Craft and Craft Resources

Need A Bridge? We’ll highlight two ways that the writer’s text can have a larger impact on the reader (or codeswitching into MFAtalk, to Show, to promote Feeling and Experience). John Gardner lists as a glaring writing failure “the needless filtering of the image through some observing consciousness. The amateur writes: ‘Turning, she noticed two snakes fighting in among the rocks.’ Compare: ‘She turned. In among the rocks two snakes were fighting . . .’ Generally speaking—tho

I found this list of clichés on the web years ago. Don’t use them as a writer (unless it’s in dialogue) and don’t stand for them as a reader. Heard That Before Add insult to injury All else being equal All things considered Along those lines Ample opportunity Armed to the teeth As a matter of fact At a loss for words At long last Awesome Be caught dead Benefit of the doubt Better late than never Bone of contention Break the bank By the same token Calling names Chop up the sma

Let us search the recent winning titles of the Booker, the Pulitzer, and the New York Times Bestsellers (ranked by time on the list) on for those that utilize THINGS.

Culture Name or Reference or Activity What Can We Say? It’s The Culture "Music is the emotional life of most people." — Leonard Cohen Let us search the recent winning titles of the Booker, the Pulitzer, and the New York Times Bestsellers (ranked by time on the list) on for those that start with some mirror of the culture (think MUSIC and WRITING). This is a less-represented category, but as you’ll see has some strong candidates. A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth, Daniel

Attribution — Who’s Talking? Having been boiled in John Gardners’ books The Art of Fiction and On Becoming a Novelist, I’m fully in on attribution being subtle and near-invisible to the reader. Consider: He said, “I am outraged.” versus He cried in a strident far-reaching shriek, “I am outraged.” A lot easier to go purple-prose with bad attribution. A lot easier to clutter the page with semaphores to instruct the reader how to interpret the tone and delivery of the dialogue.

Organization or Event Event? Organization? Grounding a Book "At the back of my mind I had a sense of us sitting about waiting for some terrible event, and then I would remember that it had already happened." Ian McEwan Let us search the recent winning titles of the Booker, the Pulitzer, and the New York Times Bestsellers (ranked by time on the list) on for those that start with Organization or Event. This is a less-represented category, but as you’ll see has some strong candi

Place Place: Have You Been There? "The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location." Flannery O’Conner Let us search the recent winning titles of the Booker, the Pulitzer, and the New York Times Bestsellers (ranketime on the list) on for those that start with Place. A particularly rich list — contemporary writers are still obsessed with Place. Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders Elmet, Fiona M

Obscure Titles Tricky Titles And Obscurity What utilitarian role does a book title provide? I would contend there are four that I look for in my own titles: 1. Grab the Reader—choose more like Demon Copperhead than I Was A St. Louis Steampunk Zombie. 2. Portend the Major Theme—if your book is about spies, then choose by global conflict and not by thing (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy rather than Peanuts and Eggcups). 3. Deliver the Book’s Aesthetic—if you’re writing a book abou

The Title Starts The Journey Let’s make an experiment that could lead you to choosing an excellent title for your own novel. Prize winning book titles can be all over the map (or the language, as it were). There are certainly times when we are beset by a formula. Take one of my least favorite—books titled [Profession]’s [Relative], e.g. The Bookie’s Illegitimate Nephew. Yes, I made that one up. Here’s a list starting in 2005, an 11 year sample. There are some great writers on

A larger-than-life character and a moment of cowardice When you buy a book, do you use the Amazon book description (full of soft ambiguous words), or the jacket copy (a torrid one hundred words), or a friend’s recommendation, or the New Yorker 3,000 word review? Consider the first lines instead. Pay attention and perhaps your own first lines will become the immediate link to your best reader. Grab the Character If you are writing a book about A person, the best decision may b

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