The trick is not to become a writer, it is to stay a writer.
– Harlan Ellison
Tag: Harlan Ellison
Pen to Paper: I Write Like
My friend Susan told me about the I Write Like site. I’ve had entirely too much fun playing with it. I tested 30 of my fiction posts with the IWL analysis. Here is the short version of the results:
Once each: Margaret Atwood, Jack London, J.D. Salinger, Ian Fleming (on a story involving multiple ways to kill someone), David Foster Wallace, Margaret Mitchell, P.G. Wodehouse (!), Raymond Chandler, Harry Harrison, and Bram Stoker (on a vampire story).
Twice each: Kurt Vonnegut, James Joyce, and JK Rowling.
Three times: Chuck Palahniuk.
Four times: Dan Brown:.
Seven times: Stephen King.
Pen to Paper: Naming Your Characters
When I write my stories, I need to know the characters I’m dealing with. I can permit their personalities to develop during the course of writing, but I must know their names. I can start by writing, “Then X crossed to the window and spotted Y doing something unnatural with a tennis racquet.” But before I can go much further, I will have to stop and name both X and Y. The names help to shape the story. If X is Ralph and Y is Aloysius, we will have a very different story than if X were to be Rajit and Y were to be Miyuki.