Tag: other people saying interesting things

Everybody Has Their Own Ten Rules

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Writers like making up “My Ten Rules for Writing” lists (heck, I’ve done it, right here), and other writers like reading and arguing with them.  I’ve said before that I suspect the liking has less to do with a desire for advice and more with a desire for company (“See!  Somebody else thinks this is important, too!”), but even the most wrong-headed List of Ten can provide a useful insight or two.

Today’s noteworthy list is over at the Paris Review tumblr:  Geoff Dyer’s Ten Rules for Writing Fiction.  It’s the usual mix of universal and idiosyncratic, helpful and what-was-he-thinking.  The rule that stuck out, for me, was the second one:  “Don’t write in public places.”  I’ve seen other writers’ lists with the same caveat (coffee shops are often singled out); on the other hand, I’ve seen or heard other writers talking about how writing in cafes and coffee shops was their salvation.  J. K. Rowling, famously, wrote her first Harry Potter novel in a cafe in Edinburgh; the humorist and playwright Jean Kerr used to resort to writing in the front seat of the family station wagon.  Of course, what counts as a public or a private place can differ from writer to writer: a naturally gregarious and easily distracted person might need a quiet office with a closed door in order to get stuff done; a writing mom with a house full of noisy children and nonstop demands on her attention might find an hour a day at the neighborhood Starbucks to be an oasis of sweet privacy.

(More thoughts on public/private writing spaces can be found here.  For the curious, I found the link by Googling “Jean Kerr writing station wagon”.)

Everybody’s different.  But it’s telling, I think, that the one rule most lists have in common is “Keep on writing.”

Today’s Nifty Link

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Over at the blog Ex Urbe, there’s a long, chewy post (with pictures) about the historical development of the city of Rome from its first days as a cluster of huts on a hilltop by the Tiber.

Writers dealing with invented worlds (whether past or future), take note:  This is how a real city grows up.  Your invented cities need to have similar layers to them if you want them to feel real.  (This is also, I suspect, why planned cities can have such a flattened feel to them.  They haven’t had enough time in place yet to accumulate additional strata, so when you scratch the surface all you get is more surface.)

John Scalzi Gets His Rant On

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…in “A Creator’s Note to ‘Gatekeepers'”, a post with which I agree, as they say, times eleventy-one.

(A lot of self-nominated gatekeepers, in my own experience, are stuffy purists of one variety or another–the sort of people who, if they’re cooks, only write recipes for people who live where they can purchase absolutely authentic ingredients, rather than making do with locally available near-equivalents; the sort of people who don’t want anyone to listen to a Bach concerto unless it’s played on authentic Baroque instrument; and so on.  The sort of people, in fact, for whom an experience is spoiled once the wrong sort of people show up and start enjoying it.  It’s a variety of snobbery, and it annoys me greatly.)

Links of Interest

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Well, of interest to me, anyhow.

This one doesn’t have anything to do with writing, except in the way that everything, eventually, has to do with writing; it’s about the spread of prehistoric dairying culture as traced through ancient cheesemaking tools, and how that tracks with the development of lactose tolerance in northern and western Europe.

I can’t see hanging an entire story on those bits of knowledge, but it’s the sort of idea that tumbles around in the back of a writer’s head for an extended period of time, accreting other ideas to itself all the while, until it becomes something much bigger and shinier and definitely other.

This post by Greg van Eekhout, on the other hand (while a couple of years old at this point) is very much about writing — specifically, about the vexed question of skin color in cover art, and the work involved in getting it right.  As long as you’re over at Greg’s site, you might as well read this more recent post, as well, in which he takes on the question, “What is a writer of Dutch-Indonesian descent doing playing around with Norse myth?”  (Other than, “A damned fine job, that’s what,” which was my instant reaction, years ago, to reading his short story “Wolves Till the World Goes Down” at the Viable Paradise workshop.)

Today’s Link-of-Interest

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An interview with Stephen King, in which he talks about effective opening sentences:

In The Atlantic, here.

(Stephen King on writing is always worth listening to, in my opinion, because — also, of course, in my opinion — he’s pretty much the Charles Dickens of our modern era.)

Because I Couldn’t Post in Time Last Night

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And because I hate to miss two days in a row when I’m not on a road trip, and always feel guilty when I do:

Presented for your amusement:  The Most Interesting Writer in the World.

