## Metadata - Author: [[Stephen Koch]] - Full Title: The Modern Library Writer's Workshop - Category: #books ## Highlights - all growth is a kind of superior beginning again. ([Location 111](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0029732JS&location=111)) - There is no need to wait for inspiration; no need to find your confidence; no need to know exactly why or what you're writing; no need read wise and thoughtful books about how to write; no need to know your story; no need to understand your characters; no need to be sure you're on the right track; no need even for your research to be complete. No need now. Later on, it will be very nice indeed to have some or all of these fine things. You will of course eventually want inspiration and confidence and selfknowledge and faith in your project and informed technique and a finished story with developed characters and completed competent research. But every single one of these things—even the research—comes to you only in the process of writing. They are the result of writing. If you let any one of them immobilize you before you write, I can guarantee that a year from now you will still be waiting to begin. ([Location 132](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0029732JS&location=132)) - “One must be pitiless about this matter of ‘mood.’ In a sense, the writing will create the mood.… Generally I've found this to be true: I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card, when nothing has seemed worth enduring for another five minutes … and somehow the activity of writing changes everything.” ([Location 155](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0029732JS&location=155)) - As Isabel Allende says, the story is “hidden in a very somber and secret place where I don't have any access yet. It is something that I've been feeling but which has no shape, no name, no tone, no voice.” ([Location 173](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0029732JS&location=173)) - If you are like me, your first instinct will be to try to “take control” of a new idea, to assert yourself, to “turn this into something.” Yet at this early stage, it may be a mistake to treat your idea too aggressively. The whole process of writing, from first to last, requires that you alternate steadily between a passive, open, daydreaming intuitiveness, followed by workedout, thought-through, fully developed acts of judgment and control. You must have both, and you must get both to work not against each other but in concert. In the early stages, most developing ideas usually need lots of fertile, nurturing passivity. Something has moved you. You begin to write about it. You sketch. You jot down a chain of fantasies and associations. You dream the dream. ([Location 205](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0029732JS&location=205)) - Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue. It is the very atmosphere of the mind ([Location 262](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0029732JS&location=262)) - PROVIDE MOTIVATION. Every story is what its characters do. Therefore, you have to show us only secondarily what your characters are like, or what they look like, or what they feel like. You must show us what they do. ([Location 302](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0029732JS&location=302)) - Eloquence, according to Cicero, resides in “an uninterrupted movement of the mind,” a motus animi continuus. ([Location 435](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0029732JS&location=435)) - Whatever their gifts or level of success, most writers spend much of their lives managing the inner drama of confidence. ([Location 547](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0029732JS&location=547)) - The four prime disciplines of any writer are: Imagining, Observing, Reading, and Writing. ([Location 609](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0029732JS&location=609)) - “Writing a novel is gathering smoke,” says Walter Mosley. “It's an excursion into the ether of ideas.” ([Location 617](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0029732JS&location=617)) - “Sit quietly and think,” says John Braine, “and think at every opportunity. There must be no panic and no hurry. There is no deadline, and you're not dependent upon writing for your daily bread. Put all generalizations out of your head. Don't think in the abstract. See your characters as real people and visualize how they'll meet the reader. Don't think about the plot of the novel; think about specific situations. Aim at making pictures, not notes. Relax and let your mind go free.” ([Location 623](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0029732JS&location=623)) - As Walter Mosley says, “These ideas have no physical form. They are smoky concepts liable to disappear at the slightest disturbance. An alarm clock or a ringing telephone will dispel a new character; answering the call will erase a chapter from the world.” ([Location 634](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0029732JS&location=634)) - Nadine Gordimer draws a sharp distinction between the demands of family life and social life. “I think writers, artists, are very ruthless, and they have to be. It's unpleasant for other people, but I don't know how else we can manage. Because the world will never make a place for you. My own family came to understand and respect this.… What I have also sacrificed, and it hasn't been a sacrifice for me, is a social life.