The Authentic Swing
This book came from a series of blog posts. The subject was Writing A First Novel.
I used my own first published work of fiction, The Legend of Bagger Vance, as the example. Then one day I thought, Why not expand these posts into a short book that could get into real depth on this subject?
Will Smith and Matt Damon in the movie version of The Legend of Bagger Vance.
Maybe, I thought, such a book would be helpful to others attempting the same, extremely difficult enterprise. It could answer questions like these:
Where did the idea come from?
How did I structure the book?
How did the characters originate? What was the book’s theme? Did I follow any specific formula or sequence of genre conventions?
What was the easiest part? The hardest?
How did I sell the book? How did I make a deal with the movies?
What lessons did I learn that might help other first-time writers?
I also wanted to talk about a technique I use called the Foolscap Method. This is a trick taught to me by my old friend Norm Stahl, who once proffered this writer’s pearl:
“Steve, God made a single sheet of yellow foolscap paper to be exactly the right length to hold the full outline of a novel.”
The front cover of The Authentic Swing was made from the original sheet of yellow foolscap that I used outline The Legend of Bagger Vance.
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