So You Want to Write

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  BOOKS BY MARGE PIERCY

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Chapter 1 - Sharpening Your Innate Skills

  An Exercise in Sensual Memory

  Chapter 2 - Beginnings

  Creating An Irresistible Beginning

  Exercise: Beginning in a Different Place

  Exercise: Changing the Plan of Attack

  Where to Start the Story of Your Life

  Exercise: Finding an Emotionally Moving Event

  A Fictional Version Of The Same Exercise:

  Chapter 3 - Characterization

  Exercise:

  Exercise:

  Chapter 4 - How to Avoid Writing Like a Victim

  Exercise:

  Chapter 5 - The Uses of Dialog

  Exercise:

  Exercise:

  Exercise:

  Exercise in Indirection:

  Chapter 6 - Plot In The Novel

  Make ‘Em Suffer - An Exercise for Creating a Plot

  Chapter 7 - Personal Narrative Strategies

  The Exercise: The Parallel Universe

  Chapter 8 - Choosing And Manipulating Viewpoint

  Some Exercises

  Exercise:

  Exercise:

  Exercise:

  Chapter 9 - Descriptions

  Some Exercises:

  Exercise:

  Exercise:

  Exercise:

  Exercise: The Spirit of Place

  Chapter 10 - When You Have Research To Do

  Exercise:

  Exercise:

  Chapter 11 - A Few Genres: Historical Fiction, Mystery, Science Fiction, And Fantasy

  HISTORICAL FICTION

  Exercise:

  SCIENCE FICTION

  Loosening the Imagination

  Exercise:

  Exercise:

  Exercise:

  MYSTERIES

  Exercise:

  Exercise:

  Chapter 12 - Writing Short Stories

  Exercise:

  Exercise:

  Exercise:

  Chapter 13 - Titles

  Exercise:

  Chapter 14 - Writing Humor: Learning Survival Techniques

  VOICE

  IMAGES

  EXAGGERATION

  COMIC SITUATIONS

  DETAIL

  REVERSALS OF EXPECTATIONS

  TRANSPOSITION OF EXPECTATION

  REPETITION

  JOKES

  CHARACTER

  DIALOG

  REPETITION IN DIALOG

  Chapter 15 - A Scandal In The Family

  Chapter 16 - Work And Other Habits

  Exercise:

  Chapter 17 - Fame, Fortune, And Other Tawdry Illusions Marge Piercy

  Chapter 18 - The 10 Most Destructive Things Writers Can Do (to Destroy Their ...

  Chapter 19 - Practical Information

  Chapter 20 - Frequently Answered Questions

  Do I Need An Agent?

  How Do I Get An Agent?

  Are New York Agents Better Than Those Outside New York?

  Publishers Take So Long, Can I Make Multiple Submissions?

  Isn’t It Better To Be Published By A Large Publisher Than A Small Press?

  How Much Money Do Writers Make?

  You Mentioned That You Don’t Consider It “Vanity” To Publish Yourself. What ...

  So What Do I Do If No One Will Publish My Book?

  Appendix I - Excerpted from The Kitchen Man, as referred to in Chapter 15

  Appendix II - RECOMMENDED BOOKS

  Index

  Acknowledgements

  A Note About The Authors

  ABOUT THE TYPE

  Are you ready to take the next step and get feedback on your work?

  Copyright Page

  Critical Raves for: SO YOU WANT TO WRITE

  A Selection of the Writer’s Digest Book Club

  A “Best Book of the Year for Writers” Selection

  —The Writer Magazine

  “A how-to written by a popular novelist and a successful publisher, this fine book is a distillation of the wisdom they have accumulated and dispensed over the years. The focus here is on technique. They start at the beginning with story openings and move smoothly through character building, the importance of dialogue and plot, and how to craft compelling narrative passages.”

  —Booklist

  “Those not lucky enough to have participated in the workshops can now benefit from their no-nonsense wisdom. Eschewing the current trend in process-based writing classes and guides, Piercy and Wood urge writers to read critically and read often; to ask themselves specific, exacting questions about their characters and plots; to complete the book’s writing exercises; to do research in order to make a piece of writing believable; to participate in some community of writers; and numerous other practical steps. Readers will appreciate the hardcore approach of these two dedicated writers.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “The authors conduct well-known writing seminars, and they have put much of this information into book form. They address all the elements of successful writing. They also go into work habits, overcoming the “inner censor” and dealing with publishers. A good primer for new writers; a fine reference book for any writer.”

  —The Tampa Tribune

  “Best-selling writer Piercy and novelist/publisher Wood have been co-teaching writers workshops for years and have reproduced their master course in this useful manual. The two authors encourage would-be writers to read as much as possible (included is a list of recommended books) as reading plays the key role in the process of learning how to write. Their exercises are short and to the point, just enough to get the juices flowing. This book, although joining an already saturated market is worth the shelf space.”

