Tammy pointed me toward this lovely little article that features short, bite-sized quotations from a wide variety of authors, providing advice on their craft. Some I'd seen before; others were entirely new to me.
While many of the suggestions resonate with me, I think the one that I probably live by the most is # 14, from James Patterson:
"I'm always pretending that I'm sitting across from somebody. I'm telling them a story, and I don't want them to get up until it's finished."
No Brother of Mine, judging from all the feedback so far, seems to have come the closest to that target of anything I've written.
Of course, I also strive to be faithful to Elmore Leonard's # 8:
"I try to leave out the parts that people skip."
That one, of course, tends to be highly subjective. So I do a slight variation on it: I try to leave out the parts that I tend to skip as a reader.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment