A MONSTER Round-Up of Articles on Writing, Creativity, All That Jazz That I've Been Loving
Get ready, kids.
This may be controversial, but here goes: I don’t read books on craft. They’re often overly didactic, dry, and filled with so many rules that seasoned writers know can, and should, be broken. I didn’t learn how to write from books instructing me how to write, I just wrote and kept writing and kept at it and learned from readers, peers, friends, teachers, and other writers along the way. I learn by observing other people practicing their craft because learning by doing (and by example) is perhaps one of the best ways to learn.
Years ago, I published my second book and I struggled with a chapter that was from a child’s first person point-of-view. Writing from that vantage point is tough because by definition it has to be limited. What’s happening on and below the surface is only realized by the child acting as if they were a camera. They document the scene and we analyze it as they’re not equipped to truly understand what’s going on.
Up until then I’d never written from the perspective of a ten-year-old child so I re-read Emma Donoghue’s The Room, which is perhaps one of the finest recent examples of a horrifying world seen and expressed through and by a child. I deconstructed chapters and saw how scenes were structured. How using the child as a camera to depict how others were acting and reacting through the five senses gave me the tools I needed for my own book.
I read a lot. I study other writers. I dissect their work like surgery. And I write and keep on writing until I get it right. And a lot of people want quick, simple answers of how to do this and how to do that, and I always respond with keep writing, keep reading, you will figure it out in a way that’s more profound than any instructional manual will tell you.
Now, I can read a sentence and intuitively know if it sounds right. Doing the work and learning from it has trained me in ways an essay couldn’t.
However, there are some resources I’ve found useful. Mostly, it’s less pedagogical and more a writer speaking from their experience. It’s not how to do this, rather, it’s how I did this. Doing so allows us freedom to pick and choose what parts work for us and discard that which doesn’t.
I hope you find the collection of links useful. Or, at the very least, you’ve discovered some new writers to read.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Hermit Diaries to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.