James A. Michener's Writer's Handbook: Explorations in Writing and Publishing
James A. Michener
Language: English
Pages: 208
ISBN: 0679741267
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Pulitzer Prize–winning author James A. Michener has written about everything from the pristine islands of the South Pacific and the endless wilds of Africa to Spanish bullfighters, American revolutionaries, and pirates of the Caribbean. Now Michener turns to his favorite and most personal subject: the written word. Reproducing pages from his own handwritten rough drafts and working manuscripts, Michener walks the reader through a step-by-step guide to the entire process of writing, editing, revising, and publishing. Addressing challenges specific to both fiction and nonfiction, all the while providing thoughtful and useful solutions, James A. Michener’s Writer’s Handbook is an invaluable resource for book lovers, editors, and, of course, writers—aspiring and accomplished alike.
Praise for James A. Michener
“A master storyteller . . . Michener, by any standards, is a phenomenon.”—The Wall Street Journal
“Sentence for sentence, writing’s fastest attention grabber.”—The New York Times
“Michener has become an institution in America, ranking somewhere between Disneyland and the Library of Congress. You learn a lot from him.”—Chicago Tribune
“While he fascinates and engrosses, Michener also educates.”—Los Angeles Times
was moving, I could travel about by air, ship, or, in Australia and New Zealand, train. On those orders I traveled to forty-nine different South Pacific stations and in time came to know the area as few Americans ever would, from the minute frontline posts like Sterling, Tulagi, and Emirau, to cities like Sydney and Christchurch, to the heavenly spots like Samoa, Tahiti, and Bora Bora, and the remote islands like Pitcairn, Easter, and the Marquesas that the war never touched. In The World Is My
also the exploration and the groping for meaning that characterize the final stages of a manuscript. This improvement did not come easily. Highlighted with a benday screen are words and passages that survived from the first version, and how few they were. Editorial Work on Revised Pages These pages illustrate the careful work done on the closing pages of the book. The first, ‘Granting a Prize,’ deals with a literary problem which I thought fascinating but which the editors considered a
problems’ would be a beginning for an extended passage that set the stage for the action that was to follow. It carries the body of the novel forward. A representative opening sentence for a scene could be: ‘When Paula entered the room clutching the paper, he could see that she had read the damaging report and was prepared to defend her husband.’ A sentence like that demands that we be allowed to hear what she is about to say and by what steps she proposes to protect her husband. The art of
masters the rhythms of cultivated language; one has to work to master good scene, since it depends so inescapably on effective dialogue. You seem to stress fiction at the expense of nonfiction. If true, I’ve been sadly misguided, because in today’s market it seems easier and more profitable to break into the nonfiction field. What may prove to be the best book I’ve written was nonfiction, Iberia, a philosophical travel book on Spain, and I know that often a fine nonfiction book will outsell all
faced a disaster at the start of a very long paragraph in Huckleberry Finn. He had written: ‘So Tom and I got our canoe …’ but his editor pointed out that in the preceding chapter the rascals had clearly lost their canoe. Something had to be done, and Twain was equal to the challenge; he changed the clause to read: ‘So Tom and I found a canoe …’ Today computer typesetting permits alterations, often of a substantial nature, at any point in a paragraph; even so, I sometimes find myself hesitating