I’ll
be away from blogging for the next week, but in the mean time, here’s a great
piece by Lee Martin’s blog “The Least You Need to Know” about five essentials
of good writing, applicable to fiction and non-fiction writers:
A teacher of mine used to say that a good short story led to a moment of surprise, which he defined as “more truth than we think we have a right to know.” The same holds true for a good piece of nonfiction. As we read, we participate in the writer’s attempt to find what he or she didn’t know when first coming to the page. Narrative is the art of constructing visual images, scenes if you will, that make a dream world for the readers and that require those readers’ participation in the intellectual and emotional life of the story. A good story, then, dramatizes, explores, illuminates. Characters move through time and space, and are profoundly changed because of the journey.
