I love to hear how writers work: what their habits are like, what time of day they write, even what type of pen they use. (True story: when I found out Harold Bloom wrote on yellow legal pads with Pentel Rolling Writers, I went down to Office Depot and ordered a few years' supply of each--only to abandon them a couple months later.) Basically, I want to know the nitty gritty of how a writer bridges that gap between the dream inside the mind and the actual words on the page. Maybe I'm hoping that if I could just figure out the right process, then I too might become a successful writer. But that hope is probably illusory. There's no magic key, and no amount of aping another's compositional methods will open the door to good writing. But, still, it can be fun to hear how others do it.
http://www.onfiction.ca/2009/02/art-of-prose-fiction-i-flaubert.html
With that in mind, I share with you a fellow blogger's post from 2009 on the compositional methods of Gustave Flaubert. The author of Madame Bovary would spend long hours at his desk, writing and re-writing his sentences in search of just the right word (le mot juste). He once admitted in a letter to spending five days (five!) on a single page. His methods, exhaustive and exhausting, are certainly not for everyone, but if you're engaged in that sometimes lonesome process of making sentences, there's nothing like turning to a master for a little company and instruction.
And don't forget: you can share your methods and your writing with our adult writer's group here at the public library. It meets on the first Saturday of each month at 10 a.m. in the Boardroom.
Image courtesy of Curtis E. Oso
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