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.

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.

There’s that old stereotype that women only write about small domestic issues–sewing, pregnancy, raising kids–and men write about big “important” issues–war, the fate of mankind, etc. I asked the Word Pirates the other night if they think this still goes on. Are there still women’s subjects and men’s subjects in writing?

My guess is yes, these stereotypes still linger, although not officially. Women aren’t confined to writing about society and family like they used to be, but they still do it. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but we need both genders writing about all subjects. And frankly, men tend to dip into the women’s subjects more than the other way around–you are more likely to find a male writer writing about family than you are to find a female writer writing about war.

Anyway, we came up with a list of stereotypical Male subjects and Female subjects, and it rather amused me. Here is it:

Subjects Regularly Covered By Female Writers:

Family
Children/Pregnancy
Emotional strife
Romance
Jane Austen
Vampires being romantic
Fashion/shopping
Death from cancer/car accidents
The emotional ramifications of sex

Subjects Regularly Covered By Male Writers:

The condition of mankind
The end of the world
Sports
War
Physical strife
Science
Vampire being violent
Death from terrorism
Politics
The sex act itself and the ramifications of women having emotional reactions to it
Cowboys

This is, of course, tongue-in-cheek. Still, I think there’s some truth to it.

I’m reading The Journals of Joyce Carol Oates right now. After a bad review for one of her books, she wrote the following:

If younger writers could anticipate what lies ahead after their years of arduous labor and their hopes and fantasies and sacrifices (if anyone still “sacrifices” anything for their art) … would they believe the effort was worth it? If it weren’t for the satisfaction of writing as an end in itself, apart even from the money involved, I wouldn’t advise anyone to write. Not at all. Therefore I’m at a loss about advising writers who are modestly gifted but who find writing very hard work, not really enjoyable. I really don’t know what to say. I look at them and think, But why do you want to writer if, in fact, you suffer so …? The rewards won’t compensate for the suffering. The “rewards” are so mixed, so ironic. Why do you want to write if you really don’t want to write?

This strikes me as true. Publishing is hard. Always has been, always will be. So the act of writing has to be important and enjoyable to the writer to make it worth it. I have seen other writers struggle like she is describing and I often wonder why they are forcing it. Why write if it is such a struggle? There are a lot of easier pursuits out there, that’s for sure.

I love this picture of three little girls looking at “a heavily marked-up manuscript for “A Christmas Carol” that Charles Dickens wrote, and rewrote, in 1843.” It’s from a NYTimes piece about Dickens editing the famous Christmas tale, focusing on some of the smaller changes of the manuscript and its publishing history.

The NYTimes was also allowed to scan 66 pages from the book for their readers to view on the web, although I found them hard to access.

It shows how much a book can change, even up to the last minute. For example:

At least one change did not occur until the book was at the printer. You will note that the manuscript is silent on whether Tiny Tim lives. But before the first editions went out the door, a line was curiously inserted on page 65 noting that “and to Tiny Tim, who did not die, he was a second father.”

Citing a 2004 book by Michael Patrick Hearn, “The Annotated Christmas Carol,” Mr. Kiely said Dickens added that line as “an afterthought.”

Aren’t we glad he put that in?

As soon as I saw the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, I had a serious case of book lust. It has 800,000 meanings for 600,000 words in more than 230,000 categories and subcategories. It took 44 years to make. It also costs $400, which is sadly out of my price range for a reference book. A girl can dream…

Anyway, I was interested to learn that the longest entry in the thesaurus is the word “immediately,” with 265 synonyms. Why so many words for immediately? It all gets down to the nature of human procrastination:

According to Professor Christian Kay, who has worked on the project for the past 40 years, it is down to the human tendency to procrastinate. (Procrastinate: foreslow, adjourn, proloyne, protract, tarry, defer, delay … ) “A lot of the words that once meant ‘immediately’ came to mean ‘soon’, so you then needed another word that really meant ‘immediately’. ‘Soon’, for instance — its original meaning was ‘immediately’.”

This is why I love language. It reflects humanity better than anything else I know.

Word Pirates loves Lydia Davis. She has a style like no other, and really gets to the core of emotions without a lot of fuss. A critic accused her of having all autistic narrators, because she does not have characters relate directly to each other in her stories. Here’s part of her response:

We all have an ongoing narrative inside our heads, the narrative that is spoken aloud if a friend asks a question. That narrative feels deeply natural to me. We also hang on to scraps of dialogue. Our memories don’t usually serve us up whole scenes complete with dialogue. So I suppose I’m saying that I like to work from what a character is likely to remember, from a more interior place.

