Natalie Goldberg wrote Wild Mind: Living The Writer's Life.
Her rules of writing practice are as follows:
1. Be specific.
2. Lose control.
3. Don't think.
4. Don't worry about punctuation, spelling, grammar.
6. You are free to wrote the worst junk in America.
7. Go for the jugular.
Another inspiration has been Hemingway, who authored four collections of short stories including "A Clean Well-Lighted Place" and "Hills Like White Elephants." I particularly enjoyed the synaptic writing in "Hills Like White Elephants."
My Creative Writing professor assigned Writing The Breakout Novel by Donald Maas. Some of his best advice discusses character development. His checklist for breakout novels includes the following:
All stories are character driven.
Engrossing characters are out of the ordinary.
Readers' sympathy for characters come from characters' strengths.
Choose a narrator based on who is changed most by the story's events.
Now, I'm working on the fifth section of the thesis. Below is an excerpt from the third section, detailing one girl's battle with anorexia.
Cold, hard cement. That was the last
thing Ashley remembered before waking up and seeing the white room. Her
roommate must have taken her to the clinic after she fainted and waited for her
mom to fly in from Georgia. Ashley knew she was likely to faint eventually,
that’s what happens when people starve their bodies, but her roommate’s
reaction surprised her. She looked at Rebecca and felt guilty. Ashley took the
blame for their unfulfilled friendship. She could have related to Rebecca,
encouraged her, grown with her. But she wasn’t Ashley now. This girl, the one
obsessed with numbers and exercising, was a ghost of Ashley’s former presence.
The obsession stole Ashley’s goodness, ripped her of her identity. A stranger
sat in the hospital bed.
