On the heels of the Guardian’s great list of rules for writers, which offered well-known authors’ advice on writing, Salon offers its own advice on writing. However, this time the advice is coming from the reader’s point of view.

An example:

2. Make your main character do something. … [M]any writers gravitate toward characters to whom things happen, as opposed to characters who cause things to happen. It’s not impossible to write a compelling novel or story in which the main character is entirely the victim of circumstances and events, but it’s really, really hard, and chances are that readers will still find the character irritatingly passive. When you hear someone complain that “nothing happens” in a work of fiction, it’s often because the central character doesn’t drive the action.

Making your work interesting and readable isn’t the same as playing a trendy guessing game to figure out what will be popular.

This article from the Guardian is well worth reading. “Inspired by Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing, we asked authors for their personal dos and don’ts.” I cherry-picked my favorite rules below:

Anne Enright:

1 The first 12 years are the worst.

[Only 2 more to go…]

Richard Ford:

6 Don’t drink and write at the same time.

9 Try to think of others’ good luck as encouragement to yourself.

Neil Gaiman:

3 Finish what you’re writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.

PD James:

5 Open your mind to new experiences, particularly to the study of other ­people. Nothing that happens to a writer – however happy, however tragic – is ever wasted.

Al Kennedy:

4 Defend your work. Organisations, institutions and individuals will often think they know best about your work – especially if they are paying you. When you genuinely believe their decisions would damage your work – walk away. Run away. The money doesn’t matter that much.

Margaret Atwood:

7. … Writing is work. It’s also gambling. You don’t get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but ­essentially you’re on your own. ­Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don’t whine.

The Brow Beat blog over at Slate looked at every poem in the New Yorker over the last few years and found that 27 percent of them were about writing poetry. How meta! Is it furtive pandering, since it’s likely that only poets read the poems in the New Yorker? (Ugh, why does criticizing the New Yorker make me feel guilty? Damn you, venerable magazine, for making me feel this way!)

I like poetry that evokes an emotional response, plays with language and challenges how I see things by showing me a unique vision. It’s possible that a poem about words and writing could do that, of course. But I think this figure, if true, points to an insular poetry editor.

To be fair, I can be a bit churlish about writers writing about writing in their fiction writing. I did, after all, throw “The Human Stain” across the room and yell “Whhhhy?” as soon as I realized someone in the book was writing a book about the characters I was reading a book about. (Criticizing Philip Roth to make a disclaimer about criticizing the New Yorker … that has to require at least a a dozen Hail Marys.)

Bonus: How to win the New Yorker cartoon caption contest

William Faulkner got a good deal of the inspiration for Go Down, Moses from a plantation diary that has just been discovered. It was written in the mid-1800s by Mississippi plantation owner Francis Terry Leak, whose great-grandson, Edgar Wiggin Francisco Jr., was a childhood friend of Faulkner.

The New York Times has a fascinating article on how much the diary influenced Faulkner.

Names of slaves owned by Leak — Caruthers, Moses, Isaac, Sam, Toney, Mollie, Edmund and Worsham — all appear in some form in “Go Down, Moses.” Other recorded names, like Candis (Candace in the book) and Ben, show up in “The Sound and The Fury” (1929) while Old Rose, Henry, Ellen and Milly are characters in “Absalom, Absalom!” (1936). Charles Bonner, a well-known Civil War physician mentioned in the diary, would also seem to be the namesake of Charles Bon in “Absalom.”

The article also looks into Faulkner’s relationship with the material–which seemed to enrage him:

Dr. Francisco, speaking by telephone from his home in Atlanta, remembered hearing Faulkner rant as he read Leak’s pro-slavery and pro-Confederacy views: “Faulkner became very angry. He would curse the man and take notes and curse the man and take more notes.”

More here.

Harper’s Magazine is struggling. They are seeing drops in newsstand sales, advertisers, and subscriptions rates, among other things. That’s sad because the magazine has been around since 1850 and has published some of our most brilliant writers. So, aside from being a little dense–who has time for 10,000-word Harper’s article these days?–what is the problem here?

While mismanagement, the economy, and the overall state of publishing seem to be contributing to the issue, as Slate points out, Harper’s real problem is that it doesn’t have an online presence because it hides its content behind a paywall. Says Slate, “Because its stories are trapped behind that paywall, no one talks about them and the magazine has fallen out of the conversation.”

One has only to look at competitors like The New Yorker to see that this is true. The New Yorker offers some free content online, and people are interested. They link to the articles, they go to the website, they click on the advertising links, and they generally remember that the magazine exists. Harper’s, meanwhile, is ignored, despite the fact that it has some brilliant writing.

So the best thing Harper’s could do would be to get with the times and put free content online. That doesn’t mean that the magazine has to stop publishing in paper–clearly it has an older readership that would hate that. It does mean, however, that it should bring down at least part of the paywall so that the magazine can gain a younger readership. It may seem counter-intuitive, but that’s how Harper’s will survive. Being “part of the conversation” is how publications gain relevance, and relevance means money.

By the way, this doesn’t bode well for the New York Times’s website. The venerable newspaper is going to start charging for some of its online content. I think this is an idiotic move. You can fight it all you want, New York Times, but the fact remains: people don’t like paying to read articles on the web, and they especially don’t like it if they used to get the articles for free, but now are expected to pay for them.

My short story “End of the Line” is in the 2010 issue of So to Speak. Published by George Mason University, So to Speak is a feminist journal of language of art. “End of the Line” is about an old woman, Mrs. Dumas, who accidentally takes the wrong bus and gets lost in the city she has lived in all her life. If you get a chance, order a copy and take a look!

I am slowly making my way through Dante’s Inferno. It’s the first time I’ve read the book all the way through and I am struck by how incredibly visual it is. I have to wonder a bit about the mind of a man who can think of so many horrible scenarios, but it’s a great read, very eerie and disturbing.

But now everyone can delve into the Inferno without having to pick up the book. EA games has apparently made a video game called Dante’s Inferno.

At first I thought this was a good idea. At the end of Doom 3, you descend into hell and it’s cool and scary, so why not make a whole game based on hell? Inferno, being very visual and having–literally–different levels (nine of them to be exact) is a good choice.

But these trailers aren’t doing it for me. For one thing, they have diminished the role of Virgil, Dante’s guide, to almost nothing. Now Dante is some sort of warrior who descends into hell and has to fight the dead souls there.

Okay, I can see that. I know it’s boring to have Dante walk through the different circles of hell and ask everyone who they are. But the book is so eerie and creepy, and this is so violent and, well, video game-ish, that I find it disappointing.

However, I might forgive all that if it weren’t for this:

“Cackle cackle! You’re never get the girl, Dante!”

That is a giant Cleopatra, by the way.

Yeah…