Great Advice from the Great Writers of The Great Courses
Every year, we’re lucky to have great sponsors for our nonprofit events. Today, The Great Courses Plus—a video-on-demand service for lifelong learning—shares some advice from great writers they’ve partnered with. The Great Courses Plus is a NaNoWriMo 2020 sponsor.
The past few months have probably shown you a different world than the one you’re used to: outside your door, there’s less commuter traffic, fewer crowds waiting to be seated at the local eatery or queueing up for the opening of the latest movie, no kids chasing each other with sticks and screaming as they wait for school buses.
Inside your door, however, it’s a whole new world. That’s because your job, your school, your favorite restaurant, your movie theater… all of your outside worlds are now contained within the four walls you call home. And all that chaos is stuck inside with you. (We know. We live there, too.)
Even if you don’t have children, pets, or additional adults going stir crazy around you, 2020 has provided enough chaos on a daily basis that it’s almost impossible to focus on a five-word tweet, let alone commit to a 50,000-word novel. The positive side is that these distractions could turn into some pretty fantastic book fodder. But of course, sitting down and writing about this hectic time while still in the midst of it? Well, that’s a completely different story.
To help out, we turned to some of our favorite writing professors to see what they are doing to get themselves through these trying times:
Jennifer Cognard-Black
Becoming a Great Essayist;
Great American Short Stories: A Guide for Readers and Writers
Remember when your biggest frustration was carving out some time to write? And yet now, when so many of our usual commitments and pleasures have been stripped away, the one thing many of us have is time. But how to harness this extra time—that is the question. It's just so seductive to try out yet another sourdough bread recipe or to binge yet another show on Netflix. My advice? Engage in slowthink. Don't ask yourself, "Why am I not writing?" Instead, ask yourself, "What might I want to learn, to know, or to create?" During the Great Pause, I've been reading all of the millennial novels and memoirs about women and food that I can get my hands on, and I'm slowthinking my way through them. There's something there—I'm not sure what—that I want to write about myself, but since I don't yet know what that is, I'm just underlining striking phrases and making the occasional note in my writing journal. And that's okay; I'm relaxing my creative mind to see what bubbles up.
James Scott Bell
How to Write Best-Selling Fiction
Write tight. Don't think about the entire project, or how the world will receive your book once it's finished. Concentrate on the scene in front of you, beat by beat, emotion by emotion. Get lost in the action. Then your writing will become a respite as well as a passion. As Ray Bradbury once said, "You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you."
James Hynes
Writing Great Fiction: Storytelling Tips and Techniques
During the pandemic, writing fiction has become my chief solace from the stress of quarantine (and everything else). I've found that active engagement with my current project—the creation of characters and scenes, or just tinkering with the prose—has calmed me much more than bingeing another series on HBO or eating too much (though I do those, too). And it's not just an escape: It's the place where I can take whatever I'm feeling at the moment and turn it into narrative.
Angus Fletcher
Screenwriting 101: Mastering the Art of Story
I have a little insight into this because my next book is about how literature of all kinds—novels, poems, films—can help improve our mental health and well-being.
And a tip that comes from literature, and that’s backed by neuroscience, is gratitude. Gratitude shifts our focus away from ourselves, and it also shifts our negative emotions, which interfere with writerly flow, into positive emotions, which boost it. Gratitude isn’t always easy to conjure in times like these, of course. But one useful method for accessing it is what psychologists’ term “reframing.”
So, for example, when your lovely children are interrupting you, causing you to lose your train of thought, and possibly your mind, take a moment to think: How wonderful it is that I’m a parent. How lucky I am to have these kids. Recall a specific moment—as precisely as you can—when your kids popped your life with joy or wonder. And in that instant, your stress will drop, your calm will increase, you’ll be more effective at figuring out an effective way to give the kids a way to amuse themselves, and you’ll be more ready to write when you return to your keyboard.
Or, when you’re suffering from writer’s block, think: How lucky it is that I don’t need to write this novel, because I have so many wonderful novels already on my bookshelf. Then, go read one of those novels, immersing yourself in its flow. And as you get deep into that flow, you’ll often feel your block dissolve, allowing you to return to your own writing with a fresh energy and perspective.
Not every negative emotion can be converted like this, of course. When we suffer grief, it can’t be reframed away. Our brains need time to process sorrow and heal. But a great many self-doubts and daily frictions can be softened with gratitude. And no matter what happens to you in your life, you can always feel grateful for being a writer. For whatever the happening is, no matter how hard or painful it may be, you have been gifted a pen to take that happening and make some good of it.
Advice from professional writers who are facing the same distractions and roadblocks you are can be helpful. And to make things better, The Great Courses Plus provides you with a wealth of resources to help you get through these weird times. Clear your mind with meditation, focus your thoughts with mindfulness, jumpstart your creativity with a “brain hack,” research the worlds and periods you’re writing about, learn to create a single great sentence—whatever you need, we have a course that will help.
Forty-five words in nine lines to break our heads upon, but I rarely get out of my mind Angus Fletcher's recasting of Shelley on the Sublime, which is that the Sublime persuades us to give up easier pleasures for more difficult and painful ones.
In two new books, “Wonderworks” and “The Modern Myths,” writers at the intersection of aesthetics and empiricism reveal the humanities at war within themselves.
Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature by Angus Fletcher
https://amzn.to/3bfjtrX
https://bookshop.org/a/17891/9781982135973
The Modern Myths: Adventures in the Machinery of the Popular Imagination by Philip Ball
A technology is any human-made thing that solves a problem. Most of our technology exists to master our world, to domesticate space. That’s why we have smartphones and smart homes and satellites. Literature tackles the opposite set of problems: not how to master the nonhuman world but how to master ourselves. It wrestles with the psychological problems inside us. Grief, lack of meaning, loneliness—literature was invented to deal with these problems. To have happy and democratic societies, effective engineers and scientists, we need people who are joyful, not angry, who have a deep sense of empathy and purpose, who have an ability for logic and problem-solving. You get all these things from literature.
‘Literature Should Be Taught Like Science’ An interview with Angus Fletcher by Kevin Berger (24 February 2021) Nautilus
Felicia Dorothea Hemans (25 September 1793 – 16 May 1835)
English poet. Two of her opening lines, The boy stood on the burning deck and The stately homes of England, have acquired classic status. (Wikipedia)
From our stacks: Frontispiece “Felicia Hemans. From the original Bust by Angus Fletcher.” from The Poetical Works of Felicia Hemans. Complete in One Volume. With a Memoir, By Mrs. L. H. Sigourney. A New Edition, from the Last London Edition, with all the Introductory Notes. Elegantly Illustrated from Original Designs. New York: W. I. Pooley, 1868.
EXCLUSIVE: Adrian Munsey’s Classic Film Productions has partnered with David A. Stern and D. Matt Geller’s Sleeping Giant Films to develop E. M. Forster’s 1907 novel, The Longest Journey, as a feature…
@sylvi10 Have you seen this? It seems this production is moving forward...
