Maria Tatar (my favorite books on writing)

Maria Tatar's Enchanted Hunters isn't precisely a book on writing. Subtitled The Power of Stories in Childhood, it is actually a wide-ranging examination of how children interact fiction, beginning with the bedtime stories that are read to them, and then moving on to the active phase, where they begin to seek out books to read to themselves.

Some may find the title "Enchanted Hunters" a bit creepy in this this connection, since it is lifted from Lolita. There is a hotel by that name in Lolita, as well as a play by that name, and Humbert Humbert uses the phrase to characterize himself. Maria Tatar is deliberately rehabilitating the phrase, since she thinks it is more aptly applied to young readers exploring the world of books than to pedophilia; but it is still an unusual choice.

The discussion of the changing roles of "bedtime stories"--which transformed from an ancient fireside tradition for whole families into stories intended to enthrall children, and has finally morphed in recent years into stories specifically designed to put children to sleep as quickly as possible--is engaging and thought-provoking. Tatar also has fine discussions on the roles of fear and horror, on the kinds of children who become habitual readers (and often writers), and on the ways where fiction can fuse escapism with facing life's problems; indeed, with facing problems that go beyond one's direct life experience.

For writers, however, the most interesting parts of this book focus on how children's literature works, and Tatar raises two points I'd never pondered before with respect to writing for children and young adults.

The concrete versus the abstract. As writers, we've all been told to focus on the specific, the Chekhovian ideal of the telling detail, and to avoid speaking in generalizations and superlatives. After all, saying that someone is possessed of "radiant beauty" doesn't really say much, does it?

On the contrary. In works for children and young adults, abstractions for positive qualities flourish, and even seem to be more effective than the concrete. As Tatar says in discussing one of Perrault's fairy tales, Donkeyskin: "There is the stereotypical proliferation of abstract adjectives: 'elegant,' 'magnificent,' 'lovely,' 'beautiful,' 'fine,' 'fresh,' 'warm,' 'wise,' 'modest'--attributes that leave a good deal of room for the imagination. It is, in fact, not very easy to spell out what Perrault wanted us to see, for there are few practical instructions for visualizing the princess. Donkeyskin's dress of gold and diamonds dazzles, and that diaphanous state of illumination, I would argue, allows the author to shine beams on her many abstract virtues to produce astonishing effects. The light of the dress ignites our imagination, urging us to fill in the blanks and to participate in the process of creating Donkeyskin's superlative inner and outer beauty...Luminosity, glitter, and sparkle enable the mind to picture persons and things despite and because of a lack of specificity."

Though Tatar doesn't discuss the issue, I think the reason this works so well with young readers is twofold. First, it allows them to impose their own concepts of beauty, warmth, or wisdom rather than dealing with specific examples which they might not, in fact, find beautiful, warm, or wise. Second, it doesn't demand the construction of subtext, a skill that develops only as readers become more mature. A "good" writer for adults throws out concrete details, specific bits of action and dialogue, and the odd metaphor or simile, and expects the readers to put it all together and summon up an understanding of character and motivation. Show, don't tell, isn't necessarily the most effective prescription for readers who have not yet developed this skill at synthesis.

I think this lack of synthetic ability and limited grasp of subtext is the reason that adverbs proliferate in the dialogue tags of young-adult novels. The Harry Potter novels contain an endless torrent of adverbial dialogue tags (some of them unintentionally hilarious, such as Harry ejaculated), but these help young readers understand immediately what the character is feeling, without demanding they stop and try to puzzle it out.

After showing that abstractions work so well for young readers, however, Tatar goes on to make a striking point: Abstractions work well for positive qualities, but for the dark, dangerous, and horrific, the more concrete, the better. As the author puts it, "Evil has many different faces, and its devlish manifestations are often in the gory details. We do not need many cues to imagine beauty and its spiritual uplift, but our minds seem to hanker for clear instructions when it comes to imagining the materiality of violence and horror. Writers of childrens books do not fail to deliver...Descriptions of beauty often have embedded in them an astonished observer contemplating the sights. Horror, by contrast, compels observers to both look and look away."

In books for children and young adults, there is a time to show and a time to tell, and which is more appropriate seems to depend on whether one is describing light or darkness.

Learning the protean power of words. At the same time that children are learning that letters on a page can tell a clear and enthralling story, they are also discovering that words can be slippery, ambiguous tools, prone to twisting in your hand just when you think you've grasped them.

Tatar points out that many treasured stories, such as The Wizard of Oz ("There's no place like home!") and The Secret Garden ("The Magic is in me! The Magic is making me strong!") teach that words are powerful, life-transforming things.

At the same time, however, some of the books best loved by the more skillful young readers, such as Lewis Carroll's Alice books, or Norman Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth, revel in the plasticity of language, using it to confuse, to baffle, or to 'prove' nonsensical propositions. To those who have mastered the art of reading, this provides a new level of delight; but one can only imagine how frustrating such books must be for those children who read laboriously, struggling to piece together a storyline when often the intent of the writer is not to transfer plot developments but instead to play with the nature of language itself. Although Tatar doesn't discuss it, to my mind this must be the point at which lifelong readers become fully committed, and the less skilled drift away.

In focusing here on implications for writers, I haven't attempted to do justice to Maria Tatar's fine book; it goes far beyond the issues I have cited here. Her analyses of particular books are fascinating (who would have thought someone could write page after absorbing page on how Goodnight, Moon works?), and her overview of how the tone and goals of books for children have changed since the 18th century is absorbing. If you're interested in children's literature, I can't imagine a more enjoyable book.

Well, okay--I can't imagine a more enjoyable nonfiction book.

Ralph Keyes (My favorite books on writing)

Ralph Keyes, The Courage to Write and The Writer's Book of Hope. (Amazon US links under image. Amazon UK links under title in text.)

[Before we begin, a caveat: Although most writers rank these books very highly among books on writing, the tiny minority of writers who don't love them loathe them. See this Amazon UK review for an example.]

The title of Ralph Keyes’ The Courage to Write is a morph of Rollo May’s classic little study The Courage to Create. May was the first psychologist to understand that the process of creation is filled with anxiety, and that an almost supernatural alertness is part of the process of what he termed “encounter”—the encounter of the subjective with the objective, of self with other, of the idealized conception of the work and the ability of the artist to execute the work.

“Ah,” I hear you say, “but I’m never happier than when I’m writing.” If so, you’re probably in the state psychologists call “flow.” I posted a piece on anxiety and flow over at the MNW blog about a year ago; here, I’d like to stick to Keyes’ books.

It’s easy to scoff the idea of writing as a courageous undertaking. Oh, sure—writing subversive material under a totalitarian regime, maybe. Writers are in prisons all over the world. But writing a travel essay or a romance novel? What’s the worst that can happen? You could get rejected; or you might get accepted, and then people might laugh at you. How life-threatening is that compared to, say, fighting a fire?

The problem with this line of reasoning is that courage isn’t proportional to the threat to one’s life. Courage is proportional to fear, and fear isn’t governed by rational assessments of risk. One of the things feared most widely and deeply is public speaking—something far less physically risky than, say, driving a car.

Keyes attacks the issue head on: “Anxiety is not only an inevitable part of the writing process, but a necessary one. If you’re not scared, you’re not writing.”

At first that sounds as if he’s going too far, but he layers in quote after quote from writers who agree. The marvelous Margaret Atwood says, “You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer, an almost physical nerve, the kind you need to walk a log across a river.” Gabriel Garcia Marquez notes that “All my life I’ve been frightened at the moment I sit down to write.” And the sarcastic, hilarious, Fran Lebowitz, who on the page displays as much chutzpah as anyone, says “It’s really scary just getting to the desk—we’re talking now five hours. My mouth gets dry, my heart beats fast. I react psychologically the way other people react when the plane loses an engine.”

Keyes doesn’t claim it’s all about fear and anxiety, but he claims those are an integral part of the process. “To love writing, fear writing, and pray for the courage to write is no contradiction…Kids on skateboards and writers at their desks know the same thing: fear fuels excitement. Writing is both frightening and exhilarating. It couldn’t be one without the other. The best writers use fear’s energy to billow the sails of their imaginations.”

