Riding A Bike With The Brakes On

By Pat Browning

I’ve lived in my apartment for almost six years and I’m still picking up, throwing out and rearranging. This week I spotted a sheaf of papers underneath an end table. What it was doing on the floor is anyone’s guess but I finally picked it up.


It’s a 13-page printout I did in February of an article from The Guardian newspaper online. The headline: “Riding A Bike With The Brakes On: The First 12 Years Are The Worst.” A survey of British writers inspired by Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing, the article is both funny and spot on.


Some highlights:

Margaret Atwood – You can never read your own book with the innocent anticipation that comes with that first delicious page of a new book, because you wrote the thing. You’ve been backstage. You’ve seen how the rabbits were smuggled into the hat. Therefore ask a reading friend or two to look at it before you give it to anyone in the publishing business. This friend should not be someone with whom you have a romantic relationship, unless you want to break up.


Roddy Doyle – Do give the work a name as quickly as possible. Own it, and see it. Dickens knew Bleak House was going to be called Bleak House before he started writing it. The rest must have been easy. Do spend a few minutes a day working on the cover biog – “He divides his time between Kabul Tierra del Fuego.” But then get back to work.


Helen Dunmore – Reread, rewrite, reread, rewrite. If it still doesn’t work, throw it away. It’s a nice feeling, and you don’t want to be cluttered with the corpses of poems and stories which have everything in them except the life they need.


Geoff Dyer – Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire. Never ride a bike with the brakes on. If something is proving too difficult, give it up and try something else.

Anne Enright –Imagine that you are dying. If you had a terminal disease would you finish this book? Why not? The thing that annoys this 10-weeks-to-live self is the thing that is wrong with the book. So change it. Stop arguing with yourself. Change it. See? Easy. And no one had to die.


Richard Ford – Don’t drink and write at the same time. Don’t write letters to the editor. (No one cares.) Don’t take any shit if you can possibly help it.


Jonathan Franzen – Never use the word “then” as a conjunction – we have “and” for this purpose. Substituting “then” is the lazy or tone-deaf writer’s non-solution to the problem of too many “ands” on the page.


Esther Freud – Cut out the metaphors and similes. In my first book I promised myself I wouldn’t use any and I slipped up during a sunset in chapter 11. I still blush when I come across it.

Neil Gaiman – Finish what you’re writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it. Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing.


David Hare – Never take advice from anyone with no investment in the outcome. If nobody will put your play on, put it on yourself.

PD James – 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 – Write. No amount of self-inflicted misery, altered states, black pullovers or being publicly obnoxious will ever add up to your being a writer. Writers write. On you go.


Hilary Mantel – First paragraphs can often be struck out. Are you performing a haka, or just shuffling your feet?

Michael Moorcock – Find an author you admire (mine was Conrad) and copy their plots and characters in order to tell your own story, just as people learn to draw and paint by copying the masters.


Michael Morpurgo – It is the gestation time which counts. By the time I sit down and face the blank page I am raring to go. I tell it as if I’m talking to my best friend or one of my grandchildren.


Joyce Carol Oates – Don’t try to anticipate an “ideal reader” – there may be one but he/she is reading someone else. Keep a light, hopeful heart. But expect the worst.

Annie Proulx – To ensure that you write slowly, write by hand.


Will Self – Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper you can lose an idea forever.

Helen Simpson – The nearest I have to a rule is a Post-it on the wall in front of my desk saying, “Faire et se taire” (Flaubert), which I translate for myself as “Shut up and get on with it.”


Zadie Smith – Don’t romanticize your “vocation.” You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no “writer’s lifestyle.” All that matters is what you leave on the page.

Colm Toibin – Stay in your mental pyjamas all day. No going to London. No going anywhere else either.


Rose Tremain – Learn from cinema. Be economic with descriptions. Sort out the telling detail from the lifeless one. Write dialogue that people would actually speak.


Sarah Waters – Respect your characters, even the minor ones. In art, as in life, everyone is the hero of their own particular story.


