Thursday, March 04, 2010

The Best Advice for Writers

As well as a large vocabulary, novels give writers a sense of how it is done. They offer templates that can be borrowed and adapted; they teach a writer how to create narrative structures and characters, how to develop tension, write dialogue, and maintain a consistent tone and pitch. Novels also trigger memories from a reader's personal experience, and these give writers ideas for their own stories. Great writers can copy just about anything they read and make it look original: a scene from one book, the description of a room from another, a piece of dialogue, an item of clothing, all of these details can remind writers of events and experiences in their own life, they can trigger a writer's imagination in ways that are distinct from the original, if not unique in the world.
The best advice for writers restated nicely on The Guardian blog by Evan Maloney :  READ!

4 comments:

Greenbottle said...

about large vocabulary. local writers would do well to emulate mr amir muhammad. any piece longer than three paragraphs by him have at least three words most people don't know how to make sentence with.

mr amir is will self of malaysia. i used to like his perforated sheet column in NST but these days he just made movies that simple person like me don't understand.

oh i pray that inglorius basterd win the academy. and that supporting actor goes to that guy in the same movie...sorry i'm digressing as usual.

KG said...

tq for the advice, i shall read more novels from now on. i usually read non fiction materials mostly.

Adline Writes said...

love this :)

composer said...

"Great writers can copy just about anything they read and make it look original"

Just be careful not to veer into plagiarism ...

-jen