Once he has established fear as a factor in the writing process, Keyes moves on to analyze the different classes of fear writers experience. The range from the obvious (fear of rejection, fear of ridicule, fear of self-revelation) to the more rarefied (fear of not living up to the original conception, fear of letting go and finalizing a work that has taken up so many hours of the writer’s life). And, unless I’m the only twisted neurotic in the crowd, Keyes is honest about that certain special moment:

To non-writers, receiving a first copy of your own book would seem to be a moment of unalloyed ecstasy. (My book! I did it! I’m a published writer! Me! I’ve reached the promised land!) In fact, examining the first copy of your book is a far more mixed experience. On the one hand, proof now rests in your hand that you indeed wrote a book. This exciting thought lasts for about six seconds. Then the mind turns elsewhere: Couldn’t the publisher have found a better typeface for the jacket? Next time, I’m going to hire a professional photographer to take a good author picture. I wonder what Mom’s gonna think when she reads the rape scene. I wonder how long it will be before my book shows up on remainder tables. I wonder if it’s going to get panned. I wonder if anybody will read it at all.

My excitement lasted more than six seconds, and I didn’t have any problems with the cover font—in fact, I thought the lettering of the title was rather brilliant; but I also admit that my mind soon moved on to the ‘but now what?’ worries about the baby’s future. And I definitely moved on to the second phase of the experience he describes:

Washington Irving once confided to a friend that he dreaded opening an advance copy of one of his books. Rather than spasms of joy, he felt tremblings of fear as he recalled the books weaknesses, the many places where he might have written better. This is a common reaction when examining a new book with one’s name on the spine. Anything that’s wrong with the book—by the author’s hand or the publisher’s—is now on public display. Any mistakes the writer’s eye catches are there forever…

After providing an excellent taxonomy of the way writers can tie themselves in knots, Keyes seems to feel we deserve some relief. So the later chapters are devoted to the ways writers cope with fears, from the self-defeating (hiding behind elegant obfuscation) to the neurotically useful (rituals) to the entirely rational (making use of critiques).

I think that at some point the author realized he’d opened Pandora’s box and let the demons free without looking into the bottom of the chest. That’s my explanation for his follow-on volume, The Writer’s Book of Hope.

The title of this second book makes it sound like a collection of inspirational stories about writers who overcame the odds to succeed. Sure, there’s plenty of that to be found here, but the strategy of Keyes book is far more cunning than a simple compilation of feel-good anecdotes. In many ways, The Writer’s Book of Hope is a sociology and psychology text slanted to the needs of writers. Considerable time is devoted to the writer’s internal problems, including procrastination and excuses, but things perk up greatly when Keyes anatomizes “Discouragers:” people in your life who for various reasons want to see you abandon your writing, or if you persist, wish to see you fail. (I’ve been relatively lucky in this regard. Or perhaps just oblivious.) Dissecting the motives of those who want you to give up is a sad but informative task.

The chapter on dealing with rejection is fine (though that’s an oft-trodden path) but it’s followed by my favorite chapters in the book, “The Publishing Tribe” and “Betting on Books.” Here Keyes takes on the role of an anthropologist describing the unusual customs and beliefs of people in the publishing industry, which in the US means a crowd of literate New Yorkers: by definition, a group of people who are thoroughly out of touch with the rest of the country, and surprisingly out of touch with writers:

To make the world of publishing come into clearest focus, recall your adolescence: the crowds, cliques, rivalries, jealousies, intrigue, gossip, slang, buzz words, fashions, fads, and who ate lunch where and with whom…The only basic difference between pub people and your high school classmates is that pub people have more money and bigger vocabularies. Like adolescents everywhere, they are far more concerned about the opinions of those they consider part of their crowd than those they don’t. I hate to be the one to break this to you, but pub people don’t necessarily consider writers to be in with this crowd.

The last third of the book is entitled “Beyond Frustration,” and it is here where Keyes describes the ways to keep hope alive. Such a section has the potential to turn sentimental and sappy, but the author remains pragmatic and practical, discussing where to find supportive people (“Encouragers”), what can be learned from the careers of other writers, and the best way to help yourself. He ends the book with these words: “Writing is both a cause of despair and an antidote to despair. Put another way, on days when we’re feeling hopeless, the best way to revive our sense of hope is to keep on writing.”

Both of these books are excellent (and worth the price for the quotes and citations alone). Nonetheless, I think of them as a unit, and if you’re interested in reading them, I recommend reading them in order. Fear first, baby.

Save the Cat!

I read books on writing in much the way that other people idly flip on the television--it's a way to pass a few moments. Most of them are mediocre, Every so often one is quite good, but in general it's just a way for my conscious mind to muse about writing while my subconscious gets a little work done.

I don't, however, read many books on screenwriting. There are two reasons for this: 1) I'm not a screenwriter, and 2) most screenwriting books aren't even good enough to be classed as mediocre.

But there's one slim book on the topic that I keep encountering, Blake Snyder's slim little volume called Save the Cat! The book has enough buzz around it that I decided it was time to see if the buzz came from bees around honey or from flies around something a little less pleasant.

I found Save the Cat! to be one of the more stimulating reads I've had in a while--perhaps because Snyder's whole approach to constructing a story is the opposite of mine. (Mine is called "groping around in the dark," and I doubt that a book extolling my method would ever become very popular.)

You know those things called loglines--the one-line summaries and hooks that are supposed to convey the essence of a story idea? Snyder starts his projects with the logline. Yes, starts there, and shortly after polishes his elevator pitch (that short summary you can blurt out and hopefully catch people's attention). And he road-tests these by approaching strangers in places like the line at Starbucks and asking if he can take just a minute and run something by them--his theory being that if he can get a complete stranger interested in his pitch, then he's onto a story people will want to hear.

Fine, I said, that's how Hollywood works, and you have to be catchy if you want to sell a script.

But Snyder isn't polishing his pitch so he can buttonhole producers and sell them idea (though I'm sure that comes in useful alter on). Snyder is trying to pin down exactly what his story is about before he takes even the smallest step toward actually writing it. Once he has established this, he establishes a title that echoes the story, and then sets about deciding what kind of protagonist is best for that sort of story, what themes need to run through it and be reinforced...

And then he moves on to decide what category or genre he's writing in, becasue each has different kinds of rules. But Snyder has his own categories, which don't include "romantic comedy" or "police procedural." His categories are:

1) Monster in the House
2) Golden Fleece
3) Out of the Bottle
4) Dude with a Problem
5) Rites of Passage
6) Buddy Love
7) Whydunit
8) The Fool Triumphant
9) Institutionalized
10) Superhero

The list is deliberately provocative, and Snyder open his discussion by claiming that the category and therefore the story dynamics of Die Hard, Schindler's List, and Titanic are essentially the same. (Whether these categories are valid and useful, I'm not sure; but they certainly are an interesting change from the usual groupings.)

After running through category basics, Snyder then moves on to the usual screenwriting stuff--three-act structure, beats, color-coded index cards. It's not clear to me that any of this is really useful to a novelist; even a skimpy novel is usually far more complex and involves many more beats than a screenplay does. But Save the Cat! runs through these elements so adroitly and entertainly that you've finshed them long before you begin to sigh at the inapplicability of most of it.

Stephen King asserts that writing a novel is a process of uncovering a prexisting story, and uses the simile of a paleontonogist excavating a fossil--you don't know what you've got until you've freed it from the stone. Blake Snyder inhabits the other extreme of the spectrum, where concept comes first and the story is crafted around it.

I don't think I could write a story in that fashion. But it was fun thinking (and, yes, fantasizing)about an entire different way of working. Even if it's one I could never adopt.

How NOT to Write a Novel--the other one I promised

How NOT to Write a Novel: Confessions of a Midlist Author by David Armstrong.

The subtitle is more accurate than the main title. Unlike the previously reviewed book of this title, Armstrong doesn't really spend much time telling you about craft, good, bad, or otherwise. Instead, he does two things: first, fills you in on his experiences as a writer, and, second, repeatedly advises you not to write. His refrain is an anti-Nike exhortation: Just Don't Do It.

I had to buy this book after reading one of the more idiotic Amazon reviews ever written (and that is no mild praise). The reviewer gave the book one star, and started with:

I ordered this once, the order got cancelled, and I hurriedly ordered it again, so eager was I to read it based on what I'd heard. What I'd heard was wrong. In addition to rambling on about himself and/or nothing, Armstrong offers only warmed-over advice from other published books on writing. That's right, he's done no original research with any primary sources whatsoever...

What on earth is a "primary source" in this context? Armstrong's "primary source" is his own career as a novelist, and that seems about as primary as you can get. But the reviewer is right in one regard--the book is mostly Armstrong "rambling on about himself." And very instructive rambling it is.

