In Every Man for Himself and God Against All, filmmaker Werner Herzog wrote:

Then in one of the Dr. Fu Manchu films, I noticed something the others hadn’t seen. In an exchange between goodies and baddies, one egregious villain on Dr. Fu Manchu’s side was picked off on a rock. He tumbled down into the depths, turning over and over. Twenty minutes later, something peculiar happened: in another fight, we saw all kinds—good and bad—meeting their ends. A few had taken refuge in a gulch between rocks, and I saw the same villain plummeting to his doom. It was maybe done a little quicker and took only a couple of seconds this time, but the man took off into the air in exactly the same way, with one foot out. No one else saw it, but I was convinced it was the same shot. For me, that was the moment I understood there were shots and cuts in a film. From that time on, I watched differently. How was story told, how was suspense created, how was a film constructed? To this day, I can learn only from bad films. The good ones I watch in the same spirit in which I watched when I was a kid. The great ones, even when I see them many times, are just an enigma.

I’ve said before and will say it again that the most important continuing education for any author in any category and genre is to read the work of other authors. Anything and everything about the art and craft of creative writing can be learned in that manner. Just as Herzog learned about the language of cinema from simply paying closer attention to movies—including “bad movies—we can learn the language of prose fiction simply by paying closer attention to novels and short stories—including “bad” novels and short stories.

This week’s exercise is to tell yourself:

From this time on, I read differently.

Then follow through with that in everything you read from now on.

Notice what other authors are doing: how they construct a scene, how and where they are using em-dashes or ellipsis, where the commas are and how that sentence would read without them or with one more or with one moved from here to there; how a chapter ends and how the next chapter begins; how scene breaks indicate a shift in time and/or place and/or point of view; how and why I’m using semicolons in this sentence…

And anything and everything else that might catch your eye like the same stuntman falling off the same rock. This will be a long list, so don’t be afraid to write stuff down, like, for instance, I did with that paragraph from Every Man for Himself and God Against All, which I pasted into my “commonplace book” file along with things like: “of all your crystalline totalities,” a line from Pablo Neruda’s “The Great Ocean”; “There is no limit to stupidity. Space itself is said to be bounded by its own curvature, but stupidity continues beyond infinity,” from The Citadel of the Autarch by Gene Wolfe; or this, from “The Resurgence of Miss Ankle-Strap Wedgie” by Harlan Ellison:

He had to ask her to repeat her answer, she had spoken so softly. But the answer was nothing, and she said good night, and was about to hang up when she called him.

To Crewes it was a sound from farther away than the Beverly Hills Hotel. It was a sound that came by way of a Country of Mildew. From a land where oily things moved out of darkness. From a place where the only position was hunched safely into oneself with hands about knees, chin tucked down, hands wrapped tightly so that if the eyes with their just-born-bird membranes should open, through the film could be seen the relaxed fingers. It was a sound from a country where there was no hiding place.

When a book is open in front of you, class is in session!

—Philip Athans

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Absolutely not one word of this post was in any way generated by any version of an “AI” or Large Language Model, and no permission is granted for the use of any of the contents of this blog in the training of AI, LLM, or other generative systems.