Should female writers compose stories teased from their lives at home with family? Muriel Gray urges them to avoid that track:

Judging by the increasing lack of inventiveness and imagination amongst too many, though not all, women authors it would seem that we have either been persuaded to stay within a narrow experience in order to be “taken seriously”, or more worryingly we are cautiously self-censoring because we are afraid of the gathering forces that are threatening feminism both domestically and internationally. As a judge in this year’s Orange prize, it’s hard to ignore the sheer volume of thinly disguised autobiographical writing from women on small-scale domestic themes such as motherhood, boyfriend troubles and tiny family dramas. These writers appear to have forgotten the fundamental imperative of fiction writing. It’s called making stuff up.

Mike Silva offers some good, hard words about attending a writers conference, several dos and don’ts, including this:

On a panel at ACFW, I recommended The Time Traveler’s Wife as the best book I’d read in 2005. In a rare moment of foresight, I included a warning that it might be offensive to some, but for months after that, I still heard about grumbling: “I can’t believe a Christian editor would recommend that book.” Dear ones, you have a responsibility to know what’s being written in the market. Most CBA editors are ABA readers. If you aren’t, that’s a serious handicap. Yes, do skip the sex/language/violence, but don’t misunderstand: you need to find out why an editor is recommending a book. That’s your ticket into his stable.

I want to say thanks to the folks of Nor-Tonna Lodge of the Sons of Norway, Owatonna, Minnesota, for bearing up under the weight of my lecture last night. I did my “The Viking Sagas: Dead Men Tell Tales” PowerPoint presentation, probably my most popular. I’m not sure why that is, though I suspect it may be because I listed it first on my promotional brochure.

Anyway, they were a wonderful audience. They even laughed during my reading of “The Tale of Thorarin Nefjolfsson’s Feet” from Heimskringla, which some audiences aren’t smart enough to do. And they bought a pile of books, which is a blessing from God at just this moment in my economic history.

A lady told me a story she’d heard from another author. I wish I remembered the author’s name, because I’d like to give proper credit. If anybody knows the source, let me know.

The story goes like this:

A writer dies and arrives at the Pearly Gates. St. Peter says, “We offer a special deal to writers here. You can choose whether you go to Heaven or Hell. Let’s look at Hell first.”

He leads the author downstairs, and opens the door to a large room, where a number of writers toil away at word processors. They are scowling and sweating. Whenever they pause, a devil comes along and whacks them with a whip.

“This isn’t very pleasant,” says the writer. “Let’s see what Heaven looks like.”

St. Peter leads him up to Heaven, and opens a door to a large room precisely like the first one. Here also a large number of writers sit hunched over word processors, scowling and sweating. Whenever they pause, an angel comes along and whacks them with a whip.

“I don’t get it,” says the writer. “What’s the difference between Heaven and Hell?”

“The difference,” says St. Peter, “is that here you get published.”

Not hilarious. Lousy theology.

But about as accurate a description of the writing life as I’ve ever heard.

I finished The Lord of the Rings today. At last.

It’s not that I didn’t enjoy it.

It’s just that it took so long. Not only because of the length of the trilogy, but because with books I’ve already read several times, I find myself lacking motivation; lacking the need to find out what comes next. That makes for slow reading.

I know C.S. Lewis would be appalled to hear that I don’t enjoy good books as much on re-reading as first reading.

I guess I’m just a philistine.

I did cry a little at the end, though. For Frodo. Because I know now what it means to know you have a wound that will never be healed, this side of Numenor.

But all in all, I’m glad I’ll now be able to tackle the pile of books Dave Alpern sent me, a month or two ago.

I have more to say about last night’s subject, come to think of it. The importance of fewer words. Like white space in graphics. Like pauses in music.

I know a pastor who’s a very effective preacher, but hopeless with words. He actually has, I think, a phobia about words (like my own phobia about numbers). Faced with a word choice, he grabs the first word that enters his mind and throws it against his meaning to see if it sticks. If it doesn’t, he throws another, and another, in the hope that the aggregate of all those words will be somewhere close to what he wants to communicate. If he weren’t good with gestures and facial expressions, nobody would ever know what he meant. But because he adds a lot of physical clues, he makes it work.

A lot of people try the same sort of thing with writing. They write a sentence and then think, “That’s not exactly what I meant.” So they add another sentence, or a lot of modifiers—adjectives and adverbs. In the end they walk away from the steaming pile of verbiage, hoping the meaning they intended is in there, somewhere.

