know in the tech world. I agreed to put the novel that I’d spent the previous five years writing on the shelf.
Starting a new book meant that I wouldn’t have to confront these terrible flaws that this charming editor had brought to my attention. Starting a new book meant I could start fresh.
I had a BA and an MFA in Creative Writing. I had been encouraged to write the book I was about to shelve by my first writing teacher, a novelist herself, who believed the story, the characters, and the writing to be strong and compelling.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author billed me a whopping $3,500 and washed her hands of me. I never even got a write-up of comments. Her work was a wholesale smash job.
How quickly I put five years of writing, revising, and editing on the shelf, not to mention the years of getting up at 5:00 a.m. to write for two hours before work. Unbeknownst to me, the “editor” had a terrible reputation for tearing writers down.
What happens next is that I blew it. Big time.
Crafting a Great Piece of Writing
“Anyone who is an inspired storyteller…knows that the essence of good storytelling is not assembling a heap of facts but having the imagination to leap through an arc of bright truths to create a great arc of invention. A story is a constellation of stars, a recognizable shape made from shining bits of fact that may exist empirically at different levels and different spatial depth.”
—Adam Gopnik, on the author Romain Gary, The New Yorker, January 2018
While Gopnik describes writing, he himself crafts an impressive piece of journalistic prose. By using imagery (an arc of bright truths), analogy (a story is a constellation of stars), and metaphor (the story exists empirically at different levels and different spatial depths), Gopnik crafts a sentence that you want to read over and over. You might like to contemplate “a constellation of stars” or how a story exists at different levels and different spatial depths.
By using basic tools of craft, he creates a memorable paragraph, as well as an excellent argument.
When I taught poetry to school-aged children, we broke down teaching into five basic elements:
•Imagery—draw a picture with words.
•Sound—use words to clash, rhyme and accentuate each other.
•Repetition—use the same words to make your piece memorable and incantational.
•Analogy and metaphor.
•By using the five senses—sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch—your writing will come alive with the specifics of the world.
It is common knowledge that many poets have become novelists of extraordinary success.
Michael Ondaatje and Alice Walker are just two examples. Because poetry is a kind of shorthand, an unforgiving and compact form (no wasteful words, no unsubstantiated arguments or theses), writers who start as poets quickly learn the beauty of the economy of words. Other writers who wrote poetry and fiction were Jorge Luis Borges, Agatha Christie, and Kingsley Amis.
About writer Reed Farrel Coleman: “Poetry was RFC’s first calling, and it also brought him to crime fiction: ‘I heard the poetry in the language of Chandler and Hammett, listened to the meter behind their words, and thought that I wanted to try my hand at it,’ he writes on his website. ‘The truth is, I knew I could do it. I realized, at last, that all those poetry writing classes and the classes I’d taken in Renaissance, Romantic, Victorian, and modern poetry had been more than fascinating wastes of my time.’ ”1
“A book has to smell. You have to hold it in your hand and breathe it in.”
—Ray Bradbury
So how long should your book be? Two hundred pages? Three hundred? Seven hundred? How much is enough, and how much is too much? On the importance of the economy of language, novelist Ethan Canin taught: “Could you write in three words what you just wrote in ten?”
This teaching could not be of more importance now. Now that we receive a virtual tidal wave of information, readers read quickly; they want to get the point, and get it fast.
Oh, and what we also taught children? Don’t be afraid of humor!
And, always let your imagination run loose. Have fun. (Remember Dr. Seuss? Whimsical, nonsensical, and so beloved!)
Poet Stephen Kopel, San Francisco writer, radio host, and organizer of the Word Dancer literary series, sees himself as a thorough craftsperson in shaping stacks of words into something beautiful, thoughtful, comical and pleasurable to both readers and listeners.
Kopel begins with concept. “My journey into the world of language…is fraught with possibilities…thank goodness. My principal interest is having as much fun in both concept and composition as I can muster toward that end. I first start with a composition of lines in which associative values, a dose of punnery, and the breaking apart of multisyllabic nouns can be expanded into two or more words.”
For the reader’s continued pleasure, here is an example of two lines from “Prankster” by Stephen Kopel:
“the
Wind”
please put on a summer show, a carnival of shrieks,
skinny sounds or fat.
Adam Gopnik, above, spoke of a story as existing “at different levels and different spatial depths.”
Poet Mary Mackey, author of fourteen novels and seven volumes of poetry, and the winner of the Josephine Miles award from PEN, taught creative writing at Sacramento State University for over thirty years. She calls it “layering,” but it is the same concept. By using language creatively, you can take a reader from one level of experience to another in just a few words.
“Purity”
By Billy Collins
My favorite time to write is in the late afternoon,
weekdays, particularly Wednesdays.
This is how I get about it:
I take a fresh pot of tea into my study and close the door.
Then I remove my clothes and leave them in a pile
as if I had melted to death and my legacy consisted of only
a white shirt, a pair of pants and a pot of cold tea.
Then I remove my flesh and hang it over a chair.
I slide it off my bones like a silken garment.
I do this so that what I write will be pure,
completely
