Literary Birthday - 24 May

Happy Birthday, Michael Chabon, born 24 May 1963

Michael Chabon: 10 Quotes

1. It’s always been hard for me to tell the difference between denial and what used to be known as hope.
2. That’s the best thing about writing, when you’re in that zone, you’re porous, ready to absorb the solution.
3. Man makes plans … and God laughs.
4. When I finish a first draft, it’s always just as much of a mess as it’s always been. I still make the same mistakes every time.
5. You need three things to become a successful novelist: talent, luck and discipline. Discipline is the one element of those three things that you can control, and so that is the one that you have to focus on controlling, and you just have to hope and trust in the other two.
6. I work at night, starting at around 10 o’clock and working until 2 or 3 in the morning. I do that usually five days a week. In Berkeley I have an office behind our house that I share with my wife, who works more in the daytime. It’s always been my tendency: working at night just seems quieter and I can focus more easily and the words tends to come more readily.
7. Ideas are the easy part. I spend a lot of time batting them away, trying to keep them from distracting me from what I actually have to focus on and finish. 
8. When I consider the problem-solving nature of writing fiction – how whatever book I happen to be working on is always broken, stuck, incomplete, a Yale lock that won’t open, a subroutine that won’t execute, yet day after day I return to it knowing that if I just keep at it, I will pop the thing loose – it begins to seem to me that writing may be in part a disorder: sheer, unfettered XO9.
9. Well, the best part is that I get to do what I love. I love to write, and I get to do it for my living; it’s something I’m eternally grateful for every day. I feel so fortunate. Reading and writing and books and stories are things I’ve been in love with all my life. It’s still a matter of profound wonder and gratitude to me that this is my job.
10. I’m so grateful and so contented with my lot as a writer that I don’t even want to talk about the worst part—it will sound incredibly trivial by comparison. It’s probably something like: It takes so long to write a book. And having to stick with it, often long past the point where your original enthusiasm has waned, and trying to find ways to renew your enthusiasm over the long haul.

Chabon is an American author. His first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, was published when he was 25 and he became a literary celebrity. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2001. He is married to writer, Ayelet Waldman.

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by Amanda Patterson for Writers Write

Literary Birthday - 23 May

Happy Birthday, Mitch Albom, born 23 May 1958

12 Quotes

1. In a newspaper, you only have so much room. It teaches you the value of getting to the point, of not pampering yourself with your glorious writing. I’ve always been much more interested in one powerful sentence that stays with you. That’s my style.
2. I believe the biggest themes of life are put into the best focus when held up against the very sharp light of mortality.
3. The way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning.
4. You have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn’t work, don’t buy it.
5. Anyone who tries to write a memoir needs to keep in mind that what’s interesting to you isn’t necessarily interesting to a reader.
6. Critics have a problem with sentimentality. Readers do not. I write for readers.
7. A memoir should have some uplifting quality, inspiring or illuminating, and that’s what separates a life story that can influence other people.
8. For years I wrote in my basement. More recently I graduated to one floor above, an office with all my books and music and - ta da! - a window.
9. Most people just want to read a book. If you have a good story, people want to turn the pages whether it’s a memoir or a novel.
10. I’ve always said I have one skill. That skill - if I have it at all - is storytelling.
11. I find interesting characters or lessons that resonate with people and sometimes I write about them in the sports pages, sometimes I write them in a column, sometimes in a novel, sometimes a play or sometimes in nonfiction. But at the core I always say to myself, ‘Is there a story here? Is this something people want to read?’
12. Writing a novel for the first time was the biggest challenge. Until The Five People You Meet in Heaven, I had always dealt with the truth and the facts. 

Albom is an American best-selling author, journalist, screenwriter, dramatist, and radio and television broadcaster. His books have sold over 30 million copies worldwide. He is best known for Tuesdays With Morrie.

by Amanda Patterson for Writers Write

Literary Birthday - 22 May

Happy Birthday, Arthur Conan Doyle, born 22 May 1859, died 7 July 1930

10 Quotes

1. It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good books which are your very own.
2. Anything is better than stagnation.
3. When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
4. My mind rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation.
5. It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.
6. I have frequently gained my first real insight into the character of parents by studying their children.
7. Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius.
8. As a rule, said Holmes, the more bizarre a thing is the less mysterious it proves to be. It is your commonplace, featureless crimes which are really puzzling, just as a commonplace face is the most difficult to identify.
9. Where there is no imagination there is no horror.
10. The love of books is among the choicest gifts of the gods.

