Douglas Glover – Madam Mayo

Recommended Books on the Craft of Creative Writing

This blog posts on Mondays. Second Mondays of the month I devote to my writing workshop students and anyone else interested in creative writing. Welcome!

> For the archive of workshop posts click here.

For updates to this list, see the page “Recommended Reading on the Craft of Creative Writing”

To learn how to write fiction and creative nonfiction you need teachers, however, they need not be local, Zoomed in, nor even living, because, happily for us all, so many have written books on the craft of writing. Here is my list of favorites. May one or some or even all of these prove as helpful to you as they have been for me.

Boorstin, Jon, Making Movies Work: Thinking Like a Filmmaker
Also helpful for thinking about how and why a reader enjoys a novel or memoir.

Butler, Robert Olen, From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction
Brilliant.

Chiraella, Tom, Writing Dialogue: How to Create Memorable Voices and Fictional Conversations that Crackle with Wit, Tension and Nuance
Expert and thorough.

Field, Syd, Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting
Excellent for plot.

Fussell, Paul, Poetic Meter & Poetic Form
More than a little bit crunchy and most of it won’t interest the average prose writer, but the chapter on scansion is worth the price of the book, and, for any prose writer aiming to achive vividness in their writing, worth rereading multiple times.

Gardner, John, The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers
Forget the subtitle, “for young writers,” this is a book for writers of any age, and not necessarily beginners. I read the chapter “On Common Errors” so many times my copy fell apart and I had to buy another. Also highly recommended for writers of creative nonfiction.

Gerard, Philip, Creative Nonfiction: Researching and Crafting Stories of Real Life
Writing a memoir or a longer, more thoughtful piece of journalism? Use this book as your project’s road map.

Glover, Douglas, Notes Home from a Prodigal Son
This includes the essay “The Novel as Poem.” All the essays are excellent but the book is worth the purchase for this one alone. Also recommended: The Erotics of Restraint: Essays on Literary Form

Goodman, Richard, The Soul of Creative Writing
Highly recommended. Especially strong on language.

Hills, Rust, Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular
The best book I’ve found on writing short stories.

Jackson, Bruce, The Story Is True: The Art and Meaning of Telling Stories

McKee, Robert, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting
A profound and essential book about narrative structure, also useful for writers in other genres, including the short story, novel, creative nonfiction, and more.

Oliver, Mary, A Poetry Handbook
This one is short and sweet. Finally, an articulate answer to the question, Why is a rock not a stone? An excellent resource for poets, as well as prose writers, who should never – ever – underestimate the importance of the poetry in their prose.

Piercy, Marge, and Ira Wood, So You Want to Write: How to Master the Craft of Writing Fiction and the Personal Narrative
The chapter on dialogue is the best I’ve read yet. My workshop students praise this one highly.

Prose, Francine, Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them
Divine.

Ricco, Gabriele Lusser, Writing the Natural Way: Using Right-Brain Techniques to Release Your Expressive Powers
The first and biggest barrier to writing quality literature is your Left Brain, or your “Sign Mind.” This book shows you how to quiet the Sign Mind and let your Design Mind emerge to play.
> See my talk On Seeing as an Artist or, Five Techniques for a Journey to Einfühlung

Scarry, Elaine, Dreaming by the Book
Essential for understanding how and why specific sensory detail “works” to create a vivid picture in the reader’s mind.

Sims, Norman, and Mark Kramer, editors, Literary Journalism: A New Collection of the Best American Nonfiction
A bit dated now, but nevertheless an outstanding selection. The introduction on the art of literary journalism (the more fashionable term these days is “creative nonfiction”) is vital.

Smiley, Jane, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel
Includes her reviews of 100 novels. A treasure of a book by one of our greatest contemporary novelists.

Pamela Jaye Smith, Inner Drives: How to Write and Create Characters Using the Eight Classic Centers of Motivation
Esoterically fabulous and supremely practical.

Snyder, Blake, Save the Cat!
A snazzy book that reads like, well, your buddy explaining the ropes. It’s for screenplay writers but the basics on story structure are useful for short story writers and novels as well.

Tufte, Virginia, Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style

Wood, James, How Fiction Works
Glorious, delectable, and practical.

Zinsser, William K., On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction

Do you have a book on craft that you don’t see here but that you would recommend? Please let me know.

> For the archive of workshop posts click here.

Thirty Deadly-Effective Ways to Free Up Bits, Drips
& Gimungously Vast Swaths of Time for Writing:
A Menu of Possibilities to Consider

Blood Over Salt in Borderlands Texas:
Q & A with Paul Cool About Salt Warriors

Consider the Typewriter (Am I Kidding? No, I Am Not Kidding)

My new book is Meteor

Language Overlay

One of the simplest and yet most effective techniques of fiction is “langage overlay.” I first learned about this from the Canadian novelist Douglas Glover. In his essay, “The Novel as Poem,” (in Notes Home from a Prodigal Son, Oberon, 1999), Glover talks about how he dramatically improved the original draft of his first novel with this technique:

My first person narrator was a newspaperman, he had printer’s ink in his blood. [I went] through the novel, splicing in words and images, a discourse, in other words, that reflected my hero’s passion for the newspaper world. So, for example, Precious now begins: “Jerry Menenga’s bar hid like an overlooked misprint amid a block of jutting bank towers…” Or, in moments of excitement, the narrator will spout a series of headlines in lieu of thoughts.
–Douglas Glover

The key word here is “passion.” What is in your character’s world that he or she would feel passionate about? There’s not a linear formula to follow; just take a piece of paper and jot down any nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, phrases, concepts– in short, whatever pops into your mind that might do.