That’s not readable writing.

I made a reference to Westerns last night. Think of all the Westerns you’ve ever watched. You’ll probably recognize the following scenario.

The bad guys ride into town, yahooing. They ride their horses on the boardwalks and into the saloons. They fire their pistols again and again, indiscriminately. Mothers snatch their babies up and run away, terrified of a stray bullet or ricochet.

Enter the hero. He doesn’t say much. He goes into the saloon and orders his drink. He refuses to talk to the rowdies.

They get angry. They taunt him.

He does nothing but drink his drink.

They shoot at the floor at his feet, to make him “dance.”

He doesn’t take the bait.

Finally they do (or say) something unforgivable.

Suddenly the hero is all action. But it’s limited, deliberate action. He draws his pistol. He may not even be fast with it. But his shooting isn’t indiscriminate. He fires three times. Three men fall, each of them shot dead center.

The hero has his weapon under control. He doesn’t use it more than necessary, but when he uses it he uses it with precision.

The writer’s weapon is his vocabulary. He doesn’t show it off. He doesn’t try to impress the reader with his fancy style. He uses the minimum number of words he needs to, but they’re precisely the words he wants.

(I know there are good writers who use a more flowery style. But even they, I think, need to learn to cut words first, before they can move on to an idiom of their own.)

“But how do I know the precise, right word?” you ask (using a redundancy you’ll need to work on).

There’s no royal road. Do what you need to do to expand your vocabulary. Read thesauri in your spare time. Do word puzzles in the newspaper. Read books above your reading level with a dictionary at your elbow.

Whatever you need to do, do it. Learn more words so you can use fewer of them. These are your tools. If you want to be a master, you need to control them and their uses.

Some provocative questions by Thomas Mallon on American writing and scholarship at The American Scholar. I’ll point out one of them.

How can the contemplative mind survive in the multitasking, ADD-inducing world of digitization? Are we willing to face the downside of this great electronic boon? Do we really want students reading electronic texts of the classics that are festooned with more links than a Wikipedia entry? Aren’t a few moments of quiet bafflement preferable to an endless steeplechase across Web page after Web page?

Well said. We must learn to use our communication/entertainment equipment (PCs, PDAs, phones, TVs, and radios) instead of submitting to them. Do you do anything to help you think deeply or keep the demands of your electronics at bay?

“Among this host of would-be writers, the majority have no literary gift. This is not surprising in itself. A marked gift for anything is not very common. What is surprising is that such a high percentage of those without a marked talent for any particular profession should think of writing as the solution.” Read on. [by way of Books, Inq.]

The amusing Dr. Luther at Luther at the Movies was playing with an aristocratic title generator yesterday. I went over and checked it out, and frankly it didn’t amuse me much. Too easy.

But at that site I noticed a link to this site, where you can purchase an official Scottish lairdship. Or so they claim.

Don’t say I never did anything to improve your quality of life.

How am I today? Much better, thanks. I went to bed about 9:00 last night, and slept till 6:00 a.m., and I woke up much improved.

My working hypothesis on what happened to me is that my body was overwhelmed by the unprecedented amount of sound sleep it’s been getting lately. It had to shut down for a while to recalibrate.

I was listening to talk radio today in the car, and when I got where I was going I turned it off. I noticed immediately how much more pleasant the silence was than the preceding discussion had been.

That put me in mind of a saying attributed to Calvin Coolidge (which means somebody else probably actually said it): “I try never to say anything that won’t improve on silence.”

Those words have been guiding lights to me all my life.

You might not realize it, knowing me only from these posts, but I’m known as a man of few words. Partly because I grew up in a situation where saying the wrong thing was physically dangerous, I learned to keep my own counsel and save my fire for the moment when I can drop one pithy, memorable, and possibly funny statement into the mix.

Because of this policy I have a reputation for being smarter than I am.

I’m perfectly OK with that, by the way.

But I think it might be a help to me in writing too. Less isn’t always more, in spite of the cliché, but in modern writing it definitely helps.

An example comes from one of my favorite books, Heimskringla, (or The Sagas of the Kings of Norway) by the Icelander Snorri Sturlusson—the most exciting and readable history book written in the Middle Ages.

