On Writing

  • |

    Will readers completely die off?

    ByJohn Brown

    For many years people have been predicting the death of literature because the stats on the reading public  show fewer and fewer books are being sold because fewer people are reading. For an author it’s a bit depressing. However, you might find this article provides some hope: http://www.newsweek.com/id/136961.

    Generation R (R Is for Reader)
    The book business may be flat, but there’s at least one bright spot: the booming sales of books for teens–and no, it’s not all Harry Potter… Contrary to the depressing proclamations that American teens aren’t reading, the surprising truth is they are reading novels in unprecedented numbers. Young-adult fiction (ages 12-18) is enjoying a bona fide boom with sales up more than 25 percent in the past few years, according to a Children’s Book Council sales survey…”

    If that trend holds, it means we’ll have a fine wave of readers to replace all of us who die off, and then some. Someone praise JK Rowling for Hogwarts and for awakening pleasure reading in the hearts of children (and adults).

    And take it as a lesson. The future is in the next generation. Perhaps reading provides just as much entertainment as anything else. The kids just have to discover it.

    Hopefully, Nellie will be doing her part to awaken that joy in the hearts of the marvelous youth of our small town. As I wrote before, she’s going to be following the steps of Nancie Atwell who has done amazing things for 20+ years up in Maine.

    http://www.amazon.com/Middle-Understanding-Writing-Learning-Workshop/dp/0867093749
    http://www.c-t-l.org/about.html

    It’s all about reading and writing for the intrinsic joy of reading and writing. Only 15 minutes of her 65 minute class will be spent in traditional lecture. The rest is for the kids to read and write. This isn’t study hall. It’s rigorous. And again, it follows the principles I learned in my last 20 years of teaching and learning how to write.

    I cannot wait to see what happens this fall!

  • Meyer on the Brain

    ByJohn Brown

    Watch an interesting Borders interview with Meyer about Host and Twilight. The thing I keep seeing in her interviews is that this woman follows her passion. She follows the story that wows her. It’s nice, of course, that millions of fans want to share that wow with her. But I don’t know that a writer can be successful doing anything else.

    Here’s Orson Card’s blurb about Meyer in Time’s list of the 100 Most Influential People

    Nobody was looking for Twilight. A Mormon housewife writes a young-adult novel about a love affair between a teenage girl and a vampire?

    Is this Anne Rice lite? Not in the eyes of the teenagers—and their mothers—who have embraced the book.

    But Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight does raise some questions, and I’ve asked them. “You really want your teenage daughter to live inside the story of a girl who lies to her parents, invites a boy to sleep in her bed and trusts him not to take advantage of her?”

    These women look at me as if I’m insane. “But she can trust him. He really loves her. He’s…perfect.”

    In an era when much of the romance genre has been given over to soft porn, and dark fantasy is peopled with one-dimensional characters bent on grim violence, many readers have become hungry for pure romantic fantasy—lots of sexual tension, but as decorous as Jane Austen.

    Meyer, 34, did not calculatedly reach for that audience. Instead, she wrote the story she believed in and cared about. She writes with luminous clarity, never standing between the reader and the dream they share. She’s the real thing. Still, who’d have thought it? Today Mr. Darcy is a vampire.

    Card is author of Ender’s Game, Empire and Women of Genesis

  • |

    Workshop: The 3 Things You Must Learn to Write Killer Stories

    ByJohn Brown

    Where: Salt Lake City at CONduit 

    Date: Saturday, May 24, 2008

    Time: 2 PM – 4 PM

    I had tons of great feedback from the last workshop. It seemed to be helpful to quite a few people. There are a number of other good workshops for writers going on before and after mine that you’ll want to look into as well.

    For more information go to the CONduit website.

  • Trusting the writing process

    ByJohn Brown

    I’ve experienced yet again the miracle of manure, of starting from scratch, and following the zing.

    This last week I’ve been rewriting a beginning to a novel. It’s a bit tricky because I can’t just rewrite it without constraint. Such a rewrite would cause massive changes to everything else in the book. In fact, a complete, unfettered rewrite of a beginning might end up requiring a totally different book. But Tor bought the book in hand. Besides, I don’t have time for a total rewrite even if they did want one. So the new beginning had to fit into the rest of the current story.

    At three different spots where this beginning needed significant changes I have had to write a pile of cow crap because it’s all I had in me at the time. I knew I couldn’t use those plops when I finished them. But there they were.

    The problem was compounded by my reading the recent Time article about Stephenie Meyer and starting to listen to Empire by Card. I have a weakness for comparing myself to others, and this time the comparison yeilded some depressing results.

    Then I asked myself what wasn’t working and how I might meet the goals of those scenes a bit better. I followed my heart. But in all three cases I had to stop trying to use the brilliant words I had written originally. Not the cow crap revision, but the original stuff.

    I’m not talking about the general prescription that we writers need to “murder our darlings” because the darlings are usually bad writing. I find general prescriptions to be wrong much of the time and that one in particular to make no sense at all.

    In this case one of the things I had to jettison was a beginning segment that had compelled 90% of the readers who glanced at it to read more. A beginning page that snagged agents and editors. A beginning page I still loved, even after reading it as many times as I had.

    But it just wouldn’t fit, couldn’t fit with the new structure. When I tried to hang onto it, I wrote crap. Which was fine. There was some good stuff in the crap. But I eventually had to trust myself and come up with something else completely.

    And while I don’t know if it’s going to suck readers in like the original, I think it’s pretty dang good. Back before Card’s boot camp I would have never made it to this point. I would have given up. But this is just the process for me now. It took some time to learn and trust it. But now I know that while sometimes I can write hot. There’s no reason to despair if I don’t. Sometimes it takes a few tries before I get to the good stuff.

    As for Meyer and Card, well, it’s not my goal to be a one-trick pony, now, is it. 🙂