Forty or so years ago, Jean Shepard spake the secret — but not everyone has heard yet.

Jean Shepard is best known for narrating A Christmas Story which was based on his own tales of growing up. He was a radio storyteller who would just start talking and wander off-topic and around his elbow and maybe have a minute left to make his point.  If you were willing to take all of his crazy stories and call them a novel, then you’d have The Great American Novel.

So, while running  today, I was listening to a show he did about the Yellow Brick Road. Not exclusively about Oz, but he did talk a little about the books – which apparently he loved as a kid. (Apparently, he hated the movie, which he accused of softening the impact of the story.)

Here’s what he had to say:

I think the reason the Oz stories made it with kids who read them … was because Frank L. Baum, who is the guy who wrote these things, dealt with real life. But he dealt with it in a fantastical form. In other words, he fantasized upon the real life things that we all know.

Wow, so it’s not just write what you know. It’s write what we ALL know

Does it work? In addition to Oz, please see Harry Potter.

Let’s not call this advice, since I don’t know how it will turn out yet, but so far this has gotten us unstuck and ready to roll on our Sci Fi MS.

Paul Dellinger and I were about halfway through our story and we had an ending in mind, but nobody could figure out what to write next.

So, I estimated how many chapters we’d want total, about 20. Took our current #, 10ish and then listed the rest of the chapter 11 – 20. We started at 20 and worked our way backwards through the plot, figuring out which dots we’d have to connect and when.

The result was a strong outline and many new ideas. And lots of new energy to finish!

I need to try this on another collaborative effort which has mired down.

I opened up the new MS which i have really been cooking on and … it was empty. I tried to scroll to the text but the text just wasn’t there!

I hadn’t touched the file in almost a week because of Halloween activities and such, but when I hit undo all the text came back. And I also had a backup copy on Yahoo notepad. In fact, copying and pasting it onto the Notepad is probably what caused it to get deleted.

Just a friendly reminder to back up your work!

I haven’t offered writing advice in a long time, possibly because I’m personally floundering in that area.

Here, then, is advice from Anthony Trollope to George Eliot regarding the book “Romola.”

 From wikipedia: The attention to detail exhibited in the novel was a focus of both praise and criticism. Anthony Trollope, having read the first instalment of Romola, expressed wonder at the toil Eliot must have “endured in getting up the work”, but also cautioned her against excessive erudition, urging her not to “fire too much over the heads of her readers”.^[6]

It was good advice, because I just gave up on Romola. Too much! First she researched too much then she notebook-dumped. Too much architecture, too much Florence goings on, too much authentic conversation, too much scholarly wisdom. I had read for quite some time and only received a hint of a plot. Sorry, George, you’re one of the all-time greats, but Romola won’t do.