How to fail as a writer

This post is not original. Indeed, not even the headline is my own. But when you come across words that express an idea/thought/concept so well, why tinker with perfection?

The thought for and the basis of this post is from freelance writer, Dawn Field, a former research scientist whose book Biocode was published by Oxford University Press. Her post on BookBaby has twenty-three suggestions for all aspiring writers who want to sabotage their writing career. I am not going to quote them all—go to her post—but I do want to highlight several I've come across in writing classes and writing groups. For example:

1. Don't worry too much about your opening line. Readers will soon be past it and into the good stuff.

4. Go with your first complete draft as your final draft. Your gut instincts were correct the first time around; you'll just dilute them when you edit.

5. Only write when the urge hits you. If you need discipline to write, it's not really writing.

18. If an editor critiques your writing, stick to your guns that it's his fault he didn't understand "what you really meant." 

 I think the only idea I would add to this list is something like the following:

24. Your writing is you and you are your writing; if someone criticizes your writing she is criticizing you as a person. You are right to be hurt.

But Field's list is something I am going to keep for future writing groups. Check it out her twenty-three rules for failure.

You too can write better sentences!

How to write a sentence. Sounds simple enough, doesn't it? There, I've just written two. In the second, I omitted the subject which should probably be "It"; that is, "It sounds simple . . . ." This "It" standing for "How to write a sentence," the second "it" standing in for "sound simple."

As a native English speaker, I can crank out sentences and analyses like these all day long. Why would I want to read Stanley Fish's thin book, How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One?

Because he will make me—and you—think about sentences, which are, after all, basic to the writer's trade. For example, what is a sentence? Fish points out that writing guides offer answers: "A sentence is a complete thought." "A sentence contains a subject or a predicate." "Sentences consist of one or more clauses that bear certain relationships to one another." He says that "far from being transparent and inclusive, these declarations come wrapped in a fog; they seem to skate on their own surface and simply don't go deep enough."

Okay, professor, what does go deeper? "Well, my bottom line can be summarized in two statements: (1) a sentence is an organization of items in the world; and (2) a sentence is a structure of logical relationships." A random list of items, for example, is not a sentence. He quotes Anthony Burgess: "And the words slide into the slots ordained by syntax, and glitter as with atmospheric dust with those impurities which we call meaning." In Fish's formula, "Sentence craft equals sentence comprehension equals sentence appreciation."

He discusses sentence form and how to turn a list of words into a sentence, using the Noam Chomsky example: "furiously sleep ideas green colorless" which can be turned into something meaningful (or more meaningful) as "colorless green ideas sleep furiously," which could be a line of poetry. The question one has to ask oneself when writing a sentence is "What am I trying to do?"

"It is often said," he writes, "that the job of language is to report or reflect or mirror reality, but the power of language is greater and more dangerous than that; it shapes reality, not of course in the literal sense—the world is one thing, words another—but in the sense that the order imposed on a piece of the world by a sentence is only one among innumerable possible orders." And every time you revise a sentence, add a modifier, delete a clause, change a tense you've changed that "reality."

Once Fish has discussed sentences generally, he spends three chapters describing the subordinating style, the additive style, and the satiric style of sentences with examples. Here is a sample of the satiric style.  J. L. Austin cautioning readers not to be impatient with the slow unfolding of his argument: "And we must at all costs avoid over-simplification, which one might be tempted to call the occupational disease of philosophers if it were not their occupation."

With practical suggestions of how to form an infinite number of sentences using a relatively few forms, Fish offers chapters on first sentences—"One day Karen DeCilia put a few observations together and realized her husband Frank was sleeping with a real estate woman in Boca" (Elmore Leonard)—and last—"He was soon borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance" (Mary Shelley). Wonderful stuff for any writer who is struggling to start a piece or finish one.

The last chapter, "Sentences That Are About Themselves (Aren't They All?)" summarizes and extends the discussion to works like Ford Maddox Ford's The Good Soldier in which the narrator in telling one story is, as the reader comes to realize, unconsciously telling another story entirely.

Every serious writer should keep How to Write a Sentence on the bookshelf to take down every year or so and read once again.  

What! There's No "Proper English"?