Ten Rules For Writing Fiction – The Guardian Feb. 20, 2010 - is still in the archives and includes Elmore Leonard’s 10 rules. Read the article at:
http://tinyurl.com/ygzq42z


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Reader graphic from www.NPR.org (Books)

I Just Want Somebody to Love

By Beth Terrell

Lately, I've had occasion to read a number of manuscripts from aspiring authors. Some have been excellent, some interesting but rough around the edges, and some in need of serious editing. One of the most frustrating issues I've seen is the grammatically polished manuscript that lacks emotional resonance. I hear the same complaint from others who are involved in the same endeavor as I. "This is very well written, but...," followed by a helpless gesture. "No spark." It's frustrating because these stories are written by good writers, writers who have worked at their craft and who clearly have ability.

Sometimes the plots are action-packed, but there's no one with whom the reader can be emotionally engaged. These stories, no matter how brilliantly-conceived, feel flat. Sometimes there is a remarkable prologue that is both poignant and authentic, with a richness of detail and a depth of emotion that made me say, "Yes! This is what it's all about." But then, chapter one would bring an adequately written scene with a reasonably likable protagonist doing things that ought to be rife with tension but somehow aren't. Often, the rest of the piece has no connection to the prologue, or the connection is only tangential. Sometimes the story is elegantly written, but the writer gets caught up in the language and forgets to tell the story. Beautiful writing can only carry a story so far; if there are twenty pages between the time our hero pours a vodka tonic and the time he takes his first sip of it, there's a good chance the story could use some tightening. (I'm talking about mystery/suspense, not literary fiction, but even in literary fiction, a writer who's going to try that had better be very, very good at it.)

I think this happens for several reasons. First, we know our characters so well, we often think we've put things on the page that we haven't. "Of course she locked him out of the house and threw his electric guitar out the window. He knew her father was an abusive drunk who beat and humiliated her throughout her childhood, but he still came home three sheets in the wind after a night out with the boys." We know our character's motivations, but unless we find a way to (subtly) show our readers this, they'll just think she's an irrational witch who just broke her husband's most prized possession without warning.

Another reason may be that we tend to do more of what we do well. Elmore Leonard does dialogue very well. You'll notice that his books have a lot of dialogue. James Lee Burke is a master of description. Guess what his book is full of. Of course, Leonard and Burke are geniuses at what they do, but we lesser souls do the same thing. I'm good at character development. The first draft of my book had almost no plot at all, but boy did it have character development. It was one long character study with a little thread of mystery woven through it. I'm pretty good at dialogue too, so naturally, people in my first draft talked a lot. To make that book into something readable, I had to become aware of my strengths and weaknesses and then work hard to showcase the former and strengthen the latter. I'm still no James Lee Burke, but I learned how and when to describe things. I'm no Philip Margolin, but I learned how to plot.

Reading these manuscripts taught me that, while the ability to write beautifully is a great gift, it can only carry a book so far. The reader has to care about what happens---and they usually only care what happens if they care who it's happening to.

Give us someone to love, though, and we'll follow you anywhere.

"Full Of Rape And Adverbs"

By Pat Browning


Elmore Leonard says that using adverbs is a mortal sin. Whether or not you’re an Elmore Leonard fan you can’t argue with his success. I’m especially interested in Leonard’s exceptions to his rules.

The Guardian, a British newspaper, recently ran a lengthy article on Leonard’s 10 Rules for Writing, followed by rules offered by British authors. You can read the entire article at:
http://tinyurl.com/yksnu69

10 Rules For Writing Fiction from The Guardian, Feb. 20, 2010, beginning first with Elmore Leonard’s rules:
*****
1) Never open a book with weather. If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a character's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways than an Eskimo to describe ice and snow in his book Arctic Dreams, you can do all the weather reporting you want.


2) Avoid prologues: they can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in non-fiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want. There is a prologue in John Steinbeck's Sweet Thursday, but it's OK because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: "I like a lot of talk in a book and I don't like to have nobody tell me what the guy that's talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the
way he talks."


3) Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue. The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But "said" is far less intrusive than "grumbled", "gasped", "cautioned", "lied". I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with "she asseverated" and had to stop reading and go to the dictionary.


4) Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said" . . . he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances "full of rape and adverbs".


5) Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.


6) Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose". This rule doesn't require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use "suddenly" tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.


7) Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apostrophes, you won't be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavour of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories Close Range.


8) Avoid detailed descriptions of characters, which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants", what do the "American and the girl with him" look like? "She had taken off her hat and put it on the table." That's the only reference to a physical description in the story.


