Whoo-boy. That was like a one-two combination from George Foreman. No, that’s wrong. It was like someone giving you a big warm kiss, then knifing you in the back. With a knife they kept in the deep freeze. I’m talking about the weather, of course. After yesterday’s (relatively) tropical temperatures, we woke this morning to plunging mercury and a carborundum-honed wind. The wind chill temperature tonight is predicted to be about 30 below. And tomorrow will be colder than today.

I tell you this because I know you care. Because I want you marvel at my sheer, primal will to survive. Because I want someone to persuade me to move south!

No, not really. I tried living in Florida. I missed the titanic struggle, the clash of man against nature. Also I missed spring.

Today’s subject: long words. If you read an older book in English, and then read a contemporary book, one of the differences you’ll note is that the older book will have used a lot more big words. Since the time of Hemingway, big words have gone out of fashion in the Anglosphere. There are good reasons for this change, since most every writer has discovered that cutting out the big words and going for simple ones adds considerable punch to prose. Whenever I give advice on writing, one of the first things I suggest is replacing long words (which usually come from Latin by way of French) with short words (which tend to be Anglo-Saxon ones). Write “door” instead of “portal.” Write “cat” instead of “feline.”

This is odd in a way, because Anglo-Saxon was a Germanic language, and German is notorious for its long words. In a bizarre twist, it was the infusion of French/Latin that permitted us to avoid the famous German monstrosities that read like “gerfundenlieberanbrachtsblechtzheitzgrund.” (That’s not a real word, just in case you were wondering.)

I talked about this with a friend in the Viking Age Society a while back. He used to work as a machinist, and at one point his company had to install a piece of equipment made in Germany. The installation manual was in German. My friend isn’t fluent in the language, but he knew a little, so got stuck with the job of figuring out how to put the thing together. He found one item missing, and had to order it. It was a special kind of cotter pin. He told me what the thing was called in German, and it was a ridiculously long name for a very small piece of steel. “But,” he said, “that name was incredibly precise. It described exactly what the pin was for. In English, we just say, ‘cotter pin,’ and that doesn’t really tell us anything.”

It was his opinion that this extreme precision of vocabulary is one of the reasons Germans do so well in the world of engineering. Our English language, compared to German, is sloppy and inefficient.

On top of that, our really technical words are generally borrowings from Latin or Greek. This worked well when it was assumed that all educated English-speakers knew Latin and Greek, but that’s no longer the case. When a German looks at one of his millipede words, he can break it down into its constituents and figure out what it means. When we English-speakers look at our long words, we generally go away as ignorant as when we started.

What’s to be done? Shall we surrender our English-speaking primacy in the world to the greater efficiency of Germans and others?

No, I say. I say we must institute a program of English compounding. From now on, instead of saying, “philanthropic,” we should start saying “humankindlovingandgenerous.” Instead of “polygamous,” we should say, “marryinglotsofpeople.” Instead of “progressive,” we could say, “happytospendotherpeople’smoney.”

I share these ideas at no cost, because I care about making a better world for all of us. Because I’m humankindlovingandgenerous.

You may have noted I’ve slowed down with the book reviews. This is because I’ve been writing more (for reasons I may or may not explain, depending on future events), and so have spent less time reading.

But I’m working my way through another Koontz, Midnight. One thing that strikes me as I read it is how much I appreciate the “nice” characters. This is common in Koontz, and more uncommon in novels generally than you might expect. It reminds me a little of C.S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength, because you have to slog through hard, dry stretches featuring evil characters who are gradually losing their humanity, which only makes the bright sections, with people you like and root for, even more enjoyable.

Good characters (I think I’ve blogged about this before) are a real problem for the novelist. Villains are easy. Good characters have tripped up authors by the dozens. Sometimes they’re so wishy-washy, dull and passive that they bore the reader. Other times they’re unconvincingly cheery and chipper, and you just want to strangle them.

I can think of two reasons why authors have this problem.

If the author is not himself a very good person, he thinks he understands good people, but probably doesn’t. John 1:5: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not comprehended it.” There’s a great scene (If I remember correctly) in Charles Williams’ All Hallows Eve, in which an evil scientist uses a device to try to monitor the mind of a virtuous woman. He finds that he can’t stand it. The environment is incomprehensible and painful for him.

On the other hand, if the author is a pretty good person, he probably isn’t paying close attention to himself, and so knows as little about how his mind works as the bad person knows.

But when it works, it works, and your reader will want to come back.

The LA Times reports that writers contracts have been canceled by 20th Century Fox Television, CBS Paramount Network Television, NBC Universal and Warner Bros. Television. Over 65 cancellations since Friday.

H.S. Key blogs, “Everybody wants to write a novel or a screenplay. If you don’t, you’re lying to yourself. And if you lie to yourself, you might just make a great writer.” He cites an article by George Singleton on what to do if you want to write.

