Elmore Leonard

Much is made of Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules for Writing. Not so much is made of them by Elmore Leonard, but others have gotten a lot of mileage out of them. And they aren't wrong, and they are obviously distilled from Leonard's own writing.

Much more should be made of Elmore Leonard's actual writing. At this point, gentle reader, I know you have said to yourself "Duh, John" or some kind of "tell me something I don't know" equivalent. However, do not dismiss the actual wonder that is the writing of Elmore Leonard and is completely absent from simple rules, no matter how useful they are.

Toward the beginning of Cuba Libre, Ben Tyler shoots an Spanish officer who draws a dueling pistol on him in a crowded bar. The build up is pure Leonard: nothing sounds like writing. You don't skip over any of it. It's all told from the point of view of an American reporter, who alternates between conveying the narrative and editing it for publication in his own mind. The genius is in the line just after Tyler kills the Spanish officer.

My lord. The sound it made.

That line right there makes everything that comes before it that much more real, and gives credibility to every description that comes after it. It's an aside. A figure of speech. And yet it is the key to this whole passage, one that has so captured my attention that I am writing a blog post about months after I last wrote, and I am doing so a full ten days after I read the line.

Seriously. If you want to know how to write, skip Leonard's rules. Just read his books.

Exercise gets easier

I do writing exercises in composition books, the ones with marbled covers. I buy them for cheap when they go on sale at the beginning of the school year. My kids usually need a couple each; this past year I bought 10 just for me. These are in addition to the ones I already had, empty and partly filled, at home.

I use these pads for other things. I keep an investing journal: I record thoughts, ideas, questions, things I've bought, things I've sold, and always the why and the expectation. This helps mitigate cognitive and emotional biases like hindsight bias and illusion of control--basically keeping me from thinking that I'm a genius and responsible for all my own success.

But mostly, these composition books wait, empty, until they are called into daily service. Or near daily service. Or occasional service. For example, the book I filled to the end this afternoon I started writing in on October 14. Its predecessor was filled on October 13, begun on August 12. Obviously, one was spent faster than the other.

However, that's six months of fairly steady writing in these composition books after several years of writing in one for a week and then forgetting the damn thing for a year. The longest piece in any of the books is probably about six hundred words. Not all of them are explicitly fiction, and some are just riffs on a theme. The two longest from this last book, one is a scene for a novel (someday), an argument between a father and his grown son over restaurant leftovers and the son's ex-wife; and another is a realization that a truly Christ-like person wouldn't be a victim of personality disorders or behavioral bias.

I am always surprised at where these things end up. No kidding: I didn't intend to write about Jesus and narcissism. And I notice that I am becoming more comfortable with that. I don't have to know exactly where it goes to have interest me and to hear the "voice" of whoever is speaking. That's nice. And fun.

It gets easier to do, so I do it more. Would that the same could be said for weightlifting or running.

I also realize I as I do this that there are three discrete parts to good writing. One is the actual writing, using whatever crazy technique or simultaneously unexpected, wacky and dead accurate voice you hear to convey meaning. Another is the mechanical lifting, sewing, excising, breaking, designing and preserving that is revision/rewrite. It is possible to possess both of those skills. I do, if I say so myself. But the third part, separate from and essential to the other two, is to be able to do the actual writing and revision/rewrite on the same piece of writing. This is harder. Which is like saying that Everest is higher than Bald Knob.

The Golden Ratio

Michael Chabon's THE FINAL SOLUTION is an exquisite sliver of a book, homage, mystery and something more all rolled together. It is also hard to read.

Which is odd, because Chabon writes so beautifully, but I find myself tripping over his turgid sentences and their serpentine coils of clause, elaboration and aside. Now, here is a book that no doubt benefits from hearing. All of that goes down much easier if one is told, rather than if one reads. You can voice a far longer sentence, with the benefits of pacing and inflection, than you can write with expectation that someone will read it. Compound this over a far longer book and few will see it to the end. See Faulkner, William, reader frustration with.

Chabon also gets away with this because THE FINAL SOLUTION is so fleeting. By the time you really get into it, you're done. He also gets away with it because his story has propulsive plot. The reader can discern what will constitute an end to this puzzle of a book, and not simply that he is at the last page. This question will drive both the reader and the writing toward an ultimately rewarding conclusion. This questing is not always the case among those whose writing tends toward the beautiful and turgid, folks like Banville and Bellow, to cite only two.

