Anecdotal Evidence has some good writing quotes from John McGahern. “Writing is an instinct. I’d say that I write to see. I suspect that unless there’s a sense of excitement and discovery for the writer, the reader will not have much sense of excitement or discovery either.”
Category Archives: Writing
On Good, Tight Writing
Elizabeth Brown reviews and anecdotes on Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Good Writing. I agree with the rule using “said” over any other dialogue verb. There’s not much point to using any other word. We say things far more than we affirm, allege, argue, assert, asseverate, aver, avouch, avow, claim, contend, declare, hold, maintain, state, voice, or vocalize.
Dude, what does asseverate mean? “To declare seriously or positively.”
Doing What I Was Crafted to Do
Tony Woodlief writes about writing and vocation.
One of the surest ways to determine if someone who wants to be a writer can, in fact, become a writer is to examine his output. I know more than a few people who want to be writers, but not so much that they actually write. . . . I write because I can’t help it. I write because sometimes, in the midst of it, I feel like I am doing what I was crafted to do.
Beautiful Music Now and Upcoming
My church hosted a great Michael Card concert last Saturday. His music is nothing like the song Lars described yesterday. He even sang my favorite song of his, one he said he wrote “at a professor” who argued for a more rational faith than Card was comfortable with. Card has always favored mystery and paradox, so when his professor argued for a list of concepts which one could assent to and thereby adopt Christian faith, Card bristled. So he wrote a song about Jesus and his clash with our understanding, called “God’s Own Fool,” which has the chorus
When we in our foolishness thought we were wise
He played the fool and He opened our eyes
When we in our weakness believed we were strong
He became helpless to show we were wrong
And so we follow God’s own fool
For only the foolish can tell-
Believe the unbelievable
And come be a fool as well
YouTube has a video of it. I sang this song during a Sunday service a few years ago because it tied so well to the sermon. I think the Holy Spirit used it, but now that I say that, I can’t point to anything for evidence of that–perhaps, that’s not a proper perspective.
I wanted to pass on something Card mentioned during the concert. He is working with several others on The By/For Project, an effort to encourage Christian musicians to write music for the whole church for use in worship services free of restrictions. The site says, “Worship is a gift freely given. By/For projects are licensed under Creative Commons, so churches can freely use the art in worship and other artists can adapt and extend it. Removing profit motives can enrich both art and worship.”
The site also wants to remove the natural boundaries between Christians. “By/For believes the local church can strengthen and support fellow worshippers down the street, across town, and over oceans” by using the Internet to distribute recorded music, scores, and lyrics. There’s also a visual art angle on this too, which should bend some perspectives a bit.
Sadism 101, for authors
Bad news for you “24” fans. I read over at Libertas that Joel Surnow, the producer up till now, has decided to leave the show. I find it hard not to believe that his decision has some connection with the recent news that the series is being “reinvented” in a more sensitive, progressive form. Hollywood breathes a sigh of relief. America is the bad guy again. Terrorists are good. The world is back in balance.
I tried watching “24” one season. I forget which season it was. It was the one where there was the big uproar because they actually had some Muslim terrorists.
I enjoyed it for a while. It was nice to see a show where (as Dirty Harry at Libertas notes) you couldn’t see the twists coming a mile away, telegraphed by liberal orthodoxy. I liked the violence, and the moral dilemmas.
But it got to the point where I couldn’t stand it anymore. Maybe being a writer spoiled it for me. I’m aware of plot and character all the time, and I’m just not capable of suspending my disbelief that much about how fast and how often human beings can recover from trauma in a single day. If Jack Bauer had had some kind of super powers, it might have worked for me, but no human being can absorb that much abuse and continue functioning. And once I’ve stopped believing in a story, I stop caring.
I’ve written about heroes and motivation before. If you want to put your hero through a lot of action, you have basically two choices. You can make him a man of violence who’s on the side of right (like Jack Bauer). This is actually harder than it seems. Nice guys—guys you really want to root for—aren’t often stone killers. But it can be done. You can make him a cop or a soldier, a guy who has made a career choice to protect and serve. Or—and this is a challenge but intriguing—you can make him a former bad man who has decided to go straight, perhaps for the love of a good woman. (This was a recurring theme of silent Westerns.) One advantage of this kind of hero is that you can kill him off tragically and satisfyingly in the end, and the reader understands it as redemptive (the original Rambo dies at the end of the novel First Blood).
