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Week 4 Story Labratory: Author's Advice

Advice to Writers - Jon Winokur

I chose this topic because I thought I could learn a lot from Jon Winokur's advice and from people who have contributed to his website. Not only educational, I saw this as an opportunity to look into the mind of an author and see what creative processes happen while they are at work. Expecting everything on this site to be from Jon Winokur, I was surprised when the home page was filled with quotes from other people. I then saw that this page was a collection of various writers, all sharing information to help enrich other's writing experience. That made me become even more interested in this website.

The very first piece of information that I found very helpful was about setting up the characters and plot. A lot of the time in my writing, I feel as if I need to explain every aspect- leaving nothing unclear to people who may be reading it. However, I learned that that is not necessary to be a good author and have an interesting piece of writing. Instead, introduce the characters and background information through a dramatic event- catching the readings attention and providing bits of information at the same time. Reflecting back, I now see how plainly explaining everything can be very boring and I hope to use this technique going forwards to make my stories and overall writing more intriguing. 

The second bit of advice that really stood out to me was the importance of reading widely for the creation of a piece. Especially in fiction stories, the more you read, the more perspectives you will have to use at your disposal. If you never read, then the ideas in your head are probably common one's that everyone has heard about- making it much more difficult to be unique. However, when you have read hundreds of books and thousands of character developments- you find some that stick out to you and can use that as a baseline to tie in other aspects to make a character truly unique. 

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Author's Note / Bibliography

The site that I gathered my information from is a collection of advice from many different writers. I think that this resource has a lot of value, especially to younger writers starting out. I read through many of the quotes of information and touched on the ones that stood out the most to me. 

Winokur, Jon. Advice to Writers. Writerly Wisdom of the Ages. Link.












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