"Nancy Kress - Beginnings, Middles & Ends (Elements of Fictio" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kress Nancy)

There's a story in your head—or maybe just the start of a story.
Characters are walking around in there, talking to each other,
doing things to the furniture, gesturing and shouting and laugh-
ing. You can see it all so clearly, like a movie rolling in your mind.
It's going to be terrific. Excited, you sit down to write.
But something happens. The story that comes out on the
page isn't the same as the story in your head. The dialogue is
flatter, the action doesn't read right, the feel just isn't the same.
There's a gap between the story you can visualize and the one
you know how to write. And at the moment, that gap resembles
the Mariana Trench—deep, scary and uncrossable.
If you've ever felt this way about your writing, you're not
alone. The truth is that there's always a gap between the story as
you imagined it—compelling, insightful, rich with subtle nu-
ance—and what actually ends up in the manuscript. This is be-
cause stories must be written, and read, one word at a time, with
information accumulating in the reader's mind to create the full
picture. This slow, linear accretion of impressions can't ever quite
equal that perfect flash of inspiration in which all the parts of
the story—action, meaning, nuances, insights, all of it—burst
into the brain all at once. Words, unlike movies, are not a multi-
sensory event. Words are symbols, and symbols don't work di-
rectly on the human senses. They work secondhand, through
suggestions to the reader's imagination, through words describ-
ing what you saw in your imagination.
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2 BEGINNINGS, MIDDLES AND ENDS
No wonder there's always a gap between the story in the
writer's head and the one she puts into the reader's head.
For professional writers, that gap may be small. A profes-
sional learns what information to present—and in what order—
to make the words convey her original vision as closely as possi-
ble. The beginning writer must learn this, too. One way to do
that is to write a lot—some people say a million words—until you
get better through trial and error. Another is to receive reliable
criticism on which parts of your story are conveying your vision
and which are not. A good writing class can do this for you. A
third way is to read books like this to learn how good writers
present information to their reader's imagination.
That "third way" isn't really sufficient by itself, of course.
Learning about writing won't help you write better unless you
actually apply what you learn to a story in progress—just as
learning about the ideal golf swing won't improve your score
unless you actually practice on the links. There's no substitute
for practice. The Mariana Trench doesn't get crossed by discuss-
ing it.
Nor will this book help you improve the quality of the story
in your head. That vision comes from everything about you: your
experiences, your imagination, your beliefs about the world,