Good evening dear readers. Tonight I posted the second adventure in my Demon’s Playground fantasy/Humor/Dark Romance series, The Things That Stalked Me. I have another installment coming soon. I hope you read it, and I hope you like it. For those of you that saw my initial post on the book’s release, I’ve changed the cover, and holy crow does it look better.
What do you think?
(The book can currently be found on Amazon, and it will soon be available on Barnes and Noble.)
This week a number of students I work with told me they wanted to be writers too. When they asked me how to begin, my immediate response was to tell them this:
“Well . . . the first thing you do is pour yourself a nice cup of coffee and find a quiet place to sit. Then you fire up your word processor. Once that’s done, for God’s sake, don’t spill your coffee on the keyboard. And next, you start with a capital letter. This has to be followed with a varying number of lower case letters intermixed with punctuation marks—all of which will occur between the capital letter and a period. Then you do that over and over again until you’ve achieved your goal.”
I stopped short of saying that. High school kids aren’t ready for reductio ad absurdums like that. Especially not without a lot of follow-up.
They deserve better.
I think my off the cuff remark was a response to the enormity of what the students were asking me to tell them—kind of like asking Magellan for a short answer to this: “How do you sail around the world.”
“Well Jenny, you find yourself the biggest log you can. Make sure there’s enough room for at least hundred and ninety days of food and a crew to help you survive. Push your log into the water and head east. Keep going until you’ve made it all the way to the California coast. When you get there, call your parents for an airplane ticket home. Oh, and don’t kill any of the natives along your way.”
My real answer was just too big. And what sucked about it was that the answer wasn’t all that complex. Not really. Even though shelves of books have been written on the topic.
How do you write a novel?
You just do it.
If you want to throw something hard and pointy at me, I’ll understand. Before you do, please bear me out for a while. My intention over the next series of posts—aside from promoting my novels—is to tell you about the processes I use for my projects.
First, a word about universities.
Some of you may like what I have to say about higher education. I hope you do at any rate. Others won’t. Especially some educators—because when it comes to writing education, you’ll find I’m something of an apostate.
[Will somebody please queue Queen’s Another Brick In The Wall?]
Here goes J. David Phillips’s thoughts on college and the craft of writing. We’ll call my approach The Apostate Learning Method (TALM for short). The first premise of TALM is simple but important: You don’t need college to learn how to write well.
What you DO need is to be able to read well.
Colleges and universities CAN teach you how to write. Yes they can. But I’ve found they more often than not kill creativity and stifle the urge to rise above the kinds of academic sophistry peddled in higher education.
If you want to write well, finding a good mentor to help you has myriad benefits, and I suggest it as one of the many strategies to consider—and I will write about that topic later. But again, you do not need college for that. You can and probably will find your mentor elsewhere. Now, stop right here.
Time out.
Am I telling you not to go to college?
Nay nay.
What I am telling you to do is apprentice yourself to someone that has written and written successfully. If you find that at a college or university, consider yourself lucky.
There is another option at your disposal, however. It’s an important one.
The best guides for good writing exist in books, beginning with the classics.
You need to read.
Read, read, read, read. The greats are great for a reason. And as far as reasons go, there are plenty of reasons professors have never written anything worth reading . . . or even writing in the first place.
Why?
Ask yourself that once you’ve spent a few hours in a literary Marxist criticism class. Or better yet, a three-hour-a-week yawner called Self, The Other, and Effects of Patriarchy and Colonialism On Gender Identity.
You won’t learn to write well. I guarantee you that. You won’t even come away able to think well. You might not even come away sane.
The best many professors—even writing professors—can teach you to accomplish is a thesis paper that is about as drab and stale as a plate of Styrofoam biscuits. 100% gluten free and positively tasteless. You’ll figure them out soon enough if you go to college. When you encounter them, cutting your feet off, coating the stumps with iodine, and running away as quickly as possible might be the best option you have. If it is, take it.
Unless you are lucky enough to find a flesh and blood writer that knows what he or she is doing. This is why you need to read, read, read.
Go to school at the table of Chaucer. Eat at the banquet of Shakespeare. Fill yourself up on Tennyson’s poetry. Drink Hopkins until you are sick. Swallow stanza after stanza of Yeats if that takes away your heartburn. Learn to apprentice yourself to them. They are the masters. Memorize their works. Create a library in your head. Absorb Ray Bradbury’s style until it becomes a part of you. Do the same with Dean Koontz and Stephen King. C. S. Lewis and G. K. Chesterton. Or maybe Tammy Hoag and Harlan Coben. Let the greatest writers show you how to employ the craft of building metaphors, similes, and personifications. Mimic the ways they construct themes, settings, and dialogues. As you can see, you don’t have to confine yourself to writers that died centuries ago.
Gregory Roper is one of a rare breed of college professors that shows students how to do just what I’ve written. I highly suggest that if you want to become a writer, your time will be well spent on purchasing his book, The Writer’s Workshop.
Start there. Get the book. If you don’t come away from the exercises and lessons he provides, let me know. I’ll buy you a coffee and we’ll sit down and find out why together.
The Write frame of mind 