber to build the story out. Here’s your observation: You’re late driving back from Albuquerque up through the Native American Reservations to your house In Taos. You didn’t get

Visitors Every writer goes down to the DoItYourself for story ideas. For some, it’s the obituaries DYI, for some it’s the Police Blotter DYI, but they come home with a notebook of nuts and bolts, a hammer, a trowel. For all writers, it’s observation that provides the lumber to build the story out. Here’s your observation: You are marching along a suburban street, looking for a house number. When you find it, the house is revealed as a Craftsman style bungalow, very out of cha

Every writer goes down to the DIY. For some, the DIY is the obituaries, for some it’s the Police Report, for some it’s the family Thanksgiving dinner. The writer comes home with a notebook of nuts and bolts, a hammer, a sack of nails. For all writers, it’s observation that provides the lumber. Here’s your observation. You’re on the backroad 285 from Tres Piedres, New Mexico to Espanola, bicycling. You’re near a place that your phone names as “No Agua.” You pull over to stretc

Write Into Realms AI Can’t Follow Bluntly, here is my premise. Probability Engines (AI) can’t write beautifully. They are fed too much crap, and they can only produce the literary equivalent of tapioca. So write into the beauty, move to the country where the actual language matters, and provide an emotional and aesthetic experience that the reader needs. The reader, or at least the one that matters, will walk away from PE pulp and turn to you. Let me give you some examples. F

It’s Only Zeros and Ones MFA programs are inadvertently designed for hostile takeover by Probability Engines, because at the lowest level they teach dogma and Rules. [Of course you’ve heard “Be creative. Learn the rules and then break them judiciously.”] Probability Engines love rules. They reverse-INVENT the rules from the thousands and millions of texts upon which they have trained. They need the guardrails, the connect-the-dots, the predictability. More precisely, they inv

BUILD-OUT OF YOUR COMPETITOR At the Santa Fe International Literary Festival, Jenifer Eagan was asked about AI and what it meant to “writers,” as persons, as a collective, as a profession. Her response was largely, “Look, we’ve faced these upheavals before, and the book world has been knocked on its head, and the answer is always the same. As writers, we have to get better.” OUR upheaval is AI. I like talking about the large language machines as Probability Engines = PE, and

Whose Story Is It? Let’s talk point of view [WHAT! AGAIN?]. Most fictional work, and most of my work, is in third person point of view. It’s so strong, so adaptable. You can have a separate narrative voice, one that knows more (or less) than the protagonist. You can play distance tricks to fit the book’s situation—move in closer to the main character or zoom out. You can treat the protagonist coldly, or in using informal indirect discourse, get right into her head with the wr

There is a street that plunges down straight away from the front windows.

One of the better teachers I’ve encountered in the literary craft world (yes, we all know about John Gardner) is Rebecca Makkai, through Story Studio Chicago. Besides being one of the most limber, twisting and slouching participants on Zoom, she also is hilarious, making up completely quirked examples on the fly. There are several conceptual architectures she’s invented that at least seem truthful even if as complicated as a Mid-East Peace Plan. Let’s take one – her framework

Another Take on Writers and LLMs

Here's Some Hints on Improving Hybrid Zooms Or Google Meet, WebEx, and Jitsi As writers circles become less local and more connected...

Those Awkward Clumsy Sentences: # 5 Broken By Its Own Weight Loose Sentences That Break Under Their Own Weight: This set of examples is...

Those Awkward Clumsy Sentences: # 4 Take Five Minutes to Fall Off A Cliff Subordinate trailing clauses with past participles and past...

Those Awkward Clumsy Sentences: # 3 Outfox Your Bad Writing -- Focus on The Sentence Introductory Clauses with infinite (“ing”) verbs:...

Those Awkward Clumsy Sentences: # 2 Hemingway Throwing A Baseball in a Bar The Three Beat Drum: Think you’re Hemingway? Live for short...

Those Awkward Clumsy Sentences: #1 The Passive Voice: Your goat wrecked my garden – versus – My garden was wrecked by your goat. Ready...