TriQuarterly Blog

Literarily: Print and Digital Lit MagsI was listening to the Canadian Broadcasting Company yesterday and heard an interview with prolific writer Elmore Leonard (the novelist/screenwriter who penned Get Shorty, 3:10 to Yuma and current F/x series Justified), which referenced his widely circulated “10 rules of writing.” 

As I’m digging back into Act 1 of my novel, it seems like a good time to revisit them. In brief, the logical but oft-broken rules are:

1.  Never open a book with weather.
2.  Avoid prologues.
3.  Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue.
4.  Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said”…he admonished gravely.
5.  Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words  of prose. 
6.  Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose."
7.  Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
8.  Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
9.  Don't go into great detail describing places and things.
10.  Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

Some of these are painful to absorb; it’s hard out here for an adverb-lover. But when critiquing a piece of writing with these rules in mind, it’s hard to disagree with a single one. The CBC is running a contest based on Leonard's rules: The winner must write a single sentence that breaks as many of them as possible. 

“All you have to do is knock us out with a truly amazing sentence and you could be one of our five finalists. Winners will have their rule-breaking sentences featured on Day 6 and published in The National Post. We'll also send winners three great Elmore Leonard books courtesy of HarperCollins.”

When the Guardian covered Leonard’s rules, they asked other writers to contribute their own rules. I’ve pasted a few of the meatier gems below. Enjoy. 

Margaret Atwood:

You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there's no free lunch. Writing is work. It's also gambling. You don't get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but ­essentially you're on your own. ­Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don't whine.

Roddy Doyle:

Do not place a photograph of your ­favourite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide.
 Do be kind to yourself. Fill pages as quickly as possible; double space, or write on every second line. Regard every new page as a small triumph 

Richard Ford:

Marry somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer's a good idea. 
Don't have children.
 Don't read your reviews.

Diana Athill:

Read it aloud to yourself because that's the only way to be sure the rhythms of the sentences are OK (prose rhythms are too complex and subtle to be thought out – they can be got right only by ear).

Jonathan Franzen:

The most purely autobiographical ­fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more auto­biographical story than "The Meta­morphosis"

Esther Freud:

Don't wait for inspiration. Discipline is the key. Trust your reader. Not everything needs to be explained. If you really know something, and breathe life into it, they'll know it too.

Neil Gaiman:

Remember: when people tell you something's wrong or doesn't work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.

PD James:

Increase your word power. Words are the raw material of our craft. The greater your vocabulary the more ­effective your writing. We who write in English are fortunate to have the richest and most versatile language in the world. Respect it.

Al Kennedy:

Write. No amount of self-inflicted misery, altered states, black pullovers or being publicly obnoxious will ever add up to your being a writer. Writers write. On you go. 
Read. As much as you can. As deeply and widely and nourishingly and irritatingly as you can. And the good things will make you remember them, so you won't need to take notes.

Hilary Mantel:

Read Becoming a Writer, by Dorothea Brande. Then do what it says, including the tasks you think are impossible. You will particularly hate the advice to write first thing in the morning, but if you can manage it, it might well be the best thing you ever do for yourself. This book is about becoming a writer from the inside out. Many later advice manuals derive from it. You don't ­really need any others, though if you want to boost your confidence, "how to" books seldom do any harm. You can kick-start a whole book with some little writing exercise.

Michael Moorcock:

Find an author you admire (mine was Conrad) and copy their plots and characters in order to tell your own story, just as people learn to draw and paint by copying the masters.

Literarily: Print and Digital Lit Mags

It’s tough to get back in the swing after the holidays, isn’t it? January work deadlines seem to come fast and furious, and there’s that holiday sugar addiction to overcome. Therefore this post will just be a snap shot of the stuff up on my screen - stuff I think you should be reading, too.

First, there’s the Chicago Reader fiction issue, judged by the instructor of my current fiction workshop at Northwestern, Goldie Goldbloom. One of the stories chosen was “The Gentle Grift,” a revenge-oriented tale by my classmate Tim Chapman.

Next, because of my recent obsession with Downton Abbey, I stumbled across this Galley Cat post about a reading list relevant to the PBS series (Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, etc.).

For a little levity, I’m reading the McSweeeney’s piece about Paula Deen and pole dancing: “I’d like to teach you one of my very favorite pole moves: the Buttercake Spin. It’s such a pretty move, y’all—your legs are going to look just like egg-beaters fluffing through a bowl of cream cheese!”

Also up on my screen is a fascinating post up by Brainpicker about a “master plotting” book. “The art of mechanized storytelling, or what a cardboard robot has to do with melodrama and Law & Order.” And I’m saving this article about the literary history of word processing for my morning coffee tomorrow.

Good luck to all of you with your 2012 resolutions, and, if you’re anything like me, weaning yourself from that holiday-centric 10-cookies-per-day.

With a Small p: Everyday Reflections on PoetryAs it is the end of the year, I want to present a list of literary events that shaped my year. When confronted with the words “literary events” one naturally assumes “public readings.” Not me.  I only went to one reading this year and that was an open mic event at my local used bookstore, the Armadillo’s Pillow.  I was one of two people who read, and I only read when my lovely wife insisted I do so. The audience was no more than five people, including my dog, but I felt more relaxed at this reading than at others, and I read better as a result. So this will serve as my first entry on a list I’m calling “Vince’s Top Seven Literary Events of 2011.” 

