How to Use Trade Secrets
Trade Secrets are compelling examples of marvelous craft technique from your favorite writers. In order to build powerful writing muscles this way, you must:
1) Find great examples;
2) Analyze them for why they work;
3) And imitate them.
In this self-paced course, I find and analyze them for you. All you have to do is listen to them and imitate them. Do it at a gut level. This will give dramatic and wonderful power to your writing.
“Trade Secrets” take a close look at craft through examples and exercises. All the best, most vital trade secrets to great writing are openly available to all of us in the pages of our favorite book—if we know how to look for them . . . and how to look at them.
Most often, a trade secret or technique boost will encourage imitation of the kind artists practice when they go to a museum to sketch the masters or set up their own still lives and use another artist’s style of shading and perspective. Here, we are looking at examples of literary techniques and craft approaches and then molding our own original content into these forms. This is a way to stretch and develop strong writing muscles. I have found it to improve my own writing immensely.
Listen and absorb. Picking one or two (or three or four) that appeal to you (or that repel you–the effect will be the same in your work, in a way). Listen to the one you are going to use. I introduce the techniques I see in each example to give you an idea of what you are attempting. Working from intuition, imitate the example, using your own story’s content.
IPosted your attempts–your quick, rough word sketches–in the assignment thread. What’s exciting about seeing a bunch of different responses to these is that everyone’s comes out differently. Original writing emerges from imitation.
You should be able to work some of these into your book itself, and perhaps, with exercises about dialog, scene and so forth, all of them will find a place in your text.
I add trade secrets from each of our visiting authors, too, looking at the craft in their books.
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