WRITERS ON WRITING: Kurt Vonnegut (Jr.)

   1.Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.


  2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.


  3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.


4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.


5. Start as close to the end as possible.


6. Be a sadist.  No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

 7. Write to please just one person.  If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

 8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible.  To heck with suspense.  Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.


The greatest American short story writer of my generation was Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964).  She broke practically every one of my rules but the first.  Great writers tend to do that.

WRITERS ON WRITING: On Process

"If the artist does not fling himself, without reflecting, into his work, as Curtius flung himself into the yawning gulf, as the soldier flings himself into the enemy's trenches, and if, once in this crater, he does not work like a miner on whom the walls of his gallery have fallen in; if he contemplates difficulties instead of overcoming them one by one ... he is simply looking on at the suicide of his own talent."

Honoré de Balzac

(May 20, 1799 – August 18, 1850)

WISE WORDS FOR THE WEEKEND

"Don't listen to any advice, that's what I'd say. Write only what you want to write. Please yourself. YOU are the genius, they're not. Especially don't listen to people (such as publishers) who think that you need to write what readers say they want. Readers don't always know what they want. I don't know what I want to read until I go into a bookshop and look around at the books other people have written, and the books I enjoy reading most are books I would never in a million years have thought of myself. So the only thing you need to do is forget about pleasing other people, and aim to please yourself alone. That way, you'll have a chance of writing something that other people WILL want to read, because it'll take them by surprise. It's also much more fun writing to please yourself."

I'm not offering any prizes, but do you know which very well-known UK writer uttered the words above?

Please post your best guess in the comments.

ANSWER ON MONDAY.

What do you think? Do they have a valid point?

Have a good weekend. I'll be back next week with more stuff.

Punctuation - the music of language? The ART of PUNCTUATION or A DASH of STYLE by Noah Lukeman

Punctuation is not my strong point. I often hesitate before placing a comma in a sentence.

No, I mean ...

Punctuation is not my strong point and I often hesitate before inserting a comma into a sentence.

Or, maybe I mean ...

Punctuation isn't my strong point; I often hesitate before reaching for a comma.

I think you get my drift.

Here, Noah Lukeman writes almost lovingly about that set of signs and symbols, those indispensable marks, which, when inserted into a text, can elucidate or obfuscate meaning and expression.

There are dozens, if not hundreds, of books dealing with punctuation. What sets this volume apart is that it is aimed squarely at writers; as is set out in the introduction:

'This is not a book for grammarians ... This book is for the audience
that needs it the most and yet for whom, ironically, a punctuation book
has yet to be written: creative writers.'

When I read a (usually unpublished) writer declaring, 'Punctuation? No dealbreaker. The line-editor will correct it,' I often bring to mind a macho type, pointing Percy at the porcelain, missing the pot and saying, 'No worries, I'll have the missus clean it up.'

Laziness? Arrogance? Ineptitude? Or an uncouth mix of all three?

Setting aside apostrophes and slashes, Lukeman ably, and entertainingly, takes us through the most important marks, illustrating his points with telling examples, pointing up underuse and overuse, and setting us end-of-chapter exercises.

There's a lot of food for thought here:

'Why did Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver lean heavily on the full stop? Why did William Faulkner eschew it? Why did Edgar Allen Poe and Herman Melville rely on the semicolon? Did Emily Dickinson embrace the dash, Gertrude Stein avoid the comma? How could the punctuation differ so radically between these great authors? What did punctuation add that language itself could not?'

Such is tempered with practical, no-nonsense suggestions for improving one's work.

• Ever wondered what your use of paragraph and section breaks reveals about you?

• Do you want to know what F. Scott Fitzgerald said about the exclamation mark?

• Ever thought why Cormac McCarthy avoids commas?
  

Excellent stuff. Every writer of English and American English should keep a copy within easy reach of the desk.

Fowler's MODERN ENGLISH USAGE (Second Edition)

This is the Big One. Desert Island Discs? No doubt whatsoever -- forget the Bible -- take this instead. As far as UK writers should be concerned this is the Bible.

If you did happen to find yourself stranded on a desert island with Fowler's, and read a few pages everyday, by the time neighbouring islanders found you, you'd be so well-versed in the fundamentals of written and spoken English they'd probably offer you a job heading up the Foreign Languages department of their only university.

With a copy of Fowler's, Oxford Shorter or Concise Dictionary and Roget's Thesaurus you're all set - all you've to do is read, understand, practice a bit, re-arrange all the words; and then you'll be a writer.

What makes this book so engaging is that you'll probably develop several quibbles with Fowler and his subsequent editors. It will challenge your thinking and your years of practice.
One quibble I have is Fowler's lack of regard for legitimate, upstanding regional variants (there isn't even a topic Regional Variants); for example retiral, the preferred Scottish form of the English retirement; or the word presently, which has a distinct and different meaning in Scotland. On this point Fowler adds insult by placing such discussion under the heading Needless Variants. But then again, it is titled Modern English Usage.

For all UK based writers in English this is a must-have; stands head and shoulders* (ouch!) above all other guides. I am constantly surprised by the would-be writers I encounter who neither know what a *hackneyed phrase is, nor care to learn the difference between such and a cliché.

Fascinating. Idiosyncratic. Erudite. And, in opposition to much contemporary opinion, not a manual for pedants and Nazi grammarians -- indeed, it is the opposite -- an entertaining, episodic treatise which aims to liberate the English language.

"He has had his reward in his book's finding a place on the desk of all those who regard writing as a craft, and who like what he called 'the comfort that springs from feeling that all is shipshape'." Sir Ernest Gowers in the Preface to the Revised Edition, 1965.

If you write for UK readers and you don't already own a copy -- buy it now and stick it on your desk or as near to as possible. You'll be glad you did, a quick dip into its pages provides much more entertainment than sharpening pencils or re-arranging the desk when living through those procrastination moments.