The answer to the question posed on Friday is William Faulkner. The excerpt is from his second book, MOSQUITOES. MOSQUITOES is the satirical tale of a Lake Pontchartrain boat trip out of New Orleans with an assortment of colorful passengers including as our paperback jacket says, “the rich and the aspiring, social butterflies and dissolute […]
There is only one way to find your writing voice, your style, and that is to write and rewrite until you get there. To demonstrate that even great novelists struggle to find their voices, here is a 1927 excerpt from a book written by a famous writer before he found the voice he is so […]
For those of you who think that realism is the goal when writing book dialogue, don’t. How-are-yous, thank-yous, you’re-welcomes, may-I-introduces should almost never appear in books although these are words many of us utter every day. All these commonplace phrases just drag things down in books and can often be taken for granted so they […]
Electronically leafing through the issue of “Life Magazine” dated August 4, 1952, we came across a ten-page spread about an industrialist/author named Henry Yorke during his day job and Henry Green when he wrote. The “Life” spread was timed to coincide with the U.S. issuance of Green’s novel DOTING by Viking Press. It was his […]
We recently took a road trip and to take our minds off the horrible monotony of the New Jersey Turnpike, we listened to horror stories, including one by Bram Stoker and one by Edgar Allan Poe. We were surprised to discover that the two masters of the macabre had completely different approaches to writing. Stoker […]
The martini bar was full of career women that meant nothing to Arnold. They were drinking an array of `tinis from apple to chocolate that made his stomach slightly queasy. The above sentences contain an error that is typical of many we read in clients’ manuscripts. Can you pick it out? It is the use […]
Since we are sometime ghostwriters, a movie entitled The Ghost Writer was bound to hold an attraction for us. We went to see it during its first weekend in the theatres. It is a wonderfully literary movie. For example, at both the beginning and the end are scenes featuring a taxi, a manuscript and the […]
We would like to ban characters in works of fiction from thinking, feeling and knowing. Okay, novel denizens may occasionally think or feel but they should never, ever know anything. Here is a passage that illustrates this point: Crystal was feeling apprehensive about the meeting with Grayson. She understood she had broken the rules and […]
Lately, we have had a number of clients who simply pass over the endings to their fiction books. It is as if they arrive at the last scenes all out of breath and can only cough up, “Oh, by the way, this, this and this happened. The end.” What a terrible way to repay the […]