I was thinking about the conversation last night about the Oppen poem, "Psalm," particularly about how we came to no conclusion. Good! Humanities teachers like that! And this morning, while looking for a few more poetry blogs to post for your reference, I came upon this one, Poetry & Popular Culture, in which blogger Mike Chasar discusses movies and poetry and nicely expresses the meat of our discussion:
"...the idea that perhaps, as often as not, we remember poetry because we don't understand it, not because we do understand it. That is, maybe what makes a poem memorable is the fact that it's to some extent indecipherable. Like the Sphinx's riddle, like Eliot's quotation of Shakespeare, like gnomic sound bites from Kipling or radio hosts, perhaps we remember poetry because it gives us something to chew on and think about, not because it answers our questions and solves our riddles."
I also found an excellent post by poet Carl Phillips that discusses the Oppen poem and comes to a few smart and helpful conclusions while not collapsing the poem into a neat algebra solution. Not to give it all away, but Phillips' subtitle reads, "How Oppen's broken syntax praises God."
Among other insights, Phillips examines the line breaks and wording that we found so interesting and says, "Syntax is the chief tool that language has for conveying meaning. And it is at the level of syntax that Oppen puts forward his concerns about praise, our obligation to give praise, and the limits to our ability to do so."
None of which is meant to incite bouts of incoherence in your assignments....
09 September 2010
01 September 2010
Begin English 332: Open Mic Thursday Night
Shea Center for Performing Arts is hosting an OPEN MIC
Thursday 9/2 at 7:30 p.m.
Signup begins 6 p.m. in the Shea Lobby.
Now that would be something to blog about.
As you begin, I do suggest glancing at the blogroll to your left. The bloggers might give you more ideas about what you'd like to do with your masterpiece.
Thursday 9/2 at 7:30 p.m.
Signup begins 6 p.m. in the Shea Lobby.
Now that would be something to blog about.
As you begin, I do suggest glancing at the blogroll to your left. The bloggers might give you more ideas about what you'd like to do with your masterpiece.
19 August 2010
What Constitutes "Poetry du Jour," via Fence Mag's Constant Critic
I couldn't resist posting this excerpt from the Constant Critic's revue of Christian Hawkeye's new book, Ventrakl. The reviewer, Karla Kelsey, lays out a list of elements of "poetry du jour." Good to know.
In fact, a list of Ventrakl’s tactics and concerns will read as a description for what it is to be a book of poetry du jour:
Interest in translation, both as overtly stated theme and as mode of composition
Collaboration and a problematizing of monological authorship
Use of ekphrasis, both as an occasion and as a tool for prying into the nature of representation
Use and problematizing of biography, of how to represent a life
Interest in overtly exploring intertextuality
Explicit articulations of a poetics, while, at the same time enacting this poetics figuratively (or by rejection of figure), formally, extra-lexically
Recognizing the necessarily political implications of language, a weariness and despair of facile articulation
The hybrid (the book, part of UDP’s Dossier Series, includes lineated poems, prose poems, invented conversations, biographical sketches, photographs, and quotations)
Documentary poetics
Procedural poetry
The poetic project
The entire review is available here.
In fact, a list of Ventrakl’s tactics and concerns will read as a description for what it is to be a book of poetry du jour:
Interest in translation, both as overtly stated theme and as mode of composition
Collaboration and a problematizing of monological authorship
Use of ekphrasis, both as an occasion and as a tool for prying into the nature of representation
Use and problematizing of biography, of how to represent a life
Interest in overtly exploring intertextuality
Explicit articulations of a poetics, while, at the same time enacting this poetics figuratively (or by rejection of figure), formally, extra-lexically
Recognizing the necessarily political implications of language, a weariness and despair of facile articulation
The hybrid (the book, part of UDP’s Dossier Series, includes lineated poems, prose poems, invented conversations, biographical sketches, photographs, and quotations)
Documentary poetics
Procedural poetry
The poetic project
The entire review is available here.
12 May 2010
Last Words, Not Mine
This came in an email from Crazyhorse today:
“What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.”