Lots of good stuff on the craft of writing in this interview. I don’t approach things the way she does, but there’s something about hearing a writer articulate how she does something that makes me think about my own technique in a new way. She calls her work “isolated events in a context of mystery” … intriguing!
Believer Lydia Davis interview

Ever read a novel that had no story? According to the Guardian, if you read according to the tastes of the Man Booker Prize, then you most certainly have. I don’t follow most awards or prizes, but I think I know exactly what kind of novel the piece is referring to:

For years, many Booker shortlists have been synonymous with “baffling”, or “unreadable”. There was something almost crusading about Booker prize juries’ preference for that bird without wings, the novel without a narrative. The more the market for “literary fiction” boomed, the more impenetrably Stygian the lists became. The truth that dared not speak its name was that many of the books in the Booker catalogue were below par. … Remote, Olympian, at times impossibly grand, Booker has held itself apart from the vulgar manifestations of commercial storytelling.

The books on this year’s shortlist are supposed to break that cycle. Hurray! I believe in stories. Somewhere along the way it became very “literary” to stray from the literary tradition of telling damn story. I appreciate experimentation, but since when did it become low-brow to expect something to *happen* in a novel?
It’s important for authors to write without worrying if it will be popular or if Joe Public or Jane Marketer will get it. But I think slapping each other on the back for being inscrutable is a bad direction for the literary community to go. I still believe a novelist is creating a world for me to explore. If your world is the written equivalent of a pretentious student film where everyone is dressed in rags and talks backwards, I’ll pass.

Return of the Cracking Good Read - Guardian UK

I am reading The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown because I like to keep up with the big books that come out–plus someone gave it to me. When I first started the book, I thought this article by the Telegraph on Dan Brown’s 20 worst sentences was harsh. (Sample sentence: “Overhanging her precarious body was a jaundiced face whose skin resembled a sheet of parchment paper punctured by two emotionless eyes.”) Having read almost half the book, I now think the article is right-on. It’s frankly disturbing how bad of a writer Brown is, especially considering his rampant popularity. Someone called The Lost Symbol “Harry Potter for grown-ups,” but that’s an insult to JK Rowling, who is a pretty good wordsmith.

I don’t put this up here to make fun of another writer, but because Dan Brown’s writing ticks are common ones that all writers should avoid. Reading bad writing can be as educational as reading good. The Telegraph’s 20 sentences are examples of telling not showing, overuse of unimportant details, unnecessary formality, clichés, excessive adjectives, and most commonly, word misuse. Amazingly, Brown’s writing is littered with words that he seems to only half-understand the meaning of. As such, his images contradict themselves and end up giving a muddy picture of what’s going on, even though you usually understand what he’s trying to say.

Which leads me to this smart analysis of Brown’s writing by linguist Geoffrey Pullum. His opinion of Brown, quoted in the title of this post, is pretty damning. And he backs it up with analyses of samples from Brown’s writing. For example, take this passage from The Da Vinci Code:

A voice spoke, chillingly close. “Do not move.”

On his hands and knees, the curator froze, turning his head slowly.

Only fifteen feet away, outside the sealed gate, the mountainous silhouette of his attacker stared through the iron bars. He was broad and tall, with ghost-pale skin and thinning white hair. His irises were pink with dark red pupils.

Pullman: “Just count the infelicities here. A voice doesn’t speak —a person speaks; a voice is what a person speaks with. “Chillingly close” would be right in your ear, whereas this voice is fifteen feet away behind the thundering gate. The curator (do we really need to be told his profession a third time?) cannot slowly turn his head if he has frozen; freezing (as a voluntary human action) means temporarily ceasing all muscular movements. And crucially, a silhouette does not stare! A silhouette is a shadow. If Saunière can see the man’s pale skin, thinning hair, iris color, and red pupils (all at fifteen feet), the man cannot possibly be in silhouette.”

The post is well worth reading, and not just for schadenfreude. It’s also a reminder that writers should pick words carefully, be specific, and make sure that even on the smallest word level, everything you write makes logical sense.

Language Log: The Dan Brown code

Telegraph: The Lost Symbol and The Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown’s 20 worst sentences