7. Reading a poem at the Armadillo’s Pillow. (See above.)

6. Deciding that life is too short to go to poetry readings. Often, I am told that I should go to more readings, if for no other reason than to be a part of the community of poets. To this I have no response, as I would very much like to be part of this community, though if admission rests solely on going to readings I may forever find myself outside the gates. I do not dislike poetry readings altogether, but I find that poets at such events often sacrifice their natural voice when transitioning from obligatory introductions (why can't the poem simply speak for itself?) to their actual work. Their tone shifts from conversational and engaging to overly serious and affected. I find this alienating.

5. Rereading Joyce Mansour, Mina Loy, and Nick Laird - three very different poets who have been on my mind these days. In an ideal world, I would write with their combined strengths.

4. Reading The Stray Dog Cabaret and realizing that, a) the Silver Age Russian poets are where it’s at, and, b) that translation can be beautiful even when it takes liberties. Translator Paul Schmidt definitely turns the work of these poets (Mayakovsky, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Khlebnikov, Pasternak, Blok, and Mandelstam) into something very much his own. The book is hardly complete or definitive, and, again, the translations take some serious liberties, but the result is an imagined conversation between these writers that no other anthology has matched. 

3. Reading poems for TriQuarterly. This has certainly helped me understand what submission readers are thinking when wading through the "slush," an invaluable experience.

2. Sunday lunch at D’Amato’s. Between classes, I race to D’Amato’s for a slice of cheese and a slice of veggie pizza and, often, a cannoli. While devouring this incomparably delicious lunch, I read some poems, as the experience demands a good poem in accompaniment. Perhaps my greatest success was when I paired the thick, soft bread laden with tomato and spinach with the organic, earthy poems of Luljeta Lleshanaku.

1. Rediscovering Tom Wait’s Alice. Ever since the age of thirteen, I’ve been a Tom Waits fan. His new record is pretty good, though it caused me to dig back into his past catalog, which, in turn, caused me to rediscover Alice, a neglected masterpiece. I have never believed that song lyrics are anything close to poetry (sorry Bob Dyaln, you’re not a poet), but the song “Poor Edward” makes me reconsider my position. Not that the lyrics are poetic, but the entire experience of listening to the song—words and music—is close to the feeling that comes with reading a good poem. I get chills every time I hear this song.  

Hours of the Universe: The Bookstore CosmonautThere is an unassuming storefront on Washington Street in Evanston, just south and west of the Main Street L and Metra stations, which houses the Chicago Rare Book Center. The front door opens on to what could be the studio apartment of an occasionally fastidious book collector. Or at least it could be if said collector had unfailing taste and funds (and no kitchen or bed). For all of the books with short, typed descriptions of their significance tucked neatly in their jackets in the twenty to thirty feet of glass cases that line the east and west walls of the shop’s anterior, there is another stack of boxed books (including, I have on good faith, a magnificent early edition of Johnson’s dictionary, a most staggering example of human intellect). When I inquired in passing about a signed first edition of Infinite Jest, I was given a full tour of that volume, as well as a test drive of a complete collection of the original serial edition of Dombey and Son and a volume of Yeats poems apparently signed from beyond the grave by the man himself. For every book in the case, there is a story, and any of the four store’s partners are happy to tell you any one of them.

Ann, Paul, Tom, and Pat, the store’s partners, are also happy to let you browse in peace. On one of my recent visits, Tom was occupied helping a would-be-seller find a buyer for some obscure book with an apparently interesting collection of maps. After my girlfriend and I had made enough laps of the ground floor to send me in search of a chair, Tom called out to us,

“Folks, there are more books downstairs. Feel free to have a look around.”

We descended the stairs, and in the basement we discovered what could be that aforementioned book collector-with-occasional-fastidiousness’s personal library. There is a small open case of signed editions including Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel The Namesake and John Updike’s memoir Self-conscious. There is a table with a few antique bookends and crates of LPs. The floor-to-ceiling shelves (or ceiling-to-shelf for you Reaganites) which wrap around the basement have all of the basics: History, Literature, Gardening, Religion, and beyond. I found myself loitering between the sections of World War I and Gardening books, an area which houses several dozen volumes of transportation books, broken down further into a shelf each of Trains and Railroad, Ships and Navigation, and Automobiles. For any of you skeptical of the majesty of the railroad, please find a first edition folio of Robert S. Henry’s Portraits of the Iron Horse in its original cloth binding, and get back to me. I can’t promise I won't say I told you so.

I would like to report on each book I found that piqued my interest, but I fear you will race yourself to Chicago Rare and raid my wishlist. I would also like to report a conversation with Pat about, as I dumbly stated to him, “What it is you do, and why you do it.” Suffice it instead to say, I’ll be back another time when he is less entrenched in cataloguing a haul of books from an out-of-town fair. When I return, I hope to find, spellbound with me.