Some of the writers locked out of their film and tv jobs by the Hollywood union strike are working on children’s books for a more personal creative outlet. Steven Zeitchik reports:

“It’s kind of a nice way to do something creative at a time when we’re having a hard time doing our bread-and-butter work,” said David N. Weiss, a “Shrek 2” and “Rugrats” writer who recently turned in a first draft of “Carl the Frog,” about a cannibalistic amphibian. . . .

The writers are realistic about the financial rewards of a children’s book . . .

“I don’t think anyone thinks they’re going to make a lot of money on it,” Weiss said. “But creatively and emotionally, the chance to work on something that’s personal without the presence of a massive corporation is special right now.”

I can’t (in spite of myself) shake the idea that 2008 is going to be a good year. It seems to me that any year in which you’re able to fix the usual beginning-of-the-calendar problem of writing the wrong date in the checkbook, by just making a squiggle on top of the mistaken digit, has to be a good one.

Hey Phil, you live close to Tennessee. Did the recent storms knock out all the phones? It’s book ordering time at the bookstore, and I got “all circuits down” messages when I tried calling both Thomas Nelson and one other house (I forget which. I was thinking it was Moody, but that’s in Chicago, isn’t it? But maybe Chicago had storms too. I should follow the weather news more closely).

Roy Jacobsen of Writing, Clear and Simple, suggested, in a comment on my last post, that we talk about the question of Good Writing vs. Good Story.

It’s possible for a writer to be a poor stylist but a good storyteller—grabbing your attention with his narrative and invention, even as he appalls you with his writing technique. It’s also possible for a writer to be an elegant stylist but a lousy storyteller (this, I think, is a good way to be nominated for literary awards).

Any examples from the audience? Authors (or works) you can lift up as examples of Good Storyteller/Bad Writer, or Good Writer/Bad Storyteller?

Just so you won’t have to enter the new year sick with worry over how the Walker Christmas gathering went, I’ll note here that it went just fine. The weather was utterly perfect, in accordance with the demands of the genre. You know how Christmas looks in those Hallmark Theater TV specials? All the deep, snow-covered scenery, with big, fat flakes falling? It was just like that on Saturday. But the snow wasn’t heavy enough to interfere with travel. (I probably shouldn’t have described it to the Youngest Niece, when she called from China. I think she was homesick enough without having to listen to a description of Postcard Christmas Weather.)

The great advantage of having the family gather at my place for holidays (aside from the motivation it gives me to dust once a year) is that I’m more or less centrally located, so that the brother in Iowa doesn’t have to drive up to the North Woods, and the brother from the North Woods… well, you follow the logic. The drawback is that once we’re all in the house there isn’t actually any room to move around, so we all have to stand in one place for the entire length of the visit, employing an elaborate choreography to allow us to visit the bathroom in rotation. However, we overcame that difficulty, even making room for the Oldest Nephew’s girlfriend, by sucking our stomachs in. I can only assume it’s serious, if he was willing to put her through such an ordeal.

We took the cowards’ way out with food, and ate Kentucky Fried Chicken, with heavy side orders of chocolates and pies and cookies.

I’ll tell you about my favorite Christmas gift in a later post. I want to share pictures, and I have other plans for just now.

Some people think of the New Year’s season as a time to look forward and make resolutions. I prefer to make it a time for looking back, for evaluating the events of the past twelve months and beating myself over the head about every mistake, real or imagined.

2007 was a big year in my history. I will always remember it, I suspect, as the Year of the Surrender. This was the year I admitted defeat. I haven’t talked about this, at least directly, in this space before, but I’ll do it now, because it seems time.

I’ve had a strategy for my life from the time I was a boy. It was a fairly simple strategy—one that made sense to me, considering the circumstances of who I am and what I wanted to do.

This first step was to get published and be a famous novelist. This, I assumed, would provide me the validation I needed to get some woman to marry me.

I’m not what you’d call a fighter. Faced with human opposition, I generally fold my hand and walk away. But in matters of living, where it’s just me against Life, I’m pretty stubborn. I take my lumps and continue doing what I was doing before. It’s actually a lot like that classic definition of insanity—doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results. So it’s taken me 57 years to realize that my Grand Strategy isn’t a winner.

Losing my publisher didn’t convince me. Even my agent going out of business didn’t quite do it. (It’s often said among writers that everybody wants to be an author, but nobody wants to actually write. The irony of my position is that I’m perfectly willing to write. It’s the being an author thing—the business and relationships and self-promotion—that kill me.)

Anyway, there’s serious talk at the seminary where I’m librarian. The Board is going to ask me to get my Master’s in Library Science, online. This will be very useful for their institutional plans, and also ought to make me better able to competently do my job, which any honest employee wants to do.

But it also means I can’t go to an agent and promise him that I’ll be turning out fiction in a steady manner. There just won’t be time for that.

So for now, I officially declare myself a former novelist.

This may change. It should only take two or three years to get the degree, and then I’ll have time to write books again. And maybe God will open the door.

But right now, it’s the time in my life (it comes to everyone, I think) when I have to bow to God, and lay down my own plans, and embrace His.

I guess that’s my New Year’s Resolution.

Have a blessed new year.