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

Comments

[faithhopetricks.livejournal.com]

Actually, I sneakily like little secret reminders that I am reading. Like when one character says to another "Oh those things only happen in books" or when Sam wonders to Frodo what kind of story they'll be in (in fact, some of those moments are my very favorite bits of LOTR). Or, more broadly, like when Don Quixote and Sancho Panza find a pirated edition of their own adventures. It gives me a tickle. Not that all literature has to have that level of meta-reference back to itself, but I think John Gardner's phrase of "the extended dream" -- where you enter into a built world -- is a lot more accurate than the invisible narrator, the invisible author or, God help us scribblers, the invisible book (wouldn't that just be a film?). I should think invisibility is the last thing you want when you're trying to hold a world together. More like what Flaubert (?) said -- that like god, the author's everywhere and nowhere.

moi

[pameladean]

I am entirely with you here.

Pamela

[faithhopetricks.livejournal.com]

((blush)) Well good! Without sounding treacly (I hope) you're one of my favorite authors in how your books refer to other books and literature itself (I tried to massage that into something more comprehensible, but it resisted), especially in Dubious Hills, frex. After all, we're building on a tradition here. I always think of the writer/narrator as being like the storyteller around the campfire. You get drawn into the world of the story, but that doesn't obviate the pleasure that someone's telling it to you. (Was also exposed to the structural delights of Arabian Nights at far too early an age.)

moi

[pameladean]

Aw, thank you. It doesn't sound treacly to me, but, well, I'd be biased, anyway.

I think you're making an important point, once I get over my ego-boo. A lot of this advice makes "being drawn into the story" and "being aware that somebody is telling it to you" into opposites, into things that preclude one another. But you are right, that isn't the case. Both things can happen at once, even in third-person narration.

Pamela

[faithhopetricks.livejournal.com]

Danke! I just have a horror of coming over all gushy -- I don't know why really, most writing is such an isolated phenomenon probably a little gush is more than welcome, que no? I guess more than anything it's fear of trampling someone's privacy. And of looking, well, dopey.

I think one of my favorite occasions of being drawn into the story and being aware someone is telling it is in Middlemarch, when George Eliot writes, "One morning Dorothea -- but why always Dorothea? Why always the pink-cheeked and young and pretty?" (paraphrasing) and we're off for a tour of Mr. Casaubon's psyche. It's so startling -- it jolted other people I knew out of the book but it was to me as if the book had sat up and started speaking (which I of course thought was just fantastic). But I grew up reading Dickens and Jane Eyre and my father's a great fan of Thomas Wolfe, so maybe I'm not as conditioned against authorial intrusion as some modern readers.

I like yr point abt opposites, and picked up another one -- how he equates remaining invisible when writing a book, which he says his rules help him to do, in order "to help....show rather than tell what's taking place in the story" (if there's anything I hate it's Show Don't Tell advice. Sorry, the Showing is an illusion. It's actually all Telling! Some Telling is more convincing than others, that's all. Bye now). Again I can't help seeing it as a sort of cinematic convention, Isherwood's contention that he was a camera -- although even a camera, of course, has a viewpoint: that of the person behind it. I think Jane Austen is invisible, sort of. There certainly aren't any George Eliot-esque authorial intrusions into the narrative of the book. But even in that first famous sentence of P&P, she's...well, telling and showing. Showing through telling I guess is the way I would like to put it.

I hadn't realied how close that book is to beginning with dialogue. Universally acknowledged, good fortune, want of a wife, truth so well fixed, rightful property, and we're off to the races. I also, if I were a little, mean, petty person, could point out that Mrs Bennet "cried impatiently", but I'm not, so I shan't.

moi