Flashbacks 2016
Thesis Resources
"Commonplaces are a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. Such books are essentially scrapbooks filled with items of every kind: recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas. Commonplaces are used by readers, writers, students, and scholars as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts they have learned. Each commonplace book is unique to its creator's particular interests." -Wikipedia-
Back off!
That's the advice that writer Andre Dubus III offers in "The Case for Writing a Story Before Knowing How It Ends." As a young writer, his mistake was trying to say something, he says:
When I began to write, I was deeply self-conscious. I was writing stories hoping they would say something thematic, or address something that I was wrestling with philosophically. I've learned, for me at least, it's a dead road. It's writing from the outside in instead of the inside out.
Eventually he learned an exciting, terrifying lesson: surrender control to your characters.
What happens then is, you start writing something you don't even really want to write about. Things start to happen under your pencil that you don't want to happen, or don't understand. But that's when the work starts to have a beating heart.
Dubus, the author of The House of Sand and Fog, also discusses the virtues of dreaming rather than imagining and of waiting six months before revising a full draft. His latest publication is a collection of four novellas titled Dirty Love.
Photos used under Creative Commons from Steven | Alan, daz smith, kkimpel, mikecogh, Cecily Michelle, ralph and jenny, dennis, kate*, Kim-Leng, mrstg, rearl, fr4dd