… A writer doesn't only need the time when he's actually writing—he or she has got to have time to think and time just to let things work out. Nothing is worse for this than society. Nothing is worse for this than the abrasive, if enjoyable, effect of other people.” ([Location 864](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0029732JS&location=864)) - Hemingway once remarked that his writing had been influenced by Mozart and added, “I should think that what one learns from composers and the study of harmony and counterpoint would be obvious.” ([Location 1238](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0029732JS&location=1238)) - “‘The cat sat on the mat,’” as le Carré points out, “is not the beginning of a story, but ‘The cat sat on the dog's mat’ is.” ([Location 1262](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0029732JS&location=1262)) - All drama is based upon unlikely events surging up into ordinary life and changing it. All narrative is engaged, at some level, with the improbable. Part of your job, of course, is to make the improbable credible. Then, once you have made it credible, you proceed to make it inevitable. And then you may have art. ([Location 1363](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0029732JS&location=1363)) - And how do you make your way from beginning to end? You can be guided at every step by only one intuition: your own sense of rightness. But the sense of rightness can come only after you have been guided away from ten thousand wrong turns by your sense for what is wrong. The sense of rightness and the sense of what is wrong have no independent existence: Each is the other's reverse side. Most good stories die before they are born simply because their authors fail to understand this. That little voice inside says to them, “This is wrong, all wrong,” and they panic, they think they have failed, and they quit. They think that inner voice—wrong; this is wrong—is a reason for stopping. In fact, it is your art's best friend, the other voice of rightness. You must listen to them both, trusting that your intellect is capable of responding to their cues and discerning at least many of their mute meanings. They will be in play every hour you spend at your desk, and they alone can guide you on your path from perplexity, complexity, and conflict to the inevitable. That movement from the improbable to the inevitable is the truest course of a story, and it defines your path. ([Location 1395](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0029732JS&location=1395)) - That movement from the improbable to the inevitable is the truest course of a story, and it defines your path. ([Location 1403](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0029732JS&location=1403)) - In the end, stories are what their characters do, and characters are what they do in stories. Unlike human beings, characters do not have any life at all outside their life on the page. As a result, their life consists almost exclusively of action. Now don't misunderstand: By “action” I do not mean merely street fights, car chases, and passionate love scenes. By “action,” I mean any thought, word, or deed that engages your character with some other character, and thereby becomes an event. Action in fiction consists of human interchange. For that reason the place—the only place—to find your characters and their stories is in the arena of exchange. ([Location 1411](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0029732JS&location=1411)) - By “action” I do not mean merely street fights, car chases, and passionate love scenes. By “action,” I mean any thought, word, or deed that engages your character with some other character, and thereby becomes an event. Action in fiction consists of human interchange. For that reason the place—the only place—to find your characters and their stories is in the arena of exchange. ([Location 1413](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0029732JS&location=1413)) - You'll create action on the page only when your character has an encounter with another character that matters, somehow, to at least one of them. Dramatic exchange is the thing—it is the only thing—that makes characters visible, even to their authors. Like a hunter peering into the leafy dusk, your imagination will never spot its quarry until it moves. ([Location 1417](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0029732JS&location=1417)) - Dramatic exchange is the thing—it is the only thing—that makes characters visible, even to their authors. Like a hunter peering into the leafy dusk, your imagination will never spot its quarry until it moves. ([Location 1418](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0029732JS&location=1418)) - Do show the typical, but remember that a little of the typical—precisely because it is typical—goes a very long way. The task that matters most is showing what is special about your character, and that means being vivid and clear about her or his role: what she or he is doing with others to transact the story's “exceptional happenings.” ([Location 1425](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0029732JS&location=1425)) - Sometimes you will start out with a vivid situation populated by a skeleton crew of characters made up of blurs or stick figures. Other times you may begin with a character who feels realer than real, even though you're clueless about her or his narrative destiny. To have one—situation or character—is to become acutely aware that you lack the other. Don't let that insight become a disability. The truth is that either situation or character is a perfectly okay starting point. You can begin only by playing the hand your imagination has dealt you. After all, it is nothing more than a starting point. So start. ([Location 