Arthur Conan Doyle was a Scottish physician and author who is best known for his Sherlock Holmes novels. He was a prolific writer who wrote fantasy and science fiction stories, plays, romances, poetry, non-fiction, and historical novels.

by Amanda Patterson for Writers Write

1. Complete a detailed biography of your protagonist and antagonist.

2. List the changes you’re going to inflict on these two characters.

3. Start your book when something meaningful happens. This is called the inciting moment. It should be shocking, exciting, and interesting.

4. Never start with back story.

5. Create conflict from page one. Your characters need problems and reasons to solve them.

6. Show motivation. Great characters want to achieve their goals more than anything and will pursue them at any cost. What are your characters most afraid of losing? Make them fight for it. Desperately. Irrationally.

7. Tell a story in scenes. Scenes hold a story together. The number of scenes depends on your chosen genre, and your novel’s length.

8. You should have one plot, and one subplot.

9. Fiction needs a Dark Night of the Soul. Move your story to the moment when things look impossibly bleak for your protagonist. This is usually a few pages before the end of your book.

10. Create an outline. It doesn’t have to be detailed but everything in life works better when you have a plan.

 from Writers Write by Amanda Patterson.

Literary Birthday - 21 May

Happy Birthday, Harold Robbins, born 21 May 1916, died 14 October 1997

I won’t leave any unfinished manuscripts. I’ll live till I’m 200 years old, and I’ll write all the stories that are in me. Put it on my tombstone: ‘He finished his job and went home.’

Robbins was an American author. He was one of the best-selling writers of all time, having written more than 25 best-sellers, and selling more than 750 million copies in 32 languages.

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by Amanda Patterson for Writers Write

Literary Birthday - 21 May

Happy Birthday, Alexander Pope, born 21 May 1688, died 30 May 1744

12 Famous Quotes

1. Hope springs eternal in the human breast.
2. A little learning is a dangerous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, And drinking largely sobers us again.
3. Fine sense and exalted sense are not half so useful as common sense.
4. The greatest advantage I know of being thought a wit by the world is that it gives one the greater freedom of playing the fool.
5. Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.
6. To err is human; to forgive, divine.
7. True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those who move easiest have learned to dance.
8. Wit is the lowest form of humor.
9. To buy books as some do who make no use of them, only because they were published by an eminent printer, is much as if a man should buy clothes that did not fit him, only because they were made by some famous tailor.
10. There is a certain majesty in simplicity which is far above all the quaintness of wit.
11. Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
12. Brevity is the soul of wit.

Pope was an 18th Century English poet, best known for his satirical verse and for his translation of Homer. He is the third-most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, after Shakespeare and Tennyson. 

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by Amanda Patterson for Writers Write

Literary Birthday - 20 May

Happy Birthday, Honoré de Balzac, born 20 May 1799, died 18 August 1850

12 Quotes

1. A flow of words is a sure sign of duplicity.
2. Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.
3. The more one judges, the less one loves.
4. If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.
5. It is always assumed by the empty-headed, who chatter about themselves for want of something better, that people who do not discuss their affairs openly must have something to hide.
6. You may imitate, but never counterfeit.
7. A letter is a soul, so faithful an echo of the speaking voice that to the sensitive it is among the richest treasures of love.
8. I am a galley slave to pen and ink.
9. All happiness depends on courage and work.
10. Reading brings us unknown friends.
11. Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.
12. There is no such thing as a great talent without great willpower.

Balzac was a French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of short stories and novels called La Comédie humaine, which shows French life after the 1815 fall of Napoleon Bonaparte. Balzac is known as one of the founders of realism in European literature. His multifaceted characters are complex, morally ambiguous, and fully human.

by Amanda Patterson for Writers Write

The hero of the story – understanding antagonists

One of the problems with plotting…

Many beginner writers struggle with plotting. This is because they don’t have an antagonist. In Writers Write we teach that the antagonist is not necessarily a bad person. The antagonist is the character whose story goal is the opposite of the protagonist.

This diagram illustrates this perfectly. Each of these characters is the hero of his or her own story. Without an antagonist your hero will wallow in his or her thoughts for 80 00 words.