9) Don't go into great detail describing places and things, unless you're Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language. You don't want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.


10) Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them.


My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.
*****
Inspired by Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing, The Guardian surveyed some established British authors for their tips on successful writing. Here are brief comments from some of them.
*****
Margaret Atwood
You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there's no free lunch. 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.

Geoff Dyer
Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire.


Anne Enright
Description is hard. Remember that all description is an opinion about the world. Find a place to stand.


Imagine that you are dying. If you had a terminal disease would you finish this book? Why not? The thing that annoys this 10-weeks-to-live self is the thing that is wrong with the book. So change it. Stop arguing with yourself. Change it. See? Easy. And no one had to die.


Esther Freud
A story needs rhythm. Read it aloud to yourself. If it doesn't spin a bit of magic, it's missing something.


Neil Gaiman
Finish what you're writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.


Fix it. Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.


David Hare
Style is the art of getting yourself out of the way, not putting yourself in it.


The two most depressing words in the English language are "literary fiction".


PD James
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
Write. No amount of self-inflicted misery, altered states, black pullovers or being publicly obnoxious will ever add up to your being a writer. Writers write. On you go.


Hilary Mantel
First paragraphs can often be struck out. Are you performing a haka, or just shuffling your feet?


If you get stuck, get away from your desk. Take a walk, take a bath, go to sleep, make a pie, draw, listen to music, meditate, exercise; whatever you do, don't just stick there scowling at the problem. But don't make telephone calls or go to a party; if you do, other people's words will pour in where your lost words should be. Open a gap for them, create a space. Be patient.


Michael Moorcock
Find an author you admire (mine was Conrad) and copy their plots and characters in order to tell your own story, just as people learn to draw and paint by copying the masters.


Introduce your main characters and themes in the first third of your novel.


If you are writing a plot-driven genre novel make sure all your major themes/plot elements are introduced in the first third, which you can call the introduction. Develop your themes and characters in your second third, the development. Resolve your themes, mysteries and so on in the final third, the resolution.


For a good melodrama study the famous "Lester Dent master plot formula" which you can find online. It was written to show how to write a short story for the pulps, but can be adapted successfully for most stories of any length or genre.


Carrot and stick – have protagonists pursued (by an obsession or a villain) and pursuing (idea, object, person, mystery).


Michael Morpurgo
It is the gestation time which counts.


By the time I sit down and face the blank page I am raring to go. I tell it as if I'm talking to my best friend or one of my grandchildren.


Joyce Carol Oates
Keep a light, hopeful heart. But expect the worst.

Ian Rankin
Get lucky.
Stay lucky.


Will Self
Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper you can lose an idea forever.


Live life and write about life. Of the making of many books there is indeed no end, but there are more than enough books about books.


By the same token remember how much time people spend watching TV. If you're writing a novel with a contemporary setting there need to be long passages where nothing happens save for TV watching: "Later, George watched Grand Designs while eating HobNobs. Later still he watched the shopping channel for a while . . ."


Helen Simpson
The nearest I have to a rule is a Post-it on the wall in front of my desk saying "Faire et se taire" (Flaubert), which I translate for myself as "Shut up and get on with it."


Zadie Smith
Don't romanticise your "vocation". You can either write good sentences or you can't. There is no "writer's lifestyle". All that matters is what you leave on the page.


Don't confuse honours with achievement.


Colm Tóibín
Finish everything you start.


Stop feeling sorry for yourself.


If you have to read, to cheer yourself up read biographies of writers who went insane.


Rose Tremain
In the planning stage of a book, don't plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it.


Respect the way characters may change once they've got 50 pages of life in them. Revisit your plan at this stage and see whether certain things have to be altered to take account of these changes.


Sarah Waters
Writing fiction is not "self-expression" or "therapy". Novels are for readers, and writing them means the crafty, patient, selfless construction of effects. I think of my novels as being something like fairground rides: my job is to strap the reader into their car at the start of chapter one, then trundle and whizz them through scenes and surprises, on a carefully planned route, and at a finely engineered pace.


Don't panic. Midway through writing a novel, I have regularly experienced moments of bowel-curdling terror, as I contemplate the drivel on the screen before me and see beyond it, in quick succession, the derisive reviews, the friends' embarrassment, the failing career, the dwindling income, the repossessed house, the divorce . . . Working doggedly on through crises like these, however, has always got me there in the end.


