Author Robert Plunket:
This sounds like the oldest cliche in writing, but you have an ideal reader. A secret in writing in the first person—or any kind of writing—is you write to one person. And the person I wrote to was my friend Liz. I went to college with Liz, and she just thought I was the funniest person in the world. I’d open my mouth, and she’d fall on the floor laughing. Back in those days, people actually wrote letters to each other, and I knew if I was sitting down to write a letter to Liz, it was going to be hilarious. I could just picture her eating it up and giggling.
Everything I write is a letter to Liz. And if I read something now and it sounds like Liz is going to think, he’s a little off today, then I throw it away and start again.
What’s the best way to begin a chapter? Plunket:
I would read examples, and the examples ran the gamut from Stendhal’s The Red and the Black to Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls. She really knows how to begin and end a chapter, and I studied how she did it. Gradually, the talent kind of took over, and I didn’t have to imitate or copy anymore. But imitating and copying, every artist does it. That’s a big secret of art that they don’t want anybody to know.
Source: Robert Plunket on the “big secret” of making art by
