Writes Briallen Hopper, in "DOES IT HOLD UP?/Anne Lamott’s Battle Against Writer’s Block/Bird by Bird encouraged would-be writers to blast past their hang-ups and embrace 'shitty first drafts.' But there’s more to the creative process" (TNR).
ADDED: Here's the full text of "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses." Sample: "In his little box of stage-properties he kept six or eight cunning devices, tricks, artifices for his savages and woodsmen to deceive and circumvent each other with, and he was never so happy as when he was working these innocent things and seeing them go. A favorite one was to make a moccasined person tread in the tracks of a moccasined enemy, and thus hide his own trail. Cooper wore out barrels and barrels of moccasins in working that trick."
Posts
38 comments:
Best book on writing ever, bar none.
This tome would not encourage us to write, more like self imolation
Her writing does not suggest she has read ']
Politics of the english language' or understood it
When I was young the first volume of Don Knuth’s The Art of Computer Programming, and I was so taken with his writing style that I consciously set out to imitate it. I never succeeded — Knuth is sui generis — but in so doing I found my own technical writing style. That, and the amazing woman who taught senior English classes in my now defunct high school.
A handful of creative writing courses taken at Stanford after work not only helped me with my fiction writing; I like to think they also improved my legal writing. I now have two full shelves of books on writing. The one I remember most is by Stephen King (a man whose politics I despise.) His description of his muse, an unshaven, grubby man dwelling in a basement, who occasionally comes up with something brilliant, is ferociously vivid. His book, On Writing, is worth a read.
I also read some very enjoyable books on punctuation - but failed to internalize much of it.
Yes thats one of my hangups, with semicolons
Twain hated Sir Walter Scott and Jane Austen too. Of course, some of his attacks on Cooper were warranted. But then Cooper was blazing the trail and wrote at a time when an ornate style was admired.
Writers often react against "Their Fathers authors". I wonder that had something to do with it. In any case, the other extreme, the pseudo- Hemingway style isn't very good either. A lot of mediocre writers in the 20th century decided that Hemingway's advice was "use few words" and not "use the right number of words".
Scott was more of a romantic than twain
Some of favorite writers were more exposition heavy versus
characterization
It's hard to top Elmore Leonard's Ten Rules for Good Writing.
I wanted to comment that "On Writing Well" is a treasure. The autocorrect insists it was written by a follow called Zinger - but I know better.
It sounds like it's worth reading. Shitty first draft. So that's the secret. Well, too late now. I wish I had heard about that in college. Although, to be fair, many of my finished papers read like shitty first drafts.....There aren't that many people on earth who can hit a ninety mph fastball, and there aren't that many people on earth who are meant to be writers. Still, there's slow pitch soft ball and writing seminars at the local college.
Bird by bird sent me way back…I loved the book at time. I was a young mother slash freelance writer. I wrote short stories, articles for airline magazines. I really wanted to write a regular humor column on motherhood. I found my children’s world to be rich in comic detail. I remember one editor of a prominent women’s magazine at the time telling me, “we’re not looking for stories about mothers at home— we’re looking for work- life balance.” But there’s no such thing, not really. So that was that. I recall all the titles this author mentions— the artist’s way by Julia Cameron, William zinsser’s On Writing Well, and Writing down the Bones. I thought this article was spot on. His objection to Lamott is essentially, I think, a flaw inherent to women’s writing, which is that, we all tend to write exclusively about our own experiences. I really hate that, and much prefer novels written by male authors.
“ I love Bird by Bird’s attention to the difficulty of the writing process, but I don’t love how it frames it primarily as a struggle with ego, as opposed to a struggle with words, images, ideas, thought. ” — that’s a man’s admirable, objective approach.
I am a believer in the Shitty first draft. In almost all of my writing, the story takes on a life of its own, so the best thing is to give it its head and see where it goes. Then let it sit for a couple of months before coming back to fix it. I find that I am a much better editor than writer. I see all mistakes as an editor that I can't see as a writer, so when I edit, a different mind is at play and my writing comes out better. 3rd drafts are even better, but after that it is mostly tweaks.
If you want to write better fiction, learn how to write non-fiction. Better still, take a good college-level philosophy class and write papers for it. People get too caught up in the "setting the scene" kind of stuff and the writing gets too florid.
Writers who are journalists first are exposition heavy like forsyth or silva
Churchill's famous "Brevity Memo" is of use to every writer, especially those trying to organize people towards some goal.
So is his recommendation never to use a Latin word when a French one will do, and never to use a French word when an Anglo-Saxon one will do.
Annie Dillard’s brilliant and beautiful “The Writing Life” is the one book on writing that really left an impression on me. Unfortunately, part of that impression was the realization that I could never, ever, write as well as she does.
A retired engineer of my acquaintance has one of Donald Knuth's famous $2.56 reward checks framed in a place of honor over his desk. Knuth gave these out to anyone who discovered an error in the text of one of his books, and they are treasured keepsakes that will surely be of considerable collector interest after the great man passes away. My friend is prouder of that check than any other award or bonus he received in his entire career.
