About Rules for Writing

[pameladean]

This entry was almost entitled just "Rules for Writing," but I realized that doing so would cause people to think that I was about to list some or recommend some, whereas in fact I don't even believe in them any more. This fact is in the foreground of my thoughts because of the recent link on[Bad username or site: Making Light @ livejournal.com] to Elmore Leonard's ten rules for writing. Now, Mr. Leonard specifically says that these are rules he uses to make himself invisible, and that if one doesn't wish to do that, one needn't look them over. So I have no direct quarrel with him. But I admit to considerable puzzlement. People are always on about transparent prose (I flatly disbelieve in that as well; I have never, ever seen any transparent prose, not to my range of vision, never, not once) and effacing the writer and making the reader forget that the reader is, well, reading, making the reader forget that there is a book, is text. I do not understand it. I like books. I like text. I like books better than movies, better than television, better than comic books, better than painting, sculpture, cooking, music, or dance. I like them because they are text, because they are words. I don't want to forget that they are books. I don't want to be tricked or fooled or to have their textuality pared down to the bone so I can see through or beyond it to its reality. Nor do I want the writer to be invisible. Well, possibly the writer, though of course that is in fact an impossible thing to accomplish. But say it's possible. Maybe it's sometimes a good idea for the writer to be invisible. But I don't want the narrator to be invisible. I don't want words that aren't much like words, small pale faint weak unassuming words. What in the world is the point of that? I know a book is writing, I like knowing that, or why would I bother reading?

Pamela