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.

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.

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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.

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.)

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?

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.

Atlanta Nights: A Writer's Anti-Textbook (A Vine-Ripened Review)

If there’s any basic rule in the creative process, it’s this: the things you try that don’t work will always show you what does work.

—Frank Santillo

In general, I think bad books are best ignored; I enjoy recommending books, not assailing them. But today I realized I could have my cake and eat it too by recommending a bad book—the inimitable Atlanta Nights.

Once upon a time, there was a POD publishing company named PublishAmerica. (In fact, there still is.) If you haven’t heard of PublishAmerica and the Atlanta Nights flap, Wikipedia’s article is a nice summary. A group of about 40 writers, collaborating under the name Travis Tea, set out to write the worst novel ever written, and PublishAmerica accepted it (though the company reneged on the deal when the hoax was announced). Luckily for the world, Travis Tea made this masterpiece available through POD press Lulu.com.

It’s easy to glance through Atlanta Nights, wince a few times, laugh a few times, and toss it aside. There are so many deliberate mistakes right on the surface—gross errors in grammar, characters changing their names and hair color and even race on the same page, misspellings, inexplicable shifts in tense, and baffling arrays of pronouns—that most readers miss the deep level of craft that went into the book’s creation. Finding exactly the wrong turn of phrase is nearly as hard as finding the right one:

The corners of Callie’s mouth drooped like saggy breasts. “Why not?” she interrogated.

OR

She urgently meandered down the marmoreal
hallway…

In many cases, the similes and metaphors are so arrestingly arbitrary and clumsy, one doesn’t even notice that the sentence makes no sense or has lapsed into poetry (squinting cars?):

Squinting into the late afternoon sun, the cars reflected the red-tinged light off windshields and bumpers and mirrors and doorknobs like a pack of bicyclists caught in a searchlight late at night on a deserted road.

Some of the more wonderful passages are far too long to quote, as they involve incompetent flashbacks, interior monologues confused with present action, and shifts in point of view that are impossible to follow. Atlanta Nights could be used as a textbook for a seminar in fiction technique, but picking apart even a single chapter could take up several class sessions. Even short and straightforward action sequences would be a chore to repair:

..........Then his eyes were suddenly trapped like wolves in jaw traps. One single detail from the newspaper article seized him by the throat and squeezed like a noose around his neck. It was the date and time of the
accident. 4:03 P.M, on July 20th!
aaaaa"No! It can’t be!’ Bruce shouted the words. He stood up from his chair. The Siamese neighbor’s cat jumped in terror…

If you choose to read Atlanta Nights, set aside some time, as it makes Being and Nothingness read like a beach book. It has a permanent place on my bookshelf (between Donna Tartt and Walter Tevis, as it turns out), because there is, thankfully, no other novel quite like it.

The world is full of bad books written by amateurs. But why settle for the merely regrettable? Atlanta Nights is a bad book written by experts.

— T. Nielsen Hayden

How Do You Do That Thing You Do? Raymond's Method

I've mentioned Raymond Obstfeld (aka Laramie Dunaway; contact your local FBI office for a full list of his writing aliases) before on this page, specifically in connection with his new book written with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Although I naturally invited Ray to contribute to this discussion, he's awfully busy these days, cutting the ribbons at the dedication of major monuments, riding to hounds, and tossing money from the sunroof of his limo to admiring throngs.

Luckily, he has already held forth on this subject in one of his books on writing, Fiction First Aid. (His other book on writing, The Novelist's Essential Guide to Crafting Scenes, continues to do steady business seven years after publication.) Ray has agreed to let me swipe the following from Fiction First Aid as his contribution to this discussion:

Some writers prepare detailed outlines of their novels before they start. They know everything that will happen from the moment the hero pulls out his gun on the first page until he kisses the love interest 358 pages later. For example, when Edgar nominee Robert Irvine once spoke to my writing class about outlining, he brought with him a typical outline that he uses when writing a novel. It was seventy pages long! It included dialogue, character sketches, chapter-by-chapter breakdowns—just about everything but what to eat while writing the book.

On the other hand, when novelist Ross Thomas spoke to my class, he claimed that he never started with an outline, that it took away the thrill of discovery. When his protagonist walked into a room, Ross told us, he wanted to be looking over his shoulder, just as surprised as his character.

I fall somewhere between. I use what I call a slap-dash outline, one that describes only the chapters immediately ahead of me. This allows me to maintain the spontaneity of discovery, yet provides a compass that points me in the general direction I need to go.

