How to learn to write books
Six months ago , an article was published here that angered me. In the comments I promised that I would write my version. On the other hand, I didn’t want to do this, because I’ll get legitimate questions: “And who are you?”. I do not like to subscribe to online posts, I have spoiled the opinion of many writers after reading their LJ blog. You read the book, you think: “Cool dude!”, You read the blog, the opinion changes: “What kind of idiot?”. Such a difference arises from the fact that the book is post-processed, edited many times.
This article was rewritten several times, in this version, I believe that it turned out the most balanced. The article is quite suitable for Habrahabr, since many well-known works came out from technical people. And some of you will want to write your story.
The article is more like a collection of useful tips than a complete guide to action.
You have written a short story and want to show it to the public. It is very important to know about two types of readers. (There are many of these types, but relatively speaking - two). Reading their comments, you must understand what type you are.
')
The moral of the story is important to them. What did the author want to say? What does he lead to? This type of reader pays attention to the style, which is sometimes more important to them than the story itself.
If the story is interesting, they can forgive the style. I remember one cult author. The style is terrible, it is difficult to read, there are many fans, a couple of films based on his books were shot. They don’t really need the moral of the story, the main character defeated the bad guy, that's enough. The main thing is, how did he do it?
Need to start with short stories. They discipline, learn to write complete stories. Heal graphomania.
The story can be started from the middle of the events, along the way explaining to the reader the details of what is happening.
Writing a purposeless story without a logical outcome. I came across a story from a novice writer, he had a half-page description of how a fly flies around the room, then how he poured himself coffee, how he prepared food, went outside, looked at nature, described his feelings. So he wrote up 10 pages. Sometimes these graphomaniac have a talent of beautiful stylistics. On it the first type of readers is bought. Description of feelings, taken to heart, it seems to them that they have read something akin, recalling their experienced tragedies. But as we see, the story has not been described, it has no strings, there is no denouement. Personally, my opinion is gum. Chewed and spat. Could not chew.
Two types of writers.
Some write for fame. They think that right now the publishers will buy their story and there will be a lot of money and fame. Most often they write a graphomaniac story. Motivation is strong, but there is no forethought in the plot. Such grafomany overwhelm the publishers with their “works”, leaving no chances to those who can really write. As a result, publishers sometimes do not even read the text sent, feed you breakfast.
The second type of writers live with stories in their head. They have a section of the brain that fantasizes, thinks out, lives its own life. Such writers also have vivid, unusual dreams, which cannot be attributed to the events that they experienced during the day. In these dreams, they can fall into unusual worlds, escape through the dungeons from the terrible monsters. But unlike other people, in this dream they will find an explanation, where these creatures came from, will see a logical outcome of the flight. Usually, if people have nightmares, they are not detailed, meaningless and caused by anxiety, they dream of how they run away from the hordes of rats. The writer dreams about how he runs away from the orcs, applies some spells against them, there is a plot, where you have to reach a certain room and turn some kind of lever.
In general, if you ask a question regarding the sleep of your friends, you can discover many surprising things for yourself. It turns out that there are people who only dream about black and white dreams, where there are outlines of something incomprehensible. If you tell your colorful dream or the story that you made up for the book, he will look at you as if he was crazy. Will recommend you to be treated. I am warning you in a friendly way :)
You can ask them:
- And how do writers write fiction?
- For the sake of money, they take and write, - they answer.
In response, they may also ask you: “What are you writing for? You already have no publisher. ”
So be careful, there are a lot of such friends, in fact. Can kill all your creative impulse. From these you can hear: "And how can you write books if you have not studied as a writer?"
By the way, Stephen King studied writing, but his university lecturer said that Stephen already knew how to write even before admission. And in class, he knew the theory better than others, his essays were already real works.
These friends always need some kind of goal: “Why do you read a scientific article? You're not a scientist. ” For them it is necessary to invent moronic excuses, and, they quite accept them. Sometimes, the dumbest excuse is accepted by them as the best explanation.
