I'm taking a couple of days' break from NaNoWriMo while I wait for my new wrist brace to arrive in tomorrow's mail.   Apparently the last few days of writing 3000 words a day have set off a reaction in my carpal tunnel -- or maybe it's just a warning from the ever-lurking old-age-related arthritis. Whatever the case, I'm trying to limit my keyboard use. So why am I writing a blog? Guess I'm an  IT addict.

I thought I'd use this break to remind you of one of my favorite websites.The picture above is the official trademark of The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature. If you like it, you can order it printed on all sorts of objects (tee shirts, coffee mugs, even men's boxers!)   

Here's their motto:

 

This writing business is tougher than it looks!  For most of my working life, I was an academic. I wrote scholarly stuff to prove to other scholars that I  was doing my homework. An academic book requires the author to include such deadly material as detailed, endless footnotes, copious illustrations, diagrams and authentic photographs, frequent references to other scholars in the field, a complete recitation of the current status of scholarship in the field, and at least  one theoretical framework.  It was sometimes boring, but I was pretty good at it, and I had publications with major university presses.

 

Then I retired and turned to a new field of study—one that had always interested me but in which I had little formal instruction. I wanted to write about a small battle of the Civil War, basing the narrative on a letter collection written by my great uncle who founght there. I wrote the kind of book I knew how to write—full of illustrations, professionally drawn maps, lengthy bibliography, and tons of footnotes. I sent the manuscript off to the university presses I knew, and they said “No, thank you. Not enough theroetical positioning, not enough discussion of the current scholarship in the field, no review of literature, yada, yada, yada.”

 

So I re-grouped, faced the fact that my audience was no longer filled with fellow academics, decided there was another audience out there, and sent it off to some smaller publishers who specialized in Civil War books. One accepted it almost immediately and I sent it off unchanged from the original.  They published it, in all its academic gobbledegook, and offered it to re-enactors and battlefield visitors. it fell flat. Only my friends bought it, and they did so only to be nice.

 

When the publisher remaindered it, I took back my publishing rights, did a major overhaul, and created the kind of book the Civil War buffs seemed to be looking for. I took out the footnotes, rewriting to put any vital citations into the text. I took out all the illustrations and put them up on Pinterest for anyone who was really interested. And then I tightened the storyline, hired a cover designer to come up with a more appealing picture, and put much more emphasis on the human interest angles. It was still my book. I was still writing what I knew and what I cared about, but this time I kept the reader in mind. And I sold over 700 books in the first two weeks of Kindle publication.

 

That’s what I call “giving the readers what they are looking for.” KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE!

 

I still have to remind myself of that from time to time. Almost all of my books are set in and around Charleston, South Carolina. Recently I published  a novel set in western Pennsylvania, and my South Carolina readers hate it. It’s not what they expect. I’ve gotten the message. The next one returns to Charleston.

 

I had a NaNoCabinmate a couple of years ago who tried to talk me into writing medieval fantasy. I could do that and It would probably be fun (I love Harry Potter!). But I won’t do it. My readers know I’m a historian as well as a writer. They comment on how much they learn from my books. They trust me to give them the nitty-gritty, even when it’s not convenient or pleasant. I can’t betray that trust by turning to fantasy and telling them that dragons are real or giving Henry VIII a seventh wife.

 

One more horrible example set by someone else. A highly selective book award contest recently asked me to review a new book just coming out. It was a war story, but it flashed back and forth between the story of brave and single-minded soldiers in wartime, and the blatantly sexual antics  their wives were up to back home. The audience the writer had in mind was quite obvious. (Note: On Amazon, he had one review from a fellow who admitted he read a lot of “erotica” and gave it five stars.)

 

He was writing for a certain male audience who would enjoy wallowing in their own pornographic fantasies. That was his choice, and he was free to make it. I think he understood that audience. But the poor fellow made the mistake of thinking that everyone would like the kind of book he had written. So he entered a serious book contest designed for military writers.  And instead of someone who likes erotica, he got a reviewer-judge who happened to be an elderly military wife. And she was not amused.

 

Bottom line: You are free to pick your audience. Decide who you want to read your book, and then figure out what they want to read. Then write for them.

 

 

 

By ELMORE LEONARD

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 flavor 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, and yet we see the couple and know them by their tones of voice, with not one adverb in sight.

9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.

Unless you’re Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language or write landscapes in the style of Jim Harrison. But even if you’re good at it, you don’t want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.

And finally:

10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

A rule that came to mind in 1983. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he’s writing, perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character’s head, and the reader either knows what the guy’s thinking or doesn’t care. I’ll bet you don’t skip dialogue.

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10.

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can’t allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative. It’s my attempt to remain invisible, not distract the reader from the story with obvious writing. (Joseph Conrad said something about words getting in the way of what you want to say.)

If I write in scenes and always from the point of view of a particular character—the one whose view best brings the scene to life—I’m able to concentrate on the voices of the characters telling you who they are and how they feel about what they see and what’s going on, and I’m nowhere in sight.

What Steinbeck did in “Sweet Thursday” was title his chapters as an indication, though obscure, of what they cover. “Whom the Gods Love They Drive Nuts” is one, “Lousy Wednesday” another. The third chapter is titled “Hooptedoodle 1” and the 38th chapter “Hooptedoodle 2” as warnings to the reader, as if Steinbeck is saying: “Here’s where you’ll see me taking flights of fancy with my writing, and it won’t get in the way of the story. Skip them if you want.”

“Sweet Thursday” came out in 1954, when I was just beginning to be published, and I’ve never forgotten that prologue.

Did I read the hooptedoodle chapters? Every word.

 

By ELMORE LEONARD

These are rules I’ve picked up along the way to help me remain invisible when I’m writing a book, to help me show rather than tell what’s taking place in the story. If you have a facility for language and imagery and the sound of your voice pleases you, invisibility is not what you are after, and you can skip the rules. Still, you might look them over.

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 to describe ice and snow than an Eskimo, 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 nonfiction. 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 O.K. 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. . . . figure out what the guy’s thinking from what he says. I like some description but not too much of that. . . . Sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle. . . . Spin up some pretty words maybe or sing a little song with language. That’s nice. But I wish it was set aside so I don’t have to read it. I don’t want hooptedoodle to get mixed up with the story.”

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 to get 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.

.

 

We’ll look at the last five tomorrow.

As I started thinking about story arcs, I ran across this set of guidelines. It was put together by someone who does a lot of reviewing, and as a reviewer myself, i can clearly imagine the kind of book that spurred him to compose it.  It appeared as part of a longer article, which you might find at: www.writermarkstevens.com, but even without the rest of the article, his point is clear: “Think about your reader, not yourself. The important question is not what you want to write, but what your reader wants to read.” You don’t have to follow these rules – unless, of course, you hope to sell your book!

Hope I can keep them firmly in mind for the next thirty days.

    •     Keep it simple.

    •     Give me one character with a strong point of view.

    •     Show me that character’s attitude about one thing.

    •     Don’t give me blah.

    •     Or ordinary.

    •     Give me edge; risk.

    •     Convince me that the story starts on this day.

    •     Rivet me with a colorful detail. Or two.

    •     Decide why I want to spend a few hundred pages with your main character and give me one reason to engage in the first few pages.

    •     Help me see, taste, smell, touch. Make it sensory.

    •     Avoid using dialogue that is only designed to fill readers in on the background lives of the characters. (Just don’t!) This is dialogue as “info dump.” It’s deadly.

    •     But, mostly, keep it simple.

    •     Really simple.

    •     No, really.