Immediate Fiction Read Free Page A

write. In the end, you must teach yourself, but there are a lot of ways to teach yourself. Some are quick and effective, and some take forever.
    The reason I can make such definite statements is that writing stories is different from the other arts. In music or painting, for example, you need some inborn talent to be successful, whereas no special talent is needed to write successful stories. The reason is that your life experience and life skills are also writing skills. You have a full set of emotions and enough dramatic experiences to draw on. You know how you work and how the world works. If you didn't, you wouldn't have survived this long. You don't have to know how to play the piano or paint a picture to get along in the world, but if you want to get by, you'd better know how people behave and how you should behave.
    So, the ability to write successful stories is an acquired skill, not an inborn talent. For purposes of writing and selling your stories, talent is irrelevant. Don't let yourself use lack of talent or lack of ability as an excuse.
    That's not to say that talent or personal brilliance doesn't exist or that they don't figure in at some point. If you're talking about the National Book Award or the Pulitzer Prize or the Nobel Prize, then talent makes a difference. But you don't need that level of ability to write successful stories. What you have is plenty.
    If you read at all, you should have noticed that plenty of talentless writers are making fortunes. The success of some published writing seems to defy explanation, but in most cases what makes the difference is the ability to tell a strong story. If you can do that, any mistakes you make otherwise will not hurt you. A number of well-known novelists require heavy editing to make their stories readable. But the story is there, and that's what counts.
    So what are the important points in all of this? There are two important messages to keep in mind. First, you can do this. Showing you how is what this course is all about. Second, for every writing problem, there is a simple solution.
    Although the story is the thing, before you get to the story, you must first get to yourself, to what you have inside you. That's not always easy. Sometimes you stall out before you get going. Getting past yourself, your doubt and anxiety, is often the first hurdle. Helping you over that hurdle, helping you anticipate and avoid that kind of trouble, are what the first chapter is about.

    [1]Rules of the Page
    Creativity obeys an unusual and contrary set of laws. If you violate them, you will expend enormous amounts of energy and get nowhere—just as you would if you pressed the gas and the brake to the floor of your car at the same time. Many writers give up, feeling they're incapable, when the only problem is that they're unwittingly violating these natural laws. To put it simply, they're trying to do the impossible. Trying to do the impossible is the major cause of frustration, discouragement, and failure for writers.
    All of this trouble stems from misconceptions about how the process is supposed to work. It's the result of trying to impose normal, everyday, noncreative standards upon a process that isn't normal. That's right. Creating isn't normal reality.
    THE RULES
    You will make a mess. Creating stories is never a neat, orderly, or predictable process. Mess is inevitable. You make a mess. You clean it up.
    You lose your way. You find it again. Your writing veers away from the story. You rein it in, or you follow it to see where it takes you. You do this many times until you get where you want to go. So, accept the mess as inevitable and good, let it happen, work with it, and you will get there a lot faster.
    You must write badly first. Trying to get it perfect right away will only get you blocked, because the bad comes first. No one does it on the first draft. Writers write many drafts to get it right. Hemingway, in typical macho style, said, "The first draft is always