Smart Advice from Smart People

Some recommended reading for you, from other places on the interwebs.

A narrative will attempt to move the reader from one state to another. There’s a question of acceleration with word length: a short story must take off very quickly and land with great precision, while a novel can take its time lifting off and setting down anywhere that looks interesting along the way to a leisurely destination. It’s the difference between travelling by plane or hot air balloon. Just as the novella is not a long short story or a short novel, a novella is not a jet fighter dragging a particoloured balloon twice its size. A novella is overland travel by foot, and the length of the journey will depend on the nature of the landscape and the unique qualities of the traveller.

From Kill Your Novellas, by A.S. Patric, over on the Kill Your Darlings Website.

So, let me clear: if you are a fan of Warren Ellis work in any way, and you have not subscribed to his email newsletter, you should fucking remedy that right fucking now.

If you are a fan of smart creators doing smart things with networking tools, you should also fucking remedy that right now.

If you are…look, fuck it. The man is smart. He talks about things in a smart way. Go forth. It is a surprising thing when I actually look forward to making a cup of coffee and sitting down to read an email, but I do this every week and it’s always fucking rewarding.

Case in point.

This is the part of the job that doesn’t get talked about a lot, not least because it’s hard to talk about, but also because it doesn’t involve Productivity and Goals and The Magic Of Writering and The Grand Statement and all that good stuff in interviews. Sure, we all talk about the important Staring At The Wall And Farting Around time, but it’s also about sifting through the shitpile at the back of your head and deciding if you actually have anything to say.  Any idiot can recycle the monomyth and plug in a setting and a handful of blank characters, but that’s not the same as having something to say: about the world, life, a thing, even yourself. I have a whole folder of loose ideas that dried up and got thrown in the folder because they and I turned out to have nothing to say about anything – they were just collections of cogs and levers.  And by that, I mean probably eight to ten dead ideas, written up and filed, for every one that gets published.

It’s a moronic way to work. Some of my books only speak to me, I’m sure.  It’s just the only way to work that I know.

From Orbital Operations newsletter, May 1st, Warren Ellis

I’ve been reading my way through David Madden’s Revising Fiction, which is rapidly proving to be one of the best investments I’ve made in the last few years. I keep stumbling over things that explain the minutia of writing incredibly well.

Case in point.

Your reader expects to see, hear, touch, smell, taste. Bald statements do not necessarily stimulate the reader’s senses. “Coughing, the tall man wearing a wool suit, reeking of garlic, ran into the flower shop.” That sentence may or may not have stimulated one or more of your senses, despite my overt, rather strained effort to do so. A cluster of sensory experiences may not be as effective in a given context as focus on a single sense. “Fires on the dry mountain slopes surrounding the town had been smouldering for days.” We can see that, but we can also smell it, without including a phrase as “and I could smell the burning leaves throughout the village.” No other sense is as difficult to stimulate in fiction as smell. But most senses are more sharply stimulated by implication than by direct attempts. “The man was so tall he had to stoop to enter the room” is less effective than “John entered the room, followed by a man who had to stoop.”

Stimulating of the readers senses is a major source of that sense of immediacy the writer works to achieve in revision.

Revising Fiction: A Handbook for Writers, David Madden.