This is the golden ratio, an undefined quantity of "story" that leavens dense prose so it is suitable for any length of reading.  

54.29%

Today is the 121st consecutive day I've written at least 250 words of fiction. Since the beginning of the year, my minimum has been 337 words (the daily average of the first 95 days in this streak), and I've averaged 460 over that time. This puts me nearly 55% of the way toward one million words.

I like statistics. I like liking what I write more. The latter has prevailed recently, as I have finally found a voice for this character I've been writing off and on for five years. For that breakthrough, I owe both the consistency of work over the past four months and Graham Greene.

Everyone says that THE POWER AND THE GLORY is Greene's masterpiece. Perhaps it is, having read precious little other of Greene's work, I can't judge. I can say that I don't really care for THE POWER AND THE GLORY. It isn't that Greene doesn't write beautifully, or that his characters don't work, or that his effort fails in any meaningful way. I simply don't enjoy reading from the perspective that Greene employs, a sort of limited omniscience (?) that explains to the reader things that the characters on the page would not necessarily know or think.

This is not what I like to read, and it's not how I write. My good work has tended to have close perspective, and genuine voice because of that. I don't have to write to a rule or a style. I have to write to that close perspective on a character only I can know. This is exciting.

Thoughts on A LIFE IN SECRETS

Sarah Helm's A LIFE IN SECRETS reads like the backstory of an Alan Furst novel. It details the life and work of Vera Atkins, whose fame stems from her WW2 work with spies and saboteurs sent from Britain to France and her tenacious search to find information about what happened to them once they were captured. Vera's personal story makes this Furstian, and the book itself is a layered tale of puzzles across six decades.

In studying Vera, Helm's exhaustive search led her both to vindicate Vera and to reveal secrets that Vera sheltered all her life. The book delves into Vera's work during the war, her efforts to locate her agents (particularly the women), her sprawling investigation into what exactly happened to them in concentration camps. That's a whole book right there, but Helm goes further, examining Vera's family history (she was born Jewish in Romania to a German father and an Englishwoman brought up in South Africa), the secrecy in which Vera shrouded it all her life and how that affected her efforts to sanitize her own background and her work during the war.

The book is as much a celebration of the work undertaken by less than ideal agents during WW2 as it is an indictment of gross negligence and incompetence of the intelligence community, often run by less than ideal officers.

I've not given much in the way of specifics about the book, because Vera's story is told so well here that I don't want to spoil it should you decide to read it. It amazes me sometimes that the Allies won the war at all, and it is shameful that we are forgetting more and more about the war in general as time passes.

N.B. This book deals in parts with the horrors of concentration camps. It is necessary to acknowledge these horrors, but it is not easy.

There is now a Level Zero

I have struggled to do my work recently. I would much rather read. Or watch a movie. Or play cards. Or board games. Or Wii Bowling. Or fold laundry.

Yes, fold laundry. It's that bad.

Even when I know I should work, I look at the task at hand and think that it's gonna take SOOOO long or I have to upstairs to do that or something similarly pathetic. Which invokes a round of self-loathing--but ironically, that's not enough to get me to work, either.

I have chosen to tackle the misperception about time. And it works. I simply set aside a short time to do work. Depending on the task, it can range from five to twenty minutes. If I'm having trouble starting an article, I force myself to work for five minutes. Usually by the end of five minutes I'm into it and willing to keep going. For studying, I do twenty minutes. Wherever I am at the end of twenty minutes, I stop. That is my reward for doing the twenty minutes.

Doing this repeatedly over the course of a day nets an impressive amount of work. Today I studied for an hour and forty minutes: five twenty-minute shifts. I also finished an article I was working on in two five minute shifts that both turned into twenty-to-thirty minute shifts.

This tells me that the way I perceive the time necessary to complete a task and the opportunity cost of going ahead and working right now are, shall we say, inadequate. That's being kind. Really, they're destructive.

I have to stop. I only allotted five minutes for this.

The death of youth

My favorite baseball player growing up is now in the Hall of Fame. I am officially old.

Congratulations, Barry Larkin.