Category: On Writing

39 Steps – Writing Advice from Frederick Barthelme

39 Steps – Writing Advice from Frederick Barthelme

Frederick Barthelme’s The 39 Steps: A Primer on Story Writing, begins:

Step one in the great enterprise of a new and preferable you in the house of fiction is: Mean less. That is, don’t mean so much. Make up a story, screw around with it, paste junk on it, needle the characters, make them say queer stuff, go bad places, insert new people at inopportune moments, do some drive-bys. Make it up, please.

Expect more of the same plainspoken, excellent advice in the following 38 steps, which range from the enigmatic–#9)Grace Slick (yes, people, that’s the entire entry for #9)–to the fundamental: #11)Be sure there’s a plot for the reader to grasp; while not necessarily the center of the story, it’s key to lulling the reader into that comfort zone where he’s vulnerable.

Learn how to write a short story in the online fiction writing course Master the Short Story.

Writing exercise – characterization

Writing exercise – characterization

Here is one of the most economical sentence pairings I’ve come across in a while: He couldn’t remember his wife clearly–only the hats she wore. How surprised she would be at hearing from him after this long while; there had been one letter written by each of them since the boy died. Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory

The exercise:
Compose two sentences in which a great deal is revealed about a character. Like the sentences above, yours should suggest something fundamental about the character’s inner life and/or relationships, as well as revealing something significant about his past.

Get more fiction writing prompts here.

graham greene on the importance of superficiality

graham greene on the importance of superficiality

“So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one’s days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come as though from the air: the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless impasse move forward: the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends.”
~Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

selection: the memoirist’s dilemma

selection: the memoirist’s dilemma

“…a detective must find it as important as a novelist to amass his trivial material before picking out the right clue. But how difficult that picking out is–the release of the real subject…Now that I come to write my own story the problem is still the same, but worse–there are so many more facts, now that I have not to invent them.” ~Graham Greene, The End of the Affair