I recommended Take Joy: A Writer’s Guide to Loving the Craft by Jane Yolen here at Fantasy Author’s Handbook way back in April of 2010. Since then it’s remained on the top of my list of books on the art and craft of creative fiction. This past month I had an opportunity to re-read it, along with the Fantasy Author’s Handbook GoodReads group, and was delighted to find it has held this position in my mind.
Instead of getting into any sort of a review, I’m just going to go ahead and share all the quotes I pulled out of this book for my notes. You’ll see these pop up again here, on the YouTube channel, and anywhere and everywhere I talk or write about writing, but if this doesn’t make you go out and find a copy of Take Joy for yourself, I just don’t even know…
From here on out, this is Jane Yolen.
A writer has many successes.
Each new word captured.
Each completed sentence.
Each rounded paragraph leading into the next.
Each idea that sustains and then develops.
Each character who, like a wayward adolescent, leaves home and finds a life.
Each new metaphor that, like the exact error it is, somehow works.
Each new book that ends—and so begins.
Selling the piece is only an exclamation point, a spot of punctuation.
***
A writer puts words on a page. An author lives in the story. A writer is conversant with the keyboard, the author with characters.
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Writing fiction—and poetry—is a bit like dreaming. You can find out what is troubling you on a deeper level. That one’s writing goes out and touches someone else on that same level—though differently—is one of the pieces of magic that attends to art.
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I contend it is not the writing that makes writers miserable. It is the emphasis on publication.
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Know this about being published. It is out of your hands.
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…once you have committed any words to the page and have sent your manuscript off to the publisher, it is mostly beyond your capacity to make anything happen in the publishing of your work.
Therefore, once the manuscript is in the mail—relax. Read a good book. Or read a bad book. Or read a bestseller, which is no guarantee of either. Just don’t worry about it. Better yet—get busy writing something new.
***
Interesting anecdotes are not fiction by themselves. They need the sandpaper touch of art.
***
I was sent 113 printed rejection letters for my poetry the first year I was serious about sending out my work, and only three of those rejection letters contained scribbled words from a real editor. As I recall, those words were, “Thanks!” “Try us again!” and “Sorry!” Not much encouragement perhaps, to a non-writer. But I found them riveting, reading them over and over, taking sustenance from them, even admiring their brevity. I did not give up. I sold my 114th submission.
***
The word challenge has gotten bad press because of book banners. But I contend we should reclaim the word and make it our own. A book should be challenging.
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What matters, of course, is not the pace but the finish line.
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Too many teachers, of course, beat into student heads the truism: Write what you know. Well, I have written about Chinese emperors, selchies, mermen, dragons, pirates, trolls, Native American horses, space-going toads, the disappearing island of Surtsey, change-ringing bells, the Wright brothers, and murderers. What I know about all of those personally comes only through research. So I would rather modify that advice: Write about what you find interesting. Or, as Marcie Hershman said in an article in Poets & Writers magazine: “We write about what it is that we need to know.”
***
I write for the still omnivorous adult reader I am. I write the book I want to read, the one I cannot find anywhere else. I write a book to find out what happens, just as I read a book to find out what happens.
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The theme that you find interesting, important, fundamental may not be what a reader thinks the story is about at all, because readers re-create any story to suit their own needs. They re-clothe the story in their own hair shirts. Put simply: Just as we write the story we need to write, they read the story they need to read.
***
Writing teachers speak of “finding your voice” as if the damned thing is lost somewhere: behind the desk, under the computer, in back of the commode. Whenever I hear that phrase, I am reminded of the “discovery” of America. Columbus did not discover America—he encountered it and the native people who already lived there. They were not lost, to be found. And neither is the story’s voice.
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The thing about being a writer is that you get to select the details, and it is that selection that moves the reader at the pace you want toward your inevitable but surprising slime. Art is, at its base, just a matter of selection.
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Literature is a textual act between consenting individuals.
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The most obvious characteristics of plot are: a beginning, a middle, an end. To write a book one need not reinvent plotting or set a precedent every time out. It can be that simple—beginning, middle, end.
***
This is how I visualize a plot:
1. Beginning
2. Immediate consequences
3. The whirligig
4. Re-establishment
5. Whirligig again and again
6. Third whirligig, deepest emotional level
7. Denouement, inevitable and surprising
[Then, after she’s elaborated on all seven points, Jane Yolen writes…]
Do not take my seven stages of plotting as gospel.
***
A textbook definition of plot would be: the sequence of narrative order. Or: the sequence of events showing characters in action.
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A good plot does not just look forward. It forces us backward and sideward as well. It makes us look inward as well as outward. Think of plot as a kind of time-travel device. While it goes ahead, it changes what it has passed through, it rearranges where it has been.
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Never take any writing teacher’s advice as gospel.
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I… don’t believe that you should write for the dictates of an unknowable audience. You should listen to the story and the steady rhythm of your own writer’s heart.
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Landscape as character, as metaphor, as background and foreground, as counterpoint to your hero, as villain, as friend. Become that better writer who knows the worth of landscape and can set down what is seen to illuminate what is not seen. Draw that world with your words, and you will draw the readers in.
***
Listen to the editor, use that reader’s comments to help you restructure, rework, and rewrite. The editor may not know how to fix something but will be good at giving you a signal that here is a problem. Fixing that problem is up to you.
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Don’t write Dear Occupant prose, designed to appeal to everyone and offend no one. Strong prose should provoke, rouse, challenge, incite. Otherwise, why write?
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I want to remind you that the sins of the publishing company are on its own head. You and I must write as honestly and as well as we can, because in the end only we are responsible for our own sins. And our own stories.
***
Don’t forget to smell the grandbabies.
Pay attention to good food.
Lie down on your stomach in the tall grass.
Listen to the rhythm of ocean waves.
Put your hand on graven stone. Finger silk. Touch a loved one’s hair.
Breathe in the world.
That’s barely scraping the surface. What might you have pulled out of this book?
There’s only one way to find out!
—Philip Athans
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