This was the first non-fiction this year. It was amazing that I could sit down,
read through it, and even enjoy taking notes. It took four days and I couldn't
wait to start writing my own stories. That might say something about the book
itself, the stage of my own learning, or both. As they say, when the student is
ready, the teacher appears.
The famous writer details how she approaches and develops a novel. It starts
with a simple idea, e.g., I want to write about a crime in Cornwall that
involves surfing. She follows up with what she calls location research during
which she creates a through line or plot kernel, which says who kills whom
and why. Next she creates the characters, 15 on average, and just writes down as
much as she could about each--a critical step called character analysis from
which the unique speeches and view points of the characters derive.
Now it comes to the actual writing. After the primary event which upends almost
everyone's life (each has a status quo before this), each character responds in
his or her own way and runs into conflicts over time. And "what's next" is
decided upon the interactions of these characters.
A creative endeavor within a framework, in short, is what the author shows us in
this book. It works for her because creating something out of thin air, the pure
artistic way, can be at times frustrating. She needs the anchor to feel
surefooted. The way she puts it is that the organized work, the research, and
the process appeal to her left brain and give the control she needs to free her
right brain in order to create.
The main challenge for me is to create unique voices for the characters which
comes down, again, to the knowledge of language, especially the idiomatic
expressions. But I am in the right direction.
I am happy that I read "Careless in Red" in advance as the book uses many parts
of it to illustrate the writing process.
