Jon Franklin’s “Writing for Story”
I’m in the middle of reading the most amazing how-to book I’ve ever come across. Jon Franklin, winner of several Pulitzer Prizes, specializes in writing “creative nonfiction” – factual stories that read like fiction. But his advice applies to writers of pure fiction as well. In Writing for Story, he shows you how to structure the story before you write it to make sure you actually know where it’s going. He shows you how to flesh out your outline, how the pacing should work, how to modify the rhythm of your sentences based upon the degree of excitement you want to build into that part of the story — and he also shows you which parts of the narrative need to be exciting and which parts are more expository. The thing that sets this book apart from average “how-to” books is the degree of specifics. I’ve never read anything that told me exactly how to structure the book, exactly how to tell whether your structure is going to be satisfying or not (before you write a word, much less before you get to chapter thirteen!), and exactly where to put flashbacks, transitions, foreshadowing, etc. Franklin’s suggestions do not work on all kinds of stories, but they work often enough for this book to be a valuable addition to any writer’s bookshelf.
February 18th, 2009 at 11:10 pm
Out of all the how-to-write texts I’ve encountered, I’ve never found a book quite like this one. I purchased Writing for Story, over five years ago. When I first read it, it didn’t really resonate with me, because of lthe Non-fiction label. I wanted to write pure fiction. The book remained, untouched on my library shelf for better than three years and then one day I started to read through all of my more than forty how-to-write books, when I chanced upon it again. This time I read it and my eyes opened completely. It, in my opinion is probably the best book in the whole wide world, in my experience, on how to write a story. All the other how-to-writes—ummmm!
December 25th, 2009 at 1:17 pm
I want to quote your post in my blog. Can I?
And can you get an account on Twitter?