3361846. Graham's magazine.
Edgar Allan Poe, the philosophy of composition.
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337I once made a list of all the pieces I had written in maybe 20 or 30 years, and then put a checkmark beside each one whose subject related to things I had been interested in before I went to college. I checked off more than 90%. Et seq.
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338A compelling structure in nonfiction can have an attracting effect analogous to a story line in fiction.
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339All I had to do was put them in order. What order. An essential part of my office furniture in those years was a standard sheet of plywood--4x8 feet--on two sawhorses. I strewed the cards face-up on the plywood. The anchored segments would be easy to arrange, but the free-floating ones would make the piece.
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340As a nonfiction writer, you could not change the facts of the chronology, but with verb tenses and other forms of clear guidance to the reader you were free to do a flashback if you thought one made sense in presenting the story.
* Flashbacks in music?
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341You can't move that bear around like a king's pawn or a queen's bishop. But you can, to an important and effective extent, arrange a structure that is completely faithful to fact.
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342Readers are not supposed to notice the structure. It is meant to be about as visible as someone's bones. And I hope this structure illustrates what I take to be a basic criterion for all structures; They should not be imposed upon the material. They should arise from within it.
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343A piece of writing has to start somewhere.
Go somewhere
and sit down when it gets there.
You do that by building what you hope is an unarguable structure. Beginning, middle, end. Aristotle, page 1.
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344It painted me into a corner, yes, but in doing so it freed me to write.
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345Often, after you have reviewed your notes many times and thought through your material, it is difficult to frame much of a structure until you write a lead. You wade around in your notes, getting nowhere. You don't see a pattern. You don't know what to do. So stop everything. Stop looking at the notes. Hunt through your mind for a good beginning. Then write it.
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346What counts is a finished piece, and how you get there is idiosyncratic.
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347Another mantra, which I shall write in chalk on the blackboard, is "A thousand details add up to one impression." It's actually a quote from Cary Grant. Its implication is that few (if any) details are individually essential, while the details collectively are absolutely essential.
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348Writing is selection, and the selection starts right there at square 1. When I am making notes, I throw in a whole lot of things indiscriminately, much more than I'll ever use but even so I am selecting. Later, in the writing itself, things get down to the narrowed choices. Et seq.
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349Art is where you find it. Good writing is where you find it.
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350Are common points of reference dwindling?
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351What do you do? You write "Dear Mother." And then you tell your mother about the block, the frustration, the ineptitude, the despair. You insist that you are not cut out to do this kind of work. You whine, you whimper. You outline your problem, and you mention that the bear has a 55-ionch waist and a neck more than 30 inches around but it could run nose to nose with Secretariat. You say the bear prefers to lie down and rest. The bear rests 14 hours a day. And you go on like that as long as you can. And then you go back and delete the "Dear Mother" and all the whimpering and whining, and just keep the bear.
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352Dear Jerry-The way to do a piece of writing is 3 or 4 times, never one. For me, the hardest part comes first, getting something--anything--out in front of me. Sometimes in a nervous frenzy I just fling words as if I were flinging mud at a wall. Blurt out, heave out, babble out something--anything--as a first draft. With that, you have achieved a sort of nucleus. et seq.
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353Writing is selection. Just to start a piece of writing you have to choose one word and only one from more than a million in the language. Now keep going. What is your next word? et seq.
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354Hemmingway sometimes called the concept "The theory of omission."
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355Concept--Greening Writing
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