MORE ON WRITING
(More on Writing? You should call it Moron Writing. You remind me of Jerry Lewis. Remember when he lectured people on comedy when they cancelled his unfunny TV show? Who made you an expert on writing?)
That CHAPTER ONE that I posted below totally sucks. I can’t start off an action-adventure yarn with total blandness such as that. I have to begin with a grabber. I have to get the reader’s attention.
That chapter will have to be moved back a little.
Oh well, this is a learning process.
The first draft is finished. It’s about 100,000 words or 400 pages. I draw heavily on my experiences in Viet Nam and Iran but it’s total fiction. It is also totally on a hard copy only so I have to retype everything.
I plan to put the whole thing way back in the archives. Maybe I’ll put an excerpt up here now and then if something worthwhile appears.
The best writing, for me, is the stuff that is virtually written before I begin.
The two entries below are examples of that. The COBRA and the JESUS stories were complete in my head before sat down at the keyboard.
That doesn’t make them great prose, but stuff that is easy to write comes out easy to read.
That is my goal.
Sometimes I have to work very hard to make stuff easy to read.
UPDATE: That kibitzer entry at the beginning is an afterthought. It is pretty presumptuous for a totally unsuccessful writer to lecture on writing. That kibitzer can be pretty cruel, but he’s my best friend.
That CHAPTER ONE that I posted below totally sucks. I can’t start off an action-adventure yarn with total blandness such as that. I have to begin with a grabber. I have to get the reader’s attention.
That chapter will have to be moved back a little.
Oh well, this is a learning process.
The first draft is finished. It’s about 100,000 words or 400 pages. I draw heavily on my experiences in Viet Nam and Iran but it’s total fiction. It is also totally on a hard copy only so I have to retype everything.
I plan to put the whole thing way back in the archives. Maybe I’ll put an excerpt up here now and then if something worthwhile appears.
The best writing, for me, is the stuff that is virtually written before I begin.
The two entries below are examples of that. The COBRA and the JESUS stories were complete in my head before sat down at the keyboard.
That doesn’t make them great prose, but stuff that is easy to write comes out easy to read.
That is my goal.
Sometimes I have to work very hard to make stuff easy to read.
UPDATE: That kibitzer entry at the beginning is an afterthought. It is pretty presumptuous for a totally unsuccessful writer to lecture on writing. That kibitzer can be pretty cruel, but he’s my best friend.
posted by Walter Guest at 5:48 PM
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