There is a misconception that a story is needed for a unique story. Take any book from the great classics and try to analyze the uniqueness of the story. Anna Karenina, meeting with the train, while the train was the latest technology. This was a marketing ploy. The whole novel describes how a woman came to life like that. With the same success, you can change the train to a supercomputer and write a novel, as the main character decided to commit suicide after talking with the first rudiment of artificial intelligence. The reader is important the very story, which should not be banal, interesting.
Uniqueness can be imitated. Add a little-known historical facts. A description of things that are already out of use. For example, how your cd worked, how it rustled, how the disc shimmered with colors of the rainbow. After 30 years it will be interesting to read, and after 100 they will already refer to your book as a historical fact. For example, one teenager will argue with another, did the CDs make noise or work silently?
If, nevertheless, you think that uniqueness is needed, then it is enough to write a book on modern history. A simple description of the daily news events, without any conclusions and conclusions. Pure facts with links. Five years of such writings - it will already be considered a textbook on modern history, which will be recommended for study. But if you draw conclusions and conclusions, they may seem controversial, and it is because of them that the book will not be recommended.
The reader wants to be deceived. So an interesting story is born. First, you introduce the reader to the plan of action, the reader agrees to himself: “Well, it is logical,” and then you break the whole plan, put the main character (hereinafter) almost in an impossible situation and the reader is intrigued, how does he get out?
The narrative does not have to be commonplace. For example, your yy is going to rob a bank, you first dream together with the reader that you can buy for the loot. Then he. goes to rob, and in the bank is that? You can write that years. waiting for the police, but it is trite, the reader himself guessed that the bank is not so easy to rob. Therefore, we transfer events for the night, and instead of protection there are other robbers who entered the bank from the other side. Somewhere in the middle of the bank, they meet and try to divide the safe that has not yet been opened. The situation no longer looks banal and the reader is interested in how it will end.
Your main character should not be a fool, because the reader subconsciously identifies with it. Doodles and nerds should be around. In the history of the bank, these are rival robbers. For example, the negotiations were successful and the safe is opened together. After the autopsy, it turns out that one of the unfortunate robbers has a strange form of a filia; when he sees a suitable size hole, he tries to push an intimate part of the body into it. And now he gets stuck, a piquant and unexpected situation arises, with a lot of jokes. You can not leave him, he saw the faces of all. And you can not kill him. And why? Because it turns out that competing robbers are brothers. Here you can also drag their mother, who is in charge of the whole operation, she is somewhere outside the bank and scolds them on the radio, recalling something personal along the way. You already wonder how your yy. get out? The most logical that he just took his share and left. But something must stop him. Everything should not go according to plan.
Rode the Greek across the river, sees the Greek in the river cancer. This patter can be stretched to 10 pages.
We describe the Greek
Describe the river
Describe cancer
Describe the road that drove the Greek
We describe the carriage in which the Greek rode.
Grekha was not driving alone, we add dialogs.
This is best done at the end, when the story is already written. You can write the whole story in the form of dialogs, and at the end, start to dilute with descriptions.
However, one must be very careful. If you have all 10 pages, the main characters are traveling in a wagon and talking about something, then you will lose the reader, he will be bored. It is desirable that on each page there was a change of events.
Some writers make a huge mistake that disappears in their later work. The mistake is that their heroes are constantly eating something. The task is to keep the reader in front of the book so that he read it avidly. Someone is trying, therefore, to even lose weight in order to forget about food. If you are talking about food, the reader remembers how hungry he is, throws a book, goes to eat. The question is, will he return? This also applies to any feces, not the best way to stretch a book.
Robert Heinlein has a moment where a minor girl offers her master to deprive her of her innocence as payment for a shelter. The protagonist is outraged by such a proposal, expels her. It should be a terrible tirade that he is not her master, and she is a free man, and so on.
I remember another case. The famous Russian writer, at the beginning of his career, on the contrary describes sex with a minor. When the writer started a blog on LiveJournal, his readers recalled this moment.
So be careful when describing such moments. Of course, this is an easy way to keep the reader, but he has his own price.
