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Frank C. Strunk, frequent
guest lecturer at the Florida Suncoast Writers Conference St. Petersburg,
Florida and at Gail Provost's Writing Retreat Workshops, shares some
of his writing tips:
- Learn how to write
in tight, well-contained scenes. And when you're finished with
the scene, stop and move to another scene. If you can write a good
scene, you can write a good novel. Strunk says it's important to
learn the structure and dynamics of a scene, to learn how to build
a scene.
- Learn to write effective
dialogue. A modern popular novel is sixty to eighty percent
dialogue. Dialogue is not the same as conversation, says Strunk.
If you wrote dialogue the way people talk, it would be clunky and
full of hesitations.
- Get a handle on your
principal characters early on. This is more important than trying
to devise a plot and trying to fit characters into it. Strunk believes
story and plot arise out of character and dialogue arises out of
character. Learn as much about the characters as you can before
you put the plot together. Strunk uses a journalistic technique
to accomplish this:
"I interview my characters and ask them questions," Strunk
said. "I try to get them to talk to me. If I can start a dialogue
with the character, the character becomes real to me. I need to
know what he thinks and feels and let him tell me in his own words
because then I'll hear his speech patterns and learn things about
him. This may run 10-15 pages of single-spaced copy from a single
interview."
- Use a journalism
technique to help you write scenes, the basic five Ws and H:
"In my file, when I start to write a scene, I place at the
top of the page the five Ws and H (who, what, where, when, why and
how) and answer questions the same way I did when I was a young
reporter," Strunk said. "Who will be in the scene, why
is the scene being written, what will take place, when will it occur,
where will it occur, is it day or night, how much time will elapse?
As I write the scene I will discover other things--the scene begins
to come alive."
- Use outlines.
Write fast, try to get all the ideas down first, then go back and
rewrite, advised Provost because "that's the raw clay that
you can start molding into a book." Strunk, on the other hand,
starts slowly and gets the first draft more refined. As his books
have become more complex Strunk does more outlining because it saves
a lot of rewriting.
- Seek challenges.
Strunk says he tries to challenge himself with every new book to
do something more difficult, go beyond what he's previously done
and always continue to learn.
Back to Frank C. Strunk profile.
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