How to Plan, Write, and Develop a Book: Famous Writers' Favorite Tips

My Favorite Writing Books

A Writer's Time by Kenneth Atchity
Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
From Where You Dream by Robert Olen Butler
On Writing by Stephen King
Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose
Story Matters by Margaret-Love Denman and Barbara Shoup
Tell It Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction by Brenda Miller and Suzanna Paola
The Art of Slow Writing by Louise DeSalvo
The Art of Time in Fiction by Janet Silber
The Passionate, Accurate Story by Carol Bly
The Situation and the Story by Vivian Gornick
What If? by Pamela Painter and Anne Bernays
Word Painting by Rebecca McClanahan
Writers Dreaming by Naomi Epel
Writing Fiction by Janet Burroway
Writing Tools by Roy Peter Clark
Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular by Rust Hills

Sample Writing Exercise from My Online Classes: Dialogue with Your Book

Pretend you’re a reporter for the New York Times. You’re going to interview your book idea.

List some questions you’d love to ask your book about its form, content, goals. You can start with something nonthreatening, as you would if you were a real reporter.

Ask your book some very good questions. Some ideas from my class are below, or you can make up your own:

What do you want to tell me about yourself?
What form suits you best?
Who is your readership and how will they
access you?
What are you most eager to say?
What are you most afraid to say?
What genre are you?

Imagine the book answering you. Write
everything down--no matter how odd, silly, or
irrelevant it seems.

When it runs out of things to say (or you get
nervous about the answers) ask a different question.

The goal of this book-writing exercise is to surprise yourself. You’ll tap the hidden parts of yourself as a writer, the parts we often censor. You can strike gold--if you maintain the attitude of no-assumptions and anything can happen.

Friday, November 2, 2018

Famous Writers' Favorite Tips

I'm just back from a marathon teaching trip so this week's post will be short and sweet: a wonderful article from the newsletter, BrainPickings, on famous writers' favorite writing tips, compiled by The Guardian. (Thanks to reader Mary K. for the link.) Enjoy!

(If the link doesn't work, go to www.brainpickings.org and search for Jeanette Winterson.)

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Encouraging Words--Well-Known Writers with Large Number of Rejections--But Published!

Because of Winn-Dixie by Kate DiCamillo--397 rejections (and it became a movie)
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle--97 rejections (and it won the Newbery Medal for best children's book of 1963; it's now in its 69th printing)
Cinder Edna by Ellen Jackson--40 rejections (and it has won multiple awards and sold 150,000 hard copies).
Judy Blume says she received "nothing but rejections" for 2 years.
Princess Diaries by Meg Cabot--17 rejections
Harry Potter novels by J.K. Rowling--rejected by 9 publishers
The Diary of Anne Frank--16 rejections (and now more than 30 million copies are in print)
Dr. Seuss books--more than 15 rejections
Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach--140 rejections
Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell--38 rejections
Watership Down by Richard Adams--26 rejections
Dune by Frank Herbert--nearly 20 rejections

To all book writers: Believe in your story. Keep trying. The right home for your book is out there, waiting for you to discover it.

Thanks to these websites for cool information:
http://www.debbieohi.com/personal/rejections.html
http://www.richardpettinger.com/interests/rejections-of-famous-writers

Want to get the creative brain going?

Book writers (and any writers) need to know how to engage the creative right brain that "writes" in images. Think of any wonderful book that's left you swimming in a setting or characters--the writer has successfully used the image-creating part of the brain. But our normal workaday lives short-circuit this part. Check out this cool video of Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, a brain scientist at Harvard Medical School, recounting her personal experience of a left-brain stroke and her awakening to right-brain reality. Pretty amazing fusion of brain science with what it feels like to a brain scientist having a stroke:
http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/229

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Read More Posts from This Blog

My Favorite Writing Books

Sample Writing Exercise from My Online Classes: Dialogue with Your Book

Books for the Blocked--These'll Get You Moving Again!