Suggestions for Writers

[pameladean]

I got this, too, from Making Light; really sometimes I hardly know how I would organize my day without Teresa's weblog.

She calls it "Gene Wolfe's Rules for Writers." I had to go look. I admire Gene Wolfe somewhere the wrong side of idolatry.

They sit so much better with me than anybody else's. I might argue with one or two, but they do not provoke an allergic reaction, a resistance like that of a two-year-old threatened with being deprived of a large fragile glass object, a mad "I won't do it and you can't make me" or "what the hell is your problem, you moron" response.

So I thought I'd provide the link:

http://subnet.pinder.net/onwriting/index.asp?name=./References/19970101wolfe.htm

I think the reason I like these better than most is partly that Wolfe and I have similar aesthetics, though hardly similar practices; but mostly it's that it hardly ever says "Never" (except in one ironic bit) or "Always," does not toy around with forbidding or prescribing very specific words and phrases, and often says "Try to" rather than "You must."

I'm quite sure a person could violate every one of them and write a good book, but I don't feel the usual desire to do just that, IMMEDIATELY.

Pamela

Comments

[alecto23.livejournal.com]

The other one is labelling at least every second speech.

Hm, in principle I agree with you—I prefer the speaker-identification to be an oppportunity for including some additional information and think that when it doesn't, it can be left out.

On the other hand, I have read books which went on for pages without speaker-identification and eventually I got so confused as to who was saying what that I had to go back and count the number of exchanges. In those cases, I'd prefer a "Fred said" to nothing, but a "Fred said, looking away in embarrassment" or something would be best of all.

[(Anonymous)]

Yes, I agree. Sorry I can't think of a more modern example just now, but there is a passage in _Shirley_ (Charlotte Bronte) where I have to go through with my finger EVERY time, muttering "Caroline, Shirley, Caroline, Shirley, Caroline ... yes, it WAS Caroline who said that! Now, where was I?"

I'd stake something that the confusion between the two there has led a few critics to assume that all the more hotheaded speeches are Shirley's, which IIRC they aren't (it's about honors even really).

Helen

[alecto23.livejournal.com]

Mmm, that's it exactly. The last one like that I remember reading was Steven Brust's Cowboy Feng's Space Bar & Grille, which I quite enjoyed on the whole. It just had this one part that went on for a couple of pages that I had to read twice (with finger, attributing as I went) before I got the sense of it. And I still had the overlay of my initial impression of the conversation having gone the other way confusing me...Come to think of it, Zelazny does that a bit, too.

[davidgoldfarb.livejournal.com]

Brust has a couple of conversations that he bobbles -- two speech tags show up in a row that wind up having to be the same person saying both of them. If memory serves me right, there's one in Orca and then another one in the Paarfi books somewhere. Perhaps following Wolfe's rule would have helped prevent that.

[pameladean]

I bet that's a typesetting error that didn't get caught or got caught but not corrected. Following Wolfe's rule might not have made any difference; you'd just have got, as in fact I just did in a kind of shabby Ruth Rendell novel published paperback in the seventies, two "X said"'s in a row.

Pamela