The Confabulator Cafe

Category: Influence

  • Know the Swirl and Swing

    My favorite writing advice comes from a writer whose work I don’t enjoy, oddly enough. Or at least he gets credit for it on the writing angel who graces my office wall with her charm. “I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions,” states the angel, quoting James Michener, the writer of those gigantic historical fictions that were really popular in the 70s. This reminds me constantly to ask myself, why would my audience care? How are my words entangling with human emotion today? What part of human experience can I capture, what are my characters feeling right now, where is the human element? Answering these questions enlivens fiction and ennobles nonfiction.

    However, the very common piece of advice, “Write what you know,” strikes me as the worst advice available. Here’s the problem: Writing what you know turns all writing into life writing, an exploration of the writer instead of an exploration of the world. Certainly life writing can be exciting, good work, work that exposes joys and injustices, that introduces incandescent personalities or unique experiences to a larger audience. But I am uninterested (mostly) in mining my rather dull life for stories. I use writing as a discovery process; I write what I want to know about.

    Now, writing does require all my empathy and life knowledge to pull the human emotions into the words. And no one enjoys reading the product of ignorance. By the time a writing project emerges to the world, it should be saturated in knowledge, the product of its author’s learning, research, and imagination. But writing only what you know is an unreasonable limitation, one that asks too much of youth’s ignorance and too little of human capacity to learn and grow, and forces life to be the research for writing–rather than the other way around.

  • Active vs. Passive

    Some of the most common advice fledgling writers receive is: use active voice not passive voice. By using active voice, sentences become clearer, verbs become more powerful, and the overall writing style gains energy and forward momentum. It’s excellent advice, and something I constantly work on while writing. It is not, however, the advice I’m about to share in this post. Seriously, if your 5th grade creative writing teacher didn’t teach you about active vs. passive voice, then creative writing is not for you.

    The best advice I’ve ever received regarding writing fiction is related to active versus passive voice. The scope of the advice is just a bit…broader. One very astute reviewer of one of my rough drafts noted, “You never let your protagonist make her own decisions.”

    This probably sounds obvious to many people. But for me, it was not. Or rather, I didn’t realize that I was not letting my main character make her own decisions until I received this comment. I read back through my current manuscript, and then, dismayed, read some of my earlier manuscripts as well. Sure enough, my protagonists were not decision-makers.

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  • The Odds of Getting My Homework Done

    Never tell him the odds, either.

    The best piece of advice I ever received wasn’t specifically about writing. It pretty much applies to everything in life, really, and came from Mr. Buchanan, an English teacher I had in high school.

    I am a procrastinator. I have spent my life perfecting the art of procrastinating. Sometimes I have to take a deep, emergency lungful of air because, seriously, I’ve been sitting there not breathing enough. At least once a day I have to sprint to the bathroom because I’ve spent the previous hour (or more) ignoring the need to pee. So, it should come as no surprise that my homework in high school was rarely done on time.

    When Mr. Buchanan asked me one day where my assignment was, I started to explain, “I’m gonna —”

    He cut me off before I could finish the sentence with something brilliant on the fly. (more…)

  • Just Write

    It’s hard to narrow down best and worst writing advice, because I seek out so much of it (I need all the help I can get, people). I adopt what works for me and discard what doesn’t, so I don’t always remember what came from where. I’ve gotten advice from websites, books, fellow writers, and people who know nothing about writing, and I’ve received both good and bad advice from all of those sources.

    I think possibly the best and worst advice is the old adage to write what you know. While it is true, to an extent – it’s hard to write convincingly about something you know nothing about – it is also misleading. I don’t know everything. Hell, I hardly know anything, really. But I learn. If I want to incorporate something in a story, I will do research until I know enough to write it. If I wrote solely based on my own experiences, my writing would be pretty boring.

    I do agree, though, that writing what you know is important. However, I use it more to imbue reality into the fiction and fantasy I write. I’ll use emotions evoked from other situations to give a character more depth, or add a detail that I ran across in my own life to make my imaginary world more realistic.

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  • Good Advice, Bad Timing

    Chance Card: You're PublishedTwenty some years ago, I thought I wanted to be a writer. I went to college to get an English degree. I spent my free time penning bad poetry and worse short stories. And after college I started a few book-length manuscripts that ultimately went nowhere. Somewhere along the line, I decided I might be missing some essential bit of writer knowledge, so I sought out a writing workshop at my local community college.

    The results were disastrous.

    First, let me tell you straight up that what I was hoping to get from the workshop was praise. I didn’t want advice. I wanted people there to read my work and tell me I was the best thing since Ernest Hemingway. Alas, it was not to be.

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  • Tell Me Your Secrets

    The older I get, the more a particular piece of advice begins to resonate with me. It’s that well-worn writing chestnut: “Write what you know.”