Oliver Kamm, an editorial writer for The Times of London, touched a nerve when he wrote an essay that he—or the headline writer—titled, "There is no 'Proper English'." It appeared in The Wall Street Journal on March 13 and when I checked three days later it had provoked 630 comments.

His argument is simple: "We know that a certain practice is a rule of grammar because it’s how we see and hear people use the language. That’s how scholarly linguists work. Instead of having some rule book of what is 'correct' usage, they examine the evidence of how native and fluent nonnative speakers do in fact use the language. Whatever is in general use in a language (not any use, but general use) is for that reason grammatically correct."

The "rules" of grammar—never use a double negative, never split an infinitive, never end a sentence with preposition, never join two sentences with a comma, and more and more.—are not rules at all says Kamm. They are at best stylistic conventions. "If someone tells you that you 'can’t' write something, ask them why not. Rarely will they have an answer that makes grammatical sense; it is probably just a superstition that they have carried around with them for years"

Kamm agrees there are rules of grammar. Just listen to a parent correct a small child who says, "Me want cookie." That's not how native English speakers past a certain age ask for a cookie. Kamm's argument: If a double negative like "I can't get no satisfaction" is both understandable and in general use, it's correct. He also argues that native speakers can adjust their language for the situation. You don't use the same language in a formal report to the board of directors that you use in a letter to your child at camp.

Although Kamm's essay seems eminently sensible to me, not everyone thinks so. Among the critical comments:

"The explanation of the problem with the garbage peddled by Mr. Kamm is set forth in Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion."

"Mr Kamm is wrong and people who use Standard English are right. My 'pedantic' English teacher once told me, 'if your friends understand your non-Standard English, all that proves is your friends are stupid too'."

"Attitudes like those Mr. Kamm propounds will have disastrous consequences. In particular, the catastrophic disregard for the law, in general, that is now so prevalent even in common law countries."

"What bull s h i t. Remember Ebonics? If Obama said, 'I be mad at Repubicans,' would Mr. Kramm call that correct English usage?"

So although Kamm tried to emphasize what is in general use—not any use—(and "I be mad . . ." is not in general use although it may be some day), these people and dozens more insist there is a Proper English and they know what is it. Good luck to them.

The issue for fiction writers, it seems to me, is that by attempting to meet some pedantic standard of English grammar, they can squeeze all the life out of their prose. Worse, they write dialogue that sounds like a textbook. (I once had a copy editor who started changing my active verbs into passive; I had her fired.) I say ignore the pedants,  read the best writers you can find, and try to see what makes their English sparkle. Then go write.

How to write a mystery

Generally (and to over-simplify), fiction writers can be divided into two camps: Outliners and Pantsers. Outliners outline the entire novel before they begin to seriously draft. Pantsers write by the seat of their pants, often with only a vague idea of how the book will end. I have done both, and there something to be said for both techniques.

An Outliner's novel can seem mechanical and contrived. Events occur because the writer needs them to establish plot points, not because they grow out of the characters or the situation.

A Pantser's book can seem loose and shambling. Unless the main character engages readers, they may lose interest, wondering just where this thing is going.

When I teach creative writing, I suggest writers begin by creating a character who wants something in a place (character, conflict, setting). As the character acts to obtain what she wants, you create conflict (conflict = drama). Those actions are the plot.

When I teach mystery writing, I suggest writers begin with the crime and the criminal, then create the character who will solve the crime. In my experience, it is much easier to start with the crime and the motivation of the criminal than to start with the person who solves the crime. If the writer knows who done it, she can plant clues and red herrings along the way to aid or frustrate the detective—and readers.

This of course is neither original nor news. As P.D. James says on her official website, ""I always know the end of the mystery before I begin to write. Tension should be held within the novel and there should be no longuers of boring interrogation."

James also advises that "there should indeed be a mystery at the heart of the novel," and I take her to mean every novel. Will Ahab find the white whale? Will Yossarian survive WWII. Will Holden grow up? As it happens, both of my earlier novels include mysteries, but neither is a "mystery" and to be shelved as such in bookstores and libraries because the mysteries are not fatal. And for what it's worth, I wrote both of those as a Pantser.