Forgotten Bestseller Secrets - Keep 'Em Reading: Lesson 01

READING TO WRITE. Any masters' works give all the secrets to writing craft you may want. It just takes a new viewpoint to extract them...

READING TO WRITE. Any masters' works give all the secrets to writing craft you may want. The trick is to know how to extract them - and become always looking for new craft to learn...

Fueling Your Inspiration

The genius keeps all his days the vividness and intensity of interest that a sensitive child feels in his expanding world. Many of us keep this responsiveness well into adolescence; very few mature men and women are fortunate enough to preserve it in their routine lives.

The most normal of us allow ourselves to become so insulated by habit that few things can break through our preoccupations except spectacular events — a catastrophe happening under our eyes, our indolent strolling blocked by a triumphal parade; it must be a matter which challenges us despite ourselves.

A writer faces real danger from this accepted dullness. Since we are not laying up for ourselves daily observations, fresh sensations, new ideas, we turn back for our material to the same period in our lives, and write and rewrite the sensations of our childhood or early years.

It is possible to strip yourself of your preoccupations, to refuse to allow yourself to go about wrapped in a cloak of oblivion day and night, although it is more difficult than one might think to learn to turn one’s attention outward again after years of immersion in one’s own problems. Deciding that you will not be oblivious is not enough. Every writer should follow Henry James: “Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost.”

Each day, recapture your five-year-old self’s intense curiosity for thirty minutes. You can feel a little self-conscious doing something so deliberately. It used to be as routine as breathing. Despite this, you can still gather volumes of new material.

Turn yourself into a stranger in your own streets.

You know how vividly you see a strange town or a strange country when you first enter it. Study the drugstore window, the streetcar that carries you to work, the crowded subway. All these can look as strange as Xanadu — once you refuse to take them for granted.

Another time speculate on the person opposite you. Where did she come from? Where is she going? What can you guess about her from her face, her attitude, her clothes? What, do you imagine, is her home like?

Try to see your home, your family, your friends, your school or office, with the same eyes you use away from your own daily route. Familiar voices can lose their unique sound.

Such simple, brief exercises improve writing skills.

No one cares to follow a dull and stodgy mind through innumerable pages, and refreshing your mind is a simple task.

This is one reason for the inexhaustible resources of the true genius. Everything that ever happened to him is his to use. No experience gets buried so far that he cannot revive it; he can find a type-episode for every situation that his imagination can present. By the simple means of refusing to let yourself fall into indifference and boredom, you can reach and revive for your writing every aspect of your life.

(from Dorothea Brande)

Learning by Reading In Reverse

The reason that Campbell’s OU Professional Writing students learned to produce salable articles and stories in just a year of training laid in their ability to self-train. This is called an auto-didact.

Campbell emphasized through his first textbook is that all the skills an author needs are already available in published books. Successful books provide authors every technical device imaginable. That author only needed to learn how to find them.

Throughout literary history, successful writers knew the “new” techniques Campbell introduced. They had to learn them over arduous decades, because no one had ever isolated and emphasized them. His text brought them out from across various writing disciplines. He noted that the technical devices used in fiction were being used by non-fiction writers. Literary techniques found in poetry are also available for other writing styles.

I first discovered Campbell’s works in reading the legendary copywriter Eugene Schwartz – who mentioned Campbell’s “Writing Non-Fiction” four times in is own masterwork.

Writing is writing. We use words to express ourselves. Just because someone wrote an Elizabethan sonnet doesn’t mean their techniques are limited to poetry and verse. So reading a translated Poetics by Aristotle will be as or more rewarding than studying today’s top-selling romance potboiler.

The trick in finding these devices is to adjust your reading habits.

You may be familiar with Rhetorical Devices from the old Greek definitions. Campbell’s use of the term “device” is broader.

Per Campbell:

A technical device is best defined as a choice and arrangement of words which solve a particular problem for the author by producing a desired effect upon the reader.

An effect has is then defined as “an impression intended by the author and produced upon the reader.” It may be intellectual or emotional, or both.

A good story, a good article or book, is a series of such small effects planned and executed with a careful view to the effect of the whole.

What the writer must learn to study in the works of others is the patterns of words which solve their writing problems. Study the words, phrases, sentences. But look also for patterns, not just specific words. Isolate them, analyze them, and practice them. So you make them your own, and have such at ready access while writing.

Learning to read with a discerning approach is key. It’s too easy to be drawn along in the story and distracted from living for awhile. That is any reader’s passive enjoyment.

The professional writer reads differently. Such pro’s read to disover where the author has created an effect on the reader and how it was done. What emotions, ideas, and thoughts did the author arouse? What reactions occurred – and what model produced this?

So the professional writer reads deliberately. They are not concerned with how the story ends. They are only interested in how the story ended for the reader.

There is a simple method to avoid being dragged headlong through a book.