Jeanette Winterson
Never stop when you are stuck. You may not be able to solve the problem, but turn aside and write something else. Do not stop altogether.


Enjoy this work!

Breaking the Rules

By Beth Terrell

Elmore Leonard, one of the masters of crime fiction wrote a now-famous list of rules for writers. They're excellent rules, and any writer could benefit from studying them. You could, as Leonard himself has demonstrated, have a long and illustrious career by following them. Yet, in the right hands and with the right techniques, almost every writing rule ever devised can be broken. Knowing the rules is important, but knowing when and how to break them may be equally important.

Consider Leonard's first rule:

1. Never open a book with weather. If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a character's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways to describe ice and snow than an Eskimo, you can do all the weather reporting you want.

Notice how Leonard himself allows for exceptions to the rule. In my opinion, one of the best examples of a book that successfully opens with a description of weather is Glendon Swarhout's masterful coming of age novel Bless the Beasts and the Children:

In that place, the wind prevailed. There was always sound. The throat of the canyon was hoarse with wind. It heaved through the pines and passed and was collected by the cliffs. There was a phenomenon of pines in such a place. When wind died in a box canyon and in its wake the air was still and taut, the trees were not. The passing trembled in them, and a sough of loss. They grieved. They seemed to mourn a memory of wind.

From this description of tumultuous wind, the author breaks yet another common writing rule (though not one of Leonard's) by taking us into a nightmare one of the boys, John Cotton, is having. But that dream, in which Cotton relives a traumatic event (the slaughter of buffalo in an annual culling "hunt") that occurred earlier that day, is what impels him to lead a band of teenaged misfits, all emotionally damaged, all sons of well-to-do families, on a mission to save the remaining buffalo. If you've never read this book, I highly recommend it. This is a guy who knows how and when to break the rules.

Here's another rule:

2. Avoid prologues. They can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in nonfiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want.

Leonard goes on to give an example of a prologue that works. I think it's Steinbeck, who can get away with breaking pretty much any rule he wants to. As I mentioned last week, without the prologue to The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, I might not have read on. (Well, I would have, because we were discussing it at our Sisters in Crime meeting, but I wouldn't have wanted to.)

Although most of Leonard's rules, like most writing rules, can--and sometimes should--be broken, the last one is pretty much non-negotiable:

10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

It's hard to argue with that one, and I can't think of a single instance where you'd want to break it. Why put in anything readers are likely to skip? It's a hard rule to follow, though. If we thought it was "skippable," we wouldn't have put it in there in the first place. What I think Leonard means, though, is big chunks of description that go on and on until readers start skimming them.

There are a total of ten Elmore Leonard rules, with a bonus rule that encompasses the rest--If it sounds like writing, rewrite it. You can read the rest of them here: http://www.kabedford.com/archives/000013.html.

One of my favorite quotes about writing rules is by Somerset Maugham, who said, "There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, nobody knows what they are."

Thank goodness for that.

Advice from Hemingway

by Jean Henry Mead

I recently came across a forgotten book in my library, titled On Being a Writer by Will Blythe. Thumbing through, I noticed a chapter about Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway is a favorite author, not only because he changed the face of literature, but because I was born on his birthday, July 21. Leather bound copies of his work are among my most prized possessions.

Elmore Leonard reveres Hemingway so much that a portrait of him hangs in his writing den, and he claims that rereading For Whom the Bell Tolls taught him to write western novels. Thousands of writers have followed “Papa” Hemingway‘s lead and learned to write succinctly rather than imitate writers of the past such as Washington Irving, whose flowery phrases give me a headache.

Hemingway was no saint but his candor and truth in writing are traits to be admired. Questioned about his drinking habits, he said the only writer he knew who drank while he wrote was Faulkner, and that he could tell from reading his work when his drinking began during the writing process.

He wrote from 7 a.m. until noon and stressed the fact that writers should write every day, no matter where they were. During the afternoons he would swim or go fishing, explaining that “the best way is always to stop when you are doing good. If you do that, you’ll never be stuck. And don’t think or worry about it until you start the next day. That way your subconscious will be working on it all the time. But if you worry about it, your brain will get tired before you start again. You have to work every day. No matter what has happened the day or night before, get up and bite the nail.”

