Haiti.

I've been watching all day. A place so poor they ate dirt, and now this. Nothing to say about writing today, so I shall give you a favorite quote:

In the endless universe there has been nothing new, nothing different. What has appeared exceptional to the minute mind of man has been inevitable to the infinite Eye of God. This strange second in a life, that unusual event, those remarkable coincidences of environment, opportunity, and encounter… all of them have been reproduced over and over on the planet of a sun whose galaxy revolves once in two hundred million years and has revolved nine times already.

There has been joy.

There will be joy again.

-Alfred Bester, The Demolished Man

The Trees Were Green.

I thought today that I should elaborate on yesterday's post, which was basically about voice. Voice is a tricky critter. Lots of people don't know what it is. That's usually cured by extensive reading. Hearing the difference between Susanna Clarke and Ernest Hemingway isn't hard, or shouldn't be. When you can hear the difference between Barbara Kingsolver and John Irving, then you're on to something.

It's not about the story. Yes, John Irving's characters will all be fourteen-year-old boys somewhere in the course of the story. That's not it. You read; you know. I know some folks who can't stand Chuck Palahniuk. Well, yes, some of his stories can be odd. Okay, three freeway stops past odd. But his voice is fantastic. What style!

Yes, some people don't like his style. And while it fits great with his stories, it might not work in a cozy mystery. This is where the "Trees are Green" comes in.

Hemingway was hugely influential in writing in the last century. Liking Hemingway's voice is on the Y-chromosome next to the Three Stooges, thinking parallel parking is a moral value and fire is a toy, and the phrase "watch this!" The Y-chromosome is probably written in the small, hard Anglo-Saxon words Hemingway used. He also used short sentences, active verbs, violence, and alcohol in quantity. He utterly demolished the kind of florid, slow writing that had come before.

I think Hemingway did more to open up writing for the amateur writer than anyone else. Because he was clear. Every reader could read him and understand what was happening. He made the idea of telling a story in plain language accessible to would-be writers. They might not understand how a man and woman could go through six bottles of wine at lunch and remain conscious, but they got the story. Likewise, I think Hemingway did a lot for writing in general. Letters, personal correspondence, even newspapers. He was a reporter who went on epic adventures and lived (barely) to tell the tale(s). He was a man other men wanted to be.

And his writing was crystal clear. It was simple. For years it seemed that everything that came after him shared that ruthless simplicity. There is more variety in voice now, but he cleared the decks of much of the purple prose that came before.

The lesson here is that clear is good. Screenwriting is a good discipline for writing plain, intelligible language. A screenplay wouldn't even contain something so uselessly decorous as "the trees were green." There's no room.

So that's it for today: until you find a voice that fits, at least be clear. Use those good, solid verbs. Use an active voice. Get the story told. You can curl the ribbons later.

Oh, My Darlin'.

There are plenty of things I don't understand about writing. More than just the vampire thing. There's the chicken soup thing. If I'm up to my ears in fail, why do I want to read about people who have escaped are doing great? That's depressing. What I really don't understand is one of the hoariest old chestnuts in all of writing instruction:

Kill Your Darlings.

This is from Faulkner. Much as I love him (The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying), I also think he can be wrong (Absalom, Absalom!). Samuel Johnson said something similar, but the number of people who read him for pleasure has been falling off of late.

The idea, of course, is that if you write something really great, something that stands out against the background of the rest of the story, get rid of it. I suppose the theory is that the great bit will make the rest suffer by comparison. I guess.

I think it's the stupidest piece of advice in writing. Don't you wish I'd stop pulling my punches? Here's why: I read a lot and my memory sucks. I look at the shelf of books I have upstairs that I've read and there are a startling number I can't remember. Some, I couldn't tell you if the main character was male or female. At the end of the day, what I do remember are:

1. Great characters.

2. Great writing.

I want to emphasize that I might remember if the writing is all-great (rare), or I might remember that a line or two here or there is great (still tragically rare). But those great lines, the ones that get a tick mark in the margin and maybe a bent-down page, stick in the mind. Even mine. They are my darlings, and I'm keeping them.

That would have been an excellent closing line, but I have examples! I'm lucky at the moment, because both the print book I'm reading and the audio book I'm listening to (not at the same time) are terrific. I'm listening to Marilynne Robinson's Home and reading in print John Crowley's Little, Big.

Aside: If Marilynne Robinson didn't go to the Iowa Workshop I shall eat my iPod. And I'm fairly sure John Crowley read and enjoyed Susanna Clarke's epic Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, another all-great book.

Neither Robinson nor Crowley ever killed a good darling. Their writing overflows with them. Here is one from Little, Big:

To his left and his right the road ran away down an avenue of horse-chestnuts heartbreakingly golden; the wind tore fortunes from them and scattered them spendthrift.