I'll tell you upfront: this book is dead-on depressing. Oh, it has the usual downer statistics and cautions, but Armstrong's candid recounting of his writing career is what really hits home. Five novels (I see a sixth has been published since this book was released). Great reviews. A shortlisting for the CWA Dagger for Best First Novel. A contract with HarperCollins.

But small sales, small print runs, minimal income. Then being dumped by both publisher and agent and starting all over again after four novels...

There's also a fine chronicle of random disappointments and humiliations; and, just to let the reader know it isn't just a black cloud floating over his particular head, he brings up folks from the canon, such as Barbara Pym, and points out that despite critical acclaim for her first half-dozen novels, she was dumped by her publisher and couldn't find another for fourteen long years, and succeeded in finding a new publisher only three years before her death. (Once she found a new publisher, six more novels were published, three of them posthumously. One only hopes that there is an afterlife from which she can look down.)

Most writers who don't get reviews assume the lack of exposure leads to meager sales. This clearly isn't true, and Armstrong is a case in point: good reviews, minor sales. He hints that promotion might be the culprit, but after looking at some of the disastrous zillion-dollar promotions here in the US that result in remainder rates of more than 50%, I'm inclined to doubt that promotion makes all that much difference either. What does? Who knows?

Books about the tribulations of a writer's life usually follow the Pandora's-Box model of keeping lovely little Hope at the bottom of the pantheon of evil, and console the reader with platitudes about how life-enriching writing has been, and how, if the author had it all to do over again, he'd happily tread the same road. Armstrong, to his credit, doesn't trot out this tired old ploy. Instead, he sticks throughout to his invariable advice: Don't Do It.

This is not a cheery book; indeed, it left me quite disheartened. But for those interested in the writing life, it's also a fascinating book.

Meanwhile, I'm going to buy a copy of his first novel, Night's Black Agents. It sounds quite good.

How NOT to Write a Novel (My favorite books on writing)

Ahem. As it turns out, there are two books with this title, the other, earlier one having been written by British novelist David Armstrong back in 2003. So I Amazoned that one into my greedy hands. I'll post on it in the next few days.

How NOT to Write a Novel: 200 Classic Mistakes and How to Avoid Them—A Misstep-by-Misstep Guide by Howard Mittelmark and Sandra Newman.

From the back cover:

aaa"What do you think of my fiction book writing?" the aspiring novelist extorted.
aaa"Darn," the editor hectored, in turn, "I can not publish your novel! It is full of what we in the business call 'really awful writing.'"
aaa"But how shall I absolve this dilemma? I have already read every tome available on how to write well and get published!" The writer tossed his head about, wildly.
aaa"It might help," opined the blonde editor, helpfully, "to ponder how NOT to write a novel, so you might avoid that very thing!"

This book was published only recently, but I have no hesitation in adding it to my list of favorites: any book that can make me laugh--and read passages aloud to any victim foolish enough to venture near--is a book I will reread.

The authors are both novelists, and Mittelmark is an editor. Both the editorial and fictioneer sides are on constant display; not only is the editorial exasperation with bad storytelling obvious, but every point is illustrated with a few paragraphs from a story dummied up as an example (and some of these are truly hilarious).

The authors don’t claim they can teach you to write well, nor do they list rules that must be followed. What they do is give train-wreck examples of how not to do things if you want your novel published.

The book follows the format of a brief title, an elaboration subheading in italics, a horrible demonstration of the mistake at work, and then a discussion. Examples of titles and elaborations are:

“And One Ring to Bind Them!” Said the Old Cowpoke
Where the author switches genre in midstream

The Cheerleader
Wherein a sidekick exists solely to admire the hero

The Crepuscular Handbag
Wherein the author flaunts someone else’s vocabulary

Said the Fascinating Man
Where the author tells you what you think of his dialogue

Reading Over Your Shoulder
Wherein the characters seem to hear one another’s thoughts

Hamlet at the Deli
Wherein the character’s thoughts are transcribed to no purpose

Prince Charming Doesn’t Deserve Me
Wherein the bad boyfriend is more sympathetic than the protagonist

The examples of how to not do it are to the point, but they also provide delightfully gratuitous gems, such as the way Leonard Cohen keeps popping up (he appears, for instance, as all twelve members of a jury in a poorly rendered dream sequence, and again as a tattoo on the desirable woman in a sex scene). Charmingly misused words are slipped in for color, as in The air was dry and scented with the exotic krill and catamite sold in the souk.

A pair of full extracts (title, subheading, example, and discussion) are given on the authors' website. Although any of my favorites from the book are too long to quote, I can't resist pulling out a few bits from The Deafening Hug (The unintended love interest). After an example passage that strongly suggests a hug between a brother and sister is more than sibling affection, they note:

Sometimes the author is the last to know. It is all too easy to create a love interest where none is wanted. We call this the Deafening Hug for obvious reasons, and for reasons just as obvious, it should be avoided. Versions include:

[…]Alice in Lapland. Any undue interest or physical contact with children will set off alarms. If you do not want your reader to think he is dealing with a pedophile, dandling of children on knees should be kept to a minimum by fathers, and even more by uncles. If your character is in any way associated with organized religion, whether he is a bishop, a minister, or the kindly old caretaker with a twinkle in his eye, he should not even pull a child from a burning building.

We’re Going to Need a Bigger Closet. Male friends hug, toast their friendship, and later stumble drunkenly to sleep in the cabin’s one bed. The reader is way ahead of you—they are secretly gay, and nothing you say later is going to change his mind. If you do not intend for them to be secretly gay, have Alan sleep on the couch.

The authors also introduce "The Gum on the Mantlepiece," the dysfunctional version of Chekov's famous dictum about storytelling. The "gun" becomes "gum" when something is portentously introduced but turns out to have no significance to the story:

The good news is that as a writer of fiction you get to create your world from scratch. The bad news is that because you create your world from scratch, everything in it is a conscious choice, and the reader will assume there is some reason behind these choices...

...[D]etails that would go unremarked in real life--a quick glance across the room, the lyrics of a song that's playing when you enter a bar--take on much greater significance in fiction. If you have to run dripping from the shower to sign for an unexpected package, its probably the gardening clogs you forgot you ordered from Lands' End. But if your character is interrupted in the shower by the arrival of an unexpected package, it tells your readers that the package will unleash a momentous chain of events.

Even if you never need the advice found in this book--even if you're not a writer--here's a truly entertaining examination of how to do it all wrong.

Ben Yagoda (My favorite books on writing)

Ben Yagoda, The Sound on the Page: Style and Voice in Writing.

This isn’t a book on writing in the general sense; it is an exploration of a single topic, and it’s like no other book I’ve ever seen on ‘style’ or ‘voice,’ or whatever you choose to call this elusive quality. I first read this book when published back in 2004, and when I finished it, I promptly picked it up and read it again, for sheer enjoyment.

Who needs another book on style? As it turns out, anybody who really cares about the issue. As Yagoda discovered when he read through the existing books on style or voice, there tend to be two classes: The Strunk-and-White school, which emphasizes clarity, transparency, and avoiding anything that calls attention to the writer; and the Follow-Your-Bliss school, which urges self-expression at the expense of the reader. None of the writers we prize are in either category.

I can’t think of a better way to explain Yagoda’s approach to the topic than to quote the opening paragraphs of his Introduction:

This book began with a single and simple observation: it is frequently the case that writers entertain, move and inspire us less by what they say than how they say it. What they say is information and ideas and (in the case of fiction) story and characters. How they say it is style.

For the first of many times, I present an example: Ernest Hemingway. What is Hemingway’s content? He has some fishing and war stories that are pretty good, if a little short in the action department, and some ideas about honorable and dishonorable behavior that would puzzle many contemporary readers. His characters, especially in the novels and most especially in the later novels, tend to be tiresome. But his style!…

Yagoda himself has a marvelous style that slips rather than veers between conversational and erudite. In addition to close readings of passages, he interviewed more than 40 writers for this book, and his definition of ‘writer’ includes some surprising figures (such as Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, or comic essayist Dave Barry).

He makes some points I’d never considered before—for example, the fact that dialogue dilutes style. Dialogue tends to follow the rules and realities of speech, and, moreover, is a representation of how the characters would speak rather than the narrative voice of the book. This may explain why so many stylish literary novels are short on dialogue, and why so many voice-y novels with ample dialogue are also first-person narratives, so that a big piece of the dialogue is in the same voice as the narrative. (As in Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, Catcher in the Rye…).