—Logan Pearsall Smith
“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”
—Ernest Hemingway
“The poet: would rather eat a heart than a hambone.”
—Theodore Roethke
“If there is a special Hell for writers it would be in the forced contemplation of their own works.”
—John Dos Passos
“I only write when I feel the inspiration. Fortunately, inspiration strikes at 10:00 o’clock every day.”
—William Faulkner
“If you’re going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you’re going to be locked up.”
—Hunter S. Thompson
“The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.”
—Flannery O’Connor
“I write a little every day, without hope and without despair.”
—Isak Dinesen
“Write, damn you! What else are you good for?”
—James Joyce
“If I don’t write to empty my mind I go mad.”
—Lord Byron
“I could claim any number of high-flown reasons for writing, just as you can explain certain dogs behavior... But maybe, it’s that they’re dog, and that’s what dogs do.”
—Amy Hempel
“Writing is easy. You just sit down at the typewriter and open a vein.”
—Red Smith
“Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant.”
—Winston Churchill
“Always pull back—and see how silly we must look to God.”
—Jack Kerouac
“The end of all our exploring will be to arrive when we started and know the place for the first time.”
—T.S. Eliot
“If you’re a good writer, these days, you pay attention to the way that people don’t pay attention.”
—Charles Baxter
"There are three rules to writing a novel and nobody knows what they are."
—Wm. Somerset Maugham
"Writing is finally a series of permissions you give yourself to be expressive in certain ways. To leap. To fly. To fail."
—Susan Sontag
“We put on our stories before our clothes….”
—William Wenthe
“All good writing is swimming underwater and holding your breath."
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
"All I am is the trick of words writing themselves."
—Anne Sexton
"You owe reality nothing and the truth about your feelings everything."
—Richard Hugo
“Perhaps there is another kind of writing, I only know this one: in the night, when fear does not let me sleep.”
—Franz Kafka
"Once your life is organized so beautifully that there's a table, and a chair, and a typewriter, that already is an incredible triumph."
—Leonard Cohen
"The poet: would rather eat a heart than a hambone."
—Theodore Roethke
"Why not say what happened?"
—Robert Lowell
"When one is highly alert to language, then nearly everything begs to be a poem..."
—James Tate
"Remember the old adage about how an infinite number of monkeys typing on an infinite number of typewriters will eventually type something beautiful? Well, the Internet disproves that."
—Kurt Vonnegut
“The poet is he that hath fat enough, like bears and marmots, to suck his claws all winter. He hibernates in this world, and feeds on his own marrow.”
—Henry David Thoreau
"A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it."
—Roald Dahl
"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you."
—Ray Bradbury
"If you can bring nothing to this place but your carcass, keep out."
—William Carlos Williams
"Why do I write? To discover the Gods I don't believe in"
—Bruce Pratt
"Substitute 'damn' every time you are inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be."
—Mark Twain
"The process of writing will always be trying to repair something that doesn't exist with tools you have to invent on the spot."
—George Saunders
"Any writer who knows what he's doing isn't doing very much."
—Nelson Algren
"Write when there is something that you know; and not before; and not too damned much after."
—Ernest Hemingway
"The job of the writer is to win the battle against loneliness."
—Barry Hannah
"An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way."
—Charles Bukowski
"Confront the dark parts of yourself.... Your willingness to wrestle with your demons will cause your angels to sing."
—August Wilson
"Truth is not an unveiling which destroys the secret, but a revelation that does it justice."
—Walter Benjamin
"Writing isn't about applause. It's about humiliation."
—Steve Almond
“A great writer is, so to speak, a second government in his country. And for that reason no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.”
—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
"Energy within the poet goes into the poem, but then must go from the poem to a reader or listener. There has to be this transfer of energy."
—Muriel Rukeyser
"Before I start writing I feel affectionate, interested, and frustrated. In that order. Afterwards I feel relieved, disgusted, and confused. Sometimes I don't think it's worth it."
—Joy Williams
"A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning.”
—James Dickey
"I believe in words. I believe that words are little gods. I believe that books are bibles."
