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"To Write Well"Excerpted from a syllabus for a course in The Writing of Fictionby Michael Arnzen, Ph.D. | Seton Hill University(http://michaelarnzen.com)

To write well, one must write and write often.

To write well, one must readwell: reading often and readingclosely. Storytelling is contagious -- reading will spark the fuel of

your imagination. But storytelling has also been going on for as

long as mankind has existed. You should know what's been said

and how it has been said to do it well yourself.

To write well, one must treat writing both seriously and

playfully, balancing the discipline of hard work with the pleasures of

creativity. Readers only respect writers who care enough to do both

with vigor. And they can spot lazy writing from a mile away.

To write well, one must first be willing to make a lot of

mistakes in the name of experimentation and practice. Otherwise,

one goes stale or repeats the same errors indefinitely. Or worse:

one might become fatally boring...to readers and to oneself.

To write well, one must be willing to share writing with others,

to get a sense of how readers respond to one's efforts. Never

forget that writing is foremost an act of communication. And if

writing is an experiment, then workshopping is a way of testing the

results of it.

Again: To write well, one must really care what readers think.

Often a reader's needs are more important than the writer's goals in

telling a story. Sometimes you have to be willing to "kill your

darlings."

Yet to write well, one must not think of writing as a slavish actof catering to one's audience -- or as mandatory homework assigned

by a teacher. Writing is something magical that originates from

within: storytelling is one of the many ways we all have of

expressing ourselves and discovering ourselves. Even in fantasy, we

http://michaelarnzen.com/http://michaelarnzen.com/

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"write what we know" -- and yet, when we are doing it right, we

surprise ourselves with our own imagination.

To write well is to tell stories consciously. We're all already

fictioneers -- we're always telling stories in our everyday lives,

whether we know it or not. But what separates a fiction writer from

an everyday storyteller, however, is a particular attention paid to

crafting the language and a purposeful massaging of the core

elements of narrative to produce the desired audience response

something emotionally resonant or truthful...something

approaching art.

***

Michael Arnzen teaches in the MFA program in Writing Popular Fiction at Seton Hill

University, where he currently serves as Chair of the Division of Humanities. His

horror fiction has won numerous awards, including the Bram Stoker Award. His

latest books areThe Gorelets Omnibus (2012) and the writing guide, Many Genres,

One Craft: Lessons in Writing Popular Fiction (2011). Learn more about his writing

online athttp://gorelets.com

http://www.setonhill.edu/academics/fiction/http://gorelets.com/http://www.setonhill.edu/academics/fiction/http://gorelets.com/