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From Writers Write - How to write a novel by Amanda Patterson

Literary Birthday - 19 May

Happy Birthday, Nora Ephron, born 19 May 1941, died 26 June 2012

10 Quotes

1. Insane people are always sure that they are fine. It is only the sane people who are willing to admit that they are crazy.
2. The hardest thing about writing is writing.
3. Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it’s a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it’s a way of making contact with someone else’s imagination after a day that’s all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.
4. I try to write parts for women that are as complicated and interesting as women actually are.
5. I don’t care who you are. When you sit down to write the first page of your screenplay, in your head, you’re also writing your Oscar acceptance speech.
6. If pregnancy were a book they would cut the last two chapters.
7. Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.
8. I don’t have much of a routine. I go through periods where I work a great deal at all hours of the day whenever I am around a typewriter, and then I go through spells where I don’t do anything. I just sort of have lunch—all day. I never have been able to stick to a schedule. I work when there is something due or when I am really excited about a piece.
9. First of all, whatever you do, work in a field that has something to do with writing or publishing. So you will be exposed to what people are writing about and how they are writing, and as important, so you will be exposed to people in the business who will get to know you and will call on you if they are looking for someone for a job.
10. Secondly, you have to write. And if you don’t have a job doing it, then you have to sit at home doing it.

Ephron was an American journalist, essayist, playwright, screenwriter, novelist, producer, director, and blogger. She is best known for her romantic comedies and was nominated three times for the Academy Award for Best Writing (Original Screenplay): for Silkwood, When Harry Met Sally…, and Sleepless in Seattle. 

by Amanda Patterson for Writers Write

Literary Birthday - 19 May

Happy Birthday, Jodi Picoult, born 19 May 1966

Jodi Picoult’s Top Three Writing Tips

1. Read a ton. Reading will inspire you. It will also help you find out where you belong as a writer.
2. Write every day. Treat writing as a job. There is no such thing as waiting for the muse. If you want to be taken seriously as a writer, take writing seriously.
3. Do not stop in the middle of your first book. Finish it. No matter what. All writers go through this. It’s more of a fear of not being good enough that makes you stop. You think, ‘What if I’m not as good as I thought I was?’ Do not allow it to stop you. If you don’t finish that first book you’re making life difficult for yourself.

To read more about Jodi Picoult’s writing routine, the best book she’s written, and her thoughts on Hollywood, follow this link

Picoult is the best-selling author of 18 novels, including My Sister’s Keeper and Sing Me Home. Her last five novels have debuted at number one on the New York Times best-seller list.

by Amanda Patterson for Writers Write

Literary Birthday - 18 May

Happy Birthday, Lionel Shriver, born 18 May 1957

Seven Lionel Shriver Quotes

1. I gather that the number of readers in this country is going down, while the number of people who aspire to write is going up. The best thing you can do as a would-be writer is to read other people’s work — and as an ironclad rule of thumb, never write anything that you wouldn’t want to read yourself.
2. I am a pedant. I insist that people pronounce ‘flaccid’ as ‘flaksid,’ which is dictionary-correct but defies onomatopoeic instinct and annoys one and all. I never let people get away with using ‘enervated‘ to mean ‘energized,‘ when the word means without energy, thank you very much. Not only am I, apparently, the last remaining American citizen who knows the difference between ‘like’ and ‘as,‘ but I freely alienate everyone in my surround by interrupting, ‘You mean, as I said.’ Or, ‘You mean, you gave it to whom,’ or ‘You mean, that’s just between you and me. ’ I am a lone champion of the accusative case, and so –- obviously — have no friends
3. Fiction writers don’t write about money enough.
4. Rituals — fixing cups of coffee, paring fingernails, and all manner of variations on staring blankly out the window — are all forms of delay, and therefore don’t constitute magical evocations of one’s muse, but distraction. Writing is fundamentally dull, and there are no real secrets to it: You sit down, you type something out, most of the time if you have any self-respect you throw it away. My desk? Is usually towering with huge piles of paper. This is not a mountainous topography I can promote. The piles represent everything I am ignoring — finances, magazines I think I should read but don’t really want to, and odious little tasks like filling out this very questionnaire.
5. Kevin as a phenomenon long ago ceased to have anything to do with me. I’ve published two novels since, and I’m stuck into another; fortunately, many Kevin fans have moved on to other novels of mine as well. Meanwhile, Kevin can continue to suck a lychee sadistically in front of his mother after her daughter has lost an eye without any further help from me. My starkest realisation that this novel has achieved a life of its own was while watching Ramsay’s riveting adaptation of the book.
6. I am not as nice as I look.
7. Though raised by Aldai Stevenson Democrats, I have a violent, retrograde right-wing streak that alarms and horrifies my acquaintances in New York. And I have been told more than once that I am ‘extreme’.