Someone like an ian flemings opens casino royale with a very atmospheric tableau and then introduces the technical reports
Essentially Ms briefing in the film
Whereas the film essentially puts the casino scene about midway through the screen play
It made for a good intro for bond in dr no though
Not in the book
Another mention of Cooper by Twain was in Roughing It, I think, or whatever book he wrote about first going out west with his brother Orion, who had some appointment to a government office. He was very disturbed to find that the Indians that he encountered were not the "noble savages" of Cooper's work, but it is not that hard to infer that his disappointment came from having loved Cooper's work as a young man and being let down. Tolstoy loved Cooper, BTW, but Twain brought the modern novel into being with Huckleberry Finn and almost nobody can read Cooper's prose anymore.
I think that one could write a pretty funny piece on the literary offenses of Ian Fleming too. One of my favorites was For Your Eyes Only, which actually takes place in Vermont, in the novel. Bond flies into Montreal and outfits himself to "hunt beavers" in the Vermont Wilderness,. I think he sees one in a field of goldenrod. The Tippy character is not an Olympic shooter, but an Olympic archer, and she hikes The Long Trail across the spine of the Vermont Mountains to get to the villain's lair, where she puts an arrow through his chest as he swan dives into his evil villain lair swimming pool.
The Spy Who Loves me takes place on Route 9 in New York State, near the Adirondacks. Fleming used to vacation in the area when it was still very wild.
To live and let die was considered too chauvinist in some quarter and racist in his depiction of urban life
Who knows how much they have excised
But he was an upper class brit fettes and eton with equivalent habits
Cooper was a fresh water sailor on Lake Champlain when it was patrolled by the US Navy, but he left the Navy a couple of years before the War of 1812, when he could have seen some action there, but his father was a Congressman and got him yanked from the ship and put into a desk job, probably, because as a Congressman, he knew that war with Canada was coming. That's just my speculation, not based on anything but my ideas about human nature.
He was a reporter for the kemsley newspaper chain, that gave him much material he could draw on, like diamond smuggling the intricacies of istanbul and eastern europe
Freud could have had some fun with Cooper, in the Pathfinder the hero is called "La Longe Carabine" and his best friend is called "The Big Serpent" and at the end of the novel, the hero gets the girl to agree to marry him, but he says no, let's her marry somebody else, and disappears to sport in the woods with his friend "The Big Serpent."
Im sure that was projection on freuds part
'On Writing Well', ' Writing Down the Bones' and certainty, ' Elements of Style' I have read. This book sounds so interesting!
The best writing trick I have learned is "stop in the middle of a sentence," which is not the same as Hemingway's "stop when you're going good," though it's often interpreted that way.
If you stop in the middle of a sentence (one that you think you know what the ending will be), then when you get back to work you at least have something for your fingers to do.
I find that "shitty first draft" is a very risk strategy in that it can sometimes prematurely lock you into a bad organizational structure. Which leads me to my second 'good trick': most of the time when I am really struggling it is not due to a lack of 'inspiration', but because I haven't yet figured out how the material needs to be organized. Making an outline of what you've already written can often save a lot of fruitless re-typing.
I can't agree with the trendy advice that you just talk your piece out loud and then clean up the AI-generated transcript. I wrote my book on the Liberal Arts* based on transcripts of audio lectures, and it was an utterly miserable experience that took twice as long as writing it from the original lecture notes would have. There is just too much of a difference in style between effective unscripted speech and good writing.
This may seem paradoxical, because writing for oral delivery is very often significantly better than writing only intended for silent reading, but it turns out that speech converted to writing often turns out to be alternately too fragmentary and too tangled.
* How to Learn How to Think: What the Liberal Arts are Good For, Anyway? Out next month from Signum University Press.
Twain is a savage literary critic! His massacre of Cooper is hilarious. Maybe the funniest thing I’ve read from him.
Big Mike said...
When I was young the first volume of Don Knuth’s The Art of Computer Programming, and I was so taken with his writing style that I consciously set out to imitate it. . .
I partied with his daughter a couple times back in the late '80s.
I learned to write well from my first prof in grad school. He was a brutal editor. His writing seemed very opaque at first, but then I realized that he didn't waste a single word. Compared to other scholars of the time (archaeology) he could say in a few sentences what others would vomit around for two or three paragraphs.
Hence, when I write a journal article or report I'm constantly stopping in the middle of a sentence and thinking "What exactly am I trying to say here?" and imagining Dr. Dunnell looking over my shoulder, ready to strike with his red pen.
I have Knuth's first three volumes (I mean, who doesn't), and used them extensively back in the day.
But let me recommend the volume he (and many others) produced during his Summer Vacation at Adobe, "3:16 / Bible Texts Illuminated".
I also wanted to recommend Stephen Kings "On Writing". Unlike much of his writing, it is fairly short and concise. I have only read a couple of his books and don't count myself as a fan, but I liked this one. I also appreciate the nod to "Bird by Bird." I had forgotten that book. It's snowing again today - I may have to pull them out for a reread this month.
One writing exercise I have enjoyed: pick a topic and a word count. Write your article. Then, if it was 300 words, write the same article but in 150 words making sure not to lose the essential elements. Then try if but in 75 words. Heard it in a video class but not by the person who developed it so I don't know who to credit.
Post a Comment
Please use the comments forum to respond to the post. Don't fight with each other. Be substantive... or interesting... or funny. Comments should go up immediately... unless you're commenting on a post older than 2 days. Then you have to wait for us to moderate you through. It's also possible to get shunted into spam by the machine. We try to keep an eye on that and release the miscaught good stuff. We do delete some comments, but not for viewpoint... for bad faith.