Gary Provost - Make Your Words Work

By Gary Provost

A Crossroad Press Production

Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

Smashwords edition published at Smashwords by Crossroad Press

Crossroad Press digital edition 2020

Copyright 2020 Gail Provost

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Gary Provost is the author of eighteen fiction and nonfiction books, including Fatal Dosage: The True Story of a Nurse on Trial for Murder; Without Mercy: A True Story ofObsession and Murder Under the Influence; and Make Your Words Work. He has written thousands of stories, articles and columns for national, regional and local publications; humorous columns for more than 100 newspapers; and celebrity profiles for a dozen magazines. He is a popular speaker around the country and also conducts several writing seminars and workshops a year. He lives in Massachusetts.

Book List

The Dorchester Gas Tank

Make Every Word Count

The Pork Chop War

The Freelance Writers Handbook

Share the Dream (as Marion Chase)

Good If It Goes (with Gail Levine-Freidus)

One Hundred Ways to Improve Your Writing

Popcorn (with Gail Levine-Provost)

Fatal Dosage

Finder (with Marilyn Greene)

Beyond Style

David and Max (with Gail Provost) across the Border

Without Mercy

Make Your Words Work

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Table of Contents

Some of the material in this book appeared in different form in Writers Digest magazine. I want to thank Bill Brohaugh and Tom Clark at Writers Digest for their work on the original articles.

At Writers Digest Books I want to thank Carol Cartaino, Jean Fredette, Anne Montague, Sharon Rudd, and Howard Wells.

Thanks also to the many writers whose work I have used as examples in this book, and to the writer friends who shared with me some of their time and knowledge:

Woody Allen, Cleveland Amory, Jim Bellarosa, Saul Bellow, Anne Bernays, Michael Blowen, Lou Burnett, William Faulkner, Phyllis Feurstein, William Goldman, Ellen Goodman, Gary Goshgarian, Ted Groff, Christopher Hewitt, Crosby Holden, Bonnie Ireland, Trish Janeshutz, Justin Kaplan, Christopher Keane, Elizabeth Loftus, Steve Lowe, Gregory McDonald, Joe McGinniss, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Marie Melville, Edwin OConnor, Robert Parker, Gail Provost, Bob Reiss, Ruth Rosing, Erich Segal, Scott Spencer, Dan Wakefield, Douglass Wallop, and Denise Worrell.

Thanks also to Evan Marshall and Russ Galen.

Writing dreams do come true.

For many years I was the person who was always doing what you have just done, picking up books about writing technique, hoping they would help me get closer to that fantasy of being a published writer. I was a dreadful writer, I really was. But in the past fifteen years I have published five novels, five books for writers, a sports book, a thousand magazine articles, short stories and newspaper articles, two poems, and four true crime books, one of which was made into a movie. I have won the National Jewish Book Award without being Jewish, and I came close to being the new Ann Landers, without being female. In my twenties I couldnt even get a word published. Now writing dreams come true for me every day.

They come true because I learned how to write well, and in this book I will tell you what I have learned about good writing. My teachers have been my own mistakes, occasional editors who have been kind enough to set me straight, and my students, several of whom have generously allowed me to publish excerpts from their work.

What you will learn here applies to your fiction and your nonfiction. There is nothing here that should be discarded by the writer who works exclusively in one form or the other. The best fiction writers have influenced the greatest journalists of the present, and they, in turn, have been influencing the new writers of fiction. Increasingly, the difference between nonfiction and fiction is one of content, not of form or technique.

There is only one quality that I ask you to bring to this book. Humility about your writing. You cannot succeed without it. You must have the humility to know that writing that looks clever to you might be boring, that something beautifully written might be unnecessary, that something very personal to you might be meaningless to distant readers. You must accept the fact that a trained editor might see in your work liabilities that you thought were assets. And you must be capable of erasing any sentence you have written, if informed and unprejudiced voices can lead you to the truth about it.

If you can do that, the battle is already won. Read the book.

Do the exercises. Read the book again. When we are done you will have a greater understanding of what it is that makes writing work for the reader. Your writing dreams wont come true the next morning. Nor will they come true the following week. But if you take these lessons to heart and keep plugging away, they will come true. You will succeed as a writer just as I have succeeded, not because this book will close the gap between you and your writing dreams, but because you will have learned how to close it.

Some Questions Answered

Can Writing Be Taught?

No. Throw this book away.

Yes, yes, of course writing can be taught.

Im not sure why this question keeps coming up, but it does. People ask it of me and of all writers, at parties and bus stops, and I feel like replying, Geez, I dunno. I didnt use to know how to write good but now I do, so yeah, I spose it can be taught.

My friend Frank plays the mandolin, and nobody has ever asked him if mandolin playing can be taught.

Anyhow, yes, writing can be taught. This assumes a certain basic understanding of language, just as the teaching of accounting assumes an ability to add and subtract. Its true that some people will never get the hang of writing well, just as some people never get the hang of riding a bicycle. There are always exceptions. But good writing, writing that works, does contain observable, repeatable phenomena, and the person who has noted them can impart knowledge or skill; give instruction; provide knowledge of; cause to learn by example or experience. Those are my dictionarys definitions of