Als dromen fluisteren

Mélissa Da Costa

Omschrijving

The problem with really making a living from writing is - it takes a long time to get there from nowhere.

The average writer spends decades learning their craft. All through lots of writing and hard-won experience. Because there aren't any effective courses which shorten that learning curve.

In 1938, Oklahoma's first Rhodes scholar was persuaded to start just such a course. His name was Walter S. Campbell. And his course wasn't a degree course. It was only for freelance writers wanting to learn and improve their craft.

For the next 20 years, his course produced professional writers who started selling their stories before they finished their training. The vast bulk of them became publishing professionals from there on out. In this short period, their thousands of students turned out literally millions in royalties, untold numbers of magazine articles and stories, hundreds of books, and some were even made into movies.

Some of their most notable graduates include Louis L'Amour, Mary Higgins Clark, Fred Grove, Tony Hillerman, Bill Gulick, William R. Scott, Ed Montgomery, Neal Barrett, and Bill Burchardt. Among the best-known movies are "The Hallelujah Trail," "Onionhead," "Hondo," and "Bend of the River." Even the hit musical/movie "Oklahoma!" had its roots in a story from one of Campbell's course graduates.

No other course, past or present, achieved comparable success. Worldwide, this course stood alone.

What made the most effective writing course in known history that successful - and whatever happened to the most effective writing course in known history?

The first clue we have is that 5 of the 6 textbooks they used over their heyday are no longer in print.

What distinguished those books?

Campbell and Harris re-introduced concepts that were known throughout literary history as common practices used to create popular stories. They recognized that those practices were common to all types of writing, not just fiction novels. Stories, articles, and all writing types were considered best written to be experienced as a single contiguous flow of creative continuity.

The premise Campbell found and taught was that all the books we have in our libraries, as well as the new ones released every year, are themselves based on ancient models and patterns. Ones which were themselves based on human nature and our limited capacity to truly understand Nature.

Campbell understood that if there were a magic secret to successful writing, the fastest results come from students doing these actions:

to write continually, regularly, to study carefully the specific market where he wanted to write in order to gauge what that market would buy, to study the works of the continuing top-selling masters in each market area, learning their techniques but not copying their writing style – and beyond all, writing only about subjects which interested him greatly and involved him emotionally.

And he proved his approach over 20 years - nearly 90 years ago.

This book wades through long out-of-print texts to return Campbell's methods - and forgotten bestseller secrets - back into our modern age.

If you're tired of spinning your wheels and want to launch your professional writing career faster, this is your book.

Specificaties