When I write my first chapter, I often have no idea what the novel is about. And for the next chapters, I avoid thinking too much about what will happen down the road in the novel. Technically, the beginning of a novel should establish tone, character, and plot. But let’s face reality. The purpose of the novel’s opening chapter is to grab readers by the throat and not let go until they are compelled to find out what happens next. So when I start a novel, I’m thinking only about writing a novel that does that—to me. It must interest me so intensely that I’ll want to write the rest of the novel just to discover what happens next…

Once you’ve written that riveting opening chapter or two, you will need to create some kind of outline. Many writers know the ending of their books before they start writing the first word…Outlines are just road maps to these destinations. For me, the slap-dash outline is road map enough because it encourages my curiosity, which helps me intensify the suspense, yet still lets me know enough about where I’m going not to panic.

[F]or the first third to half of a novel, you can limit your outlining to three or four chapters ahead of where you are. This is enough to keep you from getting stuck, but not enough to kill the freshness or momentum of your writing…

The further along you get in your novel, the more detailed your slap-dash outline will become. For the first half of a book, you might need only a few lines under each chapter heading…However, as the novel becomes more complex, with all the subplots coming together, you may need to write much more under each heading. Also, you may need to outline more than a few chapters in advance. In fact, there will be a definite point, usually two-thirds of the way through, where you’ll have to outline the rest of your novel. Again, you may not stick to the order or even the events you outline, but you’ll at least know the basic elements that need to be in the novel.

The book also includes a reproduction of one of Ray's slap-dash outlines (beneath his comment that "At first glance these notes look like the drug-induced scribblings of someone who claims frequent sightings of UFOs, but they make sense to me.")

Raymond then adds an odd flourish—the After-The-Fact Outline. This outline breaks down the novel into scenes on (shades of Roger Morris) colored index cards. Ray claims this allows him to see the shape of the book better, to note where the tone, length, or pacing of scenes might be repetitive, and consider which scenes might be moved around for maximum effectiveness. Many screenwriters (and Raymond is one himself) lay out their scenes on index cards as a kind of proto-storyboard. In any case, Raymond’s method is an interesting hybrid, with a fairly free-form initial process, followed by a highly organized attack on the finished draft.

Wait until I tell him about Roger's A3 transparency paper. He's gonna love that.

How Do You Build a Story? Part I

I was once lucky enough to spend some time talking one-on-one with screenwriting guru Robert McKee. (In case you’re wondering, yes, he is as obstreperous as he’s portrayed in the press and in films like Adaptation. Though it’s kind of refreshing, in an irritating way, to have someone in Hollywood who simply shouts people down rather than trying to smarm them to death.)

I knew McKee’s philosophy on story building, be it screenplay or novel: sit and think about the structure before you begin writing. Make outline after outline (on yellow legal pads, mind you), and once the story structure is unassailable and the characters are nailed down in detailed notes, begin writing.

What I asked him about is the other approach—find an image, a situation, a character—that calls to you as a writer, and begin writing to discover your story.

“That doesn’t work,” he said.

“It’s how Faulkner said he worked,” I said.

McKee shrugged. “Artists lie all the time. Nobody’s ever written a successful story like that.”

Well, if McKee is right, then an awful lot of writers tell exactly the same lie. Faulkner’s famous “muddy underpants” story isn’t unusual. Philip Roth has described writing for up to six months at a time before he finds an image, a paragraph, or a situation that can act as a point of departure. E.L. Doctorow began what became Ragtime by writing about the history of the wall at which he was staring. Donald Westlake began his first Parker novel with a man stomping across the Washington Bridge and snarling at anyone who offered him a lift; the rest of the book sprang from his need to know who the man was and why he had so much attitude. In his Paris Review interview, Martin Amis said:

The common conception of how novels get written seems to me to be an exact description of writer’s block. In the common view, the writer is at this stage so desperate that he’s sitting around with a list of characters, a list of themes, a framework for his plot, and ostensibly trying to mesh the three elements. In fact, it’s never like that. What happens is what Nabokov described as a throb. A throb or glimmer, an act of recognition on the writer’s part. At this stage, the writer thinks, Here is something I can write a novel about.

Novelist and teacher Stephen Koch says (in his excellent book on writing) that you cannot know a story until it’s been told. In other words, only after it has been laid out can you decide what elements belong and which are extraneous; only after you in some sense ‘know’ the story and the characters can you really polish and embellish it for maximum dramatic effect.

