Excerpt: A Novel Approach (To Writing Your First Book, or Your Best One), by Jack Woodville London
Title: A
Novel Approach (To Writing Your First Book, or Your Best One)
Author: Jack
Woodville London
- ASIN: B00KVR0V9M
Book description:
Characters. Conflict. Dialogue. Story arc. Editing. You can do this! In many respects it’s like building a home or raising a child, efforts of love and patience that are hard enough in their own right but almost impossible without a blueprint or the example of some devoted predecessors to show the way. The goal is to write a novel or a story, not to type a lot of pages and bind them. It sounds like work, and it is, but you can do this!
Characters. Conflict. Dialogue. Story arc. Editing. You can do this! In many respects it’s like building a home or raising a child, efforts of love and patience that are hard enough in their own right but almost impossible without a blueprint or the example of some devoted predecessors to show the way. The goal is to write a novel or a story, not to type a lot of pages and bind them. It sounds like work, and it is, but you can do this!
Purchasing Link:
Author bio:
Jack London is the author of the award-winning books French Letters: Virginia’s Wars and French Letters: Engaged in War and most recently, A Novel Approach (To Writing Your First Novel, or Your Best One). He has published some 30 literary articles and more than 50 book reviews. Prior to his career in fiction writing, London University of Texas London grew up in small-town Texas before earning degrees at the University of Texas and West Texas State University Fiction Academy , St. Céré , France and Ecole Francaise, Trois Ponts , France London lives in Austin , Texas
Excerpt:
Forget the spell checker — Activate the read checker
CAUTION CHILDREN, EXCITING
What’s
going on here? Is this statement really about warning youngsters to beware of
some unidentified tantalizing something? It could be. The ab- sence of a colon,
a hyphen, or a comma after ‘caution’ turns it from a warn- ing into a
directive.
Worse,
however, the sign also could be about pedophiles who may not know always where
to stick their commas. In that case the creep should have written ‘Caution,
children exciting.’
However,
it is more likely that the person who composed the sign made a combination of
errors in attempting to warn cars in the neighborhood that children would be
getting off the school bus. That message should have been written: “Caution:
Children exiting.”
Despite,
or perhaps because of, the wonders of spell-check and gram- mar correction
functions in word processing programs, errors in gram- mar, punctuation, and
spelling ultimately hole more boats than a renegade submarine. Spelling errors,
contractions, commas, and mistakes in word selection are common buggers for
writers. They also are the easiest to dust up without the author having to
suffer the red marks of humiliation that editors love to scribble on
manuscripts. Your word processor will not catch these. It is your job to catch
them.
Take
a few minutes to read Eats, Shoots & Leaves,
a wonderful little book by Lynn Truss. It might be about
the diet of pandas, who eat shoots and leaves, or it might be about a renegade
marsupial that rides into town, gob- bles up the food, then uses a six-shooter
to gun down the waitress before departing. (The panda eats, then shoots, then
leaves....) Regardless, her book is about the devil in the comma, not the least
of the imps that cause confusion to writers and readers as well.
Here
are a few examples of easily-made, easy to correct errors:
Bee
ware. Your in. Sorry for the incontinence. Man eating tiger. And, my favorite
advertisement on a billboard at a rather inexpensive motel: ‘Free wife for your
lap top.’
Be
hard on yourself in your quest to make your writing clear to readers.
Look
for uncertainty in every punctuation mark and synonym. By the time you are
ready for someone else to read your story, you’re riding will be reddy two.
A Novel Approach
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Jack Woodville London
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writing your book
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