Writing Advice From Robert McCrum at The Guardian

D. H. Lawrence

In a recent article in The Guardian, "A Lesson In Teaching Writing," Robert McCrumb provides some terrifically austere, old-school models for beginning writers:  "I'm agnostic about the benefits of creative-writing classes, but would-be fictioneers could do worse than emulate the greats."


McCrumb goes on to lay out the below -- "some passages I'd refer to by way of illustrating some technical lessons":

1. The introduction of a fictional landscape

How to bring up the curtain on a narrative setting. Two classic passages:

- The first chapter of Hardy's The Return of the Native
- The opening of EM Forster's A Passage To India

2. Narrative economy

How to get a story going and introduce your protagonists with maximum speed and efficiency, while developing the plot and establishing character and motivation:

- The opening chapter of Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon
- The opening pages of DH Lawrence's Women in Love
- The first two pages of Hunter S Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

3. The joy of dialogue

How to convey character and situation in fictional speech:

- Almost any passage from Beckett's Waiting for Godot
- Elizabeth Taylor's Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont

4. The magic of tone

How to make your voice heard on the page, to mesmerise the reader:

- Lorrie Moore's story "Vissi D'arte" (actually, almost anything by Lorrie Moore illustrates this)
- JD Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye
- Herman Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener"

5. Pace

How to get started, at top speed:

- Act I of Macbeth
- Virginia Woolf's Orlando
- Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island

6. Impact

How to grab the reader's attention and hold it by the scruff of the neck:

- Graham Greene's "The Destructors"
- Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song
- Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses

7. The only rule is that there are no rules

How to defy gravity in prose and still come out a winner:

- Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy
- Melville's Moby Dick
- Samuel Richardson's Clarissa.