On Writing: Following the Pro's Rules

How are your writing habits? Could you be more organised? Do they yield constantly good quality work? Or do you often get writer’s block or feel the work is sloppy and needs shaping up?

Maybe you need some helpful tips to get you on your way?

If so, follow this link to the Guardian’s website where a collection of writers, inspired by Elmore Leonard’s forthcoming 10 Rules of Writing, have shared their top 10 rules for writers. I followed it and was prompted to compile my top 10; not my own top 10 though, the top 10 as chosen from the website – they’re professionals after all.

Here’s my Top 10 Rules of Writing

From the Pro's Top 10 Rules for Writers
(which is now printed on A4 paper and attached to the wall in front of me)

1) If it sounds like writing, rewrite it. (Elmore Leonard)

2) Read it aloud to yourself because that’s the only way to be sure the rhythms of the sentence are OK (prose rhythms are too complex to be thought out…). (Diana Athill)

3) Do change your mind. Good ideas are often murdered by better ones… (Roddy Doyle) *

4a) Keep a diary. The biggest regret of my life is that I never kept a journal or a diary… 4b)Beware of clichés… There are clichés of response as well as expression. There are clichés of observation and of thought – even of conception. Many novels, even quite a few adequately written ones, are clichés of form which conform to clichés of expectation. (Geoff Dyer) **

5) You see more sitting still than chasing after. (Jonathan Franzen)

6) Editing is everything. Cut until you can cut no more. What is left often springs into life. (Esther Freud) ***

7) 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. (Al Kennedy) ****

8) When I’m deep inside a story, living it as I write, I honestly don’t know what will happen. I try not to dictate it, not to play God. (Michael Morpurgo) *****

9) Don’t overwrite. Avoid redundant phrases, the distracting adjectives, the unnecessary adverbs. Beginners, especially, seem to think that writing fiction needs a special kind of flowery prose, completely unlike any sort of language one might encounter in day-to-day life. This is a misapprehension about how the effects of fiction are produced, and can be dispelled by obeying Rule 1. To read some work by Colm Tolbin or Cormac McCarthy, for example, is to discover how a deliberately limited vocabulary can produce an astonishing emotional punch. (Sarah Waters) ******

10) Work on a computer that is disconnected from the Internet. (Zadie Smith) *******

* This reminded me of the late Alan Coren’s rule: Whatever the first thing is that comes into your head, don’t write that because that’s what everyone will write. When the second idea comes into your head, don’t write that either because that’s what the bright kids will write. Wait for the third idea, because that’s the one that only you will do.

** I similarly regret not keeping a diary throughout my childhood. I tried once when I was about 7 but only managed about 5 months. I regretted this more significantly after taking note of Francois Truffaut’s like minded quote about a film director’s total work is a diary kept throughout their lifetime.

*** This is the rule known as Occam’s Razor which I’ll be writing about in a post shortly.

**** He’s right about ‘good things will make you remember them’, one quote that has stuck with me recently was David Blunket’s summary of the Question Time/Nick Griffin debacle: They made a victim out of the perpetrator. 8 words that perfectly summed up the 10000’s of words used surrounding the event.

***** This style of writing illustrates the organic and majestic nature of the idea: spontaneous, unexpected, unpredictable, magical, natural, primal.

****** Overwriting is an easy trap to fall into. Unnecessary flourishes in language can be destructive.

******* It’s inevitable: how can you fully concentrate on a piece of writing when the world is at your fingertips. Sometimes it takes me two hours of surfing the web before I realise I’m not doing what I intended and have to click-off!

On Writing #1: The Writer vs The Editor

Whenever I’ve read a work of fiction, I’ve naturally assumed, perhaps naively so, that the content was entirely decided upon by the author. I never considered the work of the editor nor the extent of their influence. That was until I read The Final Cut, Sarah Churchwell’s revealing article in the Guardian’s 24/10/09 Review supplement.

In the article Churchwell illustrates the influence editors have had over literary giants such as Raymond Carver, Ernest Hemmingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. For me, the article was a shocking revelation; editors not only advise but also rewrite, sometimes making huge decisions on the author’s behalf? Inevitably I was led to the question: how much is the author the author?

During the 70’s, Raymond Carver was a respected writer, having written the well-received Will You Be Quiet, Please? (1976), but far from famous. Then he wrote the collection of short stories, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1980), which received massive critical recognition. The collection was noted for its laconic and ‘minimalist’ style, a style that was labelled ‘Carveresque’. This distinct writing style was not so much created by Carver but by his editor, Gordon Lish. It could therefore be said that Lish had, in effect, ‘made Carver’s reputation’.

When Lish was handed the manuscript for What We Talk About When We Talk About Love he proceeded to edit, after he finished he had altered Carver’s original book’s title (Beginners), the characters’ names, the chapter titles and even the nature of the stories. Churchill writes:

‘… Lish not only made the stories much shorter: he also made them more elliptical, more open-ended, darker, more violent and callous, more working class and less overtly intellectual… changing their tone and overall attitude to women.’

I never realised editors had the power to take such liberties. I assumed the brave or ruthless editorial actions Lish took would scorn the author’s credibility and breach the extent to which editors can contribute to an author's work. I was clearly wrong, or maybe the Carver and Lish relationship was unusual. To me it seems that their collaborative relationship was so intermingled that the editor should be credited as much as the author, otherwise is that not a doing a disservice to the editor and fooling the reader?

After reading Churchwell’s article I went to my own shelf of books and rifled through a dozen or so, searching for the names of credited editors. I could not find one. So who knows who made the final decision of the final piece? Has the content been toned down? Who is responsible for the quality of the writing? How much have the author's original intentions been swayed by those of their editor?

Ironically the closest I came to finding an editor was in Raymond Carver’s Short Cuts (1993), a collection of 9 stories from What We Talk About When We Talk About Love that inspired Robert Altman's film of the same name. The copyright goes to Tess Gallagher, Carver’s wife who has recently restored Carver’s original, un-Lished, version of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, restoring even its title, Beginners (which now is 229 pages long, over 80 pages longer than before).

Afterthought........ Comparatively, in other works of art, for example painting, I wonder what it would have been like if there was an editorial artist who finished some of Dali's surreal landscapes, adding tones where they had consider it missing.

The editors of films are credited and well acknowledged. However, the real editors who notoriously use their power to cut are the producers and studio executives. But which one is superior: the director’s cut or the studio cut? The author’s vision or the populist package? Would you rather see Sergio Leone’s 229 minute cut of Once Upon A Time In America (1984) or the studio version which runs at 144 mintes?