1431](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0029732JS&location=1431)) - Let's say some figure flickers out of the murk of your imagination asking for visibility. Your question must be, “Visibility as what? Visibility in what role?” With the drama still emerging, you may not be in a position to assign anyone a clear role quite yet. We've already spoken about the moment when your imagination leaps from having too little to work with to having too much; when your notebook is suddenly crowded with characters angling for prime time. We've said the thing to do is to focus not on plot but on character, and above all to focus on a search for your protagonist. Find the character in the conflict whose fate matters to you most. Once you know whose role is in that top spot, you can begin to determine the roles of all the other characters. But not until—because the identity of the protagonist defines all other roles. ([Location 1540](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0029732JS&location=1540)) - When it comes to deciding whose conflict and fate matters most to you, you may have to live with the story awhile. Among a range of active characters, you may hesitate. Your doubts may feel insoluble. You can't shape the story without a protagonist, and without a shaped story you can't find your protagonist. Are you trapped? The only way out of this chicken-egg dilemma is to feel your way to the outcome, watching as you work, and waiting—waiting with the absorbed attention of a predatory beast. You are waiting for the flash of excitement that sparks certainty. It may be subtle, but it should feel like subtle certainty, and it should last and grow stronger, until you can't believe you were ever in any doubt. ([Location 1549](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0029732JS&location=1549)) - A character's type is the doorway through which she or he enters the reader's imagination. If you are afraid to show how a character is typical, you will never be able to show anything special about her or him either. We are none of us sui generis. We are all typical of something; in fact, we are typical of many things. At the same time, we are all also absolute individuals: uniquely ourselves, facing our fate in the universe alone. In art as in life, we can face that fate only while occupying some definable place in the world, and our individualism can articulate itself only through the lingua franca that comes with our role. ([Location 1563](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0029732JS&location=1563)) - Flat characters, then, are built on some singular trait that defines them unchangeably, come what may. That trait marks their every move. It makes them memorable, predictable, and pure. Flat characters are not necessarily minor characters: Many very important characters in Shakespeare are quite flat. Iago, for instance. His single trait: I hate the Moor. ([Location 1579](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0029732JS&location=1579)) - Round characters, then, are round because they come “equipped with purpose.” Something they want or need that makes them capable of change. They can succeed. They can fail. They will be different afterward. They can leave the past behind. They fall from hope to defeat, or rise up in the reverse. They are not locked into the comedy of some frozen, interminably repetitious destiny. As Christopher Tilghman puts it: “Any story has major and minor characters. And for me, whether they're major or minor has little to do with how much they're on stage. It has to do with whether they develop and change over the course of the story.” ([Location 1594](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0029732JS&location=1594)) - You can't depict what your imagination doesn't see and hear, and most of us see and hear ourselves rather poorly. ([Location 1621](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0029732JS&location=1621)) - The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life in general so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it—this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town, and in the most differing stages of education. ([Location 1738](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0029732JS&location=1738)) - My advice to anyone writing about something researchable is, write it first, then research it.” ([Location 1757](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0029732JS&location=1757)) - A character's voice is the sound of her or his identity. It is the sonic fingerprint of personality. ([Location 1758](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0029732JS&location=1758)) - Wharton's old-fashioned advice on this subject is generally sound. “The use of dialogue in fiction seems to be one of the few things about which a fairly definite rule may be laid down. It should be reserved for the culminating moments, and regarded as the spray into which the great wave of narrative breaks in curving toward the watcher on the shore.” ([Location 1796](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0029732JS&location=1796)) - Most of our thoughts and feelings are not immediately bound to language. We almost always feel an emotion and connect to a thought well before we can say precisely what either one is. The art of indirect discourse—broadly defined—lets you put this inarticulate aspect of any character into the character's own words. It speaks with a voice that is neither theirs nor yours, but which reaches beyond the characters' explicit words and thoughts to become the voice of the fiction itself, making consciousness a unity. ([Location 