Lars Eighner's Homepage Writers' Workshop: Creative Writing Basics

Creative Writing Basics

The Recreational Writer

Recreational writing—it's web version is called blogging—is an admirable hobby. It is more creative than working crossword puzzles. It exercises the intellect and the imagination, and it is considerably less vicious than graffiti tagging. I am not being facetious in saying that I think recreational writing is a fine thing.

However, recreational writing is not the same thing as writing for publication.

A recreational writer doesn't have to please anyone except him- or herself. If it suits the recreational writer to use a Barnum & Bailey font on lime green paper (or background), that is fine. If the recreational writer wants to fill page after page with nonsense words, there is no harm in that. If the recreation writer rambles on, never making any point and not writing much that is interesting to anyone else—well, why not?

There is no problem with recreational writing. The problem occurs when a person who is doing recreational writing confuses that with writing for publication. If you are a recreational writer, a recreational writer is what you want to be, and you derive some satisfaction, amusement, or edification from recreational writing, you have my admiration and respect for having found such a constructive, educational, and rewarding pastime. I hope some of the lessons here will be of interest to you and will stimulate you to pursue more and better recreational writing.

Diarists have become famous writers, and no doubt the best bloggers will attract an attentive audience to their blogs. Such things happen. And someone wins each lotto jackpot, eventually. You may blog and dream of becoming a great and famous writer in the same way that you may buy a ticket and dream of winning a jackpot. But neither counts as plan for paying the rent.

If, however, you entertain some hope of publication, of having your work read beyond a small circle of friends and relatives—or of someone other than guys in front of their monitors in their underwear—or if you hope of achieving fame or influence or even of making a little money by writing, then you ought to approach writing not as a recreation, but as a craft.

These tutorials address writing as a craft or even as a trade. I believe some of them will be useful to recreational writers as well, but I will not accept as valid the criticism that the tutorials do not wholly suit the purpose of recreational writers because that is not the purpose I intend to serve.

Wannabees and Writers

By wannabees I do not mean anything derogatory—so if you think "wannabee" means something like perpetual loser, then substitute "aspiring" where I have written "wannabee". Everyone who gets to be a writer begins as a wannabee. Unfortunately, many or perhaps even most wannabees get stuck at this stage and never develop into to writers. Many writers will admit to having remained in the wannabee stage too long. And I admit it too. I got much good advice and excellent instruction that I did not put into practice for a long time—and even today have not exploited fully.

I hear very much the same thing from other writers I have discussed this with. We all are mystified as to why we did not do as we were told much earlier. But not totally mystified. I am beginning to understand just a few of the wannabee attitudes that keep people stuck in that place for too long and sometimes forever.

These are just a few of sticking points:

I'm creative. One of the reasons people get stuck in the wannabee stage, I think, is they are creative people. Creative people want to do new and different things and they want to do things in their own way. Creative people tend to think that rules for ordinary people do not apply to creative people—and of course, some of the rules don't. However, some of the rules in creative writing are little more or less than the distilled experiences of many other creative people, and in ignoring them the wannabee is likely to meet the same fate as any other craftsman who ignores the advice of the masters. The person who invented the electric toothbrush was being creative (for good or ill), but he or she did not try to make it a perpetual motion machine: there was no attempt to get creative with the laws of physics.
I'm waiting for inspiration. The thought is something is wrong with writing except in flashes of white-hot inspiration, perhaps that there is something artistically dishonest about planning a project and working with some regularity at completing it. Yes, inspiration does happen. Sometimes the results are very good. Other times the inspired work doesn't look quite so wonderful. Much is made of serendipity, but the truth of the matter is that serendipity tends to smile on those who are prepared to receive its favors. The discovery of penicillin is often cited as an example of serendipity—but ask yourself, could it have happened if Alexander Fleming were not a trained bacteriologist, in a laboratory, doing the business of bacteriology? Inspiration is not a lightning bolt that strikes at random. Literary inspiration tends to favor those who are doing the business of literature, who are writing.
Everyone is a hack but me. This is the thought that structure and formula are the same thing. Structure is not formula. A formula is a rather strict recipe for novel, often assigned by "work-for-hire" publishers of romance novels that come with a wine glass or adult novels that have very much the same covers, with more-or-less interchangeable characters. I have simplified the plotting process in other tutorials so they do seem a bit like fill-in-the-blanks formulas. But they aren't. They are simplifications, and the blanks can filled in with just about anything. Formulas are much more detailed and are more like multiple choice.
I just don't have any ideas. As should be evident to anyone who works through the novel tutorial, ideas are cheap and easy to come by. What "not having any ideas" usually means is not having any ideas that seem truly great—sure-fire tickets to the bestseller list. Ideas of that kind never—or hardly ever—occur to anyone, yet plenty of books are written and garner fame and fortune for their authors. All, or almost all, ideas look lousy at their birth. They get to be great ideas by being researched, reconsidered, and worked on. If you don't have a great idea, pick a lousy, trivial one—pick one at random—and work on it.

Scams to Watch Out For

A number of scams are designed to profit from the aspirations of those who wish to become writers. Most of them have in common an implicit or explicit promise of publication if the writer pays money from some thing or service.

Legitimate literary agents do not charge reading fees. That is all there is to it. Anyone pretending to be an agent who asks for a reading fee or a payment against expenses is not on the up and up. Legitimate agents make their money from commissions on sales. They don't get a penny until they have collected money for the author from a publisher. One of the most notorious agencies haunting USENET is Woodside, which has mailing addresses in New York and Miami. No legitimate agency advertises for clients on USENET or in magazines; no legitimate agency has any need of advertising.

Vanity presses, self-publishing, and subsidy publishers are not always scams. Under certain circumstances self-publishing or subsidy publishing might be a reasonable way to proceed, but almost no novels or general interest books meet those circumstances.

There are a number of ghost writing, book doctors, and editorial services that prey on aspiring writers. Some of them even go so far as to set up dummy agencies to give themselves referrals. The most notorious at the moment is Edit Ink, but there are several others who take out small ads in magazines.

Naturally I don't think there is anything wrong with paying for instruction or professional criticism. Some people can learn to write in these ways when other ways don't seem to work for them.

What is wrong with the scams is the implicit promise of publication. The writer is led to believe that the manuscript is almost good enough for publication and that one particular service can make the difference. Legitimate instructors and critics will not promise or seem to promise that a writer's work will be published any more that a legitimate driving instructor will promise his students will never get a ticket. Moreover, legitimate instructors and critics will attempt to teach the writer to make revisions for him- or herself. There is such a thing as legitimate book doctoring: usually the book doctor is called in to help make a manuscript from a very famous person publishable. This makes economic sense for a celebrity book that will certainly sell briskly. But in the ordinary novel, there is not enough money to pay both the author and a book doctor.