Eavesdrop on
the Most Important Things
Sol Stein Advised
Some Famous Authors

Jack Higgins. Bestselling novelist.

 

1. Physical action must be plausible.

    

2. Use famous people in walk-on parts without dialogue if possible.

    

3. When revising, substitute precise words and phrases for top-of-the-head words that flow into first drafts.

 

James Baldwin. Essayist, playwright, and novelist.

 

Every manuscript has a weakest part that is not a zero but a minus that detracts from the quality of the best parts. In nonfiction, cut the weakest part (in fiction, the weakest part is usually a scene or a chapter). You then have a new "weakest part." Consider cutting that also until the entire work meets a standard the writer and the editor agree on. In Stein's view, this is the most important consideration in making Notes of a Native Son a classic.

 

Elia Kazan. Two-time Oscar-winning film director, five-time Pulitzer-Prize winner.

 

1. Stein's formula, 1+1=1/2, designed to remind writers that conveying the same matter more than once in different words diminishes the effect of what is said. If the same matter is said in two different ways, either alone has a stronger effect.

    

2. Characterize by giving humans characteristics we attribute to animals.

    

3. How to cut flab, unnecessary words and phrases that weaken the text. (The Flab Editor(TM), highly-praised by reviewers, enables all writers to cut flab and observe their prose with and without the flab. This copyrighted technology is available in all WritePro lessons and is taught in Lesson 5.)

 

Leslie Fiedler. Literary critic and novelist.

 

1. To clarify the action in a scene, make believe you are a camera filming the action shot by shot.

    

2. Readers perceive one element at a time, therefore avoid convoluted sentences.

 

Christy Brown. Bestselling literary novelist and poet.

 

Writers in Ireland thrive on rich adjectives, but even when they are appropriate, too many adjectives choke the reader like too much pepper in a great soup. Thin out the adjectives unless they are necessary. The effect is to strengthen the prose. (N.B. Daniel Day-Lewis won the Academy Award for Best Actor playing Christy Brown in the film "My Left Foot.")

 

David Frost. TV interviewer and author.

 

The difference between recorded speech, which is as boring as transcripts to read, and dialogue that jumps off the page.

For help with dialogue, see The Dialogue Doctor? in WritePro's Lesson 4, the complete module on dialogue in FictionMaster, and Chapter 11 in Sol Stein's book, "Stein on Writing."

Sol Stein is the creator of four computer software programs, the award-winning WritePro^?, FirstAid for Writers^?, FictionMaster^?, and WritePro for Business^?. Click on any of these to get more information and reviews of those programs.

Meet Sol Stein

First, who is Sol Stein?

For 36 years Sol Stein edited and published some of the most successful writers of the century, including James Baldwin, David Frost, Jack Higgins, Elia Kazan, Dylan Thomas, Lionel Trilling, W. H. Auden, Jacques Barzun, and three heads of state. He is himself a prize-winning playwright produced on Broadway, an anthologized poet, the author of nine novels, plus nonfiction books, screenplays, and TV dramas.

Stein's novels have been translated into French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Danish, Dutch, Greek, Japanese, and Russian (one of his novels made the bestseller list in Moscow). His novel The Magician sold over one million copies. The New York Times said, "If you bury yourself in a Sol Stein book while walking, you'll walk into a wall."

His nonfiction includes the highly-acclaimed A Feast for Lawyers and the recently-published Stein on Writing, now in its third printing, which Barnes & Noble said was "the number-one practical choice for fiction and nonfiction writers of all experience levels."

Stein's play "Napoleon" won the Dramatists Alliance Prize for "the best full-length play of 1953" and was performed both in New York and California. "A Shadow of My Enemy" was performed at the National Theater in Washington and subsequently in the ANTA Theater on Broadway. With Tennessee Williams, William Inge, and Robert Anderson, he was a founding member of the Playwrights Group at the Actors Studio.

Stein founded the book publishing firm of Stein and Day, and served as its President and Editor-in-Chief for over a quarter of a century. In 1985, the "Writers' Yearbook" rated Stein and Day #3 of the top 50 U.S. publishing firms based on benefits to authors. Elia Kazan, winner of five Pulitzer prizes and two Academy Awards, in his autobiography said, "My publisher Sol Stein was my producer, my editor Sol Stein was my director." Kazan's The Understudy is dedicated to Stein, "who saw what I didn't think possible." Stein had books on bestseller lists for nineteen consecutive years.

Stein has lectured on creative writing at Columbia University, the University of Iowa, UCLA, and the University of California at Irvine, which presented him with the Distinguished Instructor Award in 1993. His computer programs, like some of his books, have been selected by the Book-of-the-Month Club and the Literary Guild and eight other book clubs.

Stein has been interviewed on the Today Show, the Tonight Show, the Larry King Show, the David Frost Program, and the major interview shows in Chicago, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Atlanta, Miami, Houston, Dallas/Fort Worth, Phoenix, Los Angeles, Hartford, Boston, New York, Paris, and London. Further information about Stein may be found in Who's Who in America, Who's Who in the World, and Who's Who in Entertainment.