I once had someone tell me this issue had been studied, and that about two-thirds of novelists planned their work carefully in advance, with outlines and character-trait sheets, and the other one-third plunged in with an image or a notion, and worked it out on the page.

There are some very successful novelists among the planners; J.K. Rowling has a reputation for plotting out her novels before writing like a general planning a major campaign in foreign territory. Elizabeth George’s book Write Away explains her own approach, which is to plan right through the end before starting to write. (George is very specific, however, about the fact that this is only her way of working, and that it shouldn’t be taken as any sort of a rule.) And most ‘how-to-write-a novel’ books take a similar tack—but, then, it’s probably hard to write a how-to book whose main advice is to flounder your way through.

I think McKee is wrong: not all successful writers know the details of their plots before they begin. But I can’t see how we will ever know for certain, given that McKee’s corollary is that anyone who says they don’t do detailed planning is lying.

And I suppose fiction writers by their nature are liars. In my next post, I’ll talk about how I build a story, and ask how you go about building yours. (Don't gnaw your nails to the quick while waiting, even though I'm sure it's pretty suspenseful.)

A Book Any Aspiring Novelist Ought to Read (A Vine-Ripened Review)

First, a confession: I read a lot of books on the topic of writing. Some are good, some are bad, and most are indifferent, but after you’ve read a few, you seldom find anything new. Why, then, do I continue to read them? Partly from nervous habit, partly, I suspect, because they de-exalt the process—more on this is some other post—and partly for the same reason that fishermen might read Bass Master magazine, which in my opinion isn’t to learn about new lures or rods, but rather to remind themselves that they really are fishermen, even when they’re not fishing.

The internet, like the US Congress, tends toward polarization. If you troll through the forums, you’ll find two opposing opinions expressed by writers about the prospects of publication. One group—let’s call these the Pangloss crowd—contends that all good books get published. (As you might suspect, the ranks of this group are mostly filled with published writers.) The other pole—let’s call these the Conspiracy crowd—claims the entire publishing system is rigged, and that trash gets published while great novels languish in drawers.

Pat Walsh says the story is a lot more complicated than either side realizes.

Walsh—founding editor of the classy indie press MacAdam/Cage—has written a book that ought to be on every writer’s bookshelf: 78 reasons why your book may never be published and 14 reasons why it just might. The number one reason Walsh cites that your book might not get published is because you never finish it, but he goes on to list twenty-four other ways you can write an unpublishable novel, some of which pertain to poor writers (14. You Do Not Have Style) and others to talented writers (15. You Have Too Much Style) All in all, 25 reasons your book might be bad, and all of them reasons that will have the Panglossians nodding and chanting, “I told you so.”

But that leaves 53 other reasons you might not get published, and, while these won’t satisfy the Conspiracy crowd, Walsh lays out some truths about the publishing industry that are all too often Panglossed over. To engage in massive paraphrasing and summarizing, if you have a good book—even a great book—you may remain unpublished because a) you piss people off, b) your agent pisses people off, c) you don’t understand how publishing works, d) you present your book badly, e) you didn’t do your research, f) you just plain had bad luck…

Various people have argued that the slush pile is so hideous that even a mediocre manuscript will shine like a beacon. Anyone who has ever been in a large writing workshop with a heavy weekly manuscript load will have reason to doubt this—after a few repeated exposures to terrible writing, one becomes snowblind and uncharitable, and the next piece needs to work hard to get a fair hearing. Walsh lists this as: 47. You Are in Bad Company, and states the problem both succinctly and all too vividly:

Reading piles of mediocre-to-lousy writing leaves a person numb, worn out, and prone to miss gems. One fresh clam will not undo the ills of a platter of bad ones.

Walsh admits that many fine books do not synopsize well or generate nice sales handles (he cites Ulysses and The Old Man and the Sea as examples, and offers two short and funny loglines for those books). He also recognizes, unlike editors and agents, that cover letters and query letters may not reflect the quality of their book: “Sadly, good manuscripts are often saddled with lousy cover letters…” (Unfortunately, he doesn’t point out that this is because writing self-promotional materials and writing a good book use different skill sets.)

78 reasons…gives insights into office politics, agent-editor relations, profit-and-loss statements, editor’s career motivations, writing conferences, and a host of other behind-the-curtain matters that affect writers and how their manuscript submissions are treated. I’ve never seen another book quite like it…

…and yet it doesn’t seem to be very popular with writers. Many of the posts I’ve seen about it on the web whine the book is discouraging and pessimistic, and in some cases doesn’t offer remedies. (Q: Is there a remedy for bad luck, other than good luck? The author never claimed he was writing “How to Get Published.”)

