Stephen King er en av verdens mestselgende forfattere. Han har skrevet 58 romaner og solgt over 350 millioner bøker verden over. “On Writing” er Kings manual for bokskriving, hvor han har samlet noen tips for deg som ønsker å bli en god forfatter. Her er noen av hans beste tips:
- Du blir god ved å lese og skrive.
“You don’t need writing classes or seminars any more than you need this or any other book on writing. Faulkner learned his trade while working in the Oxford, Mississippi post office. Other writers have learned the basics while serving in the Navy, working in steel mills or doing time in America’s finer crossbar hotels. I learned the most valuable (and commercial) part of my life’s work while washing motel sheets and restaurant tablecloths at the New Franklin Laundry in Bangor. You learn best by reading a lot and writing a lot, and the most valuable lessons of all are the ones you teach yourself.”
- Forbered seg på å mislykkes og motta kritikk. Du kommer til å tvile på deg selv og andre kommer til å tvile på deg. Fortsett å skrive selv om det er vanskelig og du ønsker å gi opp. Når du mislykkes er det viktig å være optimistisk.
- Les, les, les. Les så mange bøker som mulig fremfor å se på TV.
“You have to read widely, constantly refining (and redefining) your own work as you do so. If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write.”
- Skriv for deg selv, før du bekymrer seg for publikummet. Ikke kast bort tid på å prøve å tilfredsstille andre.
“When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story. When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story. Your stuff starts out being just for you, but then it goes out.”
- Skriv om de tingene som er vanskeligst å skrive. De viktigste temaene er ofte det som er vanskeligst i si noe om. Grav i dybden og bruk tid på å tenke ut historien.
- Unngå adverb. Spesielt ikke etter “sa han” og “sa hun”.
“The adverb is not your friend. Consider the sentence “He closed the door firmly.” It’s by no means a terrible sentence, but ask yourself if ‘firmly’ really has to be there. What about context? What about all the enlightening (not to say emotionally moving) prose which came before ‘He closed the door firmly’? Shouldn’t this tell us how he closed the door? And if the foregoing prose does tell us, then isn’t ‘firmly’ an extra word? Isn’t it redundant?”
- Ikke bruk en passiv stemme. Våg å ta risikoer.
“Timid writers like passive verbs for the same reason that timid lovers like passive partners. The passive voice is safe. The timid fellow writes “The meeting will be held at seven o’clock” because that somehow says to him, ‘Put it this way and people will believe you really know. ‘Purge this quisling thought! Don’t be a muggle! Throw back your shoulders, stick out your chin, and put that meeting in charge! Write ‘The meeting’s at seven.’ There, by God! Don’t you feel better?”
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Ikke bruk mer enn 3 måneder på førsteutkast.
“The first draft of a book—even a long one—should take no more than three months, the length of a season.”
- Fjern distraksjoner. Skru av TVen og telefonen osv. Steng resten av verden ute.
“There should be no telephone in your writing room, certainly no TV or videogames for you to fool around with. If there’s a window, draw the curtains or pull down the shades unless it looks out at a blank wall.”
- Ikke vær pretensiøs. Ikke bruk store, overbærende ord når du kan bruke korte, enkle ord for å forklare det samme.
- Unngå lange avsnitt.
- Ikke heng deg for mye opp i grammatikk. Du skal forføre leseren, slik at de glemmer at de leser en fortelling.
“Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes. The object of fiction isn’t grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story… to make him/her forget, whenever possible, that he/she is reading a story at all.”
- Mestre kunsten å beskrive. Bruk enkelt språk og enkle bilder slik at leseren ikke kjeder seg.
- Ikke gi for mye bakgrunnsinformasjon. Gi leseren nok informasjon til å drive handlingen fremover og overbevise dem om å lese videre.
- Gi dybde til karakterene. Fortell om hva de gjør og vis flere sider. Mordere kan også hjelpe gamle damer over veien.
- Innse at du ikke trenger rusmidler for å være en god forfatter.
- Ikke stjel noen andres stemme. Finn din egen stemme og ikke kopier skrivetstilen til en annen forfatter med mindre du jobber med en skriveøvelse.
“One cannot imitate a writer’s approach to a particular genre, no matter how simple what the writer is doing may seem. You can’t aim a book like a cruise missile, in other words. People who decide to make a fortune writing lik John Grisham or Tom Clancy produce nothing but pale imitations, by and large, because vocabulary is not the same thing as feeling and plot is light years from the truth as it is understood by the mind and the heart.”
- Skriv hver dag. Hvis du ikke skriver hver dag risikerer du å miste taket på karakterene og handlingen i historien.
- Ta en pause. Når du har skrevet ferdig, la det ligge urørt i seks uker. På denne måten har du et åpent sinn når du leser det du har skrevet på nytt. Da legger du merke til hull og mangler i plottet eller karakterene.
“If you’ve never done it before, you’ll find reading your book over after a six-week layoff to be a strange, often exhilarating experience. It’s yours, you’ll recognize it as yours, even be able to remember what tune was on the stereo when you wrote certain lines, and yet it will also be like reading the work of someone else, a soul-twin, perhaps. This is the way it should be, the reason you waited. It’s always easier to kill someone else’s darlings that it is to kill your own.”
- Vær modig nok til å kutte ut det kjedelige. Når du leser gjennom historien må du kutte vekk de unødvendige, kjedelige delene. Hvis noe ikke er relevant eller ikke driver historien fremover, kutt det ut.
“Mostly when I think of pacing, I go back to Elmore Leonard, who explained it so perfectly by saying he just left out the boring parts. This suggests cutting to speed the pace, and that’s what most of us end up having to do (kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your ecgocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.)”
- Vær sunn og lev et godt liv. Ta vare på kropp og helse og lev et balansert liv.
“When I’m asked for ‘the secret of my success’ (an absurd idea, that, but impossible to get away from), I sometimes say there are two: I stayed physically healthy, and I stayed married. It’s a good answer because it makes the question go away, and because there is an element of truth in it. The combination of a healthy body and a stable relationship with a self reliant woman who takes zero shit from me or anyone else has made the continuity of my working life possible. And I believe the converse is also true: that my writing and the pleasure I take in it has contributed to the stability of my health and my home life.”
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