the writing workbench
"The young writer is ... demon-driven and wants to learn and has got to write he don't know why, he will learn from almost any source that he finds. He will learn from older people who are not writers, he will learn from writers, but he learns it." - William FaulknerWhy The Road Captures Readers
Enter the black, unbroken dream of The Road.
Bold-faced Truth
Gardner may kindle your desire for creative, self-expression, or ...
The workbench peels back the cover and let's the sobering truth out. Read more
Inside the Glass Case
All of us need a source of inspiration and a page or two of worship. Mine are here.
Writing Workbench
The site's goal is simple: to lay out a set of tools for the writing community. Looking for an online dictionary, thesaurus, or the complete text to The Elements of Style? Or maybe something larger for forging a novel?
The Writing Process
I like to approach writing projects in the following phases:
- Creating - needed for most projects, especially for fiction.
- Books - get familiar with your subject matter.
- Writing - nuts and bolts of the craft
- Editing - break throughs happen here
- Publishing - sell your work
Slicing up the writing process into distinctive pieces serves a couple of purposes: (1) it's convenient, (2) it focuses discussion, and (3) it organizes content on the writing-workbench. For many writers this process is intuitive, and the rest of us get hung-up on one phase of the process. Can you guess which phase?
Writing for True Profit
As you explore the site, you'll quickly realize I'm a big fan of quoting other writers. I'll end this page with one of favorites.
Finally, the novelist is the one who doesn't quit. Novel-writing is not so much a profession as a yoga, or "way," an alternative to ordinary life-in-the-world. Its benefits are quasi-religious--a changed quality of mind and heart, satisfactions no non-novelist can understand--and its rigors generally bring no profit except to the spirit. For those who are authentically called to the profession, spiritual profits are enough. - On Becoming a Novelist by John Gardner
