Creative Writing Notes, Gotham Workshop

I loved Writing Fiction: The Practical Guide from New York’s Acclaimed Creative Writing School. It’s a straightforward, practical handbook for writers at all levels. Written by the instructors of the Gotham Writers’ Workshop, it breaks down elements of fiction—character, plot, dialogue, setting, and style. It answers the simple question: What is fiction? In the broadest sense, fiction is simply a made-up story. Here were my Kindle notes and highlights. But note, make your own by reading the book, these are for my own reference.

Love and Hate, Villains Too

What are the things you most love? What are the things you most hate? If you were to make a list of answers to either of these questions, you would have a collection of ideas that are of passionate interest to yourself.
Bear in mind, however, that a single big idea won’t give you a whole story. A fictional work is really an accumulation of many ideas. A single word may have inspired The Hunchback of Notre Dame, but, somehow or other, Hugo managed to cultivate some five hundred pages from this seed.
If you’re serious about creating fiction, you should set aside designated writing times, preferably most days of the week. If you leave it catch-as-catch-can, it will become all too easy to catch nothing. Some writers prefer the first blush of morning, others opt for the graveyard shift. Find the time at which you feel the most free and stimulated.
Desire beats in the heart of every dimensional character. A character should want something. Desire is a driving force of human nature and, applied to characters, it creates a steam of momentum to drive a story forward. You may create a character with quirky habits and high intellect and vague tendencies toward adventure, but if all he does is sit on the couch and snack on lemon squares, the reader is going to find more excitement in thumb twiddling.
Literature is filled with great villains. Part of what makes them so compelling is the tiny bit of ourselves we can see in them. Usually there is something, however small, that a reader can relate to. In Lolita, the reader can relate to Humbert Humbert’s inability to resist a desire he knows is wrong. Although Humbert’s desire is extreme, that basic idea of wanting and indulging in what you shouldn’t—be it greasy foods, cigarettes, or too much mind-numbing television—is a very human trait.
Try to figure out what the major dramatic question might be. Remember, this is a question that can usually be answered with a yes, no, or maybe.

Point of View

The unreliable narrator emphasizes the philosophical view that there is no such thing as a single, static, knowable reality.
Perhaps the most prevalent version of the third person is the third-person single vision. With this POV, the narrator has access to only one character’s mind.
As with first-person POV, a writer using the third-person POV may decide that two or more heads are better than one. The multiple-vision POV allows the writer to show a story’s events from different angles.
As a general rule you should make distinct transitions between point-of-view characters.
Novelists often make this switch at a chapter break; that is, each chapter belongs to a single point-of-view character.
Happenstance: Two Novels in One About a Marriage in Transition, Carol Shields’s switcheroo between the husband’s and wife’s point of view is impossible to ignore—the reader must turn the book over to begin the second half. And in another POV twist, Shields gives no instructions or even hints as to which half should be read first. The reader’s experience of the book is literally in his own hands.
Through the omniscient narrator you have the ability to do any of the following: enter the mind of any or all of the characters, interpret the story’s events, describe incidents unobserved by any of the story’s characters, provide historical context for the story, and inform the reader of future events. Soon thereafter a variety of social changes occurred related to the rise of democracy (and the decline of empires), Freud, religious skepticism, feminism, and so forth which over time resulted in the (now seemingly paternal, heavy-handed, one-sided, bigheaded) omniscient point of view falling out of favor with contemporary writers. Once enough writers traded in omniscience for more limited points of view, this kind of omniscience seemed old-fashioned and fell out of favor. Yet it is still an effective device.
As with the third-person points of view, second-person POV stories are told in the voice of a narrator. In second person, however, the narrator tells what you did or said.

Writing with Description

Mark Twain once noted that the difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. Always challenge yourself to find the best possible word to convey the picture in your mind.
Always ask yourself: Does the description interrupt the flow of the story?
Pick a telling detail—one particular thing that most embodies the thing you described. As a rule of thumb, ask yourself how important a particular time or place is to your story and this will help you determine how much “space” to spend describing any given setting. “The Fall of the House of Usher” takes place entirely in the House of Usher, and so a good amount of description on the house is warranted. But you don’t need to spend page after beautiful page describing a drugstore if your main character simply stops in to buy a bottle of aspirin.
Background: A woman who grew up in a family with seventeen kids is going to have a much different experience from a woman who grew up as an only child. While we certainly can’t make sweeping value judgments about characters’ backgrounds, the characters will undoubtedly be impacted by their previous experiences.

Voice:

First of all, the voice of a piece is what makes it special, what sets it apart and makes it feel lived.
However, the best thing you, as a writer, can do is to concentrate on the narrator’s voice of each individual piece of your fiction. Someday, a critic may see what your varied works have in common and write an admiring article that defines what your voice as a writer is like. Until then, your job is to focus on the voice in each individual story.
If voice is the velvet dress, style is the fabrics, threads, buttons, and such that create the garment.
I’ll tell you something surprising: how you place words in a sentence is the most important stylistic choice you’ll make.
At some point, you may get bolder about modifying the style to fit the story—you might, say, adopt longer sentences for a story about an obsessive person, or shorter, curt sentences for a story about an unemotional parent.

Theme

The theme is the container for your story. Theme will attempt to hold all the elements of your story in place. It is like a cup. A vessel. A goblet. The plot and characters and dialogue and setting and voice and everything else are all shaped by the vessel.
Simply discover the theme of your story, after a draft or two, then revise and revise. And with each revision look for ways to make all your choices fluidly and delicately flow inside the vessel of your theme.

Revising

So much cutting may seem masochistic, but the fact is a piece of writing that can work well in five thousand words shouldn’t run to ten thousand. And you’ll be surprised what you can cut. So much of what we state is implied; so much that we’ve spelled out can be deduced or imagined.
As writing is hard work, your desire to profit from your efforts is understandable. But if you want to make serious money, fiction is probably not the best way to go about it. This is a feast-or-famine industry, where famine is much more common, and even well-established authors gnaw on the carrion bone.* So, if you equate writing with winning the lottery, you are bound to be disappointed.*

Query Letters

Typically a query letter works something like this: An opening line or two introducing your short story or novel and explaining why you’ve contacted this particular agent or editor. Perhaps you’ ve been referred to him by one of his authors, or maybe he handles work that resembles your own. A brief pitch of your story. Showcase character and situation. Pretend you’re writing book- jacket copy. Intrigue, don’t explain. For short stories, a line or two is sufficient, and for novels, one well-crafted paragraph. A bit about you. Don’t sell yourself too hard; just try to convey a sense of who you are. Include anything relevant—writing credits, personal or professional expertise related to the subject matter, promotional experience … If you have none of these things, don’t worry. Many don’t. The closing. State that you’ve enclosed a self-addressed stamped envelope and that you look forward to the recipient’s response.
So, how can you be sure that your agent is legit? Well, most reputable agents are members of the Association of Authors’ Representatives.