Read Read Read Write Write Write (repeat)
I’ve broken the cardinal rule of the professional writer. I admit it. I am guilty. What is my sin, you ask? Well, it is this, plain and simple: one cannot be a writer without writing. For the past couple of weeks, I have been obsessing over the layout of this site–trying first one Wordpress theme, then another. Sometimes I would go through more quick changes than (what?) Superman in a phone booth . . . a vaudeville act on steroids . . . or pick your analogy. That’s the fun I’ve been missing–sitting down at the keyboard and actually putting words on the screen. Well, I’ve settled (at least for now) on the presentation you see before you. I hope you like it. If not, try to overlook it as I’ve worn myself out looking for the perfect theme. From now on, it’s going to be a renewed focus on providing the best content that I can muster.
If you’ve read through the posts on this site, you’ve seen that I committed to writing a novel in a month. That was a little crazy, even for me. I want to hold up on that for the time being. Instead, I intend to focus on more “bite-sized” writing projects. Still, I want this to be a helpful exercise that I can share with readers in the blogosphere, so I have decided to begin working through some of the numerous “how to” write books on my shelf, start to finish. I will share my efforts to work through the course and, ultimately, I hope to give you a sense of the relative worth of the various approaches to creative writing.
First up, “Immediate Fiction: A Complete Writing Course” by Jerry Cleaver.
This book was published in 2002. If you Google the phrase “immediate fiction” or “Jerry Cleaver,” you will find that Mr. Cleaver teaches an online course called “The Complete Story,” which is intended to take a student from zero to a finished novel, working one-on-one with Mr. Cleaver. The cost of the course is $1,150–a lot of money! But, wait, wouldn’t it be worth it to many, many people to be able to have a professional coach guide them all the way from page 1 to The End? I admit that I am intrigued by The Complete Story course. If I had an extra $1,150 lying around, I would certainly purchase the course. But I don’t, so instead I bought a couple of “Immediate Fiction” and read through it. It was extremely good–one of my favorite, if not my favorite “how to” book.
Next up–we’ll talk about what Mr. Cleaver calls “Rules of the Page.” You’ve probably heard them all before in one variation or another, but his way of getting them across to the reader is, I believe, unusually effective.
