8 minute read
OFF THE PAGE with Raymond Atkins
OFF THE PAGE with Raymond Atkins
I am asked quite often by people who want to write what the rules for writing are, and I’m sorry to say that I can’t tell you what they are. No, I’m not being mean or cagey, and there is not some secret society you have to join before you are allowed to have this information, like the Masons or the Scientologists. It is simply that writing is an extremely individual endeavor, and what works for me may not work for you. It’s like Somerset Maugham said: “There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”
He was a great writer, by the way, and it’s not his fault that I can no longer stomach his most famous effort, Of Human Bondage, which used to be one of my favorite books. The blame for that rests with a former professor of mine from grad school who once made me whip out fifty pages on existential depression and club feet, thus sucking all the joy out of great literature, grad school, love, life, tacos, and European travels. So, thanks for that.
Anyway, now that I have gotten my monthly digression out of the way, and boy do I feel better, I want to share with you some writing tips that work for me. If you find any of them useful, please feel free to take them as your own and run with them. If none of them appeal to you, well, these things happen, and don’t let the fact that I have this awesome column in a swanky magazine sway you in any way into doing anything you are not comfortable doing.
The most useful writing tip I have to share has been attributed to various authors, but I encountered it while reading A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway. Papa made a point of urging us all to stop at a good place every day when writing. Truly, this has been a lifesaver for me. Back when I began to write, I would write and write each day until I no longer had anything left. This was great for word count, but it had the unintended side effect of making it extraordinarily difficult to get started during the next writing session, because I had written myself into a corner and had nothing to say. Now, though, I set a word target, and when I hit that goal I stop, even if I am “in the zone” and have more to write.
Speaking of word goals, 500 words is much easier to hit than 10,000 words. Even if you take weekends and your birthday off, that will still produce a good fat book per year (500 words X 300 days = 150,000 words) plus the beginnings of the next one, and it is very doable. Okay, enough of that. I promised Mandy that there would be no math in these things, so do me a solid here and don’t mention this paragraph to her.
This next one is pretty important, and I really can’t stress it enough. Never, ever try to be profound with your writing. I get it that as writers we all want to be profound, but I have found that the harder I try, the less likely it becomes, and then I end up talking about handicapped people and existential depression, and trust me when I tell you that neither of us wants that. So what I do instead is just put my best words on the page, and if you the readers decide that they have achieved profundity, yay for me, and just make that Pulitzer check out to “Cash.”
I am an English teacher by trade, so if you didn’t see this next one coming, that’s on you. Use punctuation, and make an attempt to be sure that at least some of it is correct. Punctuation marks are like little road signs that help keep readers firmly in the narrative, which is where you want them. To put it plainly, if your book is hard to read, it is much less likely to get itself read. I understand that some of our greatest writers have skipped style in favor of content—Cormac McCarthy comes to mind, and if you haven’t read Blood Meridian or Suttree, what are you waiting for—but for most of us it is best to do whatever we can to put an easy read in the hands of our readers.
Yesterday during the course of living a random Saturday, I encountered three separate images vivid enough to perhaps someday appear in a book. This was about a normal day for me. The stuff of our writing is all around us, and every day as I live my life I witness unique and interesting people, places, names, and situations that might one day find their way into my writing, but if I rely upon my memory, this will never happen. Since I am old school, you will never catch me without my little steno notebook, and several times a day you will see me jotting impressions into it.
Most people these days have smart phones. Well, I don’t, but I do have this trusty flip phone, and since I can’t even make it do all the things it will supposedly do, there is not much point to an upgrade. And anyway, I am in negotiations with the Smithsonian for them to feature it in their History of Technology exhibit, but so far their offer has been low. But for the rest of you, capturing these moments for later use has become easy. You can just point and click, and by doing so you will have plenty of material to choose from when it comes time to write.
As an aside to this tip, if you are married and show up for Wednesday night “tea” wearing a rental Viking outfit and carrying your smart phone with a full charge, your partner may balk a bit, at least until you explain to them that you are researching a sex scene for the next Great American Novel, after which everything should go smoothly. I mean, everyone wants to be a character in a novel, right?
Names are important, and you want to take as much care with naming a character as you would with naming a child. With luck and some distribution, your character, just like that child, will have that name for an entire lifetime, and perhaps for several. Take Odysseus as an example. He has carried that name for over 2000 years, and the name has become synonymous with the character and what he represents, but what if Homer had gotten lazy with the naming and just called him Chuck? It just would not have been the same.
I have found that the best place to discover great names is in the old section of almost any cemetery. These names are often interesting, and always authentic, and I like to think as I use one that the former owner of the name approves of this small bit of immortality.
There are several writing tips that I have heard of but have not tried, and I’ll share a few of them here on the chance that they might appeal to you. I have heard that William Faulkner was sloshed most of the time while writing, and while that may or may not be true, I don’t suppose it would hurt to have a glass of wine or maybe a cold beer while you stare at your screen waiting for the Muse to make an appearance. When she first started out, J.K. Rowling liked to write in public places like coffee shops and cafes, both because she liked the hustle and bustle of people around her while she wrote, and because as a poor single mother, sometimes her electricity had been cut off.
Victor Hugo wrote in the nude. I will pause here a moment while you wrap your head around that image, no matter how Misérable it makes you. Okay, enough of that. I mentioned these last three tips to illustrate my original point, which was that there are just about as many writing strategies as there are writers. Take what you need from this column and leave the rest, but just remember that if you show up at your local Barnes and Noble drunk and unfettered with your laptop in tow, you are on your own.