When writing about something monumental like a current war, he said at first it’s too fresh and you’re too close to what has happened. When you have sorted out your feelings about your subject, it’s time to write before the freshness wears off.

“When you write, your objective is to convey every sensation, sight, feeling, and emotion to the reader." He stressed rewriting and keeping your work fluid so that you can always improve upon it. Calling writing the hardest trade in the world when writing about fellow human beings, he said that wordsmiths can train themselves by recalling memories of walking into a room and experiencing the sights, smells and emotions present there.

“Then write it down, making it clear so the reader will see it too, and have the same feelings you had.” Hemingway also stressed watching people and attempting to insert yourself in someone else’s head, and above all, never take sides in an argument. See the problem from all sides and allow the reader to determine who’s right and wrong.

“As a writer you should not judge, you should understand.”

Hemingway encouraged writers to talk to one another about their craft, but not about the stories they were writing. If you tell it, you won’t write it. Writers should work alone, then talk about their work. He also discouraged writers from imitating what others have written unless they know they can do a better job. It’s important to keep a journal if you’re writing about actual historical events because you have to write "an exact, detailed and specific account" of the story. And above all, you have to be serious about your subject as well as your craft.

An Interview with Elmore Leonard

by Jean Henry Mead


Elmore “Dutch” Leonard has always been an avowed reader. “A bookworm, yes,” he said, “beginning with The Bobbsey Twins and The Book House volumes of abridged classics that included everything from Beowulf to Treasure Island. In the fifth grade I read most of All Quiet on the Western Front serialized in the Detroit Times, and I wrote a World War I play that was staged in the classroom, my first piece of writing.”

The first nine years of his life were spent south of the Mason-Dixon line. Born in New Orleans in 1925, the youngest of two children, he lived in Dallas, Oklahoma City, and Memphis before moving to Detroit in 1934, during the World Series. Raised a Catholic, he graduated from Detroit High School and the University of Detroit, both Jesuit institutions where he majored in English and philosophy.

Leonard lusted for full-time writing, and remembered receiving a letter from his agent in 1951, trying to discourage him from quitting his advertising job to freelance. He had concentrated on truck advertising for Chevrolet and, by that time, had a tank full of writing catchy ads.

Getting out of bed each morning at five o’clock, he’d write two pages of fiction before going to work “with the rule that I couldn’t put the water on for coffee until I started writing. I’ve been a disciplined writer every since." While still working for the ad agency, he supplemented his early morning writings by placing a pad of paper in his desk drawer. With the drawer partially open, he’d write fiction on the job.

He first wrote western stories and novels because he liked western films. His novel, Hombre, evolved into a western film starring Paul Newman and earned him a modest $10,000. He then turned full attention to the other side of his genre coin and found that crime pays quite well. Stick and LaBrava made him an overnight sensation, earning him a lot of money, along with the film version of Stick, starring Burt Reynolds, a production he would rather not lay claim to.

“My humor is deadpan,” he said, “not slapstick.” The slightly-built, quiet-spoken novelist had written well all along, and his sudden popularity created some problems, the most serious of which was lack of time to write.

“It’s nice to get fan mail, a few letters a week, and being recognized on the street, but the interviews are wearing me out. I’m asked questions about writing, and about my purpose in the way I write that I’ve never thought of before. And I have to take time to think on the spot and come up with an answer. I’m learning quite a bit about what I do from recent interviews and getting answers too.”

When asked for advice to fledgling writers, he said, “The worst thing a novice can do is to try to sound like a writer. I guess the first thing you have to learn is how not to overwrite.” He also advised fledglings to “write. Don’t talk about it, do it. Read constantly, study the authors you like, pick one and imitate him the way a painter learns fine art by copying the masters. I studied Hemingway, as thousands of other writers have done. I feel that I learned to write westerns by rereading For Whom the Bell Tolls.”

A portrait of Hemingway hangs on the wall of his den, reminding him that he studied the revered novelist’s work for “construction, for what you leave out as well as what you put in.”

Excerpted from my book, MaverickWriters. The rest of the interview may be read at my website: http://jeanhenrymead.com/elmore_leonard_interview.htm.