His discussion of cliché phrases is also well worth reading. Yagoda contends that clichés pass through phases, beginning as fresh observations, then becoming trendy, then becoming cliché…and finally retiring to become parts of speech that are almost as neutral as well-worn words. He notes:

Evelyn Waugh…advocated sections of narrative written to conventional standards punctuated by moments when the author steps forward. In the former, he maintained, the most unobtrusive language was best, up to and including (gasp!) clichés…

He then goes on to quote the master, Waugh himself:

I think to be oversensitive about clichés is like being oversensitive about table manners. It comes from keeping second-rate company. Professional reviewers read so many bad books in the course of duty that they develop an unhealthy craving for arresting phrases. There are many occasions in writing when one needs an unobtrusive background to action, when the landscape must become conventionalized if the foreground is to have the right prominence. I do not believe that a serious writer has ever been shy of an expression because it has been used before. It is the writer of advertisements who is always straining to find bizarre epithets for commonplace objects.

(I would have shortened that if I could have, but what would I cut from that marvelous torrent? Go, Evelyn.)

Yagoda would never urge, ala Strunk and White, that there is a right style that ought to be adopted. (In fact, he points out that EB White himself was a stylish writer…and that Orwell, in his famous essay Politics and the English Language, happily ignores some of the rules he is expounding.) But he does try to systematize a bit, at least identifying the traits that make up a writing style. The seven he discusses at some length are:

Competence: The basic skill of the writer in handling language.
Iconoclasm: The unexpectedness of irregularity of the constructions.
Extroversion: The “loudness” or “quietness” of the writing itself.
Feeling: The divide between rational and emotive elements.
Single-mindedness: Focus versus elaboration.
Tension: The degree of complacency or edge/irony in the prose.
Solicitousness: The posture assumed before the reader.

He then suggests that

For each of the seven scales, there’s a certain zone of expectation—a place where “transparent” writers gather and presumably look right through each other. Styles that are close to one or the other pole being to attract readers’ attention. And styles that are all the way to one side seem odd, or maybe even pathological…

Normally, writers with extreme tendencies will mute them in the process of revisions; others, however, will retain or even aggravate them. Writers of this kind face one of two prospects: a life of rejection notes and marginalization, or the hope that somewhere along the line, an editor, critic, or reviewer will decide they are a genius and start the ball rolling.

I’m not sure how helpful this book is to writers; it certainly isn’t a how-to book. But it’s a hell of a lot of fun—and wonderfully well-written.

Francine Prose (My favorite books on writing)

Francine Prose. Reading Like a Writer.

Francine Prose is a marvelous writer of both novels and that neglected form, the novella. (Three Pigs in Five Days is a novella of which I'm especially fond.) She manages to be literary without drawing attention to her writing—a neat trick, given that often her language is so ironic and her descriptions so spot-on that you want to stop and savor them.

This is her book on writing, which isn’t a book on writing at all. It’s a book about “close reading,” about looking at prose in detail to see how writers achieve their effects. (Our own Tim Stretton is a major advocate of the practice, as can be seen in his reviews of what can be learned from particular books.) Close reading is how most writers learned their craft in the days before college writing courses--and those same college writing courses ought to encourage more reading along with all the writing.

On some writing forums, you will find the majority of voices claiming that they can't read when they write—either because they fear it will interfere with thinking about their own story, or because they are anxious that their prose will be—gasp!—influenced. I’ve always been baffled by both of these fears, and I was happy that to find that Ms. Prose agrees:

I’ve also heard fellow writers say that they cannot read while working on a book of their own for fear that Tolstoy or Shakespeare might influence them. I’ve always hoped they would influence me, and I wonder if I would have taken so happily to being a writer if it meant that I couldn’t read for the years it might take to complete a novel.

The chapters are topics: Words… Sentences… Paragraphs… Narration… Character… Dialogue… Details… Gesture… and two final chapters entitled Learning from Chekhov and Reading for Courage. And the chapters are exactly what they sound like—almost microscopically close reading of extracts from novels and short stories.

Now, Ms. Prose is a bit sniffy about the whole topic of Literature (note capital "L"). The extracts are mainly from Flaubert, Woolf, Babel, Austen, and others safely dead and interred in the canon—though she does stoop to include Philip Roth and John Le Carre. But she has some blind spots, too--for example, she is a little dismissive of Elmore Leonard (“highly skilled and competent but less than first-rate”). That's a judgment of his place in the canon rather than an assessment of what can be learned from reading him. I would argue that a close reading of Leonard’s dialogue would be one of the best ways to learn about subtext and sly characterization, and that aspect of his craft is valuable regardless of his standing in the pantheon of Literature.

No matter. I find her book engrossing, and the techniques she employs in looking at a text are applicable far beyond the texts she happens to choose. And, if you don't care for this sort of thing, take a look at her fiction instead.

Steven Pressfield (My favorite books on writing)

Steven Pressfield, The War of Art.

As I mentioned back when I started this series of posts, I’m not a big fan of “inspirational” books on the writing process. I want to hear from real writers talking about writing, not life coaches urging me to follow my bliss.

So Steven Pressfield’s book was initially a bit off-putting to me. In the original hardback edition, the cover (there is no dust-jacket) is made up of silver embossed squares, and a few have been polished to a high gloss so when you pick up the book you see your own reflection. Cute. Add in the title, which puns off Sun Tzu, and it might be too cute altogether. Inside, your worries only multiply: the book is made up of super-short chapters, most only one-to-three pages long, and the layout seems like something Kahlil Gibran might have suggested.

On the other hand, Pressfield is the author of the excellent novel Gates of Fire (which probably spawned the comic book and movie 300, but is, unlike 300, actually good), as well as other fine books set in classical Greece, and he seems like a hard-nosed sort of guy. So I read the first few pages, and I was hooked.

Pressfield’s book is about one thing only, a force of evil he calls “Resistance.”

Most of us have two lives. The life we live and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.

In other words, this is a book about all the ways you can fail to do the work you want to be doing. As Pressfield says, “Every sun casts a shadow, and genius’s shadow is called Resistance.” In other words, Resistance is a form of self-sabotage—though we often explain our failure to do our work in terms of external constraints (job, family, illness, and whatever else seems to get in our way).

Creating soap opera in our lives is a symptom of Resistance. Why put in years of work…when you can get just as much attention by bringing home a boyfriend with a prison record?

Sometimes entire families participate unconsciously in a culture of self-dramatization. The kids fuel the tanks, the grown-ups arm the phasers, the whole starship lurches from one spine-tingling episode to another. And the crew knows how to keep it going. If the level of drama drops below a certain threshold, someone jumps in to amp it up. Dad gets drunk. Mom gets sick, Janie shows up for church with an Oakland Raiders tattoo. It’s more fun than a movie. And it works: Nobody gets a damn thing done.

Pressfield’s book is all about how to get your work done, and, in the end, his real message is “If not now, when?”

Resistance is fear. But Resistance is too cunning to show itself naked in this form. Why? Because if Resistance lets us see clearly that our own fear is preventing us from doing our work, we may feel shame at this. And shame may drive us to act in the face of fear.

Resistance doesn’t want us to do this. So it brings in Rationalization. Rationalization is Resistance’s spin doctor. It’s Resistance’s way of hiding the Big Stick behind its back. Instead of showing us our fear (which might shame us and impel us to do our work), Resistance presents us with a series of plausible, rational justifications for why we shouldn’t do our work.

What’s particularly insidious about the rationalizations that Resistance presents to us is that a lot of them are true. They’re legitimate…What Resistance leaves out, of course, is that all this means diddly.

Although it looks like a book to idly browse through, in fact Pressfield is marshalling an argument that builds from one mini-chapter to the next. And he means it: he really believes that Resistance to our purpose in life is the root of all evil in the world, and that this is a force trying to snuff out our eternal soul. And he believes that the proper response is to act in the face of fear, to gird our loins with faith, and to cultivate the Muse.

Literally? Yep. He believes in the Muse, and inspiration, in the most literal and heroic terms—but the believes the gods only smile upon you if you go forth to do battle. Pressfield’s view of the universe is unapologetically premodern, half-Homeric and half- Zoroastrian. To many, this book may seem absurd or simply beside the point. I think it’s a minor masterpiece; but I'm sure it won't suit everyone's tastebuds.

George Plimpton and Paris Review (My favorite books on writing)

George Plimpton, et al. Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Volumes 1-8.

I need a word, here. You know how there can be something--a writer, or a music group, or a vacation spot--that you discover when it is still relatively obscure and difficult of access, sort of a cult item that you feel deserves wider recognition? And then that day comes when your relatively hidden treasure becomes well-known and widely available...

