10 Great Authors to Learn From

I love reading. What writer doesn't? I've already shared my top ten books with you. But what did I learn from them?

From Sir Walter Scott (Ivanhoe) I learned to be descriptive. He is often accused of being flowery in his writing, but most of us don't have enough description. If we used him as an example, we might just put in enough adjectives, adverbs, and descriptive nouns and verbs to make our writing come to life.

From Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice) I learned two things: to follow through a theme, and living characters. She uses her characters to develop a theme that every single character is an example of. And those characters are never the same. Even incidental, side characters are never duplicated and this is in a very limited world. I stand in awe.

From Dostoevsky (Crime and Punishment) I learned about taking a huge theme, and putting it in an exciting context so that the philosophizing doesn't get boring. Actually, Tolstoy was good at that too. Anna Karenina probably did a better job than Crime and Punishment.

From Tolkein: world-building, of course. No one can beat The Lord of the Rings. Ever. But to make such a world, you have to be invested in it with your whole life, as Tolkein was, and not many writers can make that investment. Most of us need to work. Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern did that to a certain extent, but it wasn't as full as LOTR and she has written volumes of other worlds, as well, which, while fascinating, sort of dilutes the depth of Pern.

From Dorothy Sayers (Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries) I learned about the efficacy of dialect. It helps make your characters come to life. Mark Twain did the same in Huckleberry Finn, but her characters, from being more contemporary with us, are probably even more alive than Jane Austen's and I credit Sayer's mastery of dialect with that.

From Benjamin Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt, I learned how marvelous an autobiography can be. From Ulysees S. Grant, I learned that not everyone should write one.

From Shakespeare and Tolkein, I learned the importance of comic relief. No matter how grim the work, they made sure there was a laugh at the right moment to give you a break. Even Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus had clowns, as bizarre as they were, which made the horror of the whole play a little bearable. And what would The Lord of the Rings have been without the hero clowns of Gimli, Sam, Merry and Pippin?

The best way to learn is to learn from a master. These are my masters. Who are yours?

10 Favorite Books

Readers don't always write, but writers always read.

What are your ten favorite books? What do they have in common?

If I were only allowed 10 books on a desert island, here's my list:

1. The Bible

2. Pride and Prejudice

3. The Count of Monte Cristo

4. Moby Dick

5. Ivanhoe

6. The Lord of the Rings trilogy

7. Shakespeare's plays

8. Crime and Punishment

9. The Chronicles of Narnia

10. Winnie-the-Pooh

My mother says that the best books are always too short. I guess that is what all of these have in common: they are long and complicated, even Winnie-the-Pooh. The cleverness and intricacies of all of these books keep me coming back to discover more each time I read them.

How many rewrites are enough?

Let's be honest; there is no perfect work; we can always rewrite.

For my book Adopted and Restored, first, I wrote.

First rewrite: organize and fill in gaps.

Second rewrite: add 1500 words. That was actually not enough. I ended up adding 2500.

Third rewrite: remove 1500 words. I found, when rewriting magazine articles that needed to be trimmed, that removing words forces me to tighten up my writing.

Fourth rewrite: My agent/editor/friend reads my book and gives details criticism. It's okay, (sniff, sniff) I can take it. Then I work with those critiques, adding, subtracting, shifting.

Fifth rewrite: Read the whole shebang and polish, tightening the rhetoric.

My mother told me of a romance novelist who did 17 rewrites, each one on a different color paper. Sound excessive? Maybe, but she was published. Can't argue with success.