Creating a novel can be one of the most frustrating tasks for a writer to do. In the essay below, I will concentrate on the writing styles of six writers' from different writing genres, including technical writing, academic writing, and fiction writing. Comparisons will be drawn in regards to the different writers' composition style and the steps to writing a book. The axiology, pedagogy, procedure, and epistemology for writing a novel will be elaborated on as well.Conforming to Writing Style
In Sondra Perl's essay “Understanding Composing,” many past freelance projects came to mind. Perl explains that when a writer is given a topic, a felt sense evokes in them and brings forth ideas. But, when I signed a contract to ghostwrite a novel, the business representative explained to me that readers want sex. Perl does not explain in her essay that there are some topics that can morally spark nothing in a writer. Because I am not a fan of erotica, I had a challenging time thinking of an idea to write those chapters. In the first four chapters that I was told to write, two of them were sex scenes. I've picked up several fiction novels only to find that they were borderline pornography. The chapters that I had to ghostwrite lacked the simplicity and vulgar nature of the first edition of this series. Whereas the original writer's sex scenes had crass language and surprisingly tacky actions happening, the sex scenes I wrote were more comedic. I realized quickly that the writer that the business representative was looking for was the same writer Perl talks about when she says: “…writers focus on what they think others want them to write rather than looking to see it is they want to write.
[...] But without the teacher's criticism, “brilliant” advice, and “irrelevant” ideas, creative writers wouldn't learn the procedures in creating a novel. A creative writing teacher is one person who takes the place of a complete audience, often times experienced in the writing field and usually critical of it. If it wasn't for a teacher to teach the writing process, an audience may never pay attention to a writer's work. The pedagogical steps I encountered while in school had the four goals above in mind. [...]
[...] Because I could not conform to the original writer's style, the contract was terminated and I breathed a sigh of relief. When I rewrote the first chapter in my novel, Change for a Twenty, and recorded myself in the writing process, I found similarities in a class writing assignment I'd completed and the tape recorded conversation. In a Composition Theory course I'd taken at DePaul University, our professor organized the graduate school students into groups. One person had to write about a given topic, a second person had to write down everything that the writer said in order to record the writing process, and two others observed the study. [...]
[...] The best way for a writer to master dialogue is to follow the study of Perl and Flower and Hayes: tape record a conversation. The best way to find out how real people talk is to listen to real people. If not tape recording, eavesdrop on a conversation similar to the dialogue that a writer would want to use in their piece. The writer will observe real people's facial expressions, physical movements, vernacular, and tone, all very important factors in a conversation. [...]
[...] He read magazines, newspapers, and reviews regularly which gave him the opportunity to write as he would read, in a nonfiction market. Although I was not a fan of the two writers mentioned above, I disagree with William Stafford's statement in the essay Way of Writing” when he states: “Writers may not be special—sensitive or talented in any usual sense. They are simply engaged in sustained use of a language skill we all have. Their “creations” come about through confident reliance on stray impulses that will, with trust, find occasional patterns that are satisfying. [...]
[...] If I see too many conversations that aren't realistic to the era in which the story takes place, that book goes back on the shelf. Sometimes description and dialogue work together in order to help the conversation. An example using the same two books will explain this theory. In the same novel by Henderson, the main character is speaking to her mother by phone. In the same novel by Weber, one of the main characters is speaking to an ex-flame by phone. [...]
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