Quotes from Dwight V. Swain

To be a writer, a creative person, you must retain your ability to react uniquely. Your feelings must remain your own. The day you mute yourself, or moderate yourself, or repress your proneness to get excited or ecstatic or angry or emotionally involved...that day, you die as a writer.

A story is the record of how somebody deals with danger.

But emotion, for most people, too often is like some sort of slumbering giant, lulled to sleep by preoccupation with the dead facts of that outer world we call objective. When we look at a painting, we see a price tag. A trip is logistics more than pleasure. Romance dies in household routine. Yet life without feeling is a sort of death.

the writer is driven by his need to escape the limits of a too-small world, the World That Is. It's in his blood to range farther than life can ever let him go.

But as Mark Twain once observed, the difference between the right word and the almost right word is as the difference between lightning and the lightning bug. So do strive for that right word!

There is really no such thing as the novel," observes novelist Vincent McHugh. "The novel is always a novel—the specific problem, the particular case, the concrete instance.

Writing is a lonely business.

The preceding chapter tells you how to communicate with your readers. With words. What should you as a fiction writer communicate? Feelings.

Making copy come alive How do you write vividly? You present your story in terms of things that can be verified by sensory perception. Sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch—these are the common denominators of human experience; these are the evidence that men believe.

Feeling tells you what you want to say. Technique gives you tools with which to say it.

In the same way, consider bungalow versus house versus building . . . starlet versus girl versus female . . . Colt versus revolver versus firearm . . . steak versus meat versus food.

feeling is the place every story starts.

How do you master all the varied techniques? By writing stories. Which is to say, by being willing to be wrong. Then, having been wrong, you check back through your stuff for process errors . . . places where you skipped over steps, or went off the path, or started with the road map upside down. Do that enough times, on enough stories, and eventually you'll learn.

Reaction" is convenient verbal shorthand for "I desire to behave in a particular way."—I may not act, you understand. But the impulse is with me. If, magically, all my restraints and inhibitions were to vanish, I'd embrace the woman, soothe the dog, throw out the cereal, weep or laugh or throw a temper tantrum.

Broadly speaking, the thing you need to avoid is the general as contrasted with the particular (reptile creates a less vivid image than does rattler); the vague as contrasted with the definite (them guys is less meaningful than those three hoods who hang out at Sammy's poolroom); and the abstract as contrasted with the concrete (to say that something is red tells me less than to state that it's exactly the color of the local fire truck).

Behavior, in turn, seldom stands neutral.

Things don't have feelings. Events don't. Places don't. But people do. And things and events and places can create feelings in people . . . trigger an amazing range of individual reactions.

Thus, to orient means to point somebody in the right direction. In story, that somebody is the reader.

It is always the writer's world that we enter in art—never the objective world.)

Each trick mastered will free you just a little more from your feelings of inadequacy and frustration.

That's why the first real

Though rules may shape your story, you yourself must shape the rules. Beware, too, of the other man's rule. He sees the world through different eyes. Thus, George Abercroft is an action writer. "Start with a fight!" is his motto. And for him, it works.

In general, the trick is to bring the past forward into the present, so that you describe what happens in past tense instead of past perfect.

Each story teaches him new tricks . . . brings him new tools, new techniques. Insight continually grows in him, and so does understanding. So, he improves as he goes along . . . seldom falls into the same trap twice.