For example, if your character is a doctor, perhaps her world might include:

stethoscope, Rx, nurse, pills, scalpel, sterile, billing, paperwork, white coat, bedside manner, cold corridors, patient, tubes, IV, tongue depresser, “Say ‘ahhh!'”

If your character is a chef, perhaps:

skillet, toque, cooking school, spices, basil, aroma, seasoned, blisters on hands, oven mitt, scalloped potatoes, seared, grilled, boiled, steamed, souffle, sweating in a hot kitchen, hsssss of sausage hitting the oil, Salvadorean pot-washers, waiters, paté, fois gras, freshness, crispness, apron

And surely, with a few minutes and pencil you can add another 10 to 100 more items.

But to continue, let’s say your character is a beekeeper:

Bees, hives, smoker, sunshine, blossoms, clover, lavender, moths, gnats, sting, hive tool , veil, gloves, seasons, orchards, Queen, drone, worker, nectar, pollen, propolis, furry, wings, extractor, candles, farmer’s markets, bottles, pans, wax, comb, jars, raspberry, apple, recipes, candy, pesticides, “ouch!” mites, cold, wind, directions, forest, nature

Or a shaman:

drum, flutes, shells, spells, chimes, stones, nature, mmm-bb-mmmm-bb, animals, wolves, robes, chants, tent, walking, dancing, running, wind, rain, sun, moon, stars

A writing conference organizer (this went over with a few chuckles at the San Miguel Writers Conference last year):

Internet, paper, books, authors, per diem, agents, writers, money, volunteers, hotel, telephone, e-mail, facebook, “what’s he published?”

Of course you needn’t incorporate everything on your list anymore than you would eat everything laid out on a smorgasboard. Browse, sniff, nibble, gorge, ignore– as you please.

To give you an example from my own writing: one of the main characters in my novel, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire, is Maximilian von Habsburg, the Austrian archduke who became Mexico’s ill-fated second emperor. One of the techniques I used to find my way into his point of view was, precisely, language overlay. Before coming to Mexico, Maximilian had served as an admiral in the Austrian Navy, so no doubt he would have used or oftentimes thought of such words as:

starboard, deck, batten the hatches, gimbles, compass, bridge, wake…

In short, I made a long messy-looking list and kept it pinned to the bulletin board by my desk. I also used a Thesaurus, adding terms I didn’t think of right away: “kedge” was one. So I had a scene where, in land-locked Mexico City of 1866, Maximilian informs his aide that they’re going on a brief vacation to Cuernavaca. “We’ll just kedge over there…” Ha! Kedge! One of those perfectly precise words that makes novelists unhunch from their laptops, raise both fists and shout, YEEEE-AH!!! Which, you can be sure, will startle the dog.

The exercise I always give my writing workshop students:

First make your language list for the doctor. Then, in 5 minutes (about a paragraph), have him take a cooking class.

Douglas Glover’s essay “The Novel As Poem” is such an important one for any creative writer to read, I would recommend buying the collection, Notes Home from a Prodigal Son, for that alone– but the collection does in fact include many other excellent and illuminating essays. Visit Glover’s website here.

Conjecture: The Powerful, Upfront, Fair and Square Technique
to Blend Fiction into Your Nonfiction

Diction Drops and Spikes

Lone Star Nation: How Texas Will Transform America by Richard Parker

Find out more about
C.M. Mayo’s books, articles, podcasts, and more.

Michael Talbot’s “The Holographic Universe”

One of the books that has most influenced my writing, and in particular, my ideas about narrative structure, is Michael Talbot’s The Holographic Universe. When I came upon it a few years ago, I was already a fan of the works of Canadian novelist Douglas Glover and his concept of the story as net. In other words, even without the scaffolding of a formal plot (ye olde Fichtean curve), a net of images can cohere and indeed so powerfully resonate in the reader’s mind that the net is the story. A satisfying story. It was directly— literally, less than an hour— after reading Glover’s essays on the story as net and the novel as poem (now collected in Notes Home from a Prodigal Son) that I sat down wrote the one that became the title story for my first collection, Sky Over El Nido. In this story the images, woven throughout, have to do with flight: birds, nests, eggs, airplanes. What’s the “plot”? A fistful of air.

Later, before beginning to write my novel, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire, I happened upon Talbot’s The Holographic Universe, an elegantly lucid and very accessible overview of some of the (then) most cutting-edge theories in quantum physics and in particular, those of David Bohm. If the universe itself is a hologram, or has holographic characteristics, then this could explain why nets of images— the suggestion of the whole in each of its parts— can resonate with such strange power in a reader’s mind.

Does my novel have that power? You decide. But one of the several paradigms I worked with while writing it was, again, the story as a net and, to borrow the title of one of Douglas Glover’s essays, “The Novel As Poem.” Yes, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire is a poem. And the main character is not a person but an idea— the prince as living symbol of the future of the empire. Where does such an idea live? In many minds— ergo, the novel has a crowd of characters, indeed, a net of characters, woven in among each other’s minds and actions.

Just of few of the fleeting and repeating images: the Totonac bowl, Egypt, birds, sweets, twilights, composers, asparagus.

(Though indeed it does have a plot, and I worked with various paradigms— Fichtean curve, Syd Field’s three acts, and others— while constructing it.)

Last night, I happened upon a video of psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove’s interview with Talbot. It’s well worth watching in its entirety. Alas, Talbot died of leukemia in 1992.