Be careful with some numbers. Megabytes, terabytes, petaflops, all this will become obsolete with time. Readers get nostalgia; they reread your books 15 years later. Kilobytes - it sounds already funny.
You can get out of the situation like this:
- How much information have you uploaded to my brain?
- I tell you that some nerdy? Sit down, don't mess around, ”she said through clenched teeth, not letting go of a cigarette with foolishness.
Please note that nonsense is not randomly indicated. This explains a few points. Why the doctor does not know how much information she downloaded? Once the crap smokes, it is most likely not a doctor and the case clearly takes place in some underground room. Next comes the description of the dirty underground room.
Many begin to write in the first person. There is a problem with switching to other heroes. There are several unobvious moments:
* You can write in the first person, then suddenly switch and write in the third person. The reader will understand and accept.
* You can write in third person and switch to the first person.
* You can always write in third person
* You can write in the first person immediately on behalf of all the main characters. But you have to have a huge experience to do it skillfully.
At first, the problem arises of associating logically several events in different parts of the universe. I recommend reading Kurt Vonnegut, in his first paragraph the events take place in New York, in the second in California, and in the third you are already on Mars. After it, you can easily learn how to switch events.
There are specialized programs for writing books. I heard about these. They are arranged on the type of Wikipedia, where you can roll back to the previous version. Make notes. Some argue that there are even programs that will write a book for you. Maybe there is, but how do you tie your style with the program? Over time, you realize that using such a program is complete nonsense. This is said by people who have never used such a thing, but they like the idea itself. "The computer is writing a book for you!" Good headline for the yellow newspaper.
The most important program you should use is one that can check grammar and spelling on the fly. I personally use MS Office XP for Windows. Unfortunately for the Mac, the Russian module is incredibly bad. Therefore, you have to write through the virtual.
Having reached this point, I was tired. Thoughts are lost, I want to postpone everything. How to make yourself keep writing? First, you should know that you can write a very large book if you write at least 10 lines a day. And for a writer, the more important it is to learn it. 100 pages you will not write in one day?
Secondly, with the loss of strength and interest, read other people's books. This will give you an impetus, and you read other people's books not as a reader, but as a writer. You immediately see where the author stretches the book, you feel when he is tired. You admire other people's maneuvers, write out beautiful phrases. Constantly learning something.
Give friends to read. One of courtesy will never tell you the truth. Therefore, you should be interested in:
* Where are they stuck, at what point?
* What embarrassed them?
Usually, after writing, I save a book for a month or even more. Then you read your own work, like a stranger. If I am interested in reading, then I recognize the writings to be suitable for giving to read to friends.
I write for my own pleasure, so I have nowhere to hurry. Sometimes I rewrite several pages. I clean heads or change their places, change something in the beginning to link it with a new chapter. Correcting stylistic errors. Be sure to re-read several times before showing someone.
Working on styling also means removing recurring words and minimizing hard-to-follow sentences. After 15 edits, then I can not believe that you wrote this text. Especially if you return to re-reading after a month, you notice so many mistakes!
Many novice writers really hope for proofreaders. Allegedly, you can write with errors, and karyktory Pat fse parasite. With so many errors, the proofreader actually becomes a co-author and they claim to have copyright. There are also proofreaders who are so perturbed by your style that phrases are reworked to be unrecognizable. So do not rely on proofreaders. A good proofreader is one that puts commas (or, on the contrary, removes commas) and corrects rare grammatical errors.
Stephen King "How to write a book." Read with the amendment that the American wrote for the English-language text, where the passive voice is not the same as Russian.
James Frey "How to write a brilliant novel"
James Frey "How to write a brilliant detective"
The last books are good because the history of the issue is considered there, you can learn a lot about how it was before and how it has become now.
Written fantasy becomes more real for the writer himself. And after 8 hours of continuous writing of the text, there is a feeling that you are just finished watching the new Hollywood action movie. For the sake of such a bonus is to do it.
PS About all noticed errors, please report it to the PM. I constantly correct the text, but at the moment I don’t see any mistakes, the eye has become “dirty”.
