"Seeing or Hearing Clearly and Then Transcribing"

Best-selling author, Stephen King, refers to these core ideas on good storytelling: "...that practice is invaluable (and should feel good, really not like practice at all) and that honesty is indispensable. Skills in description, dialogue, and character development all boil down to seeing or hearing clearly and then transcribing what you see or hear with equal clarity (and without using a lot of tiresome, unnecessary adverbs)." p. 195* One might add "or unnecessary adjectives."

He states that, "...good writing consists of mastering the fundamentals (vocabulary, grammar, the elements of style)" and with "hard work, dedication, and timely help," a good writer can be made out of a merely competent one. "

Stephen King also wrote, "If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write."

* Stephen King, On Writing ~ A Memoir of the Craft, Scribner, 2000.

"Twist Them Up in Hard Punishment"

Seventy-eight year old, Alice Munro, has withdrawn her latest book, Too Much Happiness from running for the Giller prize this fall. Arguably, "Canada's greatest living writer" (Toronto Star, Sept. 1, Front pg.), Munro has won the prestigious Scotiabank prize twice in the past. In 1998 for The Love of a Good Woman and in 2004 for Runaway. Whatever her reasons for withdrawing, the fact remains that she has arrived at a resoundingly successful stage in her professional life.

This is a woman who wrote, "...it seemed that I had to be a writer as well as a reader. I bought a school notebook and tried to write -- did write, pages that started off authoritatively and then went dry, so that I had to tear them out and twist them up in hard punishment and put them in the garbage can. I did this over and over again until I had only the notebook cover left. Then I bought another notebook and started the whole process once more. The same cycle -- excitement and despair, excitement and despair." *

*Alice Munro, "Cortes Island" (1998) The Love of a Good Woman, p. 143.

Photos: by Lorna