—Marcel Pomerlo
"Poets think they are pitchers, but they are really catchers."
—Jack Spicer
"If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster."
—Isaac Asimov
“Everything I learned about human nature I learned from me.”
—Chekhov
"The author's task is to synchronize thoughts, images, raw creative material in a meaningful way, a task as difficult and frantic and joyful as herding cats."
—Brandon Dorn
"I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences."
—Gertrude Stein
"As if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose."
—Rilke
"Imaginative work is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground; it is like a spider web attached ever so lightly, but attached to all four corners of the earth."
—Virginia Woolf
"My weakness and my absurdity is I must write at all costs and express myself."
— Antonin Artaud
"Poetry is mostly hunches."
—John Ashberry
“You owe reality nothing and the truth about your feelings everything.”
—Richard Hugo in The Triggering Town
“…you can kill characters only once, but you can hurt them everyday.”
—Neil LaBute
"Always pull back—and see how silly we must look to God."
—Jack Kerouac
"I always write from my own experiences whether I've had them or not."
—Ron Carlson
"This autonomy crap? That means you're off working alone. If you want autonomy, be a poet."
—Michael Eisner (CEO Disney)
“. . .failure is the writer's only real business. The one hope is for a better and better failure."
—John Ciardi
"Writing should be done on your knees."
—William Maxwell
"Use the right word and not its second cousin."
—Mark Twain
“If you're really listening, if you're awake to the poignant beauty of the world, your heart breaks regularly”
— Andrew Harvey
"Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard."
—Anne Sexton
“The life of a writer is absolute hell compared with the life of a businessman…A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom.”
—Roald Dahl
“Go forth my book and help to destroy the world as it is.”
— Russell Banks
“Art is long, and life is short, and success is very far off.”
—Anton Checkov
"Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant, there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing."
—Georgia O'Keefe
“It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.”
—Robert Hass
“This morning I took out a comma, and this afternoon I put it back again.”
— Oscar Wilde
"I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is grace in territory held largely by the devil."
—Flannery O'Connor
“What crazies we writers are, our heads full of language like buckets of minnows standing in the moonlight on a dock”
—Hayden Carruth
“There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either.”
—Robert Graves
“When ideas fail, words come in very handy.”
—Goethe
“I'm a writer first and a woman after.”
—Katherine Mansfield
"I write for myself and strangers."
—Gertrude Stein
"It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there."
—William Carlos Williams
“For all the words of a poem both emerge from, and finally add up to silence, whatever beauty and terror that may mean.”
—Marianne Boruch
"Not every poem can sing like a drunk man, but it sure better swing punches."
—H.D Dinken
"And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."
—Anaïs Nin
"Like a piece of ice on a hot stove, the poem must ride on its own melting."
—Robert Frost
“Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day’s progress through the dazzling quicksand, the marsh of blank paper.”
—John Updike
"If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad."
—Lord Byron
"Poetry is my love, my postmark, my hands, my kitchen, my face."
—Anne Sexton
"The author's task is to synchronize thoughts, images, raw creative material in a meaningful way, a task as difficult and frantic and joyful as herding cats."
—Brandon Dorn
"Imaginative work is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground; it is like a spider web attached ever so lightly, but attached to all four corners of the earth."
—Virginia Woolf
“The poet is he that hath fat enough, like bears and marmots, to suck his claws all winter. He hibernates in this world, and feeds on his own marrow”
—Henry david Thoreau
“Do not observe yourself too closely..."
—R.M. Rilke, "Letters to a Young Poet."
“...one doesn't become an artist overnight. You have to be carbonized and mineralized in order to work upwards from the last common denominator of the self. "
—from The Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller
“Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like paté.”
—Margaret Atwood
“The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.”
—Lisa Kerr
“Perhaps I'm inventing a little, perhaps embellishing, but on the whole that's the way it was.”
—Samuel Beckett
"The more it smells, the better it sells.”
—Franz Douskey
“Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.”
