How to Write an English Paper, and Well

Need help with your English paper? Turn to Jack Lynch.

Lynch is a professor at Rutgers University in Newark, and his specialty is eighteenth century literature–the era of Lord Byron, John Dryden, Samuel Johnson, and William Blake. However, after a battery of graduate work, a dissertation, and years of teaching college, he also knows how to help students spiff up their writing.

On his university webpages, Lynch has compiled a concise how-to guide on English papers. He says,

My audience is primarily undergraduates in college English classes, though of course some advice will be appropriate for high schoolers and graduate students. The idea is to collect all my advice on writing good English papers in one place.

The guide, entitled “Getting an A on an English Paper,” includes sections on Thesis, Research, Close Reading, Style, and Mechanics. Of course, Lynch can’t guarantee your grade, but he can offer insight into academic sentence-smithmanship.

Link to Getting an A on an English Paper here.

Terry Brooks on Writing (Part 2)

These tips come from Sometimes the Magic Works: Lessons from a Writing Life.

6. Show, don’t tell. Consider the difference between these two sentences:

“The young man was clearly disgruntled by the news.”

“The young man furrowed his brow at the news.”

The second sentence describes the character’s actions without interpreting them, which makes for much better storytelling and more pleasurable reading.

7. Avoid the grocery-list approach to describing characters. Grocery lists interrupt the action and make your prose feel stuffy. Plus, it’s easy to botch the parallelism in long lists, and if you don’t catch your own errors, don’t expect an editor to, either.

8. Characters must always be in a story for a reason. Stories center around action, and action requires streamlining. Sure, you can have subplots, but every character should contribute something to the story’s movement forward.

9. Names are important. The central symbols in your story, names offer a wealth of supra-sentential meaning, tapping into humanity’s linguistic, historical, and archetypal heritage. From a marketing standpoint, names also act as branding.

10. Don’t bore the reader. ‘Nuff said.

Terry Brooks on Writing (Part 1)

These tips come from his autobiography and writing guide, Sometimes the Magic Works: Lessons from a Writing Life.

1. Write what you know. If you know law, write a suspense novel. If you know Vietnam, write a war novel. If you know Norse mythology, write a fantasy novel. Let your knowledge and life experience determine your niche.

2. Your characters must act in a believable fashion. Every good guy has vices, and every bad guy has virtues. Even yours.

3. Your protagonist must confront a challenge that requires resolution. In other words, your characters need a plot. If you don’t have a plot, you don’t have a story.

4. Movement equals growth; growth equals change; without change, nothing happens. There is a season turn, turn, tun…

5. The strength of the protagonist is measured by the threat of the antagonist. Some budding writers try to shelter their characters from hardship, but without hardship, their characters cannot show and develop strengths. Strong characters must overcome big challenges.

Jem Bloomfield on The Scarpetta Factor

Jem Bloomfield published an enlightening piece in the California Review of Literature. His review of the Scarpetta Factor, by Patricia Cornwell, highlights key features of all good fiction writing. In some of these features Cornwell excels, while in others she lacks.

Let the Setting Influence Your Characters. In The Scarpetta Factor, Cornwell’s characters make numerous allusions to the U.S. economy. But are they affected by the downturn? Nope. Scarpetta is repeatedly offered–”begged,” to use Bloomfield’s word–to star in her own television show, and Lucy, without consequence, drops hundreds of millions from her stock portfolio.

Characters are the product of their setting.

Make Every Sentence Count. Bloomfield takes issue with Cornwell’s occasional lazy sentence. Of note is “Dodie checked into the hospital and was breathing down Benton’s neck, and the toying and torturing continued while laughter rose to the rafters inside the medieval house of Chandonne.” The shifting verb tenses make this sentence awkward, and the phrase “breathing down Benton’s neck” is cliche.

Even in a novel topping 500 pages, every sentence should be skillfully worded.

Keep Your Plot and Characters in Balance. If your main characters become too big, they can overshadow your plot. In The Scarpetta Factor, Scarpetta tends to shift the story’s focus onto herself, obscuring the murder victims who drive the action.

