Everyone has a favorite book or two about writing that has served him well, that he recommends to other writers and aspiring writers.
Here are two lists (list one, list two) at Flashlightworthy Books of suggestions writers have made.
Category: Pen to Paper
Pen to Paper: Contract Language
HarperCollins — a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation and thus a corporate sibling of Fox News — has added a morals clause to its authors’ contracts. HC will terminate a contract if the “Author’s conduct evidences a lack of due regard for public conventions and morals, or if Author commits a crime or any other act that will tend to bring Author into serious contempt, and such behavior would materially damage the Work’s reputation or sales.”
Richard Curtis wrote the original post, which you should read. Keep scrolling and take in the comments; many are quite insightful.
Sure, you don’t have to sign such a contract. The ball is in your court, right? And if you haven’t committed a crime, then there’s no reason not to let the local cops, state police, FBI, or anyone else with a badge walk into your home and conduct a search — or even take you somewhere for questioning. How could these scenarios possibly go wrong?
That contract is the golden ticket to authordom. At that point, are you really going to turn it down? No, you’re going to sign on the dotted line and hope that a blog post or Tweet or attendance at a political event doesn’t rile the bluenoses and beancounters at the book company. You’re going to hope they don’t turn something innocuous into a reason to not pay you and to take your book out of print overnight.
George Orwell warned us about the encroachment of government in our lives; if only we had listened. But he didn’t tell us that an equal threat would come from our corporate masters who — despite their own sins and crimes — tell us that we’re on the clock 24-7 and will live our lives as good corporate citizens. Or else.
Of course, we can refuse to work for such companies. We can get jobs elsewhere … in this economy. How hard can it be to opt out of Corporate America?
HarperCollins is making yet another excellent argument for both self-publishing and the demise of the publishing industry as we have known it.
Pen to Paper: Libel in Fiction
You have to work at it a little, but you can, in fact, libel someone in a fiction story. Here are two excellent articles that tell you how you could libel a person in your story and, more importantly, how to avoid doing so. I’ll get out of the way and let you get right to this valuable information.
First Amendment Center (This article mentions a libel suit brought against the makers of the movie Hardball. Scroll down to Muzikowski v. Paramount Pictures Corp. and you can see how that came out. And here is how the Sandlot case ended.)
Pen to Paper: The Gender Question
When I write, I use “he” as a gender-neutral pronoun. It’s how I was taught, and I’ve known enough women who are smarter than I am who unapologetically use “he” that I haven’t been terribly self-conscious when I use it. Still, it is obvious that “he” is not gender neutral, and using it as the standard pronoun denies half of the human race.
The “s/he” or “his and/or her” attempts at gender neutrality are simply abominable. They announce, “I’m working so hard to be inclusive that I’ve destroyed the flow of my own sentence, and now you’re focused on my inclusiveness rather than my point.” Alternating between “he” and “she” has the same effect.
Pen to Paper: Beneath Our Notice
I am not a nature lover. To me, one field with something growing in it looks very much like any other field with something growing in it, whether that’s cabbages, corn, or crabapples. I am well aware that my life is dependent on things growing in fields, but that doesn’t make them any more interesting. My philosophy is that if the Great Outdoors were truly so great, humanity would not have spent its entire existence trying to perfect the Great Indoors.
I am not good with tools. I can handle a screwdriver reasonably well, and Red Green has nothing on me in using the Handyman’s Secret Weapon: duct tape. But most other tools look like oddly shaped paperweights to me. And that’s where I prefer to leave them.
Finally, as H.L. Mencken put it so aptly, “I hate sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.”
Why am I telling you so much about what doesn’t interest me?
Pen to Paper: Generating Ideas
Where do you get your ideas?
That’s a popular question to ask writers. Some, weary of answering, claim to have hired a service to send ten or fifteen a week. Harlan Ellison famously answered: “Schenectady.”
I can track down the inspiration for some of my stories; others surprise me as much as, if not more than, they do the reader. Some quick examples for ones I know about:
Pen to Paper: Snowclones
Adam “Ape Lad” Koford’s Laugh-Out-Loud Cats say it all for me.
Kitteh’s statement to Pip refers to the old canard that the Inuit language has a hundred or thousand or ten thousand words for snow, depending on who’s talking. Said canard gave birth to the linguistic fact of the snowclone. The Wikipedia article is a nice, tight piece about the history of the snowclone and some of the more common ones; you’ll undoubtedly recognize many of them.
The snowclone is both a useful shorthand and a cliché. Like all clichés, it has to be handled with great care lest it fall flat on your readers’ ears. If you use a snowclone formula in a new way, however, it can sparkle.
The Snowclone Database is your source for all things snowclone. (In fact, that phrase might count as a snowclone: “your source for all things X.”)
When you get your fill of other snow activities (I’m done!), you can play around with some snowclones in the warmth of the Great Indoors.
IN UNRELATED NEWS: A month after they were announced, here is the Write to Done list of Top 10 Blogs for Writers for 2011. I’ll let the writers speak for themselves.
Pen to Paper: Breaking the Rules of Haiku
Two weeks ago, we examined whether personification and other literary devices common to Western poetry were acceptable in haiku.
Now I have discovered (a mere eleven years after publication) an article that takes us far beyond that initial discussion of what might be permissible in haiku. The piece is by Haruo Shirane, Shincho professor of Japanese literature and culture at Columbia University in New York City. It was published in Modern Haiku magazine in 2000. Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, this was the year of the Matsuyama Declaration, which politely insisted that writers of haiku in languages other than Japanese explore the form without being tied down by Japanese conventions.
Continue reading “Pen to Paper: Breaking the Rules of Haiku”
Pen to Paper: Pulling Twain’s Fangs
“But the truth is, that when a Library expels a book of mine and leaves an unexpurgated Bible lying around where unprotected youth and age can get hold of it, the deep unconscious irony of it delights me and doesn’t anger me.”
— Samuel L. Clemens, letter to Mrs. F. G. Whitmore, February 7, 1907
You’ve seen the story by now: a book publisher is bringing out a sanitized version of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Nigger Jim will be Slave Jim; Injun Joe will be Indian Joe. I’ll be surprised if they’ve left Huck’s (and Twain’s) greatest line alone rather than change it to, “All right, then, I’ll go to heck.”
Pen to Paper: Literary Devices in Haiku
Greg Bryant wrote and posted a fine haiku over at his site. I immediately caught the use of personification in it — giving a non-human object human traits. This, I had always read and been told, was one of the big no-nos in haiku, no matter how good the result might be.
Haiku (so I was taught) is the poetry of simply noticing and letting the reader draw his own conclusions. Simile, metaphor, personification, apostrophe, and all the other staples of Western poetry have no place in a form that seeks to describe in the plainest terms that which is.
But is that the case?