—William Wordsworth
“He threw a lot of spaghetti up against the wall and developed a keen sense of what was going to stick.”
—Kurt Vonnegut
"Writing is finally a series of permissions you give yourself to be expressive in certain ways. To leap. To fly. To fail."
—Susan Sontag
"The depth is in the surface."
—William Matthews
“What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.”
—Logan Pearsall Smith
“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”
—Ernest Hemingway
“The poet: would rather eat a heart than a hambone.”
—Theodore Roethke
“If there is a special Hell for writers it would be in the forced contemplation of their own works.”
—John Dos Passos
“I only write when I feel the inspiration. Fortunately, inspiration strikes at 10:00 o’clock every day.”
—William Faulkner
“If you’re going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you’re going to be locked up.”
—Hunter S. Thompson
“The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.”
—Flannery O’Connor
“I write a little every day, without hope and without despair.”
—Isak Dinesen
“Write, damn you! What else are you good for?”
—James Joyce
“If I don’t write to empty my mind I go mad.”
—Lord Byron
“I could claim any number of high-flown reasons for writing, just as you can explain certain dogs behavior... But maybe, it’s that they’re dog, and that’s what dogs do.”
—Amy Hempel
“Writing is easy. You just sit down at the typewriter and open a vein.”
—Red Smith
“Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant.”
—Winston Churchill
“Always pull back—and see how silly we must look to God.”
—Jack Kerouac
“The end of all our exploring will be to arrive when we started and know the place for the first time.”
—T.S. Eliot
“If you’re a good writer, these days, you pay attention to the way that people don’t pay attention.”
—Charles Baxter
"There are three rules to writing a novel and nobody knows what they are."
—Wm. Somerset Maugham
"Writing is finally a series of permissions you give yourself to be expressive in certain ways. To leap. To fly. To fail."
—Susan Sontag
“We put on our stories before our clothes….”
—William Wenthe
“All good writing is swimming underwater and holding your breath."
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
"All I am is the trick of words writing themselves."
—Anne Sexton
"You owe reality nothing and the truth about your feelings everything."
—Richard Hugo
“Perhaps there is another kind of writing, I only know this one: in the night, when fear does not let me sleep.”
—Franz Kafka
"Once your life is organized so beautifully that there's a table, and a chair, and a typewriter, that already is an incredible triumph."
—Leonard Cohen
"The poet: would rather eat a heart than a hambone."
—Theodore Roethke
"Why not say what happened?"
—Robert Lowell
"When one is highly alert to language, then nearly everything begs to be a poem..."
—James Tate
"Remember the old adage about how an infinite number of monkeys typing on an infinite number of typewriters will eventually type something beautiful? Well, the Internet disproves that."
—Kurt Vonnegut
“The poet is he that hath fat enough, like bears and marmots, to suck his claws all winter. He hibernates in this world, and feeds on his own marrow.”
—Henry David Thoreau
"A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it."
—Roald Dahl
"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you."
—Ray Bradbury
"If you can bring nothing to this place but your carcass, keep out."
—William Carlos Williams
"Why do I write? To discover the Gods I don't believe in"
—Bruce Pratt
"Substitute 'damn' every time you are inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be."
—Mark Twain
"The process of writing will always be trying to repair something that doesn't exist with tools you have to invent on the spot."
—George Saunders
"Any writer who knows what he's doing isn't doing very much."
—Nelson Algren
"Write when there is something that you know; and not before; and not too damned much after."
—Ernest Hemingway
"The job of the writer is to win the battle against loneliness."
—Barry Hannah
"An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way."
—Charles Bukowski
"Confront the dark parts of yourself.... Your willingness to wrestle with your demons will cause your angels to sing."
—August Wilson
"Truth is not an unveiling which destroys the secret, but a revelation that does it justice."
—Walter Benjamin
"Writing isn't about applause. It's about humiliation."
—Steve Almond
“A great writer is, so to speak, a second government in his country. And for that reason no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.”
—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
"Energy within the poet goes into the poem, but then must go from the poem to a reader or listener. There has to be this transfer of energy."
