Tag Archives: writer

Comma Sense

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red pencil, grammar, comma“Perhaps the most hotly contested punctuation mark of all time”—the Oxford comma is back in the news. Well, sort of. See this 3-minute TED-Ed lesson animation, and see what you think. Plus a quiz to test your comma-sense and the chance to participate in discussions of this burning controversy, including one entitled “Why do you think so many people care so much about grammar?” Hadn’t notice that, really, in everyday life. Maybe it’s generational. Like the MDs who want first-year residents to suffer through 40-hour shifts in the emergency department, because, “goddammit, I did it and survived,” though possibly their patients didn’t. Those of us who absorbed all the rules hammered into our brains in junior high, goddammit, feel the same way about our hard-won expertise: “Can you believe he split an infinitive?” (that’s ok now, BTW). But not, as I read the other day: “He sent the email to him and I.” Ouch.

I use the serial comma, myself, because most of the time it avoids confusion. But I confess that using commas in all the technically correct places can make you want to brush at the page as if there were crumbs on it. At the moment I’m reading a Cormac McCarthy novel that is heavily “and”-dependent and nary a comma on the dust-clogged horizon. Makes for an interesting tone.

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A Personal Writing Style

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Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Jeeves and Wooster, P.G. Wodehouse

Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie as Jeeves and Wooster. (Artwork: hockypocky.deviantart.com)

Michael Lydon, in an entertaining essay for Visual Thesaurus, takes on the elusive question of how a personal writing style develops. Writing styles were something I used to take as they came, part of the background. Some were more old-fashioned, but beyond that, I didn’t think about them. Not until I read the entire two-inch thick volume of John Cheever’s short stories did I think about how a style might be something a writer could strive for. When I turned the last page, I was so marinated in Cheever’s deceptively simple way of putting words together, his choice of subjects, and the kinds of characters who peopled his stories, I felt as if I could sit down and dash one off myself. Of course I couldn’t. That writing style was Cheever’s alone.

Lydon’s essay takes the experience of Pelham Grenville Wodehouse as his model, and how Wodehouse created “a comic world centered on the quintessential featherbrain Bertie Wooster, his unflappable manservant Jeeves,” and the memorable friends and relatives in the Wooster orbit. Over six decades, Wodehouse  produced dozens of best-selling novels and stories about Jeeves and Wooster. And they’ve been adapted for television, movies, and the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, By Jeeves (title song).

Authors can certainly claim literary success when one of their characters enters the language as the only descriptor needed for a particular type of person, a Fagin or a Portnoy. “Jeeves” remains the archetype of the unflappable, ready-for-any-unlikely-eventuality manservant. And Jeeves and Wooster are an instantly recognizable duo, brought to life in Wodehouse’s lively stories.

How is such a distinctive voice and style developed? Distinctive, but not too constraining? Comfortably familiar, but not tiresome? Lydon suggests the answer can be found in  Enter Jeeves, a 15-story collection published in 1997 (Dover) that “opens a crystal clear window on Wodehouse’s work method which may be fairly summed up in four words: unremitting trial and error.” The stories trace a stumbling path in the development of Bertie’s eventual world view and the complex relationship the two men settle into. With each story, Wodehouse’s prose became “sharper, more succinct, and—there’s no other word for it—more Wodehouse-ian.”

The key to making one’s own prose as inimitable as that of Wodehouse or Cheever or any other admired writer is to imitate—not the style—but the work method. Lydon advises writers to “keep honing, polishing, revising, rejecting, and rewriting” until they begin to approach what they want to say, then do it some more. Lather, rinse, repeat.

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2-9-14 Readers, Writers, Booklovers Unite!

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Reading, book, Budi SukmanaHugh Howey’s Rants

Everyone who buys, sells, reads, borrows, downloads, and LOVES books has a stake in moving the publishing industry into the 21st century. It won’t happen easily. Best-selling indie novelist Hugh Howey (Wool) launched a well-aimed missile of advice at the industry in his notorious 1/8 blog post, “Don’t Anyone Put Me in Charge,” in which he explains what he would do if he ran one of the big publishing houses. He followed it up with a new barrage on 1/12, “My Second Month on the Hypothetical Job.” Even if thoughts about publication are not your daily preoccupation, his ideas are lively and thought-provoking.