To Be or Not To Be . . . Likeable

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Among the many arguments swirling around the internet this week (I swear it must be something in the air, like pollen) is the brouhaha stirred up by Annasue McCleave Wilson’s  interview in PW with novelist Claire Messud.

In the course of interviewing Messud about her latest book, The Woman Upstairs, Wilson observed that:

I wouldn’t want to be friends with [the protagonist], would you? Her outlook is almost unbearably grim.

To which Messud responded:

For heaven’s sake, what kind of question is that? Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert? Would you want to be friends with Mickey Sabbath? Saleem Sinai? Hamlet? Krapp? Oedipus? Oscar Wao? Antigone? Raskolnikov? Any of the characters in The Corrections? Any of the characters in Infinite Jest? Any of the characters in anything Pynchon has ever written? Or Martin Amis? Or Orhan Pamuk? Or Alice Munro, for that matter? If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble.†

Whereupon the literary blogoverse was plunged, as they say, into war. Panels of literary experts were assembled to discuss the relative literary merit of likeable and unlikeable characters; the interview question itself was more than once called out as sexist; and other authors and readers then took to the net in defense of likeable characters, and in opposition to the idea that reading for the company of such characters, like reading for the story, is a lower form of literary engagement.  (A few mostly-woman-shaped people also pointed out that women writers of both popular and literary fiction would do a far better job of combating sexism in literature and publishing if they had each others’ backs, rather than looking for opportunities to stick knives in them.)

What do I think?  Well:

I don’t subscribe to the castor oil theory of artistic merit. (“Yes, it tastes bad; but you should take it anyway, because it’s good for you.”)  I think that if you’re going to expect your readers to spend several hours in the company of a character, you damned well ought to give the reader something in return — maybe a likeable protagonist, maybe an interestingly unlikeable one; maybe an intricately convoluted plot; maybe exquisite prose and imagery; but by God, you’ve got to give them something.

†Actually, I’ve always thought that Hamlet would have been fun to hang out with, in his Wittenberg days. And I kind of liked Oedipa Maas in The Crying of Lot 49.

Getting There

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Fantastic and historical fiction is full of journeys, quests, hot pursuits, and other assorted road trips — sometimes with magical assistance, and sometimes not.

It’s with the “not” that things can get difficult, because a lot of modern-day writers don’t have anything like a working knowledge of any kind of travel that doesn’t involve an internal combustion engine and a four-lane divided highway.  Doing research can be tricky, too, because while modern-day horse people (and trail hikers and dogsled racers and people who raise and train yokes of oxen for fun) are almost always delighted to share their specialized knowledge, a lot of the time it can be like asking a NASCAR driver or a rally enthusiast, “How many days would it take me to drive from Podunk to Ashtabula?”

You’ll get an answer, all right, but it may well be so full of qualifying details that you can’t sort out the single thing you really need to know, or so far out there on the extreme performance end that an ordinary mortal wouldn’t have a chance of coming near it.  These people are all highly-qualified experts driving perfectly-maintained, high-end machines, and all you really want to know is roughly how long it would take an ordinary Joe or Jane driving a plain vanilla sedan with an automatic transmission and 50,000 miles on the odometer.

(I don’t know for sure, but I suspect that once horses stopped being a means of transportation and became a hobby, the equine equivalent of the midrange family car with automatic transmission and cruise control started fading out of the picture.)

Nevertheless, you have to try.  Criticism of fantasy, both from within and from without the genre, has already said a lot of true and cutting things about fantasy horses that are functionally indistinguishable from motorcycles; you don’t want to provide the critics with yet more ammunition.

For some help on that, you could do worse than to read this LiveJournal post, here — also the comments, which contain much additional useful information.

Link of the Day

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(In lieu of a more substantive post, because I’ve got a Viable Paradise chat conference tonight.)

The New York Times has a series of blog posts on the process of writing, by various authors.  The current one, “Writing and Fear”, by Sarah Jio, is one that ties in with my own stated maxim that writers shouldn’t flinch away from the strong stuff, even if it scares them.

There are a lot more posts in the archive.  I’ve only had the chance to read a few of them, but they all look interesting.

I have a theory:  writers like to read other writers talking about writing, because this can be a lonely job, and it’s always heartening to know that somebody else out there has hit that Slough of Despond in the middle of the book, or had their hard drive die without warning at the eleventh hour, taking a novel’s worth of hard work with it in its death throes, or struggled to retain their dignity in the face of an utterly wrongheaded review.