The best writers tell a good story and they make it look easy. Try to do it yourself though and if you get past an opening sentence, you get stumped creating dramatic moments that don’t reek of melodrama, characters that aren’t stick figures, and sentiment that doesn’t come off being sentimental.
Writing programs tell you that good writing can be taught. Novelist and writer Doug Bauer may be more honest in warning that something crucial is born in the writer. There’s a difference between gift and grit, he says, between talent and tenacity.
What you need, at bottom, he says is a fictional imagination – Saul Bellow’s for putting new ideas about humankind into flesh and blood. Or Hemingway’s instinct for writing how people talk by knowing how they think. Then, Doug Bauer says, you have to roll up your sleeves and study “the daily sweaty business of making animate sentences.”
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)
Guests:
Douglas Bauer, author of “The Stuff of Fiction: Advice on Craft.”