For Publishing: A Radical Makeover

They would radically change the culture and the economics of the book business, making it better for readers and writers in the process. Among his memorable suggestions: get out of New York to cut overhead and get some work done. From home, mostly. (He suggests Houston. Not in August.)  He wants them to invest in Print on Demand, which would keep authors’ backlists alive. And he’d devote greater attention to the midlist bulge of authors. As publishers whittle down their emphasis to manuscripts that are “sure-fire” best-sellers, reader choice withers. And these are not people you’d want standing at the rail next to you at Santa Anita or Churchill Downs.

These next three were picked up by Business Insider writer Dylan Love:

  • “Every format, as soon as the book is available.” The day a book is released, you could buy it in hardback or paper, or Kindle, Nook, or other e-reader formats. No more stringing people along with a hardcover release, and letting them lose interest while they wait for the Kindle edition.
  • “Hardbacks come with free ebooks.” This “would change my perception of e-books overnight,” Love says. At present, e-book Digital Rights Management systems restrict readers’ flexibility. Bundling a hardback with a digital file would increase it.
  • “No more advertising.” In Howey’s publishing house, the firm’s money would “go into editors [remember when books weren’t full of mistakes?] and into acquiring new authors,” not into bookstore promotions and pricy advertisements that he says “don’t sell books.”

How Publishers Shouldn’t React

Howey admirer Baldur Bjarnason has drafted a list of tips for publishing insiders to use in their inevitable responses to Howey’s assault. The last of these is to make the argument that traditional publishers are “somehow responsible for keeping the general quality of books high.” I’ll let you explore for yourself Bjarnason’s links that stick the needle in that bit of puffery. LOL.

(Thanks to Beth Wasson at Sisters in Crime’s SinC Links for pointing out Howey’s and Bjarnason’s great posts!)

“30 Days and Nights of Literary Abandon”

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The first question almost everyone asks when they learn I’ve written a novel is, “Do you plot everything out in advance, or do you figure it out as you go?” The answer is “Both.” I have a general idea of where I will end up, and I point the plot in that direction, but the route is unclear until I get there. Thousands of people—many of whom have never written a book before—are discovering their fictional paths this month.

We are reaching the middle of National Novel Writing Month (awkwardly abbreviated NaNoWriMo). Participating authors from countries around the world already report they have set down some 1.2 billion words. Skimming the long list of NaNoWriMo participants whose books drafted during this annual literary frenzy were ultimately published, I found Hugh Howey’s Wool, Kindle Book Review’s 2012 Indie Book of the Year. I happen to be listening to Wool on my iPod. I’ll bet there are authors in the list whom you know, too.

NaNoWriMo encourages participants to write a novel of at least 50,000 words in 30 days. In its first year, 21 writers participated, and six reached the finish line. (I use that term loosely, since completing the first draft of a novel is pretty darn far from anything resembling a “finish.”) Last year, the 14-year-old program had 256, 618 participants, 14 percent of whom reached the goal. Though they undoubtedly will have further work to do, this is a tremendous accomplishment.

The whole idea of NaNoWriMo appeals to me as a helpful boot camp for writers, aspiring or accomplished. It stresses the importance of writing every day—sustained effort—and shows writers they are capable of actually finishing something. Too many of us have promising, half-complete manuscripts languishing in drawers and Word files,  awaiting the return of a Muse who has apparently decamped to Brazil. NaNoWriMo’s fixed and tight deadline requires writers to power through at a blistering 1700-words-a-day pace, barely leaving time to roast the Thanksgiving turkey.

NaNoWriMo offers moral support and coaching through regional support groups. It took my breath away to learn that my region (Central New Jersey) has almost 3500 NaNoWriMo participants! The “shared experience” this encourages is based on the founder’s first experiment with the concept in July 1999. “We called it noveling,” he says. “And after the noveling ended on August 1, my sense of what was possible for myself, and those around me, was forever changed.”

A wistful look comes over people’s faces when they find out I’ve written a novel and published short stories. “I’ve always wanted to do that,” they say. If they do, there will be a rocky road ahead, but what I tell them about is the joy in traveling it. In future, I’ll also tell them about National Novel Writing Month.

As the NaNoWriMo folks say, “Win or lose, you rock for even trying.”