While I was busy reading Orlando by Virginia Woolf, I came to the conclusion that this book was also a wonderful manual about writing. In the beginning Orlando’s problem in creating a poem is the dissonance between reality and the way he imagines colors and objects. Then there was a knock on the door and I received several books about writing from Amazon.com that I want to share with you this week.

The first book is The Making of a Story – A Norton Guide to Creative Writing by Alice LaPlante. This book holds in a nutshell everything one needs to know about writing. This book is read very easily, starting with the basic definitions of terms like ‘creative non-fiction’, which is a relatively new genre. The book is mostly written in second person and one feels that the writer is actually taken along on a journey with the reader.

A couple of exercises that I very much connected to because of my ideology and point of view on how to write books were the first exercises called, “Don’t know why I remember” and “I am a camera”. The goal of these exercises is explained as to “pinpoint some previously unexplored material that remains ‘hot’ for you in some important emotional way”. During this exercise you are asked to think of an important event which is not obviously apparent every day, like a birth, long-forgotten death or birthday and you render them on a page with the opening sentence, “Don’t know why I remember…” The point isn’t just to explain the reasons why the event is important, but to simply write it and put it down on a page.

The other exercise is to write a stream of consciousness passage, acting almost like a camera. The goal is to notice what you notice and to convey it without trying to explain or interpret it.

This book doesn’t give you a classroom solution but it does give you answers of other people, who completed the exercise, so even if you don’t have a writing group you can learn by yourself at home.  

I wonder if all these books over-simplify the process of writing. In many ways, writing is a science and since these ‘manuals’ are important, I will write about them this week.