Book Recommendation: Alice Laplante's "Method & Madness"
The full title of the book is Method and Madness: The Making of a Story, a new edition just reprinted in 2009. It was originally published in 2007 just as The Making of a Story, but this edition emphasizes the two processes writers do as they create their works. There is the liberating phase of madness, which is the flow of ideas out of your creative recesses, in any order, as they want. It is madness,which leads to drafts. Once you have produced a draft, now you can say you are writing a story. LaPlante demonstrates that creative writing requires both madness and method, which represent creativity and craft.
She argues that most writers cannot reconcile the two; some will produce very compelling drafts, as far as the creativity goes, but will fail in turning the them into well-crafted pieces. On the other extreme are those writers who have been trained in craft, who know what a short story is, but will produce well-crafted, yet boring stories. Perhaps in teaching people to write, adds LaPlante, a reconciliation of the two process may be achieved.
This is a book for teachers of creative writing (yes, writing can be taught)and their students. Most importantly, it is a book for the writer who has no time to attend a writing workshop and just needs a book that gives access to the advice and prompts that MFA's practice on. Just as those MFA programs cost a lot of money, going through the prompts in this book requires that a writer invest in patience and time, and take the exercises seriously. In using some of the prompts, I have realized that I end up writing "too much", and, ah, that can be good too.
So here is LaPlante again, "Everyone has something within them to express; it's just a question of giving them the process tools to discover it and the craft tools to express it coherently" (3).
Alice LaPlante teaches creative writing at San Francisco State University and Stanford University, where she has a Wallace Stegner fellowship. Her own accolades include a Transatlantic Review fiction prize. She lives in Palo Alto, California.
She argues that most writers cannot reconcile the two; some will produce very compelling drafts, as far as the creativity goes, but will fail in turning the them into well-crafted pieces. On the other extreme are those writers who have been trained in craft, who know what a short story is, but will produce well-crafted, yet boring stories. Perhaps in teaching people to write, adds LaPlante, a reconciliation of the two process may be achieved.
This is a book for teachers of creative writing (yes, writing can be taught)and their students. Most importantly, it is a book for the writer who has no time to attend a writing workshop and just needs a book that gives access to the advice and prompts that MFA's practice on. Just as those MFA programs cost a lot of money, going through the prompts in this book requires that a writer invest in patience and time, and take the exercises seriously. In using some of the prompts, I have realized that I end up writing "too much", and, ah, that can be good too.
So here is LaPlante again, "Everyone has something within them to express; it's just a question of giving them the process tools to discover it and the craft tools to express it coherently" (3).
Alice LaPlante teaches creative writing at San Francisco State University and Stanford University, where she has a Wallace Stegner fellowship. Her own accolades include a Transatlantic Review fiction prize. She lives in Palo Alto, California.
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