ICUメサイア

Basics are important, and writers need to learn those first.What sets a breakout novel apart from other novels?Writers, this strategy is open to you too!What are you struggling with?They continue to resonate for the audience and even for their creators.Lucinda Williams told a story about her father, the poet Miller Williams, listening to her perform Car Wheels on a Gravel Road for the first time.After the performance, he found her backstage and apologized to her.Until that moment she had not thought of the song as being about her childhood, but it was immediately clear to her that it was.The raw power of that song was fueled by an energy Williams hadn’t even realized she had tapped.That’s the problem we wrestle with as writers, right?Those emotional depths where the idea fish swim are often chilly, dark places.Maybe on a Tuesday at 8:00 a.m.Maybe we don’t ever feel inclined to jump in.Write Something That May Change Your Life.This is a very high standard, but it may be the most valuable piece of advice you’ll ever get as a writer.I’ve never seen a writer go wrong following it.Because if a story is that important to you, it may be that important to a lot of people in the audience.And when you’re done writing the story, no matter what else happens, you’ve changed your life.We may need to write our way into it.Maybe, like Lucinda Williams, we don’t even recognize we’ve created it until someone else points it out.How is the writing going?I have two clients who are using NaNoWriMo energy to power their revisions, which I think is a brilliant strategy.Set your own goal for winning and then see how far it takes you.Maybe your goal is to take the first brave step of creating a file called novel and roughing out a character or scenario that has been kicking around in your brain for years.Syntax as Style, came to my attention in a similarly roundabout way.It’s only available in print, and it was a joy to read in that format.Artful Sentences is, as promised, a treasure trove of wisdom about sentence construction.You just need to imprint the structure in your brain.Read these sentences slowly, maybe copy down some of your favorites and stick them on a wall in your writing space, and make the structures your own.She is alert to the degree of activity in verbs, according to their kind and placement in a sentence.One afternoon, in an early summer of this century, when Laura Rowan was just eighteen, she sat, embroidering a handkerchief, on the steps leading down from the terrace of her father’s house to the gardens communally owned by the residents in Radnage Square.She liked embroidery.The kernel of that long first sentence is she sat.The simple kernel can support phrases that branch off from it in both directions.As Tufte points out, the branches in West’s sentence are free modifiers, which means we can easily break them off from the core of the sentence.We lose detail if we break them off, but we don’t garble the meaning altogether.