  —Library Journal

  “Seamless and exceptionally engaging…a valuable tool for the apprentice in search of practical advice on the craft of fiction and memoir writing from accomplished novelists.”

  —Fore Word

  “This new column, The Writing Life, helps to choose the best [of the how-to-write books] ... Writers seriously looking to have their work published should pick up So You Want to Write. Wood’s advice on getting your work published is extremely helpful and worth the cost of the book alone.”

  —The St. Petersburg Times

  BOOKS BY MARGE PIERCY

  POETRY

  Breaking Camp

  Hard Loving

  4-Telling (with Emmett Jarrett

  Dick Lourie, Robert Hershon)

  To Be of Use

  Living in the Open

  The Twelve Spoked Wheel Flashing

  The Moon is Always Female

  Circles on the Water

  Stone, Paper, Knife

  My Mother’s Body

  Available Light

  Mars and Her Children

  What Are Big Girls Made Of?

  Early Grrrl

  The Art of Blessing the Day

  Colors Passing Through Us

  Louder: We Can’t Hear You Yet!

  (A udiobook)

  FICTION

  Going Down Fast

  Dance the Eagle to Sleep

  Small Changes

  Woman on the Edge of Time

  The High Cost of Living

  Vida

  Braided Lives

  Fly A way Home

  Gone To Soldiers

  Summer People

  He, She, And It

  The Longings of Women

  City of Darkness, City of Light

  Storm Tide

  (with Ira Wood)

  Three Women

  The Third Child

  Sex Wars
>
  MEMOIR

  Sleeping with Cats

  OTHER

  Parti-Colored Blocks for a Quilt: Essays

  Early Ripening: American Women’s Poetry Now : An Anthology

  The Earth Shines Secretly: A Book of Days

  BOOKS BY IRA WOOD

  The Kitchen Man

  Going Public

  The Last White Class: A Play (with Marge Piercy)

  Storm Tide (with Marge Piercy)

  For the young who want to1

  Talent is what they say

  you have after the novel

  is published and favorably

  reviewed. Beforehand what

  you have is a tedious

  delusion, a hobby like knitting.

  Work is what you have done

  after the play is produced

  and the audience claps.

  Before that friends keep asking

  When you are planning to go

  out and get a job.

  Genius is what they know you

  had after the third volume

  of remarkable poems. Earlier

  they accuse you of withdrawing,

  ask why you don’t have a baby,

  call you a bum.

  The reason people want M.F.A.’s,

  take workshops with fancy names

  when all you can really

  learn is a few techniques,

  typing instructions and some-

  body else’s mannerisms

  is that every artist lacks

  a license to hang on the wall

  like your optician, your vet

  proving you may be a clumsy sadist

  whose fillings fall into the stew

  but you’re certified a dentist.

  The real writer is one

  who really writes. Talent

  is an invention like phlogiston

  after the fact of fire.

  Work is its own cure. You have to

  like it better than being loved.

  An Introduction to the Second Edition

  This book is a product of workshops we have given together for many years and the thousands of writers we have worked with over that time. One of the many lessons we’ve learned is that effective workshops aren’t performances but dialogs that expand and evolve, reflecting not only the knowledge of the leaders but also the interests of the writers who participate. We’ve discovered that no two workshops are ever alike. No matter the material we came prepared to cover, writers in our workshops were of many levels of experience and worked in different genres. They had different needs and questions about their work. Releasing a Second Edition of So You Want to Write has enabled us to include a variety of of topics that we’ve developed since the original publication. You’ll find new chapters on short story writing, genre writing (historical, science fiction, and mystery), humor writing, selecting a title, and how to avoid writing like a victim; many new writing exercises and examples; a personal essay on the illusions of fame; a section on the career pitfalls that many writers fall into; additions such as the writing of sex scenes and how to characterize emotion; and a lot of new information that comes from our personal give and take with writers, reflected in the updated Frequently Asked Questions and Practical Information sections.

  We usually teach personal narrative or fiction together, but each of us has also taught a version of both courses alone. In actual team-taught workshops, we divide up the topics, but we have each worked on every essay in this book. The “I” throughout the manuscript is one or the other of us; we felt it did not really matter which, and was less awkward than the royal “we” when speaking of something one of us wrote or did.

  In workshops, we use examples from many writers—but the problem of paying for permissions has led us to use only our own work or those of writers published by our press, Leapfrog. It is not egotism but the desire to keep the price of this book down that has led us to quote so freely from ourselves.