Update: thanks for the message, corrected the errors.
This article was rewritten several times, in this version, I believe that it turned out the most balanced. The article is quite suitable for Habrahabr, since many well-known works came out from technical people. And some of you will want to write your story.
The article is more like a collection of useful tips than a complete guide to action.
Two types of readers
You have written a short story and want to show it to the public. It is very important to know about two types of readers. (There are many of these types, but relatively speaking - two). Reading their comments, you must understand what type you are.
')
First type
The moral of the story is important to them. What did the author want to say? What does he lead to? This type of reader pays attention to the style, which is sometimes more important to them than the story itself.
Second type
If the story is interesting, they can forgive the style. I remember one cult author. The style is terrible, it is difficult to read, there are many fans, a couple of films based on his books were shot. They don’t really need the moral of the story, the main character defeated the bad guy, that's enough. The main thing is, how did he do it?
Where to begin?
Need to start with short stories. They discipline, learn to write complete stories. Heal graphomania.
The story can be started from the middle of the events, along the way explaining to the reader the details of what is happening.
And what is graphomania?
Writing a purposeless story without a logical outcome. I came across a story from a novice writer, he had a half-page description of how a fly flies around the room, then how he poured himself coffee, how he prepared food, went outside, looked at nature, described his feelings. So he wrote up 10 pages. Sometimes these graphomaniac have a talent of beautiful stylistics. On it the first type of readers is bought. Description of feelings, taken to heart, it seems to them that they have read something akin, recalling their experienced tragedies. But as we see, the story has not been described, it has no strings, there is no denouement. Personally, my opinion is gum. Chewed and spat. Could not chew.
What are you writing for?
Two types of writers.
Some write for fame. They think that right now the publishers will buy their story and there will be a lot of money and fame. Most often they write a graphomaniac story. Motivation is strong, but there is no forethought in the plot. Such grafomany overwhelm the publishers with their “works”, leaving no chances to those who can really write. As a result, publishers sometimes do not even read the text sent, feed you breakfast.
The second type of writers live with stories in their head. They have a section of the brain that fantasizes, thinks out, lives its own life. Such writers also have vivid, unusual dreams, which cannot be attributed to the events that they experienced during the day. In these dreams, they can fall into unusual worlds, escape through the dungeons from the terrible monsters. But unlike other people, in this dream they will find an explanation, where these creatures came from, will see a logical outcome of the flight. Usually, if people have nightmares, they are not detailed, meaningless and caused by anxiety, they dream of how they run away from the hordes of rats. The writer dreams about how he runs away from the orcs, applies some spells against them, there is a plot, where you have to reach a certain room and turn some kind of lever.
In general, if you ask a question regarding the sleep of your friends, you can discover many surprising things for yourself. It turns out that there are people who only dream about black and white dreams, where there are outlines of something incomprehensible. If you tell your colorful dream or the story that you made up for the book, he will look at you as if he was crazy. Will recommend you to be treated. I am warning you in a friendly way :)
You can ask them:
- And how do writers write fiction?
- For the sake of money, they take and write, - they answer.
In response, they may also ask you: “What are you writing for? You already have no publisher. ”
So be careful, there are a lot of such friends, in fact. Can kill all your creative impulse. From these you can hear: "And how can you write books if you have not studied as a writer?"
By the way, Stephen King studied writing, but his university lecturer said that Stephen already knew how to write even before admission. And in class, he knew the theory better than others, his essays were already real works.
These friends always need some kind of goal: “Why do you read a scientific article? You're not a scientist. ” For them it is necessary to invent moronic excuses, and, they quite accept them. Sometimes, the dumbest excuse is accepted by them as the best explanation.
Plot
There is a misconception that a story is needed for a unique story. Take any book from the great classics and try to analyze the uniqueness of the story. Anna Karenina, meeting with the train, while the train was the latest technology. This was a marketing ploy. The whole novel describes how a woman came to life like that. With the same success, you can change the train to a supercomputer and write a novel, as the main character decided to commit suicide after talking with the first rudiment of artificial intelligence. The reader is important the very story, which should not be banal, interesting.