There’s a scene in the saga of King Harald Hardrada (who deserves to be much better known than he is). Harald has come into open conflict with one of his jarls (earls), a man named Haakon. who spared an enemy of Harald’s against his orders. Harald goes out to attack Haakon with an army. He defeats him, but it’s uncertain whether the jarl survived or not. As the king’s army is going home, a man suddenly leaps from the forest into the path, grabs the jarl’s captured standard, kills the man carrying it, and disappears into the trees again.

In the earlier versions of the saga that Snorri used for sources, Harald replies with a fairly long speech about how dangerous an enemy Haakon is, and how everyone should be on guard.

In Snorri’s version, Harald just says, “The jarl is alive. Bring me my armor.”

Think of the impression Clint Eastwood made by doing the Man With No Name westerns almost entirely without lines.

Writers do well to remember how powerful a few, well-chosen words can be.

Wow! It’s snowing hard out there.

Winter is alive. Bring me my sweater.

They’re playing Hangman over at Dictionary.com with an opportunity to win Will Ferrell and Emma Thompson’s Stranger Than Fiction.

Also on Dictionary.com, does this list of “Words of the Year 2006” tell us anything about our culture? The “Top 10 Looked-up Words” last year are love, affect, effect, good, beautiful, metaphor, integrity, experience, irony, and happy. From my scant research, integrity appears to be a perennially popular words for online dictionaries. I wonder if it and the words love, good, and beautiful reveal a yearning for meaning and purpose among internet users.

Maybe it just reveals a strain of schmaltz in me.

Lars Walker futures took a sudden surge upward today, still down from their 1996 highs but well above their recent bargain basement valuation.

Investor interest rose on news of Walker’s sale of an opinion piece to The American Spectator website. The essay, reported to be a humorous attack on the fashion habits of American seniors, is expected to appear on the magazine’s online service some time this week….

Thanks are due to Hunter Baker, a TAS writer and a frequent commenter here, for badgering me into trying something I’d never done before in a paying market, something I was quite certain I couldn’t carry off. Ben Stein writes for the Spectator site, for Pete’s sake. Who am I?

But man, acceptance feels good.

It’s really pathetic, you know, how much I require tangible validation, how needy I am for credentials. Paul Johnson, in his wicked, marvelous book Intellectuals, tells how Henrik Ibsen (one of my least favorite Norwegians, right down there with Vidkun L. J. Quisling) used to petition the Swedish crown (Sweden ruled Norway in those days) whenever he heard about a medal he hadn’t been awarded yet. And then he’d wear his whole collection on his suit—not just the ribbons but the actual “gongs”—whenever he went out, jingling down the street like a horse with bells on.

I understand why he did that. If I had a medal I’d be tempted to do the same thing. Because I feel inferior to every human being I’ve ever met, including criminals and the mentally disabled. Credentials give me something to wave—“See! See! I’m somebody too!”

Sad as it is, that’s how I am, and that makes today a pretty good day.

In other positive news, I found out Saturday that Sissel will be doing two concerts at the Høstfest in Minot, North Dakota in October. This means, it goes without saying, that I’ll have to make that ten-hour drive in the fall. It also means that I’ll have to try to do both that and the Norway trip I’m trying to arrange, which means I need more money, and I don’t think the Spectator gig will pay that well. Gotta get that renter in the spare room.

I learned about the Sissel concert in Hutchinson, Minnesota, where I drove for a Viking Age Society event. We did live steel in an empty store in a mall there. Every time I have a sword fight, I think it adds an hour to my life. Sold several copies of my books, too, in spite of the low turnout due to weather.

The weather sucked. The blizzard had ended, and the sky was clear, but there was a stiff wind out of—I actually don’t recall where it was coming from. But it was cold. And Highway 7 from Minneapolis to Hutchinson was coated with about a 75% covering of ice. The county, in its wisdom, had apparently elected not to waste any of the taxpayers’ money on fripperies like sand and salt.

So by the time I got to Hutchinson (Sissel playing on the CD player, of course), I was ready to hit something with a sword. Hard.

Technical note: This entire post was written in a reverse chronological order. That’s the kind of textural richness that makes my writing so much in demand among the more discerning of the online media outlets.

Mr. Bertrand blogs, “For all our speculative theorizing, precious few of us can make our theories work out on paper. The rhetoric of Christian fiction is a more exalted thing than the reality, in part because we understand our ambitions better than we do our abilities, but also because rhetoric is always more exalted than reality, no matter who’s talking.”

Read “The Whole Truth.“