How To Write A Novel

Start with an emotion. One that is close to your heart. Then dress it up with a character one that really moves. Then start with a sentence one that grabs you and doesn't let you go. Follow that with another sentence that sets a tone and allows the reader to gain confidence. Follow that with a paragraph that gives you a tempo and a rhythm. Follow that with a page that begins a world.

Now you are rolling. Writing that first chapter is the first shot across the bow of your story that has to be told. And of course one good thing begins another so you start the second chapter then a third then a fourth. No one can stop you now and you have created a ship that sailing along and taking the reader with you. Bail out all the nonessentials because it really is only the light touch that moves one into the chambers of the human heart.

Take the unexpected turn because no surprise for you is no surprise for the reader. Tears are expected and sweat and grime and grimace. Above all else make it live like a dancer on a brightly lit stage. Then run for the end like man whose life depends on it. Then when you are done circle around and begin again like the craftsman who will never be satisfied. Don't stop until you are sure nothing more can be done.

That is how you write a novel.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
Real Santa

Can Writing Be Taught?

Something to wrestle with. The problem is teaching has nothing to do with writing. We were all taught to diagram sentences with grammar spelling and punctuation. This can be taught. We can be assigned papers. We can complete the papers but this is not teaching writing. John Gardner in the Art of Fiction basically says that you have to have the talent in the first place. That if this talent is not there then no amount of teaching will do  it.

I am teaching an advanced fiction class at a private college and it is a question that pops up. Can writing be taught? Even craft is a hard one to teach to someone because it is the experimentation of rewriting that is craft. Basically writers have to be wired up. Their brains have to figure out why one word works when another one does not.

And of course we are talking connotation and denotation. What does a word really do. And this is something instinctual that no amount of courses can give you. I would even argue writing courses hurt writers because they codify what should never have been codified in the beginning. Still one has to try and convey what one has learned.

And so maybe it is like the old nudge the horse to water scenario.
But the thirst must be there.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher..What if a dream was all you had

The Best Guess of the Novelist

You know what your best guess is. It is the book you have not undertaken because it might be great or it might be a colossal failure of years and time and money. The modern novelist is stuck between selling and fame and artistic merit if not immortality. You could out Franzen Franzen but if you fail then you will have used up precious ideas not acted upon and the fact is you literally only have so much time to write so many novels before you earn yourself a slab in a cold dark cemetery.

These are the thoughts novelist deal with every day. Write something containable and marketable and safe or throw it all to the wind like that first novel you were never sure you could finish or even what the name of it was going to be. You settle down with novel two and three and four is the beginning of something new but you have not knocked the roofs off for a while if ever and you are wondering if your best guess as a novelist might really be your best.

And so there you stand at your crossroads. Take a shot at the prize or keep drinking the swill that might pay off with repetition and various ideas if not various genres. The stakes have become very high now. Only one novel gets the prize of the New York literary establishment lining up to ensure success. This years winner was The Art of Fielding. A wide ranging baseball novel that was pretty milk toast when it came to the end, but no matter, it had won the prize and publishing lined up and swung the big bat and the ball did sail out of the park.

So there you have it. The prize or settle into your comfortable mediocrity and produce good novels that hopefully lots and lots of people will read. Or take your best guess... and go for it.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Hemingways Attic...a writers survival guide

Addicted to Literary Crack

Before there was nothing. You lived in isolation writing your stories or your novels and all you had was a rejection letter coming back from a nameless editor from a nameless publishing company who might comment on your latest chapters and synopsis. And that was it. You literally wrote for years with the only feedback coming from friends, enemies, the compressed air of writing groups. Real feedback, real anointment came only from the Big Apple in the form of the acceptance letter that just never seemed to come. So you toiled on in the loneliest profession in the world. Then came the Internet.

Suddenly everyone became a writer but you had been doing it for years in your secret agony. Ensconced in your Garrot you had been honing your skills, wiring your synapses, developing your craft. The Newbies spewed while you thundered. People marveled you were able to spin off an essay crackling with wit and insight and you kept it yourself that it took you all of five minutes. Because your isolation had been broken. You suddenly were being recognized and people actually commented on your work. They complimented you, they criticized you, but it didn't matter. Your isolation had been obliterated and suddenly you were talking to the world.

So writers became bloggers. And for novelists who need to cool down between books or want to try out different forms it became an easy place to get that instant feedback writers crave. Suddenly that novel you have been burning to write gets put to the side for that quick essay on Obamas squeamishness and you are writing for that literary crack. It comes buzzing into your phone with one comment after another. Brilliant. Love your writing. Excellent piece. Just great. Your day becomes a little brighter as the comments pile up and you create a small firestorm. Thirty four hundred hits in one day for one article.

So you tell yourself its time to get back to that novel, but you have spent your best capitol on a one page blog and you are already considering topics for your next one. You hate to admit it, but you have become  addicted to literary crack.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will be out in January

Waiting in the Green Room at WGN Radio

You have glimmers of something passing. Sometimes you just know that what you are seeing might not be around too long. Maybe it was the space reserved for the microphone from the Scopes monkey trial. Maybe it was the foundation of the Chicago Tribune building inscribed on Lower Michigan with Culled in 1920. The slight wisp of snow in the cold darkness as a guard buzzes you into the WGN studio in the bowels of the old Tribune building and you follow a man up to the green room, passing the cases where old microphones reside and black and white pictures of celebrities long passed.

Then you sit down and wait and there is no one there in the green room, just you and rows and rows of pictures of people who look curiously human. The celebrity quality is gone and they are just men and women with gray hair, getting old. A thirty minute radio interview on WGN in Chicago is something you want to hang on too. The man doing the interview is the son of a legendary newspaper man from the Chicago Sun Times. You can hear the footfalls and you shake hands and he tells you to relax and do whatever the *&%$ you want. All Chicago old school. Then you are on in front of the WGN microphone telling your story for thirty minutes.

You try and imagine people all over Chicago waking up and hearing your voice, but your mind doesn't work that way. All you think is that it is just the two of you talking and it doesn't go near long enough. There are a million things you want to say, but you just can't get it all in and then you are walking back through the silent building and down through the guard room and suddenly outside in the cold. It's barely eight o'clock on a Sunday morning. Chicago is empty and just waking up. You drive through the streets, knowing you have used up one of the moments of your life that will never come back. You hit the city limits, then slip into the past.


http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Rocket Man will be out in January