Being A Professional Writer

,

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781847165121
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Creative Writing
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The perfect book for anyone wanting to develop their writing skills, whether through a study course or as a hobby. The guide provides the knowledge essential for approaching this growing and highly marketable area with confidence, covering research, self-assessment, improving skills, and submitting work.

1

You the Writer

One-minute summary – There are as many writing ‘voices’ as there are writers.

Research has shown that we each have a specific way of using language, and that the old rule about ‘Don’t write the way you speak’ is not necessarily the right advice.

Successful writing is defined as that variety of verbal composition that you personally wish to produce. Therefore it is virtually impossible simply to produce that writing to a satisfactory level without preparation. This pre-writing stage is the subject of the first chapter. We look at established ways of using your own resources and life-experience; then we move on to a consideration of the choices open to you in forms, conventions and genres.

In this chapter you will learn:

➢ How to access and use your own resources and experience

➢ What thinking goes into choosing your writing category

➢ How to take stock of yourself as a reader and writer

➢ What factors influence your decisions: long-term planning and aims

Taking stock of experience

Write from life?

In our lives as writers, from the first sentences at school to the writing of an epic novel, we tend to play safe most of the time and ‘write about what we know’, but no-one is sure whether or not we fall into two groups of those who write from actuality and those who have to make things up. For many of us, telling stories is a mixture of both. But some of us feel safer and more comfortable with ‘facts’. Some experience is ideal for use in creative writing and some has very little potential. But these definitions change with every individual.

Is everything a fit subject for writing?

In 1925, a writer on literature said that there were five subjects for poetry: love, nature, women, life and religious belief. What he meant by ‘life’ is unclear, but it is true that in the period of English history up to the early twentieth century there were certain subjects considered to be suitable for poetry and some that were not.

We live in different times. The pace of life has accelerated and the communications revolution has meant that the global village concept has changed our ideas about the personal life. To take stock of one single life – to log and comment on a constant flow of life-data – has become the focal concern of modern writers. Therefore, in starting out as a writer, consider some fundamental ideas about your life and how it is or is not ‘material’ for your writing.

For instance, think about these questions:

Do you find it easy to invent stories and characters?

In conversation, are you mainly a talker or a listener?

Do you always have the habit of reflecting on your life (as in a diary)?

When you choose a book to read for pleasure, do you like imagined worlds or a world that reflect the real world?

A matter of taste

Taking stock of experience, with potential creative writing in mind, is largely about considering yourself in ways you perhaps never did before. These questions are meant to make you think about your instinctive relationship with books and stories, words and life itself.

There are many ways to examine your life, and the maxim from Socrates that to ‘know thyself’ is the basis of wisdom applies here too. In writing classes there are always plenty of people who have never undergone this initial thinking stage, and they start to write without a foundation of real knowledge.

In doing the following preparatory exercises, always follow your ‘taste’ in art and storytelling. The word for the study of beauty and art, aesthetics, is useful here. Each of us has an aesthetic profile and this plays a major part in our formation as artists and writers. For instance, you could list these:

Favourite stories – in any genre?

Preferences in ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow’ literature and art?

Music and the visual arts in your life – decoration and time-filling only?

Time spent discussing art, books and ideas?

A recent debate in the media looked yet again at the question of ‘Is Bob Dylan a better poet than John Keats?’ This is a meaningless question, though it has its interest for a writer. The word ‘better’ has no meaning. As Shakespeare said, ‘What is ought but as ‘tis valued?’ In other words, you like what you like: end of story. But as an aspiring writer you need to know where you stand in terms of this aesthetic profile. That means being sure of your answers to questions like these:

➢ What kinds of stories interest you most and why?

➢ Do you make time to talk about responses to these stories?

➢ Do you tend to feel deep responses to art, with no need to talk?

➢ Have you dismissed some art-forms from life – and why?

➢ Why do you dismiss stories told in particular forms and genres?

➢ For example, if people mention jazz or opera or modern dance, do you immediately ‘turn off’? Do you only like ‘what you like’ or are you open to new aesthetic ideas and forms?

Life and art: transmutation

All these questions are important because people tend to form their tastes without reason or purpose. There may be no pattern. But if you have favourite book that you always return to, then start relating this to your own use of words and love of stories. Our lives are our most profound and probably infinite resource when we start to write. The ordinary life is often overlooked. Never discount experience, and never say that nothing worth writing about has ever happened to you. Gustave Flaubert set out to write his story a Simple Heart as a challenge: to make an ordinary life extraordinarily interesting.

Creative writing of any kind is about taking a second look, or even dredging feelings and responses from life-date that have long passed into the ‘dark backward and abysm of time.’ Writing is about reclamation – but of feelings, not fossils from rock.

Aims and aspirations

Why are you writing?

We all have different reasons for wanting to write. For some it may be a personal ambition simply to see their name in print. Others may want to change the world. P.G. Wodehouse quite clearly invented Jeeves and Wooster to entertain. Although critics have read all kinds of meanings into the books, the intention of the writer is always almost impossible to pin down. John Braine, author of Room at the Top, was once asked how hard it was writing a scathing indictment of corruption in regional British political life. He replied that he just wanted to write a story of love and desire.

For the writer setting out in any type of composition, from screen-writing to science fiction, the question needs answering at the early sage: for whom do you write?

The old man and the poor woman

A famous American novelist once expressed this point in this way. He said we should decide whether we want to write for the rich old man, in a wheelchair with a butler by him and a rug over his knees, reading your paragraph over a third time, or for the young woman in the tenement, desperately trying to finish her romance novel before the candle goes out, as she has no coins for the meter. So, for whom do you write?

Give some thought to your own specific aims in writing. You might consider these factors:

➢ Is there a writer who is your ‘template’ or role model? (Why?)

➢ Do you want to entertain or instruct the reader – or both?

➢ Is the research and preparation as interesting to you as the writing itself?

➢ Have you been told by friends/parents/teachers that you can writer particular things?

Stages of Writing

In our lives as writers, after we have mastered basic sentence structure and can produce fluent prose with suitable vocabulary, we tend to go through six stages:

One: releasing

Here we write largely for ourselves. The nature of this writing is a need to put feelings into words to make sense of them, and to express responses to experience. There is no sense of readership.

Two: documenting-limited

Here we are still coping with the factual basis of writing, although a readership may be intended.

Three: documenting extended

Choices are now being made about the form and expression of the material gathered. For instance, something may take the form of a short story, a one-act play or an article.

Four: narrating-limited

Now we make new and hesitant efforts to use forms and conventions which have a defined reader. So this could be our first writing in genre or in-house style.

Five: narrating-extended

There is now a more profound understanding of the shared experience of the text by reader and writer. So this is very advanced, with a sure sense of the right style and language needed.

Six: critiquing

The final stage is that at which we can apply long and insightful reflection on the texts we have produced: so detailed editing, re-writing and drafting are part of this, but also the placing of our writing within a wide context of writing in society generally.

These terms come from research done by Dr Greg Light, and full details of his writing are included in the bibliography. Notice that the process is one that starts with a simple unloading of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. You the Writer
• 2. Observation and Recording
• 3. Practice in prose
• 4. Practice in Poetry
• 5. Gathering the Right Resource
• 6. Ready for print?
• 7. Re-writing and editing your work
• 8. Creative Non-Fiction
• 9. Starting out in Fiction
• 10. Writing for performance
• Glossary
• Reference: Print
• Web sites for writers