—Muriel Rukeyser
"Before I start writing I feel affectionate, interested, and frustrated. In that order. Afterwards I feel relieved, disgusted, and confused. Sometimes I don't think it's worth it."
—Joy Williams
"A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning.”
—James Dickey
"I believe in words. I believe that words are little gods. I believe that books are bibles."
—Marcel Pomerlo
"Poets think they are pitchers, but they are really catchers."
—Jack Spicer
"If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster."
—Isaac Asimov
“Everything I learned about human nature I learned from me.”
—Chekhov
"The author's task is to synchronize thoughts, images, raw creative material in a meaningful way, a task as difficult and frantic and joyful as herding cats."
—Brandon Dorn
"I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences."
—Gertrude Stein
"As if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose."
—Rilke
"Imaginative work is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground; it is like a spider web attached ever so lightly, but attached to all four corners of the earth."
—Virginia Woolf
"My weakness and my absurdity is I must write at all costs and express myself."
— Antonin Artaud
"Poetry is mostly hunches."
—John Ashberry
“You owe reality nothing and the truth about your feelings everything.”
—Richard Hugo in The Triggering Town
“…you can kill characters only once, but you can hurt them everyday.”
—Neil LaBute
"Always pull back—and see how silly we must look to God."
—Jack Kerouac
"I always write from my own experiences whether I've had them or not."
—Ron Carlson
"This autonomy crap? That means you're off working alone. If you want autonomy, be a poet."
—Michael Eisner (CEO Disney)
“. . .failure is the writer's only real business. The one hope is for a better and better failure."
—John Ciardi
"Writing should be done on your knees."
—William Maxwell
"Use the right word and not its second cousin."
—Mark Twain
“If you're really listening, if you're awake to the poignant beauty of the world, your heart breaks regularly”
— Andrew Harvey
"Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard."
—Anne Sexton
“The life of a writer is absolute hell compared with the life of a businessman…A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom.”
—Roald Dahl
“Go forth my book and help to destroy the world as it is.”
— Russell Banks
“Art is long, and life is short, and success is very far off.”
—Anton Checkov
"Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant, there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing."
—Georgia O'Keefe
“It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.”
—Robert Hass
“This morning I took out a comma, and this afternoon I put it back again.”
— Oscar Wilde
"I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is grace in territory held largely by the devil."
—Flannery O'Connor
“What crazies we writers are, our heads full of language like buckets of minnows standing in the moonlight on a dock”
—Hayden Carruth
“There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either.”
—Robert Graves
“When ideas fail, words come in very handy.”
—Goethe
“I'm a writer first and a woman after.”
—Katherine Mansfield
"I write for myself and strangers."
—Gertrude Stein
"It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there."
—William Carlos Williams
“For all the words of a poem both emerge from, and finally add up to silence, whatever beauty and terror that may mean.”
—Marianne Boruch
"Not every poem can sing like a drunk man, but it sure better swing punches."
—H.D Dinken
"And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."
—Anaïs Nin
"Like a piece of ice on a hot stove, the poem must ride on its own melting."
—Robert Frost
“Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day’s progress through the dazzling quicksand, the marsh of blank paper.”
—John Updike
"If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad."
—Lord Byron
"Poetry is my love, my postmark, my hands, my kitchen, my face."
—Anne Sexton
"The author's task is to synchronize thoughts, images, raw creative material in a meaningful way, a task as difficult and frantic and joyful as herding cats."
—Brandon Dorn
"Imaginative work is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground; it is like a spider web attached ever so lightly, but attached to all four corners of the earth."
—Virginia Woolf
“The poet is he that hath fat enough, like bears and marmots, to suck his claws all winter. He hibernates in this world, and feeds on his own marrow”
—Henry david Thoreau
“Do not observe yourself too closely..."
—R.M. Rilke, "Letters to a Young Poet."
“...one doesn't become an artist overnight. You have to be carbonized and mineralized in order to work upwards from the last common denominator of the self. "
—from The Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller
“Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like paté.”
—Margaret Atwood
“The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.”