Uniqueness can be imitated. Add a little-known historical facts. A description of things that are already out of use. For example, how your cd worked, how it rustled, how the disc shimmered with colors of the rainbow. After 30 years it will be interesting to read, and after 100 they will already refer to your book as a historical fact. For example, one teenager will argue with another, did the CDs make noise or work silently?
Another word about uniqueness
If, nevertheless, you think that uniqueness is needed, then it is enough to write a book on modern history. A simple description of the daily news events, without any conclusions and conclusions. Pure facts with links. Five years of such writings - it will already be considered a textbook on modern history, which will be recommended for study. But if you draw conclusions and conclusions, they may seem controversial, and it is because of them that the book will not be recommended.
Narration
The reader wants to be deceived. So an interesting story is born. First, you introduce the reader to the plan of action, the reader agrees to himself: “Well, it is logical,” and then you break the whole plan, put the main character (hereinafter) almost in an impossible situation and the reader is intrigued, how does he get out?
The narrative does not have to be commonplace. For example, your yy is going to rob a bank, you first dream together with the reader that you can buy for the loot. Then he. goes to rob, and in the bank is that? You can write that years. waiting for the police, but it is trite, the reader himself guessed that the bank is not so easy to rob. Therefore, we transfer events for the night, and instead of protection there are other robbers who entered the bank from the other side. Somewhere in the middle of the bank, they meet and try to divide the safe that has not yet been opened. The situation no longer looks banal and the reader is interested in how it will end.
Your main character should not be a fool, because the reader subconsciously identifies with it. Doodles and nerds should be around. In the history of the bank, these are rival robbers. For example, the negotiations were successful and the safe is opened together. After the autopsy, it turns out that one of the unfortunate robbers has a strange form of a filia; when he sees a suitable size hole, he tries to push an intimate part of the body into it. And now he gets stuck, a piquant and unexpected situation arises, with a lot of jokes. You can not leave him, he saw the faces of all. And you can not kill him. And why? Because it turns out that competing robbers are brothers. Here you can also drag their mother, who is in charge of the whole operation, she is somewhere outside the bank and scolds them on the radio, recalling something personal along the way. You already wonder how your yy. get out? The most logical that he just took his share and left. But something must stop him. Everything should not go according to plan.
We stretch the book
Rode the Greek across the river, sees the Greek in the river cancer. This patter can be stretched to 10 pages.
We describe the Greek
Describe the river
Describe cancer
Describe the road that drove the Greek
We describe the carriage in which the Greek rode.
Grekha was not driving alone, we add dialogs.
This is best done at the end, when the story is already written. You can write the whole story in the form of dialogs, and at the end, start to dilute with descriptions.
However, one must be very careful. If you have all 10 pages, the main characters are traveling in a wagon and talking about something, then you will lose the reader, he will be bored. It is desirable that on each page there was a change of events.
Food
Some writers make a huge mistake that disappears in their later work. The mistake is that their heroes are constantly eating something. The task is to keep the reader in front of the book so that he read it avidly. Someone is trying, therefore, to even lose weight in order to forget about food. If you are talking about food, the reader remembers how hungry he is, throws a book, goes to eat. The question is, will he return? This also applies to any feces, not the best way to stretch a book.
Sex
Robert Heinlein has a moment where a minor girl offers her master to deprive her of her innocence as payment for a shelter. The protagonist is outraged by such a proposal, expels her. It should be a terrible tirade that he is not her master, and she is a free man, and so on.
I remember another case. The famous Russian writer, at the beginning of his career, on the contrary describes sex with a minor. When the writer started a blog on LiveJournal, his readers recalled this moment.
So be careful when describing such moments. Of course, this is an easy way to keep the reader, but he has his own price.
Numbers
Be careful with some numbers. Megabytes, terabytes, petaflops, all this will become obsolete with time. Readers get nostalgia; they reread your books 15 years later. Kilobytes - it sounds already funny.
You can get out of the situation like this:
- How much information have you uploaded to my brain?