    I honestly have no idea who first said this, and I don’t have a clue as to the context in which it’s meant to be taken. All I can tell you is what it means to me, or what it has come to mean to me, which is maybe the same thing but still feels a little different in my mind.

    Whenever I hear “write what you know,” I immediately think open your diary. Not that I have such a book. Nor is its cover adorned with winged unicorns. And no, it doesn’t feature a gold-filigreed lock that responds to a single key which I wear around my neck night and day. That would be ridiculous, and I am a serious sort of man. Seriously!

    Getting back to the point, opening your diary means putting yourself in your stories. It doesn’t matter what genre you write or when and where your story is set, you’re going to be dealing with characters and situations about which you have an opinion. What better place to tell people what you think.

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  • My Macabre Mentor

    After Ray Bradbury died, I wrote a blog for my personal website about how I have never had a real mentor when it comes to writing. My original writing instructors were too early in my development to be much of a use as serious mentors. My peers in the community are generally around the same level as writers. As such, I have gotten advice about particular bits of particular stories, but not so much about writing in general.

    Most of the advice I have gotten about writing has been gleaned from quotes and books from famous authors. I read a lot of writing books. I read a lot of essays. I read internet blogs, forums, commentaries, and anything else I can find on the craft of writing. That has been my writing education. That is why people like Bradbury are so important to me.

    As such, it is difficult to come to a decision regarding the best and worst advice I have received. I will have to go with the best and worst tips I have come across.

    In some ways, I am torn by writing influences. I am heavily influenced by classics and literary fiction. However, the horror genre has also been a big influence on me. Stephen King gets a bad rap as a writer. If you haven’t read On Writing, there is no time like the present. King has a great blue collar work ethic behind his writing that really speaks to me. Look at the numbers.  King has written forty-nine novels, nine short story collections, and five non-fiction books since 1973.  That is an amazing amount of work output. He hasn’t needed the money in decades. He must work because he loves it. I think some of his work is underrated because it is popular and there is so much of it. (more…)

  • Writing Advice: The Good and the Bad (Week Ending July 21)

    We don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that every writer has — at one time or another — received advice about the craft. Some advice is solicited, other advice comes from unexpected sources. And not all writing advice is good. In fact, some is downright bad. But even bad advice can be helpful in the long run.

    Our writers are always giving advice here at the Cafe, so we decided to ask them to take a break from creating their own advice. Instead, they’re going to share the best — and worst — writing advice they’ve received over the years. We hope you enjoy this week’s post and learn something.

    And remember, you can follow us on Twitter @ConfabCafe and on visit our Facebook page.

    Until next week,

    The Cafe Management

  • Grist for the Mill

    One of my favorite professors in library school believed that a good librarian had knowledge a mile wide and an inch deep. He gave us the following advice.

    The next time you go to the library (and if you’re like most Confabulators, your library card is burning a hole in your pocket pretty much most of the time), on the way in the door look at a random license plate. Jigger the numbers and letters around until it looks like a call number. Then go check out that book.

    It works, it really does.

    OK, so you don’t have to read the book cover to cover. But you should at least read the table of contents, the introduction, the first chapter, and the first few paragraphs of each of the other chapters. If you find something that interests you, read a bit more deeply. If not, feel free to skip. But try to take away at least the gist of the book.

    If you find yourself at a newsstand or in a waiting room, read a magazine you would never have considered looking at in your ordinary life. Or find a random blog and read a few posts.

    See, we all get into ruts. This is what I’m interested in; that is boring. Sometimes it takes just a little nudge to get you out of your comfort zone and open up whole new realms of ideas and associations.

    You will be amazed at how useful all those random little bits of information become.

  • Some hobbies just don’t translate…

    Some hobbies translate better to writing than others. For instance, my grandmother attempted to teach me to knit at various stages of my life with varying success. When I went off to college, it finally stuck. When I was writing my last novel, I thought it would be useful to have my character be able to knit—at least so far as darning socks is concerned.

    Let me tell you something about knitting, it is mind numbing. I usually work on it while I’m doing something else—like watching TV or listening to a book on tape, because otherwise I would lose all interest in the project.

    If the actual process is that mind-numbing and dull, imagine reading an entire paragraph where the only thing of note that takes place is that the protagonist darns a pair of socks. It was awful. Don’t do it.

    So I suppose a good rule of thumb for hobbies is that if it is boring in real life, it won’t translate well to paper.

    Other than writing itself, I don’t really see any of my hobbies cropping up in my stories. Perhaps if I wrote urban fantasy instead of doing world building, I would see more of an inclusion, but somehow sitting in front of a TV playing video games all day doesn’t really fit in to a sword and sorcery style novel… and I’m not about to attempt to pick up swordsmanship… that’s a good way to end up with broken or missing fingers… and then how am I supposed to write?