1819](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0029732JS&location=1819)) - “I once asked Ethan Canin,” Anne Lamott reports, “to tell me the most valuable thing he knew about writing, and without hesitation he said, ‘Nothing is so important as a likable narrator. Nothing holds a story together better.’” ([Location 1823](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0029732JS&location=1823)) - In truth, you are going to feel all kinds of responses to your characters, and your prose is likely to be, one way or another, an invitation to the reader to join in those feelings. ([Location 1837](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0029732JS&location=1837)) - A talker focuses on the relation between her or his subject and the listener—and that listener is always a real person, physically (okay, telephonically) on the scene, present, part of the exchange. No third party is contemplated. Prose, on the other hand, must focus on an absent and, in fact, “invented”—“invented” in our sense—figure known as “the Reader.” Prose—all prose—addresses this absent but imagined figure and shapes itself and that figure and its needs in an unseen relationship between them. In “our” sense, it both “invents” and is “invented” by that absolutely necessary yet invisible personage, that disembodied, Protean, purely imaginary being. The tone of the prose is created by the feel of the relationship between what we might call the persona of the Writer and the persona of the Reader—invented beings, both. ([Location 1930](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0029732JS&location=1930)) - Your prose is going to invent some kind of reader through its tone of address, through its manner of speaking, through the way it makes contact, and through the feeling of its exchange. You create the Reader with your style, in a word. ([Location 1942](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0029732JS&location=1942)) - Hemingway, the most imitated writer of the twentieth century, would have understood. “What amateurs call a style is usually only the unavoidable awkwardness in first trying to make something that has not heretofore been made. Almost no new classics resemble other previous classics. At first people can see only the awkwardnesses. Then they are not so perceptible. When they show so very awkwardly people think these awkwardnesses are the style and many copy them. This is regrettable.” ([Location 2040](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0029732JS&location=2040)) - The novel and journalism were nourished in the same cradle, and the middle style is their common parent. ([Location 2120](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0029732JS&location=2120)) - This is because what really makes for readability is not clarity but attitude: the attitude of your prose toward our elusive friend the Reader and the role you invent for that invented being in your invented world. It is in precisely that relationship to the Reader that you will find most of the classic faults of style: pretension, condescension, servility, obscurantism, grandiosity, vulgarity, and the like—even academicism. That's why most serious faults of style can be described in language relevant to human relations. ([Location 2177](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0029732JS&location=2177)) - Every kind of narrative—be it pure fiction, pure nonfiction, or something in between—has no choice but to embrace its facts through the imagination. The nature of that partnership assumes various forms, but it is always there. Yes, a historian will use the imagination to embrace the facts in a very different way than will a science fiction writer. But both must make the merger. To see facts as the adversaries of the imagination and the imagination as hostile to facts is simply to roll down the superhighway of received opinion to defeat. ([Location 2226](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0029732JS&location=2226)) - The prime job in any autobiography consists in shaping a sharp, firm, vital persona—a character—out of the amorphous mass of Everything we call “you.” It's a very tricky transformation, and it's usually fumbled—not through selfindulgence, but through a failure of the imagination. A failure to imagine yourself. The writer slips into a fatal error. After all, she or he muses, why work on myself? I don't need to “invent” myself! Do I? ([Location 2322](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0029732JS&location=2322)) - You must first get a firm grip on the fact. Then you must turn it over and over in your mind until it is fully, both consciously and unconsciously, in your possession. Visualize. Conceptualize. Remember. Invent a context. Give it language. The job will be done only when the fact is talking to you, even in your dreams. ([Location 2460](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0029732JS&location=2460)) - Whether you are showing us Vienna in 1938, or your own living room yesterday afternoon, your imagination must have taken possession of the facts through curiosity, arousal, excitement, and love. ([Location 2481](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0029732JS&location=2481)) - ‘A fact is not a truth until you love it.’ ([Location 2484](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0029732JS&location=2484)) - Above all, memory meanders, and meandering is what memories do best. All too many memoirs—novels, too—fail because the writer hopes that this meandering can serve as a substitute for a structure. As a result, the piece rambles from memory to association to recollection to random thought. It grows confused, then lost, then pointless, and finally boring. You will be lucky to get even a vague contour of things from pure recollection. The miracle of Proust goes well beyond his dazzling capacity for recall: More impressive even than that is his ability to subsume all that recollection in one controlling, stylistically coherent narrative flow, and nothing more persuasively demonstrates the power of his controlling intelligence. ([Location 2503](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0029732JS&location=2503)) - The only draft that really matters is the final one, but somehow the three-draft rule of thumb does seem to correspond to some fundamental rhythm in the process. First comes conception. Second comes development. Third comes polishing. Bernard Malamud put it this way: “The first puts [the story] in place. The second focuses, develops, subtilizes. By the third most of the dross is gone.… ([Location 2617](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0029732JS&location=2617)) - Note well: I'm suggesting you write your scenario after—not before—you finish your first draft. You were in no position to write a scenario before you'd done the first draft. You did not know the story well enough for that. No story is really a story until it can be retold. Paraphrase is one of the mind's most potent instruments of understanding: What cannot be paraphrased has probably not been understood at all. ([Location 2756](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0029732JS&location=2756)) - Keep each summary short and try never to devote more than a day's work to any one of them. You are not rewriting. You are summarizing; you are testing possibilities. If your project is a short story or novella, don't produce one syllable over 350 words. If you are writing a novel, the summary should not be more than 3,000 words. ([Location 2765](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0029732JS&location=2765)) - If you imagine that a second draft can be created simply by sitting down and starting on page one to polish every line, stop: You are about to fall into a classic trap. You are not yet ready to polish anything. I've repeatedly seen novices slaving away at polishing rough first drafts before they had really taken charge of the shape and structure and character alignments of the story itself. They had not yet taken possession of the narrative voice, they did not yet really know who their characters were. Polishing happened to be the only technique of revision they knew, and so they were polishing, hoping that it would release the things they needed, the way rubbing Aladdin's lamp released the genie. It won't. Do not polish a mess. Polishing can't give your story its shape. Polishing can't show you what action you need or reveal your characters' roles. Polishing can't even give you the sound of your dialogue or your voice. In a second draft, you are going to be hauling huge hunks of prose to completely new places, cutting whole chapters, banishing irrelevant characters, and adding new relevant ones. ([Location 2784](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0029732JS&location=2784)) - Redrafting should begin by solving the problem of sequence. Always. So should every revision, no matter how minor. Structure determines not only the large shape of the story; it also determines every section, every paragraph, for that matter, the smallest turns in the cadence of every sentence. ([Location 2796](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0029732JS&location=2796)) - I like, need, and demand significant coherence in everything I read. Life is simply too short for me to spend it wandering alone in the desolate wastelands of gnomic implication. ([Location 2964](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0029732JS&location=2964)) - What pleases is a coherent image of life, and life is always both communicable and incommunicable, simultaneously freely given away and present to us alone. ([Location 2981](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0029732JS&location=2981)) - what a story “means” will usually involve exactly what the story is unable to put into words. ([Location 2986](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0029732JS&location=2986)) - Late research will function like all crowning touches, its relevance and usability, even at the last minute, will be instantly clear, leaping out at you. Indeed, some of the very best research of all is just such “last-minute” research, precisely because your sense of what is relevant now has a pitch of completeness and sensitivity it has never had before. ([Location 3089](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0029732JS&location=3089)) - Incidentally, every time you bring in outside readers, whether early or late, it's a useful idea to ask them to summarize the story for you. Nothing fancier than that. The reader may balk: Just retell the story? That's it? No big thinking about the theme? No grand observations or profundities about the characters? Just tell the story? Right. Just tell the story. That summary can be the most useful thing you will hear. If the story you hear back is something other than the story you think you told—and you'd be amazed to know how often it is—you will have just learned exactly what you need to revise. ([Location 3166](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0029732JS&location=3166)) - Gardner can be schoolmasterish, peevish, and prescriptive. He can struggle too ferociously, trying to wrestle his personal prejudices to the mat of general truth. ([Location 3364](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0029732JS&location=3364))