Is there a word for that conflicted feeling when your treasure wins the recognition and ease of access it so deserves? Perhaps the Germans have a word for it--after all, they gave us schadenfreude, and this is to some extent schadenfreude's mirror reflection.

The first volume of Writers at Work came out around 1960, and the last one around the end of the 1980s, and for those of us who didn't subscribe to the Paris Review from 1953 on, finding the collected interviews was both a joy and, sometimes, a bit of a quest. I have them all on my shelf. The battered first volume has interviews that now seem to be from the Age of Legend: EM Forster, William Faulkner, Thornton Wilder, Georges Simenon, Dorothy Parker, Joyce Cary, and a half-dozen others.

But, starting last year, the Review announced they would be publishing "The DNA of Literature" free on their website. And I can't help but applaud the idea. Even if I had to scour the world for years to find the books, and now anyone can download them for free. (Hence that funny feeling that has no name.)

However, they haven't been quite as generous as it sounds. Hundreds of interviews are now available as PDF downloads, but they held some back for republication in the new four-volume set being published by Picador (the first two are out). So if you go looking for the interview with TS Eliot or Ernest Hemingway, you will find you are out of luck. And if you are looking for interviews since 2000, you will generally be politely invited to buy the issue of the magazine in which it ran.

The interviews are marvelous. Although the writers are given free rein, the interviewers are intelligent and produce something far more in-depth and valuable than your typical magazine or newspaper interview. I'll never have a chance to sit down with Faulkner or Vonnegut or AS Byatt and have a chat, but these interviews are a good second-best option. Maybe even a better option, as they give me no chance to make a fool of myself.

-------------------

Note to Jen: If you really seek out Ernie's interview, it's in the second edition of Writers at Work, and can be bought used on Amazon for less than $2...about 90% of everything Hemingway is quoted as having said is somewhere in that interview.

Stephen Koch (My favorite books on writing)

Stephen Koch, The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop.

Is it possible to come up with a less-appealing title? Possibly, but you’d really have to apply yourself to the task. Nonetheless, hidden beneath that ugly title, and between the shocking safety-green covers (makes it easy to find on the shelf, I must admit) is one of the best writing books ever, well, written.

As well as being a novelist himself, Koch was long the head of the creative writing program at Columbia University (the one in New York City, not the one in Bogota), and the mentor of many other novelists. Yet the book is far from academic, and Koch is one of the least dogmatic of teachers. If there is any single philosophy he embraces, it is the belief that what works, works.

Most writing books, intentionally or otherwise, situate themselves somewhere in the Great Chain of Prose; the authors tend to value precious, MFA, lit-magazine prose on the one hand, or assume that you want to be Dan Brown on the other. Not so with this book: Koch joyously embraces the full spectrum of literature, and he peppers his arguments with quotes from Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Stephen King, Vladimir Nabokov and Patricia Highsmith, Truman Capote and Edith Wharton…and about a hundred other writers. (Indeed, his habit of quoting so many snippets from interviews with writers has irritated some readers. I think it’s one of the great things about the book, and led me to many interviews I never would otherwise have read.)

This probably isn’t the best book for a true newbie writer. It doesn’t give assignments, it doesn’t do case studies, it doesn't mess about with definitions of the obvious. Moreover, it assumes you are well-read, and, perhaps more important, widely read. It doesn’t teach technique or the details of craft, but instead discusses concepts. Because of this, it tends to be of more value to, and enjoyed more by, those writers who already have a fair amount of writing experience behind them.

Koch makes a sharp distinction between “story” (which he considers essential and fundamental) and “plot” (which he believes consists of the details of how the story unfolds, and is therefore a matter of both craft and choice). He also has fine discussions on drama/melodrama, the problem of the improbable, and the “invention of your style.”

This is not the place to come if you want lessons on past and present tense, or how to craft POV, or why to avoid the passive voice. This is a book for writers who want to sit down and enjoy a wide-ranging discussion of all the issues in writing that lie somewhere between art and craft—in other words, where we all really live and work. I've bought copies of this book for many writer friends, because it's a sure thing; within a few days I have calls or e-mail telling me how much they are enjoying it.

One of the unusual strengths of Koch's book is his chapter on revision. One is constantly reminded that "writing is mostly rewriting," but the process of rewriting is often treated as the most mystical part of the process. Koch attacks the problem with real verve, but he recognizes that writers produce their first drafts in very different ways. He suggests that drafts should alternate in speed: If you're a fast first drafter, who slams the words down the way a potter gets the clay onto the wheel, then you should count on a slow, meticulous second draft; if, like me, you're a slow first drafter, then you should pick up the pace when you revise, to avoid getting mired in your previous work.

If you do get stuck in revision, he has tactics to consider--for example, Rewriting From Memory:

Some prose is a tar baby. Touch it and you just sink deeper into tar. If your battle with some passage is leaving you bleary-eyed and frustrated, it's often best simply to return to your original inspiration and without so much as a backward glance, quickly write out the whole thing again, from scratch, and from memory.

At the same time he advises a certain ruthlessness, however, he also cautions:

Cut, but don't cut out your heart...From the very beginning, the definition of your job has been to trust your own excitement and make it pay off. It still is. Never condemn your own prose. Redeem it. If you do, the original excitement will come back, but it will come back fulfilled and alive with a power that will be new to you.

So much for the refrain of cut, cut, cut! First, do no harm.

Lawrence Block (My favorite books on writing)

Lawrence Block, Telling Lies for Fun and Profit and Spider, Spin Me a Web.

The Chandler-Hammett generation of popular writers came up through the pulp magazines to establish themselves as novelists. The next generation of writers, who first published in the 1950s and 1960s, still dashed off things for magazines, but their main route into the world of books was through mass-market “paperback originals” (a now virtually dead segment of publishing).

The appetite for mystery, soft-core sex, romance, and science fiction paperbacks once seemed inexhaustible. The pay was low, but so were the barriers to publication and the standards of craft. The paperback-original writers ‘learned on the job,’ and most of them wrote more than a dozen books a year. Out of this generation came some terrifically talented and long-lived writers: Elmore Leonard, Donald E. Westlake (Richard Stark), Brian Garfield, and, of course, Lawrence Block.

Block isn’t even sure how many volumes of fiction he has written. Checking the front matter of a recent novel of his gives a total of 55 novels and 7 collections of stories, but that doesn’t take into account his vast output of pseudonymous pulp in the 1950s. He only arrived on the radar screen of the critics in the early 1980s with Eight Million Ways to Die, and has since gone on to win almost every honor there is in the field of crime fiction, as well as heaping loads of praise from the literary establishment. He’s now 70 years old, and going from strength to strength.

In the middle of his career, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Block found the time to knock out a monthly column on fiction writing for Writer’s Digest, and it is these columns that are collected in Telling Lies for Fun and Profit and Spider, Spin Me a Web. Although some of the material is a little dated (he frequently refers to some ancient device called a typewriter), most of it has aged remarkably well.

If John Gardner makes fiction seem like a somewhat mystical and perhaps burdensome occupation, Lawrence Block makes you feel like you’ve got a friend in the business. He cheerfully admits that writing fiction is a frustrating, crazy racket, but at the same time he makes it seem approachable. He’s honest about his own failings and fears, but explains them in such a jocular, casual way that he makes you relax about your own neuroses. Hey, you say to yourself, writing a novel is something even mortals can do.

Block claims to dislike the process of writing fiction (and remarks on how odd it is that most musicians love playing, and most painters love painting, but that so many authors get their buzz from having written rather than from writing), but he claims to have had fun writing his column, which he describes as being like dashing off a letter to a friend. It’s easy to believe he was having fun: he fools around with gimmicks, makes corny jokes, tosses in anecdotes, and seems utterly at ease.

Despite all the tomfoolery (who was this Tom fellow, anyhow?), a surprising number of writers I meet cite these as the most helpful books on writing. Because they were tossed off as columns they are concise, and because they were written over a stretch of years they cover a wide range of topics. It’s rare to come up with an issue Block hasn’t addressed at least once. The usual suspects—POV, conflict, motivation, flashbacks, characterization, verbs versus adverbs, dialogue—yeah, they’re all here, and so are the matters of the writing life, such as rejection, envy, fear, and determination.

But Block addresses some unexpected topics. Character names, for instance. Series characters as opposed to characters for stand-alone novels. Writing in the morning versus writing at night. When procrastination rather than writing is a good thing. Living on a writer’s income. Feigning expertise in subjects about which you know little. Pen names. Titles. A technique he chooses to call “Creative Plagiarism” (just to pique your interest). Whatever your issue, at some point Block probably wrote a column about it.