  You will find that throughout the book we will refer you to many memoirs and novels. We do this in the earnest hope that you will not only read, for example, the beginning of a piece cited as having a good one, but go on reading. Since we’ve begun teaching these master classes together, we’ve noticed an alarming trend. Students ask us what to read to improve their writing and seem disappointed when we do not refer them to the hundreds of books that have appeared on the market in the last decade that are “about” writing, or “the process” of writing, or the “path” or the “journey” taken by writers. Reading itself—the habit of reading, the immersion in books, learning how other writers have solved the same problems—seems to some emerging writers less important than developing the perfect attitude toward writing or fitting writing into a life the way they might schedule time at the gym. Great writing has been done in prisons and cramped hotel rooms and commuter trains, on rickety tables in noisy restaurants, at four in the morning before the twelve-hour workday begins. Such writing has been done by people who experienced the need to write as strongly as they experienced thirst. People seem to take it as a given that great movies have been made by those who have immersed themselves in the cinema, who find true passion on a screen in a room with no windows. Yet these same people bridle when we tell them that to be a good writer you should be as well versed in literature as Martin Scorcese is in the films of John Ford. You would not want to be defended in court by a lawyer who had read a book called The Attorney’s Journey and neglected to study case law. Likewise it seems absurd that people who want to write memoirs don’t think it necessary to read the memoirs others have written before them.

  Of course if you are not writing primarily to be published and read, you may not need or wish to be informed of the state of your art. The choice to write in journals for therapeutic reasons and for self-expression is a righteous one. Some journals, after intensive editing, have been published and cherished by readers. Often these have been the works of experienced writers or people who have lived through extraordinary times. Such memoirs have been more carefully shaped than the word “journal” might imply.

  Nevertheless, this book is about writing to be published, about learning the elements of craft that modern readers have come to expect, such as the ability to seduce your reader with a good beginning and to create characters who are more than stereotypes. Most writers use notebooks in one way or another, whether in the form of a laptop or a Palm Pilot or a spiral pad or even scraps of paper napkins: some way of capturing random ideas or snippets of dialog overheard or insights from a nightmare. This note-taking is not to be confused with the journal kept by a young man in one of our classes who had more than a thousand single-spaced handwritten pages about his family that he expected us to tell him how to turn into a novel. For years he had been dutifully writing down his thoughts when he woke up every morning. Now he was overwhelmed by the task of recopying and editing these impressions and memories into a manuscript with a shape: a beginning, a plot, and characters who could come to life in a mind other than his own. (For instance, a man who had needs and motivations and a history understandable to a reader, as opposed to the workaholic bully who was all the writer saw when imagining his father.) Eventually, he decided to start from scratch on the novel and use his journal as a reference.

  Where we have included exercises, we recommend actually trying them to get full benefit. We ask people to do these in our classes and have found they work. A number of people who have taken our workshops have gone on to publish, some quite successfully; many make the leap to submitting their work to book publishers and zines, while others have joined writers groups or used these essays and exercises to motivate their own students. We don’t for a moment imagine that our advice is the last word on writing. It is simply the distillation of many years of professional experience in literature and publishing. What we most hope to communicate, in our classes and in this book, are the skills necessary to read critically. That is, what to look for as you read, what questions to ask. How
have other writers solved the problems of drawing in a reader who is faced with thousands of other titles? How have other writers used dialog to advance their plot?

  We have a dear friend who hates cookbooks. Whenever she makes a casserole or creates a soup, she insists on inventing from scratch. She thinks it’s more creative, or that she’s avoiding the reenactment of her mother’s tired life. The product leaves much to be desired. Roast lamb really isn’t very good well-done in salsa. Cashews are seldom found in tomato soup for a reason. We hope you won’t write like this dear woman cooks. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel or the novel. There is always room for innovation, but you won’t know what’s new and what’s tired if you don’t read widely and critically. This book is a craft workshop on paper, but if you only read it without trying out at least some of what is suggested, you won’t get the maximum benefit.

  1

  Sharpening Your Innate Skills

  I believe the barriers to creativity are both inner and outer. The distinction between madness and sanity is one made by those around us: they honor us or they commit us. An act that brings admiration in one society will get you locked up in another. Seeing visions was a prerequisite for adulthood in Plains Indian societies, and quite dangerous today. Societies also differ in how they regard the artist, how integrated into the ordinary work of the community she or he is thought to be, how nearly the society regards artistic production as real production, as a reasonable adult activity—a job, in other words.

  Working in any of the arts in this society is a self-elected activity. Although parents may applaud their children’s performances in school plays, I have never heard of a parent who did not try to discourage a child who decided to become a professional actor. Even the occasional bit of back-slapping advice you get from peers is usually based on the misapprehension that writing is much easier than it is and that it is infinitely more well paid than is the case. If you tell a friend one week that you are trying to start a novel, likely they will ask you what you are doing the next month, be astonished that you are still writing the same novel, and so on; and when you have finished, they will ask whether you have sold it yet, as if selling a novel were easy.