Råd från en författare

"There's an enormous difference between being a story writer and being a regular person. As a person, it's your duty to stay on a straight and even keel, not to break down blubbering in the streets, not to pull rude drivers from their cars, not to swing from the branches of trees. But as a writer it's your duty to lie and to view everything in life, however outrageous, as an interesting possibility. You may need to be ruthless or amoral in your writing to be original. Telling a story straight from real life is only being a reporter, not a creator. You have to make your story bigger, better, more magical, more meaningful than life is, no matter how special or wonderful in real life the moment may have been."
A propos berättelser som bygger på verkliga händelser, och ren fiktion.

"Do not, after writing a scene in which your characters remain seated at a table after the only other people in a restaurant have gotten up and left, say, ´They were alone now.´ Instead, for instance, after writing, ´The man had his hand on the back of the woman's white satin dress. They followed the waitress into the next room,´ go on to say, ´The cigarettes they left in the ashtray were still smoldering.´
Now your remaining characters truly are alone, and we, the readers, are alone, too, whereas if the author had said, ´They were alone now´--well, they would have been alone, but at the readers' expense: we wouldn't have felt like we were in the story, with whatever was going on at that lonely table, and that's no good."
A propos detta med gestaltning versus förklaring.

Författaren Rick Bass delar med sig av funderingar och erfarenheter i Huffington Post.