Shriver is an American journalist and the author of 12 novels. She is best known for We Need to Talk About Kevin. She lives in London.

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by Amanda Patterson for Writers Write

Literary Birthday - 17 May

Happy Birthday, Peter Høeg, born 17 May 1957

Quotes

1. I start every day with meditation and then I write and then I meditate again and then I do the second writing stretch.
2. A novel is like a wave of tension that travels over a very long time … I think it is important not to carry with you the tension that you created in one work into the next.
3. Each new book, it’s a game for me. It’s like going to a carnival and dressing up.
4. It’s a mistake that we divide art into popular art and fine, highbrow, high-quality art.  It has no basis in reality. And it is a way to keep other people and other people’s taste at a distance. It is a way of closing oneself towards some kinds of reality.
5. I like to play with genres and to experience the thriller and the love story and to play with reality.
6. There is a day of change in the life of most authors… That is the day they go from writing poems and short stories to working on a novel and writing for several hours every day… I must have been about twenty-four or twenty-five when I reached that turning point. I’d written for years before that but had never sent anything to a publisher.
7. My first novel took four years to write, but that doesn’t say anything about the quality or the size of the novel. It was a learning piece, an apprentice book, because writing is not just a talent but a skill. It’s something you have to learn and develop. It’s a slow process. 
8. The book is the slowest art/media form. Everything else is very fast, but a book is very slow. 
9. To describe what you’ve read is like explaining music in writing.
10. There are no fearless people, only fearless moments.

Peter Hoeg, a Danish fiction writer, published his first novel, A History of Danish Dreams, in 1988 but it was Miss Smilla’s Feeling For Snow (1992) that earned him international literary celebrity. His books have been published in more than 30 countries.

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by Amanda Patterson for Writers Write

Literary Birthday - 15 May

Happy Birthday, Katherine Anne Porter, born 15 May 1890, died 18 September 1980

Quotes

1. If I didn’t know the ending of a story, I wouldn’t begin. I always write my last lines, my last paragraph, my last page first, and then I go back and work towards it. I know where I’m going. I know what my goal is.
2. I love the purity of language. I keep cautioning my students and anyone who will listen to me not to use the jargon of trades, not to use scientific language, because they’re going to be out of date the day after tomorrow. 
3. I have not much interest in anyone’s personal history after the tenth year, not even my own. Whatever one was going to be was all prepared before that.
4. Most people won’t realize that writing is a craft. You have to take your apprenticeship in it like anything else.
5. The real sin against life is to abuse and destroy beauty, even one’s own even more, one’s own, for that has been put in our care and we are responsible for its well-being.
6. I prefer to get up very early in the morning and work. I don’t want to speak to anybody or see anybody. Perfect silence. I work until the vein is out. There’s something about the way you feel, you know when the well is dry, that you’ll have to wait till tomorrow and it’ll be full up again.
7. I think it’s something in the blood. We’ve always had great letter writers, readers, great storytellers in our family. I’ve listened all my life to articulate people. They were all great storytellers, and every story had shape and meaning and point.
8. Human life itself may be almost pure chaos, but the work of the artist is to take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things, things that seem to be irreconcilable, and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning. 
9. You have to speak clearly and simply and purely in a language that a six-year-old child can understand; and yet have the meanings and the overtones of language, and the implications, that appeal to the highest intelligence. 
10. You do not create a style. You work, and develop yourself; your style is an emanation from your own being. 

Porter was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist, essayist, short story writer, and novelist. Her 1962 novel Ship of Fools was a best-seller but she received critical acclaim for her short stories. 

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by Amanda Patterson for Writers Write

Analysing Agatha - How to become the best-selling novelist of all time

Agatha Christie wrote 85 books that sold between two and four billion copies.

The Agatha Christie Code

According to UNESCO, she is the most translated author in the history of the world. The Guinness Book of World Records has recognized her as the Best Selling Author in any genre of all time. See the list of the Top 10 Best-Selling Authors here.

