As you develop your writing skills, you will want to learn to talk about your craft. These are not discussions about how to publish, because not every author you meet will get involved in publishing their book. No, these are the talks about how to organize a nonfiction boo, or when you introduce characters that won’t appear much in the book — but you need them for a crucial scene.
I didn’t take traditional college training for literature. I studied in the most essential nonfiction, journalism. Everything I learned to get that degree helps the rest of my writing life. I learned to ask questions and research to expand my knowledge base. I learned to succinct and lively at the start, because a lead to an article works just the same as opening paragraphs. You have to grab the reader with whatever is at stake. In journalism it’s paragraph two, called the nut graf, because it’s the kernel about why the reader should care.
I was eager to take in all the learning about literature. After a few years finishing a journalism degree, I wanted to take a literature course in the UT English Department. Applying for access was something that a younger instructor was tasked with vetting. I did not look like a genuine author, to him, simply because I practiced journalism. Later on, the editors who I worked with saw things differently. In an application letter for MFA writing school, a recommendation from an Iowa Writers’ Workshop grad said that I had ardor. It’s a good quality that leads you directly to genuine.
Learn to Sound Genuine
We’re about as genuine as we can sound while we talk about writing. When I started my lit study at the start years of the twenty-first century, the differences between style, voice and tone were a mystery. I went to a used bookstore in Iowa City as part of one Iowa Summer Writing Festival week. I came away with a 1960 copy of A Reader’s Guide to Literary Terms. Its sturdy paper, musty with the smell of old print, told me about two kinds of style and said tone conveyed attitude. Voice? It didn’t even have an entry among the 234 pages. There’s a book about understanding voice by Ben Yagoda, and there’s meaty passage in “The Making of Story” by Alice LaPlante that covers voice.
Learning to speak the language about literature and writing takes practice. If you have any chance to talk with other writers, try to turn the conversation to how your own work comes together. While I led monthly workshop meetings for novelists and memoirists, we’d get used to using terms like protagonist, antagonist, or hero and villain. But we’d also talk about foreshadowing, character introduction methods, and how many people were most effective for a single scene. Attribution, dialogue tags, the way that backstory can help and harm a book: all of that can flow from talking about your book.
The best part of this lifelong learning challenge is that answers are everywhere. Sometimes there’s not a single answer to a question, in the same way that a garment might be a sportscoat, or a sport coat. But what’s working in a book is often a good answer to any how-to question. If nothing else, we want to talk about the books we enjoy, the ones we hate or don’t finish — and why.