These are perfect books for those times when you have a few spare moments and want something that is bound to be engaging but short. But there’s also the salted nuts problem: after reading one of the short chapters in these two volumes, it’s all too easy to read another…and another…which is why these books keep getting reissued (the Kindle version of Telling Lies... just came out).

Well, there’s worse ways to spend your time.

John Gardner (My favorite books on writing)

[Before we begin, let me make it clear that this is not the John Gardner who wrote the James Bond books after Ian Fleming died.]

John Gardner. The Art of Fiction and On Becoming a Novelist.

When the chemist Lavoisier was beheaded during the Reign of Terror following the French Revolution, the mathematician LaGrange (of the L5 point beloved of science-fiction writers) said, “It took them only an instant to cut off that head, but France may not produce another like it in a century.”

John Gardner died in a motorcycle accident before he was fifty. He left behind a long line of marvelous novels. Critical opinion (and, more important, my opinion) is unanimous that his novella Grendel—which is Beowulf told from the monster’s point of view—is a masterpiece. Opinions are more divided on his other novels; his earlier works, such as The Sunlight Dialogues and Nickel Mountain, were widely praised and have a cult following, but I admire his later October Light and especially Mickelsson’s Ghosts (which the critics generally scorned).

Had his head not been (metaphorically) cut off, I think it would now stand up there next to writers like Bellow and Mailer—not perfect, and far from uncontroversial, but one of the major figures of twentieth-century literature. The fact that he got on the wrong side of the critical establishment by attacking Pynchon and Barth and a few other darlings as being “frigid” writers without a sense of moral duty in that highest of all callings, writing fiction, didn’t help him much. (I rather like Pynchon and Barth, as it happens, but I don’t find that the critical politics of the situation are terribly interesting: these are novels, not football teams.) I’m hoping Gardner will be resurrected in the 21st century the way forgotten Melville was in the 20th.

Nonetheless, Gardner made his mark on literature in other ways than his fiction. He was a master teacher, and fostered a number of important (if sometimes tragic) writers, notably Raymond Carver. And he also penned two of the most influential books—at least in the US—on writing. They need to be read as a pair; they really ought to be one book.

Gardner’s books on writing are frustrating. They are meandering, ranting, illuminating, digressive. The books are like having a brilliant, half-mad professor deliver a lecture with you trapped in the classroom: at moments, you want to argue, at other moments you wonder if he’s lost his mind, and then he hits you with a lightening bolt and you say, my god, this man is pure genius.


There are things no one has ever dealt with as well as Gardner: Psychic distance. Levels of diction. Genre (in the grander sense of tale, epic, etc.). Rhythm and prosody. And when you go to look up what you remember he said, you find that what you recalled as a chapter is in fact two pages at most.

But, beware. Gardner thinks fiction is a high calling, and that reaching out to strangers who may read your work carries a heavy moral burden. He reminds us that the reader who picks up your book may be dying of a terminal illness, or that the reader may be someone wronged who is teetering on the edge of forgiveness or vengeance, or that the reader may be bereaved or contemplating suicide or abortion or even just getting divorced or quitting a job. And here you come with your novel, portraying life through a particular lens, messing with their emotions…

On second thought, don’t read Gardner’s books on writing. The insights are marvelous, but they aren’t worth the guilt he loads on your back. Every time I write anything, I feel like I’m failing Father John.

I’d really recommend Grendel, though.

Why Read Books On Writing, Anyhow?

Suroopa Mukherjee, who penned Across the Mystic Shore, asked me this question (rather less bluntly) in the Comment trail.

To tell the truth, I don't particularly recommend anyone read books on writing unless they are so inclined. They are often repetitive (except where they are contradictory). And I am very skeptical as to whether someone can teach you to write a novel.

I don't think art can be taught. But I do think that craft can be taught, and that art employs craft.

The books on writing I enjoy most are down-to-earth discussions of how writers go about their work and how they feel facing the blank page each day. To some extent, what I'm wondering is, "Does anyone else have this problem?" and "Do real writers ever feel this way?" And the answers are always "Yes" and "Yes."

Rob Siders already mentioned Lawrence Block (author of the brilliant Eight Million Ways to Die, which is as good as anything Chandler or Hammett ever wrote). Block is the craft guy par excellence because he wrote a zillion short essays for Writer's Digest, and all of them are tightly focused. For example, did you ever wonder about the problem of withholding information from the reader while writing in first person? Block has an essay on the topic. Want a discussion of different ways to drop into a flashback? Block has an essay on that, too.

But those are little flourishes. If you haven't read enough novels and haven't spent enough time writing, and you don't have a story to tell, none of those tricks will do you any good.

But there is also the aspect of hearing people talk about the topic of writing without making it seem as though they are stealing fire from the gods. For me, taking some of the grand mystery out of the process is vital. In the movie All That Jazz, the fictional director Joe Gideon asks, "Does Stanley Kubrick ever have days like this?"

I don't know how Stanley Kubrick felt. But I have to tell you it was a relief to read an essay where Joyce Carol Oates said that she wrote both when she felt inspired and at other times when her "soul felt as thin as a playing card," and that she had discovered that how she felt about her writing at the time she was doing it wasn't any indicator of quality.

I suppose it's rather adolescent of me. I want to know if how I am is, well, you know...normal. (For a writer, that is.) And it is through books on writing that I've discovered almost all writers lack confidence and gnaw on their knuckles, and, more important, that they work in every conceivable way: planning in immense detail or plunging right in, rewriting every line of the first draft or never going to the next page until the current page is perfect, writing any damn thing and then cutting later or writing minimalist and then fleshing out later. Standing up or sitting down or laying down: as the Barenaked Ladies song says, It's All Been Done Before. (Books on writing also prepared me for the world of rejection a writer must face, which is a great surprise to many.)

Above all, books on writing are a chance to sit and listen to talented people talk about their craft, and that has always been fascinating to me (even when it's a craft I don't practice). I'll probably never meet most of the writers I read, and in many cases the only place we could meet would be in some afterlife, as so many of them predeceased me. And, sure, I'll know them mainly through their art. But I'm so glad that Poe, for example, bothered to set down his thoughts on writing. Are his essays on writing as important as his stories? No. But the essays are as close as I'll ever get to sitting down and buying him a drink.

And if anyone ever needed me to buy him a drink, it was good old Edgar.

Uh-oh. Another series of posts.

Way back in June, Cate Sweeney (of Selfish Jean fame) was about to teach a workshop, and polled various folks about their favorite books on writing. In my case, this had roughly the same effect as asking an apartment-bound dog if he’d like to go for a walk. I bounded about, knocked over lamps, and frantically tried to find my leash. I even mailed her three books of which I had duplicates. (Two of them I had in paperback, then found them used in hardback, and the third…oh, why am I explaining this?)

For, you see, I read a lot of books about writing. More than you can imagine. Especially when I was working at my first novel, I found them a great thing for filling in spare moments. (Hey, we don’t watch TV—our set is hooked only to our DVD player, and has no cable or even antenna—so you gotta do something.)

Admittedly, most books on writing aren’t very good, and some of them are downright wrongheaded. But even those are fun, because of the furious arguments I have in my mind with the author—which often serves to clarify my perspective.

There is also the phenomenon, which I recognize from yoga classes, where an instructor will say something that hits me like a sharp slap. (Usually it’s something like, “The purpose of this posture is to stretch your ankles. Your forehead isn’t connected to your ankles. Scrunching up your forehead won’t help.”) When I tell her after class how helpful it was, and ask why she never mentioned it before, she usually says, “What do you mean? I always say that.” So, sometimes I apparently don’t hear things the first ten thousand times. And sometimes I don’t hear what books say, either, until fifty books have told me the same thing.

I don’t really know how many books I’ve read on the topic.

(Though I could come up with a damn good guess just by counting them. Anyhow, less than 200, but more than 100. Unlike most people, I find nonfiction to be more effortless to read than fiction, because with nonfiction I can pick it up, set it down, pick it up again, read it for five minutes while waiting for a phone call. I hate doing that with a novel.)

So, I plan to tell you—even though you didn’t ask—though Cate foolishly did—what my dozen favorite books on writing are.

I need to issue a disclaimer, however. I don’t like books that assign me “exercises”; if we aren’t playing for keeps, I find it hard to give a damn, so I don’t do exercises. And I’m not crazy about ‘inspirational’ stuff, like Writing Down the Bones or Let the Crazy Child Write, though I recognize they are the sort of thing some people like best. What I really enjoy is, well, shoptalk—where working writers share what they know as if you’ve gone out for a beer together. So my selection is very biased indeed.