(Parenthetically, I’d like to mention one of my personal heroes, or at least fascinations, Wild Bill Hickok. I haven’t followed him as closely as Lincoln [see my post yesterday], but I have been to his grave in Deadwood. Hickok discovered during the Civil War that he had a proficiency with the Colt revolver. After the war he became a policeman, though he supplemented his income through playing poker. During that phase of his career, I believe, he had a romantic view of himself as the kind of white knight Harper’s Weekly magazine had portrayed him as. All that ended one night in Abilene, Kansas when, while putting down a riot, he accidentally shot a friend who was coming to help him. Hickok served out his term as town marshal, but his contract was not renewed, and he didn’t particularly object. As far as we know, he never fired a weapon in anger again. He devoted himself to gambling, got married, and generally deteriorated. He was probably going blind when Jack McCall murdered him. No one has yet told his story properly in a novel or movie.)
The second kind of action hero is the Ordinary Guy Pushed to the Limit. Andrew Klavan’s Don’t Say a Word is an exceptional example of this approach. A man who is physically weak and utterly without fighting skills has to go far beyond his personal limits to save the life of his daughter. Dean Koontz’ Intensity, which I reviewed a few days back, is another example.
The advantage of this approach is that your reader will probably identify strongly with this kind of hero. Even as he wonders whether he’d be able to do what your protagonist is doing, he feels a little encouraged by the idea that a man (or woman) can actually do what a man’s gotta do.
The challenge in such a story is to really put the screws to your hero. Most ordinary people have to be pushed cruelly before they resort to violence. So you as the writer have to push him. You have to be ruthless and cruel, or your nice-guy hero will just roll over and give up. It’s amazing how hard this can be to do. In a real sense, you have to become the villain of your story.
Personally, I can’t understand how any fiction writer can ever ask the classic agnostic question, “If God is so good, why does He allow suffering in the world?” Fiction writers know the answer to that. Suffering’s the only thing that gets your characters off their duffs.
On autobiographical fiction
I’m consuming Dean Koontz books like salted peanuts right now. Although I still have reservations about his style, especially in the early books, I’d have to be even more in denial than I am to claim I don’t find his books satisfying on a very elemental level.
I don’t know what other people find in Koontz. I can’t imagine that all his millions of fans have the same reasons I do. Because what I respond to most in Koontz is the recurring themes of protecting abused children, and of adult children of abuse overcoming their personal demons.
It would be interesting to know what elements in the author’s own life led him to tell these kinds of stories. If he himself suffered abuse as a child, then I can only assume he’s made a remarkable recovery. Because it’s hard to write that way unless you’ve unpacked your old baggage.
I’ve got an unfinished manuscript on my laptop, and I’ve been stuck on it for at least a year. I made the mistake of having one of the main characters suffer from Avoidant Personality Disorder, as I do. I think that’s one (but not the only one) of the reasons the story’s stuck. Because stories are about overcoming obstacles and, in my heart, I don’t really believe this guy is going to overcome his.
Last time I talked about my reading here, I was working on Koontz’ Intensity. I said that I was finding it hard because the story involved spending a lot of time with a really vile sociopath. And that was true, as far as it went. But I think another part of the problem was that I really—really—identified with the heroine, a woman named Chyna Shepherd who, because of childhood abuse, has walled herself off from the world. But she is forced by circumstances to go far beyond her personal limits, and to suffer much, to save a child’s life.
Loved it. But it was harrowing.
Then I went on to read Cold Fire, which looked like it would be a lot more fun. It’s about a guy who’s a living superhero. From time to time he gets psychic promptings that tell him to be at such and such a place at such and such a time, and to be prepared with this or that equipment. When he shows up, he finds somebody’s life in danger, and he saves them.
But the story gets darker. A woman reporter who falls in love with him discovers that his “gift” has its roots in terrible events in his childhood, events he has blotted out of his memory. With her help he confronts them and faces the truth.
At which point, of course, I stopped identifying.
Anyway, the moral (I guess) is, if you want to write autobiographical fiction about your own neuroses, it’s best to wait until you’re all better.
Write While the Iron is Hot
Anecdotal Evidence is talking about Thoreau’s thoughts on writing. “A feeble writer,” Thoreau says, “and without genius must have what he thinks a great theme, which we are already interested in through the accounts of other, but a genius – a Shakespeare, for instance – would make the history of his parish more interesting than another’s history of the world.”
Hollywood Writers Strike Alienates Viewers
News that the Hollywood writers strike may be over meets a yawn from Kristen Chapman of World who says the vacation she took from TV watching has uncovered new things to do with the time. Hurrah!
Hollywood Writers Strike May Be Ending Soon
The Writers Guild of America appears to be close to a final deal with Hollywood studios.
“I’m a positive individual. I think the sun will come up tomorrow,” said Viggo Mortensen.
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Useful Clichés?
Andrew Ferguson writes, “Like most clichés it tells us more about the people who used it than about the state of affairs it was supposed to describe.” Do you think that’s true? Aren’t clichés usually well-worded phrases that everyone’s likes to use because they are so useful?
The elephant in the room, part and parcel, clear as mud, lies like a Clinton. Wait, one of those isn’t a cliché. Oh, now I can’t tell which one it is.