Writer’s Digest has six tips on reviving your writing routine. It’s essentially making a plan and pursuing it. Don’t wing it. You were made to fly like that.
Books as Source Material
Transfer of Power, by Vince Flynn
Good writing and good storytelling are two distinct qualities, and don’t necessarily reside in the same practitioner. Bestselling Minnesota author Vince Flynn is a classic case in point.
In terms of storytelling, his performance is flawless. Transfer of Power begins, after some brief preliminaries, with super-secret operative Mitch Rapp leading a commando raid into Iran (this is before 9/11) to kidnap a terrorist ringleader. Then the focus shifts to one of that ringleader’s proteges, Rafique Aziz, who is planning an audacious attack on the White House itself, intended both to kidnap the president and to humiliate the United States. Information the CIA extracts from its prisoner (through torture; Flynn makes no bones about it) allows enough warning to enable the Secret Service to get the president into a safe bunker before the terrorists take possession of the building. But the terrorists have a drill and a weak vice president with whom to negotiate.
The tension never lets up. Hero Mitch Rapp employs all his formidable commando skills, and often defies his superiors, in a dangerous operation to infiltrate the White House and impose summary justice on the attackers. He is ruthless and his actions are viscerally satisfying. Also he gets the girl.
As a piece of prose writing, the book is less successful. The force of the narrative pulls the reader along so quickly that he barely notices frequent infelicities, like “Warch, who was more entrusted with the president’s life than any other person in the Secret Service…,” and “…he wondered if he wasn’t being overly paranoid,” and my personal favorite— “the two junior officers fell in astride their senior.” Best to just move along and not inquire too closely into these careless turns of phrase.
As an entertainment, Transfer of Power is a great success. As a statement of a viewpoint on how the War On Terror should be fought, it deserves respectful attention. As a piece of literature, it’s… a successful entertainment.
Cautions for language, violence and adult themes.
The Joy of Books
Rejection: ‘Thank You for Submitting This Post; However…’
Thomas Lee writes about being rejected and imagines there are multiple tiers of rejection letters from literary journals like Ploughshares. “In what other field can someone brag about the quality of one’s rejection?”
One for Dale, one from
Our friend Dale Nelson is a fan of the long literary sentence–at least longer than is currently fashionable. He’ll appreciate this article from the LA Times, by way of Mirabilis: The Writing Life: The point of the long and winding sentence.
Enter (I hope) the long sentence: the collection of clauses that is so many-chambered and lavish and abundant in tones and suggestions, that has so much room for near-contradiction and ambiguity and those places in memory or imagination that can’t be simplified, or put into easy words, that it allows the reader to keep many things in her head and heart at the same time, and to descend, as by a spiral staircase, deeper into herself and those things that won’t be squeezed into an either/or. With each clause, we’re taken further and further from trite conclusions — or that at least is the hope — and away from reductionism, as if the writer were a dentist, saying “Open wider” so that he can probe the tender, neglected spaces in the reader (though in this case it’s not the mouth that he’s attending to but the mind).
Dale sent me this link, from the English Government Archives: J. R. R. Tolkien’s Army Commission Application.
It’s a Plot, Mugsy
The Master Book of Plots, Plotto, was written in 1928 by your favorite author and mine, William Wallace Cook, and Tin House has released it anew for your reading or writing pleasure. With well over a thousand plots, Plotto can spoil more stories than you can swap by the fireplace in a year of weekends. Of course, the joy is in the telling, which is why I’m working on revisions of The Tale of Two Cities and Macbeth. I may even combine the two–not sure.
Along these lines, Greg Bergstrom explains how the cliches line up in various TV mysteries and detective stories. “There are also 2.74 metric tons of clichés,” he says, “like the typical stubbly detective who breaks the rules, struggles with the bottle and tends to tune up suspected killers with a copy of the Manhattan Yellow Pages.”
Snippet Five, Troll Valley
The “Old Stone Church,” Kenyon, Minnesota. Photo: Lars Walker.
[The book is coming out soon. I promise. We’re that close. ljw]
THE PRESENT
“What the—what kind of crap is this?” Shane demanded.
“ʽCrap’ is an interesting word,” said Robert Swallowtail. “Very marginal. I might have to use the soap on you, just to be prudent.”
“I’m talking about this story. You realize what this means, don’t you?”
“It’s a little early in your reading to have discovered a theme.”
“The old man was crazy. All that stuff people said about him, what a great man he was, and all the time he was a loon from the moon. No wonder I got problems. It’s genetic!”
“You may find this hard to comprehend,” said Robert Swallowtail, “but the book is not about you.”
CHAPTER II THE HAUGEANS
They established Anderson & Co., Inc. of Epsom, Minnesota that summer, manufacturers (then) of the Anderson Viking Separator and (eventually) of the Anderson Reaper and the Anderson Traction Engine, first steam then gasoline. The year was 1900, a good round number for our lives to pivot on. I celebrated my eighth birthday on Sunday, September 30.
It was a cool, fine morning. I remember the pinch of my knickerbockers below the knees, and the scraping of the hard brush Mother used on my hair. One of my most enduring impressions of childhood is how much everything hurt. Being young was like being an unhealed wound.
I’m going to take you to church with us now. I know that’s bad manners. But if you’ve come this far and want to know what our lives were like, you need to understand about our church. Continue reading Snippet Five, Troll Valley
The Church of Kopimism in Sweden
Also from Sweden, “a ‘church’ whose central tenet is the right to file-share has been formally recognised by the Swedish government,” reports BBC News. It was founded by a 19-year-old philosophy student.
Tolkien’s Writing Wasn’t Good Enough for Nobel
C.S. Lewis nominated his friend, J.R.R. Tolkien, for a Nobel prize in literature. The judges said nay, or maybe Ni!. “Swedish reporter Andreas Ekström delved into 1961’s previously classified documents on their release this week, to find the jury passed over names including Lawrence Durrell, Robert Frost, Graham Greene, EM Forster and Tolkien to come up with their eventual winner, Yugoslavian writer Ivo Andrić.”