This is an Aristotlean complaint. In The Poetics, Aristotle argued that the plot, not the characters, was the most important element in storytelling. (The Poetics apply to tragedy specifically but to all fiction generally.) This emphasis on plot has influenced writing for over two millennia. In fact, there’s a book out now called Aristotle’s Poetics for Screenwriters: Storytelling Secrets From the Greatest Mind in Western Civilization.

If you follow Aristotle, you follow the best.

Patricia Cornwell on The Scarpetta Factor

Today, we’ll let the author speak for herself. Consider Cornwell’s story construction, her analysis of Scarpetta, and her approach to contemporary social issues.

That’s good noveling.

Patricia Cornwell has a mind for crime.

Not as a criminal, of course, but as one of the world’s leading crime writers. Her latest book, The Scarpetta Factor, is vying for top spot on the New York Times Bestseller List. Only Dan Brown is besting her.

What can fiction writers learn from Patricia Cornwell?

Pepper your story with details. Consider the first two sentences of The Scarpetta Factor:

A frigid wind gusted in from the East River, snatching at Dr. Kay Scarpetta’s coat as she walked quickly along 30th Street. It was one week before Christmas without a hint of the holidays in what she thought of as Manhattan’s Tragic Triangle, three vertices connected by wretchedness and death.

Immediately, Cornwell establishes the precise location, the precise character, and the precise time of year in her novel. She also provides internal and external perspectives–readers know what Scarpetta is seeing and doing, in addition to what she’s thinking and feeling.

That’s good storytelling.

Write how people talk. Consider another early passage in the novel, this one a bit of dialogue:

“Well, you know how it works,” Scarpetta said. “A dispute, and the body doesn’t go anywhere. We’ll put a hold on her release until Legal instructs us otherwise. You showed the mother the picture, and then what?”

Let’s dissect what we see here. Scarpetta speaks in thinking noises (”Well…”), sentence fragments (”A dispute, and the body doesn’t go anywhere”), jargon (”Legal”), paraphrases (”You showed mother the picture”), and clarification requests (”then what?”). All of these communication strategies abound in natural, everyday speech.

That’s good dialogue.

Read the full excerpt for The Scarpetta Factor here.

Dan Brown has enjoyed monumental success.

The Da Vinci Code has sold 80 million copies worldwide, and his latest conspiracy tale, The Lost Symbol, smashed sales records the day it hit shelves. Even now, it’s perched atop the New York Times Bestseller List.

What can fiction writers learn from Dan Brown?

1) Early to bed, early to rise, advertise advertise advertise. According to legend, this slogan graces the administrative offices of Hamburger Central, but Dan Brown ain’t selling Happy Meals. He’s selling novels—by the pallet.

Coincidentally, he also arises at 4:00 every morning to put words on paper. There’s something to add here about work ethic.

2) Secrets sell. Ancient symbols and modern day cover-ups keep pages turning because, as readers, we thirst after hidden things. Hence why The Lost Symbol was guarded by lock and key and legal contract until its release last September.

3) Avoid maliciousness. Despite the hoo-ha over his portrayal of the Catholic church, Dan Brown harbors no ill will against his Holiness. As a writer, you may have a point to make, but literary libel undercuts its own artistic power.

4) Build upon previous success. Readers fond of Robert Langdon will gladly follow him from one novelized enigma to the next. The same can be true of your characters.

5) Write well. Dan Brown is a dang good storyteller, scaffolding his plotlines within well-polished prose. However, such mastery requires hours of revision and reformulation, so stick with it. The more you write, the better you’ll write.

Read an excerpt from The Lost Symbol here.

Like or loathe his fiction,

you must concede that Stephen King knows his literary stuff. His prolific pen has produced more than 60 titles, which have racked up some 350 million sales. Yes, he’s a commercial writer, but he has a keen eye for detail and continuity. There’s much to learn from him.

Here’s his advice for burgeoning writers:

Ever read an exhausting novel or yawn-drawing short story? I sure have. Not every work churned through the presses is quality, and if mediocrity makes the publishing cut, then why can’t you?

Stephen King’s advice: Let lousy writing inspire you to do better.