Note: Shakespeare was left out of this comparison, because he wrote plays and not novels. Even so, the best he can do is match Agatha Christie’s sales numbers.  

What is Agatha Christie’s secret to success?

There is a link between the success of Agatha Christie and Plain Language.

The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do. ~Thomas Jefferson

Dame Agatha seems to have mastered that talent. In The Agatha Christie Code, a team of professional linguists in England analysed Dame Agatha’s way with words.

The experts agree that she has a hypnotic style, but it is her use of patterns and plain language that make her so readable.

In Plain Language

Dr Pernilla Danielsson explains her success by her use of Plain Language.  

An excellent example is that Christie almost exclusively uses the word ‘said’. (Novice authors often try to use silly synonyms when said is the perfect choice.) She doesn’t introduce new words, but makes the reader comfortable with her use of everyday language. She doesn’t challenge the reader with big words, and long convoluted sentences. She doesn’t bore the reader with unnecessary descriptions. The reader is free to enjoy the story by focusing on the plot.

Her books also follow a formula

They are all similar in style, word length, and sentence length. Take Evil Under the Sun as an example. This novel follows her classic formula: 

1. There is a body, very early on
2. There is a closed group of suspects, either because of setting or social group
3. The detective arrives
4. We are taken through a series of red herrings
5. There is a solution, and closure

Excerpts from The Agatha Christie Code

But how many other best-selling authors use plain language?

Agatha Christie is not the only author to have realised the value of using Plain Language. In Fiction Writer’s Brainstormer, James V. Smith explains exactly how the best-selling authors succeed.

A Writing Standard

After studying authors like Stephen King, John Grisham, Danielle Steele, and Elmore Leonard, he came up with this as an ideal writing standard (if you want to sell your books).

You should have (on average):

• no more than four characters a word in any scene
• no more than 5% passive voice
• no less than 80% readability on the Flesch-Kincaid scale
• no higher than a 5th grade readability level on the Flesch-Kincaid scale

This is writing in plain language. If you want to communicate, I recommend you try it. If you want to sell lots of books, I recommend you apply this formula. On our creative course, Writers Write, we teach you exactly how to do this.

by Amanda Patterson from Writers Write

Literary Birthday - 14 May

Happy Birthday, Eoin Colfer, born 14 May 1965

Nine Quotes On Writing

1. Stop telling people about your idea and lock yourself in a room. Stay in the room until the work is done with only broadband and takeaway food for comfort. Writing is about inspiration but there is also a lot of work involved. Not as much work as digging a hole obviously but we like to make it sound tough.
2. I will keep writing until people stop reading or I run out of ideas. 
3. Practise – write every day even if it’s only for ten minutes. Remember, nothing is wasted. Eventually your style will emerge. Persevere!
4. I have wanted to write since I can remember, and I have been lucky enough to have had my parents’ encouragement every step of the way. I have also had the support of several English teachers who gave me high marks and gold stars. I remember several specific instances when my work was praised and I honestly believe that this fed my determination to become a writer.
5. Films definitely had an impact on my writing style. I am a huge movie fan, and the action genre is one of my favourites. I realised that very few action movies are specifically for kids, even though kids love them. So, I decided to fill the vacuum with a book that reads like an action movie. Hopefully when you read the book, the movie will play itself in your head.
6. I have a lovely office at the back of my house, it’s an old stable and you can see right out to the countryside on one side and into the house on the other side. I just sit there, put on my Kate Bush CDs and work away. I love it.
7. I would tell aspiring writers to observe. They already know it is vital to read and write whenever possible, but often people forget to watch what is going on every day in their surroundings. That is where your ideas come from. Keep one eye on your computer screen and the other on the world around you
8. Nothing is wasted; don’t throw anything away. I often meet frustrated young writers who say they’ve only got so far and just can’t finish a book. Even if you don’t happen to use what you’ve worked on that day, it has taught you something and you’ll be amazed when you might come back to it and use it again. Keep all your writing in a box somewhere. I wish I had, I bet there was at least a couple of good ideas in there that I could have used.
9. I’m delighted to be in Who’s Who, but for me, the big thing is being able to call myself a writer

Colfer is an Irish author who is most famous as the author of the Artemis Fowl series. He also wrote the sixth instalment of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, entitled And Another Thing….

by Amanda Patterson for Writers Write