And, to add a second disclaimer, I plan to cheat. In some cases, two or more books by the same author will be treated as a single unit. This isn’t one of those ‘desert island’ things.

And even if it were, I’d still probably cheat. (Did I ever mention that I spent a lot of time in juvenile correction facilities as a youth for an obscure crime labeled "incorrigibility"? Well, okay, and for some other things, too.)


Oh, and if anyone would like to toss in their own suggestions, please do. Some time back, Neil Ayres recommended Mat Coward's Success...and How to Avoid It, and I've been grateful ever since. (And I see that Matt Curran has posted about a favorite book of his which I now plan to track down.)

Zelazny, Diction, and Style

In my recent interview, I mentioned Roger Zelazny as an influence on my writing because he taught me that a diction drop could be a tool rather than a mistake. In the Comment trail, novelist (and famous Rat) Neil Ayres asked if I could elaborate, which is like asking a retriever if he can fetch. I can not only fetch, but I can slobber all over the ball before you pry it from my fangs.

Strictly speaking, a diction drop is a sudden shift in style--usually from the so-called High Style to the colloquial. It's typically seen in amateur writing when the author is going for a Melvillean tone and stumbles into something far less elevated, as in this made-up example:

The vault of the sky shattered under the torrent of the monsoon, and he sought shelter beneath the canopy of trees, huddling in the embracing concavity of a banyan's mighty trunk; yet even that ancient giant could not hold back the deluge, and so he gave up on keeping dry.

Now, starting out the sentence with the vault of the sky might be inadvisable in the first place, but unless you're goofing around, you probably don't want to end by slumping down into he gave up. It undercuts the tone of the sentence.

And you never want to undercut your prose, do you? Isn't consistent style, voice, and diction every writer's goal? I thought so--until I read Zelazny. He deliberately plays with such things to add another dimension to his writing, to manage transitions in tone and pacing, and to keep certain passages from sounding too faux-poetic or pompous. I can't give an example of his more clever drops without quoting long scenes, but here's a transitional drop from his novel Jack of Shadows that carries us from a rather emotional scene to something more mundane:

Beside the flat, black ocean, he now walked. The stars within it danced whenever the ground and the waters trembled. The air was chill and he felt a great fatigue…He longed to wrap his cloak about him and lie down for a moment. He wanted a cigarette.

From Beside the flat black ocean, he now walked to He wanted a cigarette? (Even odder in the broader context of the book, which is an alternative-world fantasy; the cigarette is as deliberately out of place and jarring here as it would be in a novel about ancient Rome.)

Zelazny played with style and diction throughout his work, frequently dancing along an edge within the same paragraph. The first chapter of his Hugo-Award-winning novel Lord of Light opens with an epigraph from an entirely invented religious text followed by another from the sacred Buddhist Dhammapada, and then arrives at the first line of the novel:

His followers called him Mahasamatman and said he was a god.

An intriguing first line--not exactly heroic or High Style, but in the tone of a tale or myth. All this becomes more complicated, though, when we continue through the entire first paragraph:

His followers called him Mahasamatman and said he was a god. He preferred to drop the Maha- and the –atman, however, and called himself Sam. He never claimed to be a god. But, then, he never claimed not to be a god. Circumstances being what they were, neither admission could be of any benefit. Silence, though, could.

Lord of Light concerns a future world where the technocratic rulers--The First, who arrived on a spaceship--have set themselves up as a pantheon of immortals mimicking the Hindu gods. Sam, the Enlightened One, and one of The First himself, leads a worldwide, peaceful rebellion against Heaven that parallels Buddha's pacifist revolt against the exclusionary, caste-ridden Hindu reincarnation cycle. Lord of Light is therefore at once a science fiction story, with glib technological nods as to how the alternate world works, and simultaneously a fantasy novel or myth that uses evocative language and images to further the story. Zelazny's style alternates between the grand--which is by its nature somewhat innocent--and a knowing, sometimes silly tone. The two levels of diction alternate throughout, but sometimes they are packed close together. Watch how this passage slithers from tale to modern self-consciousness and back to mythic again:

.......Hellwell lies at the top of the world and leads down to its roots.
.......It is probably as old as the world itself, and if it is not, it should be, because it looks as if it were.
.......It begins with a doorway. There is a huge, burnished metal door, erected by the First, that is heavy as sin, three times the height of a man and half that distance in width. It is a full cubit thick and bears a head-sized ring of brass, a complicated pressure-plate lock, and an inscription that reads, roughly, “Go away. This is not a place to be. If you do try to enter here, you will fail and also be cursed. If somehow you succeed, then do not complain that you entered unwarned, nor bother us with your deathbed prayers.” Signed, “The Gods.”
.......It is set near the peak of a very high mountain named Channa, in the midst of a region of very high mountains called the Ratnagaris. In that place there is always snow upon the ground, and rainbows ride like fur on the backs of icicles, which sprout about the frozen caps of cliffs. The air is sharp as a sword. The sky is bright as the eye of a cat.

(I'm particularly fond of the Gollum-like, "Go away. This is not a place to be." It appeals to the AA Milne in all of us.)

To my 13-year-old eyes, the twisting, swerving tone of Lord of Light was a revelation: Look! Would you just look at what this guy's doing! I mean...is that legal?

Of course, writers had already been playing with diction and style for decades, beginning with the strident stylistic parodies/tributes/gamesmanship of James Joyce in Ulysses, down to the inimitable originality of Zelazny's contemporary Donald Bartheleme, who never wrote anything twice in the same style (and seldom wrote an entire story in only one style). What was astonishing to me wasn't that someone would play with tone and diction in this fashion; experimental fiction by its nature had no rules. But here was a genre writer--no, worse, a science-fiction writer--jazzing around with language to serve his own ends, and managing to write page-turners at the same time.

In later works, Zelazny continued to have a slippery style, but he tended to spread it out. The diction changed radically within a book, but there were less of the sudden drops and elbows in the side, and more of the slow segues that matched language to content. By the time he began the Amber series--which, like most series of any flavor, ran too long for my taste--he had achieved a chameleon style that morphed to match what was needed for a scene, and he could write passages which, at their peak, were far over the top; but he vaulted that top so casually that, in context, the passages are read without a hitch.

In Nine Princes in Amber, the first-person protagonist is a Prince of Amber. Amber is a Platonic Ideal of a city; all the other cities of the multidimensional universe, indeed, all of our universe, consists of only the shadows and reflections of Amber. Our narrrator is an amnesiac who has lived for centuries on the shadow called Earth, and has been employed mostly as a mercenary. In one passage, memory of his recent (several hundred years) past returns:

I saw the paper skins and the knobby, stick-like bones of the dead of Auschwitz. I had been present at Nuremburg, I knew. I heard the voice of Stephen Spender reciting “Vienna,” and I saw Mother Courage cross the stage on the night of a Brecht premiere. I saw the rockets leap up from the stained hard places, Peenemunde, Vandenberg, Kennedy, Kyzyl Kum in Kazakhstan, and I touched with my hands the Wall of China…

I saw the rockets leap up from the stained hard places? I like it, but I wouldn't expect it in a novel with this hardboiled Hammett passage:

......It became boring with the third repetition, so I threw the bedclothes over his head and clobbered him with the metal strut.
.....Within two minutes, I’d say, I was garbed all in white, the color of Moby Dick and vanilla ice cream. Ugly.
.......…Laughing Boy’s wristwatch told me it was five forty-four. The metal strut was inside my belt, under the white orderly jacket, and it rubbed against my hipbone as I walked…When I reached the first floor I turned right, looking for the door with light leaking out from beneath it.
.......I found it, way up at the end of the corridor, and I didn’t bother to knock.

Clobbered? Laughing Boy? But wait--there's more, when Roger goes all Song of Solomon on us:

…for often at night my dreams were troubled by images of thy green and golden spires and thy sweeping terraces. I remember thy wide promenades and the decks of flowers, golden and red. I recall the sweetness of thy airs…Amber, immortal city from which every other city has taken its shape, I cannot forget thee, even now…

Looked at in isolation, each of those quotes is perhaps a bit too much, but trust me: they don't call attention to themselves in the context of the book. The guy always had his eye on the volume control, and fiddled with it constantly.

Was Roger Zelazny high literary art? Maybe not, though I'd argue some of his books were more thought-provoking, entertaining, and stylistically challenging than, say, Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain. Was he the first to play such games? Assuredly not. But he was the first to gain my attention, and he deeply affected my sense of what is stylistically permissible in a novel.

