Reading Response for Franklin

I was apprehensive immediately reading Franklin since I had always been hesitant to really follow anyone else’s advice about altering my writing style as I had always felt this was something that should be unique to each person and left to them to finesse and manipulate over time. Perhaps this view was wrong but Franklin’s book ended up not being as worthless or boring as I had initially worried. I thought some of his theories could be helpful to one’s writing though not entirely necessary. I’ve always been the type who tries to write very intuively: just sitting down and typing, not really any brainstorming or anything yet his formulation of an outline did not sound as anathema as they often seem to me. It was more like something I could use, “The conflict has to fit with the ending, make sense”.

I feel that he also put maybe too much emphasis sometimes on the story as opposed to the writer. Why the story takes developments and goes beyond sometimes what the writer can even imagine- the writer is always behind it and inevitably, in control. Much of the time, I enjoy the search for the story as opposed to the story seeking me out and while as much as I might like to think of myself as some of conduit, we all know that inspiration is not constantly striking us. I think it might be interesting to apply his outline to my piece and see how it fits, though I’m a little worried that all of my writing would look pretty shoddy under Franklin’s constructs. Franklin’s book can be useful as advice for another writer but I think to take it as some kind of authorial Scripture would be taking it a bit too far.