1. Start with chapter one — or the first few pages. Only enough to learn what the story is about. You’ll then have the story problem.

2. Then turn to the last chapter of the book, or the last scenes of the story. Read those through. So, you learn the goal of the writer. Now you’re going to see how that author worked it out.

3. Next, turn to the preceding chapter of the book (or scene of the story) and read that. Study those with care. Make and keep your notes. Then back up one more chapter or scene and study those pages. Again, keep notes as you go.

Meaning: Read chapter 1, then read chapter 20, then chapter 19, then 18, 17, etc. Until you return to the first chapter.

Because you are always knowing what happens next, you’ll be more interested in how the author moved the reader to that point. In this, you’ll be studying methods and devices.

4. Once you’ve finished reading backward, then read the book forward again. You’ll now know the story and obvious devices. You’ll now spot what you missed the first time. Such as transitions. If it’s a true masterpiece, you’ll want to reread it to discover additional models and devices.

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Once you’ve trained yourself how to read in this fashion, you’ll run up against how to keep track of all the devices you’ve uncovered. Keeping these all in mind is as improbable as having an entire tool chest in your shirt pocket.

The solution is to keep a scrapbook of devices. To do this, you’ll require you a loose-leaf notebook, a three-hole punch, and sturdy paper or card stock pages of about 8 ½ x 11” size. With two copies of the book, cut out the device phrase and paste it on a blank page. (Having two copies is because it’s printed on both sides of each page. And maybe having a third copy for later reference is good advice. Second-hand editions are economical.)

Now:

1) Write out a heading above the clipping which tells the problem this device solves.

2) Then write out how this device solved that problem.

3) And then write your reason it was a suitable solution.

4) At last, if you have any, add your suggestions that may improve it.

The clipping and the first three points will both organize this device record and help you analyze it. The fourth is optional.

(If you are reading a digital version, it’s easier to copy/paste the clipping as a block of text. You can also enter this into a database or spreadsheet. This enables you to sort and search easier.)

Next, how do you remember these?

It’s a simple as the technique of learning unfamiliar words In this technique, you use it in three sentences of your own making.

These are called “finger exercises.” Here, you write three examples of new text that fits the model you clipped.

Let’s look at one described by Edith Wharton, as the Wave Formula:

It comprises three steps: first, the motive of the character; second, the gesture or action of the character; third, the dialogue or speech of the character. These occur in that order.

The Wave Formula is often used. Readers, lacking an initial motive, might fabricate their own, unlike the author’s. So if you give the character’s action first off, the reader may misinterpret the action, and if the writer then gives the motive, the reader will refuse to believe it. Depend upon it—in any argument between author and reader, the reader is always right!

Mrs. Wharton compared this formula with a wave of the sea making toward the shore:

• The power of the winds behind the wave is the motive.

• The rising of the wave as it rolls up the beach is the action or gesture.

• The foam on the crest as the wave breaks is the dialogue or speech.

So:

Heading - CHARACTERIZATION

Clipping

1. Joe was weary. 2. He slumped in his chair. 3. “I’m exhausted,” he gasped.

Problem of the Author

To display the convincing motive of a character.

Solution by the Author

We use the Wave Formula. The author gives (1) the motive of the character; then (2) the action which illustrates the motive. Then followed by (3) the actual words of the character which corroborate the motive and the action.

Effect upon the Reader

This triple presentation of the character’s motive is convincing and therefore may arouse the sympathy of the reader for the character.

Now try making three examples of your own:

Mary was happy. Her eyes danced. “Oh, I am having fun,” she laughed.

Or, using other subject-matter, you might say: The prisoner was furious. He struggled to free himself. “Let me go, he growled.

Or again you might write: Toby, the cat, was impatient to be fed. He clawed at the screen door, trying to get in. “Meow,” he screamed.

As you clip and practice these devices, they will then internalize so you can have them at a moments notice while you’re writing.

When you have free time, consult your scrapbook for devices that need further review. Writing examples for these to cement their usage.

We’ll see that these devices lend to each other. Each sentence seems to then lead onto the next as it follows. Samuel Tayor Coleridge noted this in his “Table Talk” about Shakespeare:

“Shakespeare goes on creating, and evolving B out of A, and C out of B, and so on, just as a serpent moves, which makes a fulcrum of its own body, and seems forever twisting and untwisting its own strength. . . . In Shakespeare one sentence begets the next naturally; the meaning is all inwoven. He goes on kindling like a meteor through the dark atmosphere.”

And so you’ll see devices connect your beginning, middle, and end. The story becomes end-to-end devices.

Readers possess finite attention. Ensure your material engages readers and keeps them reading without interruption. Because once the reader stops, they are unlikely to start again. In fact, they’ll blame you and never pick up one of your books again.

This is the problem of continuity. And its greatest reward when done right.

And is the next lesson – how to keep the reader reading?

Table of Contents

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