- I tell you that some nerdy? Sit down, don't mess around, ”she said through clenched teeth, not letting go of a cigarette with foolishness.
Please note that nonsense is not randomly indicated. This explains a few points. Why the doctor does not know how much information she downloaded? Once the crap smokes, it is most likely not a doctor and the case clearly takes place in some underground room. Next comes the description of the dirty underground room.
First person
Many begin to write in the first person. There is a problem with switching to other heroes. There are several unobvious moments:
* You can write in the first person, then suddenly switch and write in the third person. The reader will understand and accept.
* You can write in third person and switch to the first person.
* You can always write in third person
* You can write in the first person immediately on behalf of all the main characters. But you have to have a huge experience to do it skillfully.
Switching between events
At first, the problem arises of associating logically several events in different parts of the universe. I recommend reading Kurt Vonnegut, in his first paragraph the events take place in New York, in the second in California, and in the third you are already on Mars. After it, you can easily learn how to switch events.
What programs to use?
There are specialized programs for writing books. I heard about these. They are arranged on the type of Wikipedia, where you can roll back to the previous version. Make notes. Some argue that there are even programs that will write a book for you. Maybe there is, but how do you tie your style with the program? Over time, you realize that using such a program is complete nonsense. This is said by people who have never used such a thing, but they like the idea itself. "The computer is writing a book for you!" Good headline for the yellow newspaper.
The most important program you should use is one that can check grammar and spelling on the fly. I personally use MS Office XP for Windows. Unfortunately for the Mac, the Russian module is incredibly bad. Therefore, you have to write through the virtual.
Read other people's books
Having reached this point, I was tired. Thoughts are lost, I want to postpone everything. How to make yourself keep writing? First, you should know that you can write a very large book if you write at least 10 lines a day. And for a writer, the more important it is to learn it. 100 pages you will not write in one day?
Secondly, with the loss of strength and interest, read other people's books. This will give you an impetus, and you read other people's books not as a reader, but as a writer. You immediately see where the author stretches the book, you feel when he is tired. You admire other people's maneuvers, write out beautiful phrases. Constantly learning something.
Post-processing or how good is the book?
Give friends to read. One of courtesy will never tell you the truth. Therefore, you should be interested in:
* Where are they stuck, at what point?
* What embarrassed them?
Usually, after writing, I save a book for a month or even more. Then you read your own work, like a stranger. If I am interested in reading, then I recognize the writings to be suitable for giving to read to friends.
I write for my own pleasure, so I have nowhere to hurry. Sometimes I rewrite several pages. I clean heads or change their places, change something in the beginning to link it with a new chapter. Correcting stylistic errors. Be sure to re-read several times before showing someone.
Working on styling also means removing recurring words and minimizing hard-to-follow sentences. After 15 edits, then I can not believe that you wrote this text. Especially if you return to re-reading after a month, you notice so many mistakes!
Proofreaders
Many novice writers really hope for proofreaders. Allegedly, you can write with errors, and karyktory Pat fse parasite. With so many errors, the proofreader actually becomes a co-author and they claim to have copyright. There are also proofreaders who are so perturbed by your style that phrases are reworked to be unrecognizable. So do not rely on proofreaders. A good proofreader is one that puts commas (or, on the contrary, removes commas) and corrects rare grammatical errors.
Recommended reading:
Stephen King "How to write a book." Read with the amendment that the American wrote for the English-language text, where the passive voice is not the same as Russian.
James Frey "How to write a brilliant novel"
James Frey "How to write a brilliant detective"
The last books are good because the history of the issue is considered there, you can learn a lot about how it was before and how it has become now.
Bonus
Written fantasy becomes more real for the writer himself. And after 8 hours of continuous writing of the text, there is a feeling that you are just finished watching the new Hollywood action movie. For the sake of such a bonus is to do it.
PS About all noticed errors, please report it to the PM. I constantly correct the text, but at the moment I don’t see any mistakes, the eye has become “dirty”.
Update: thanks for the message, corrected the errors.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/168153/
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