I admit that Walsh’s writing, while often hilarious, is acerbic, and frequently as frank and to-the-point as a quick sock in the nose. At times, the book would verge on savage were not so much of his humor at his own expense, and if you’re looking for inspiring, follow-your-bliss, Natalie-Goldberg-type warm fuzzy-wuzzies, this is not the book for you. If you’re an aspiring novelist, there are sections that will make you cringe (“Dear God, is that me he’s talking about?”); but it’s a book that bears a second reading, and the next time around, most of what Walsh has to say will seem like no more than common sense. (So give it that second read before slashing your wrists.)

I have one quibble with the book: 22.You Read Your Writing Aloud Too Much. Walsh claims that words need to work on the page, and that writers who read their words aloud can, like great actors, bring sense and power to writing that is essentially flat and lifeless. Perhaps so, but I think more writers ought to consider reading their words aloud, preferably in a monotone. I’ve seen many a train-wreck of a sentence that a writer would never have let stand if he’d tried to mouth it.

The ..and 14 reasons why it just might section that ends the book is obviously intended as Hope hiding at the bottom of Pandora’s Box, and it’s as close to soothing and inspiring as you’re likely to get from this treatise. There’s little here in the way of recommendations that doesn’t read as “avoid everything in the 78 reasons (if you can!)” In these chapters, though, Walsh lets his love of writing and publishing (which is a subtle undercurrent in the rest of the book) shine through.

Yeah, yeah, very nice. But buy the book for the 78 reasons Why Not.

Vine-Ripened Reviews

“Fresh-ground pepper on that, sir?” There was a time not too long ago when, as soon as the food landed in front of you, this question was mandatory (even if the food were ice cream, cheesecake, or a half grapefruit). I grant that fresh-ground pepper has a distinctive taste, but I’m not sure it’s superior to pepper ground a year ago.

Indeed, given the history of cheese and wine, why ought we to be so excited about fresh-ground pepper? When will they be asking instead if we’d like to sample the house’s 2001 ground pepper, aged in French oak, and stored until last week in limestone caverns under constant temperature and humidity?

All this is preamble to telling you I’m going to toss the occasional book review onto this blog. Now, there’s no shortage of reviews around. You can get the latest in crime and mystery served up over on David Thayer’s site or at Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind; you can read an eclectic mix from Mark Sarvas and the gang at The Elegant Variation or from the wide-ranging Bookslut; you can hear about whatever comes to mind for Michael Allen at Grumpy Old Bookman, or find various largely lit-fic reviews at Fiction Bitch, and even read reviews of the latest self-published novels at Girl on Demand (aka POD-dy Mouth)...and there's more worthy sites beyond those.

If you want to hear the latest, Tomorrowville is not the place to come. In terms of reviews, think of this site as Yesterdayville.

My little niche will be books for writers—either books on craft, books on the writing life, or novels I feel exemplify some unique approach to the page. But I don’t plan to post these in a timely manner. Instead, I will be talking about books that have been around; indeed, in some cases, I will be talking about books that have vanished from sight (and some that were never terribly visible to begin with).

No fresh-ground writing here. Only vine-ripened, sun-dried writing.

And what’s my goal? Establishing or reviewing a canon certainly isn’t in the cards. I’m not going to do the obvious, and refer you to Aristotle’s Poetics for advice on structure, to Gardner’s Art of Fiction for overall craft, or to Nabokov or Hemingway for close reads of sentence structure; if somehow you’ve missed those, there are already plenty of signposts pointing to those well-trod paths. Instead, I will be going for the treasures hidden in the weeds—lesser-known books on craft, or novels that show some special (if sometimes elusive) technique.

I warn you, I will be doggedly lowbrow (or perhaps non-brow) about this. TVille is a casual hang-out with friends, and on this cyberpage I’m more likely to wax surfboards or bikini lines than poetic. The sublime is, well, sublime, I suppose, and also often ineffable, and here I want to deal with practicalities, with things that are as effable as possible. Posturing will be important when Paris Review interviews you some day (the interviews are now online free, BTW), but for the here and now, let’s all agree to admit that effing is good, and if you can recommend any books that will help us eff, please toss them into the Comments trail. Don’t be shy, and if you feel the chill breath of your Lit Prof on the back of your neck, post anonymously or use a pseudonym.

Or, if you hate this sort of thing, skip any post that has “Vine-Ripened” in the title.