No bent-down page to find that one. I remembered the page number. A lavish bit of writing, isn't it? And it fits in the book. And that's the point. If that had cropped up in anything by Hemingway, it would have ground the read to a halt. Hemingway didn't use the language that way. Remember The Sun Also Rises? Remember the equivalent line from that one?

The trees were green.

No, I don't remember that page number.

The point is this: Know What You Are Writing. Are you writing a lavish, rich piece of prose? Are you busting out the fifty-dollar words? Or are you Hemingway, who would find the average prescription too florid? What is the voice of the piece?

Want to read a piece of writing that had no control over the complexity of the writing between one page and the next, one chapter and the next, one character and the next? A book with a supposedly simple bunch of people, uneducated, where suddenly you'd be listening to the most elevated bit of language because the writer had burst straight through the text and was sitting in the reader's lap? Yep, As I Lay Dying.

So much for Faulkner. Just stick to your guns. If you create a bit of good writing, even great writing, and you think it fits in your story, leave it. Unless someone you truly trust says it doesn't belong, keep it. It might be something that stays with someone forever.

To the day when everything is beautiful, and nothing hurts.

I Can Has Coincidence?

I was using a random page search function on Firefox in order to waste time and avoid writing, and the first page offered was this:

"A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot. That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better. An American who read just one book this year was disproportionately likely to have read ‘The Lost Symbol’, by Dan Brown. He almost certainly liked it."

—The Economist

Would You Like to Know a Secret?

Nobody told me this before. I had to publish a novel to find out. Hopefully, your mileage will vary.

You know your writer friends? The ones you know from that conference you've been going to for a decade? The people you know from that writing bulletin board on line? The folks from the Yahoo community you joined way back when? The people in that professional organization who have rooted for you during the writing, selling, and publishing of your novel?

Those people won't buy your book.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, and it certainly surprised me. Now, the people in your real-life, face-to-face writing group probably will buy your book. Because there you are every week. You saw their new SUV and heard about the cruise they took the family on last fall. They will probably have a tough time avoiding coughing up $25 for your opus. But those online folks? The people you see once a year at that conference? They are not buying.

The reason (or at least the excuse) for that, at present, is obvious. All the writers you know are now turbo-poor. Or at least they can claim it until they pull up to the conference this spring in this year's new SUV.

The real reason? Too many would-be writers don't read any more than anybody else. Sorry, but there it is.

Someday I'll try to come up with a happy secret for you.

You Lie!

Or, Playing the Lottery.

I hear this one a lot: "Oh, I just write for fun. I don't expect to sell anything." I usually hear this when someone tells me their new novel is about vampires in high school except they're not shiny, they make a nice humming noise or smell like tangerines. Or else the writer has a screenplay about snakes and terrorists on a bus that crashes into an office building.

Ahem.

Basically, picture yours truly offering advice or a critique to a writer. I may express certain reservations as to their project as it stands. Heck, once the minor suggestion was to repair the misspelling in their title. The response? "Oh, I just write for fun. I don't expect to sell anything."

This is the lying part. Because it's like the person holding a lottery ticket saying they don't expect to win. Reasonable as that is, you're holding a lottery ticket! Well, in a numbers sense it's easier to get a novel published than it is to win the lottery. But in the work sense it is almost infinitely harder.

Don't coast. Don't just throw together X-thousand words and send it out there to see what happens. You're just cluttering the landscape. Try. Try hard. Because if you took the time to put those words together, you care, and you're not fooling me when you pretend you don't.

Your book isn't a lottery ticket. There's not enough money in this gig.

Stuck in the Middle.

That didn't take long! Four days into working on the book again and I'm in molasses. Cold molasses. Fortunately I've been here before, and I know what the problems are. Pace and structure. And the dreadful fact that I don't have an outline. As it stands, I obviously know what comes before this moment in the book, and I know what is on the horizon in the next few thousand words, but between here and there is a bit of a swampy area.

The structural problem is that I've got several lines of action going for my main character at the same time. Perhaps too many. My memory is bad, and I've layered in enough logical systems in this book that I have a hard time bearing them all in mind at once. Things my character can and can't do. I keep having to rewrite scenes and paragraphs and sentences... Grrr...

And pace! I've written about it before, and I'm usually nagging writers to pick up the pace. But now I have the opposite problem. I have reached a moment in the book that was perfectly described by Gandalf of all imaginary people as "the deep breath before the plunge." If you'd like something a bit more highbrow, go listen to Beethoven's Emperor Concerto. That second movement, the Adagio? It's like that. A moment for the story to slow, to become calm, and to let a bit of time pass. A time to breathe.

I'm not great at that. I've been writing screenplays too long. They don't do the passage of time well, for the most part. The flying calendar pages of days past should tell you that. Novels have more graceful ways to do it, but I'm struggling with it. I think it's just that I want to skip to the Rondo.

Next time, I shall outline.