—Lisa Kerr
“Perhaps I'm inventing a little, perhaps embellishing, but on the whole that's the way it was.”
—Samuel Beckett
"The more it smells, the better it sells.”
—Franz Douskey
“Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.”
—William Wordsworth
“He threw a lot of spaghetti up against the wall and developed a keen sense of what was going to stick.”
—Kurt Vonnegut
"Writing is finally a series of permissions you give yourself to be expressive in certain ways. To leap. To fly. To fail."
—Susan Sontag
"The depth is in the surface."
—William Matthews
01 April 2010
It's NaPoWriMo
Greetings poetry writing addicts and graphomaniacs. It is once again the cruelest month, and I and a mad cadre of my students will be joining Robin Reagler and many others in attempting a poem-like-thang every danged day.
Since this particular blog is devoted to a class called Advanced Creative Writing, I've created a new blog just for poem-a-day-ing: ab chaos poesis.
There you'll see links to Robin and several classmates, including Jacqueline, and others to be added (or dropped).
Since this particular blog is devoted to a class called Advanced Creative Writing, I've created a new blog just for poem-a-day-ing: ab chaos poesis.
There you'll see links to Robin and several classmates, including Jacqueline, and others to be added (or dropped).
29 March 2010
Re:Vision (to see anew) (and one other thing anew, too)
“The first draft reveals the art, revision reveals the artist.”
Michael Lee
“Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.”
Bernard Malamud
“Half my life is an act of revision.”
John Irving
My first point? I'd like to see revisions of each of your poems by the first week in April. After all, April is National Poetry Month....
In addition, Group B workshop will be held next Monday, April 5.
Michael Lee
“Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.”
Bernard Malamud
“Half my life is an act of revision.”
John Irving
My first point? I'd like to see revisions of each of your poems by the first week in April. After all, April is National Poetry Month....
In addition, Group B workshop will be held next Monday, April 5.
04 March 2010
Rules for Riting
Read them, consider them, forget them. (But if you want more, go here.)
1 Never open a book with weather. If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a character's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways than an Eskimo to describe ice and snow in his book Arctic Dreams, you can do all the weather reporting you want.
2 Avoid prologues: they can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in non-fiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want. There is a prologue in John Steinbeck's Sweet Thursday, but it's OK because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: "I like a lot of talk in a book and I don't like to have nobody tell me what the guy that's talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks."
3 Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue. The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But "said" is far less intrusive than "grumbled", "gasped", "cautioned", "lied". I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with "she asseverated" and had to stop reading and go to the dictionary.
4 Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said" . . . he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances "full of rape and adverbs".
5 Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.
6 Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose". This rule doesn't require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use "suddenly" tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.
7 Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apostrophes, you won't be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavour of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories Close Range.
8 Avoid detailed descriptions of characters, which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants", what do the "American and the girl with him" look like? "She had taken off her hat and put it on the table." That's the only reference to a physical description in the story.
9 Don't go into great detail describing places and things, unless you're Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language. You don't want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.
10 Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them.
1 Never open a book with weather. If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a character's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways than an Eskimo to describe ice and snow in his book Arctic Dreams, you can do all the weather reporting you want.
2 Avoid prologues: they can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in non-fiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want. There is a prologue in John Steinbeck's Sweet Thursday, but it's OK because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: "I like a lot of talk in a book and I don't like to have nobody tell me what the guy that's talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks."
3 Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue. The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But "said" is far less intrusive than "grumbled", "gasped", "cautioned", "lied". I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with "she asseverated" and had to stop reading and go to the dictionary.
4 Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said" . . . he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances "full of rape and adverbs".
5 Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.
6 Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose". This rule doesn't require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use "suddenly" tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.
7 Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apostrophes, you won't be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavour of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories Close Range.
8 Avoid detailed descriptions of characters, which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants", what do the "American and the girl with him" look like? "She had taken off her hat and put it on the table." That's the only reference to a physical description in the story.
9 Don't go into great detail describing places and things, unless you're Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language. You don't want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.
10 Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them.
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