You can do that? Too cool. Now I wanna be a writer!

Favorite Fiction About Writers

On his blog a few days back, Tim Stretton mentions a thriller he enjoyed despite the fact that the protagonist is a writer (which he describes as "usually A Very Bad Sign.")

In general, I have to agree. Telling stories about writers probably isn’t a great idea. As the movies have discovered, there isn’t much drama inherent in the process, and even less visual interest. The best Hollywood can do is to insist that we all still use typewriters, because the hammering of the keys and the bite of the letters into the page (often shown in close-up) at least offer some tiny sense of momentum. Not to mention the growing stack of pages, which can then be stolen, or, as in the 2003 film Love Actually—where Liam Neeson is still, of course, using a typewriter—be blown all over the place by an errant wind.

Word processing has eliminated the limited cinematic value we had, and the situation in prose isn’t that much better. Who wants to read about someone’s struggle to write? It’s like reading about someone’s struggle to get out of bed.

Nonetheless, I do have some favorite tales with writers as protagonists. If you ask nicely, I’ll tell you what they are.

“How to Become a Writer” by Lorrie Moore. A short story included in her wonderful collection Self-Help, but also widely anthologized. Begins with the famous line, “First, try to be something, anything, else.” Compresses a whole career into a few pages.

“Lost in the Funhouse” by John Barth. A short story, in his collection of the same title, where the protagonist must be interpreted as a younger version of the omniscient narrator. The narrator is not only intrusive but self-conscious and keeps interrupting himself with notes on how fiction is composed. Simultaneously hilarious and instructive.

The Hook by Donald E. Westlake. Blackly humorous crime story about a bestselling but blocked writer, plus a fellow writer who has fallen out of publication, and a pact. Grim yet funny.

Foul Matter by Martha Grimes. A writer arranges to have a literary writer dumped from a publisher's list, and the publisher finds the only way to break the literary writer's contract is to have the literary writer killed. Problem is, the hit men hired develop an interest in literature. Hey, everybody’s a critic.

The Calling by Sterling Watson. Hard to find these days. The story of a young writer who attends a writing workshop conducted by his literary idol. The dark side of writing groups, mentor-protégé relationships, and the war between artists and their loved ones. Has an autobiographical feel.

Famous Writers School by Steven Carter. A funny, cleverly constructed epistolary novel built around a fiction correspondence course. The chapters are composed of lessons, student submissions, and letters from the teacher. Pitch-perfect and squirm-inducing.

That’s my list. But no doubt I’ve overlooked some gems. Any suggestions?

A Book Every Writer Needs to Keep Nearby

The picture above is entitled Rejection #1, one of the wonderful and peculiar wire sculptures done by the prolific Terry Border at his blog Bent Objects. (Well worth a visit. Some of his stuff is beautiful; some, like his McDonald's Monster, are a little horrific. There is also an "Immature Adults Only" version at Really Bent Objects.)

Rejection #1 seemed like the ideal illustration for this post about Pushcart's Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections (for Amazon UK link go here). Bill Henderson--the founder of Pushcart Press--had the idea of collecting excerpts from particularly nasty or wrongheaded reviews, giving special attention to those that look jaw-droppingly absurd in retrospect. His partner in crime, Andre Bernard, decided to find the best in rejections. Initially published as three volumes, they have been combined into a single book that is indispensible for any writer trying to maintain their sanity, optimism. or sense of humor.

The classic rejection, of course, is the San Francisco Examiner's rejection of an article by Rudyard Kipling: "This isn't a kindergarten for amateur writers. I'm sorry, Mr Kipling, but you just don't know how to use the English language." That's in this volume, but there is so much more.

***Reviews***

Wuthering Heights: Here all the faults of Jane Eyre (by Charlotte Bronte) are magnified a thousandfold, and the only consolation we have in reflecting upon it is that it will never be generally read.

Alice in Wonderland: We fancy that any real child might be more puzzled than enchanted by this stiff, overwrought story.

The Great Gatsby: A little slack, a little soft, more than a little artificial, The Great Gatsby falls into the class of negligible novels.

Fear of Flying: This crappy novel, misusing vulgarity to the point where it becomes purely foolish...represents everything that is to be loathed in American fiction today.

***Rejections***

(Some of these are addressed to the author or agent, but others are internal memos Bernard retrieved from the vaults of publishing houses.)

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold: You can have Le Carre--he hasn't got any future.

Lolita: It will not sell, and will do immeasurable harm to a growing reputation...I am most disturbed by the fact that the author has asked that this be published. I can see no possible cause could be served by its publication now. I recommend that it be buried under a stone for a thousand years.

The Fountainhead: I wish there were an audience for a book of this kind. But there isn't. It won't sell.

Ironweed: I like William Kennedy, but not enough. He's a very good writer, something no one needs to tell you or him, and his characters are terrific. I cannot explain turning this down.

Catch-22: It is always possible that a reader who goes in for this zany-epigram stuff will think it is a work of genius, and of course he may be right. But from your long publishing experience you will know that it is less disastrous to turn down a work of genius than to turn down talented mediocrities.

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That's only a small sampling of the delights in Henderson and Bernard's great compilation. See now why every writer needs this book? You may be scorned, you may be rejected...but you're in august company.

And, in a More Mystical Vein than Rats and Black Swans...

I bought Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art (with a nod and a wink to Lao Tzu) when it was first published back in 2002 by Rugged Land. It was a book I almost didn’t buy. The shiny little silver hardback had been pressed with crosshatchings, and a few of the resulting squares had been polished so that your own face was reflected back to you from two or three spots. Cute. Too cute.

Inside, I found a profusion of short chapters, many of them only two or three paragraphs long, filled with pronouncements that verged on the proverbial. I’d read Pressfield’s great and moving novel Gates of Fire (the story of the Battle of Thermopylae that was later told so much more poorly by the graphic novel--and now movie--300), so I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. But I admit I found the Kahlil-Gibranish layout more than a bit off-putting.

I bought it anyway. (It was later reissued by Warner Books in an even-more-distressing trade paperback form, with cover blurbs that suggest it is a general self-help book that might even help with your diet.) And it turns out to be one of the best books ever written on the topic of being a writer.

What Pressfield does first is to personify the Great Enemy. After Robert McKee’s introduction, the War of Art opens with:

Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance…Late at night, have you ever experienced a vision of the person you might become, the work you could accomplish, the realized being you were meant to be? Are you a write who doesn’t write, a painter who doesn’t paint, an entrepreneur who never starts a venture? Then you know what Resistance is.

Despite the odd, snippety layout, the book is intended to be read in order, not picked up and browsed through. Pressfield is marshalling a complex argument about the nature of that which keeps us from doing our work, and, as it turns out, form is following function in his development of his theme, because Resistance wears many masks. After showing us one facet of how the Enemy works, Pressfield backs away and assaults the problem from yet another angle.

It is no wonder that most of Pressfield’s novels are set in ancient Greece. He has an archaic mindset tempered only slightly by modernity. He believes in the existence and power of Resistance as a literal personified force, and he fears and hates Resistance as surely as a tent preacher abhors Satan. Pressfield also believes in the Muse—again, quite literally. His philosophy is that of the Spartans or the warriors of the Bhaghavad Gita. We are entitled to our labor, but not necessarily to the fruits of our labor. The honor is not in victory, but in being allowed onto the battlefield.

...[t]he most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying. Why is this so important? Because when we sit down day after day and keep grinding, something mysterious begins to happen. A process is set into motion by which, inevitably and infallibly, heaven comes to our aid. Unseen forces enlist in our cause; serendipity reinforces our purpose.

This is the other secret that real artists know and wannabe writers don't. When we sit down each day and do our work, power concentrates around us. The Muse takes note of our dedication. She approves. We have earned favor in her sight. When we sit down and work, we become like a magnetized rod that attracts iron filings. Ideas come. Insights accrete.

This is about as far from Taleb's world of randomness as imaginable, but I have a writer's mind, so I'm capable of holding two (or more) opposing worldviews in my mind at the same time. Oddly enough, though, Pressfield's conclusion about 'success' matches with Taleb's, though for different reasons:

Grandiose fantasies are a symptom of Resistance. They’re the sign of an amateur. The professional has learned that success, like happiness, comes as a by-product of work. The professional concentrates on the work, and allows rewards to come or not to come, whatever they like.

Taleb would say that there is a large measure of chance at work in determining outward success. Pressfield would probably say the gods are fickle. Take your pick. Me, I believe both.