lilla.ca

I’ve blogged before about quotations and how they can be touchstones of wisdom or at least impetus for thought.  In part, I think because they are not encumbered by a lot of verbiage.  Standing on their own, they challenge you to think.  There is one I recently came across that I particularly like in that way.  Logan Pearson Smith wrote, “We need new friends.  Some of us are cannibals who have eaten their old friends up; others must have ever-renewed audiences before whom to re-enact an ideal version of their lives.”  I had never heard of Logan Pearsall Smith before this.  Turns out he was an American essayist (1865-1946), an authority on 17^th century divines and the correct use of English.  I wonder if he felt as if his friends had eaten him up or he had eaten them up.  I suspect the former.

Alice Munro - Great Canadian Novelist

Shortly after having blogged so disparagingly about Jonathan Franzen’s latest novel, I read a review of his recent non-fiction book, Farther Away: Essays, in The Economist.  It made me want to rush out and read more Franzen.  It wasn’t so much that the review was favourable, the essay topics seemingly ranging and far-reaching, with one noting that “each of us is stranded on his or her own existential island” (note the gender inclusive language), or finding out he was friends and rivals with David Foster Wallace (whom I am glad I have read but not sure I can bring myself to re-read).  It was that the review noted that he wasn’t a very good book reviewer: “On a Alice Munro book [Franzen writes]: “Basically, ‘Runaway’ is so good that I don’t want to talk about it here.  Quotation can’t do the book justice, and neither can synopsis.  The way to do it justice is to read it.”” Anyone who likes Alice Munro’s work that much can’t be bad.  If I don’t end up reading Farther Away, I will certainly be re-reading Runaway.

I recently read Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom.  As a disclaimer, I note that I loved The Corrections and perhaps that is colouring my views, but I found Freedom to be supremely irritating.  It was filled with characters whose hyper self-awareness bordered on self-obsessed navel-gazing.  In regard to one in particular, the author felt compelled to keep telling us how intelligent and fun people found her since there was no evidence of this on the page itself.  It was not this, however, that spoiled what was otherwise a well-written book.  Nor was it the use of death as an easy out in a complex storyline.  Or the undisciplined wanderings off to tertiary characters I had no interest in, or pages and pages of undisguised didactics.   It was that the one person who was uncritically treated by the author and was rewarded with a happily ever after was a self-mutilating young woman whose life – her every choice, as well as her happiness – revolved completely around a man.  Perhaps it’s just reflecting the vagaries of life, but when every other character suffered life’s usual mix of ups and downs, I couldn’t help feeling like I was being told something I found, well, offensive.

Oops, wrong movie.

Every writer is familiar with the old adage, “Show don’t tell.”  For those of you less familiar, rather than talking about so-and-so not liking such-and-such, a writer should – or so the adage goes – write the scene that makes apparent why so-and-so ended up not liking such-and-such.  Of course, video excels in showing and not telling but, as in the case of Game of Thrones, distilling 700 pages of 7 point text down to 10 hours of video can be hurdle even if a picture is worth a 1000 words.  The writers (director?) of the video version of the Game of Thrones have come up with an interesting solution.  They recognized that making certain things clear in the miniseries was going to require some old-fashioned telling, but why not do all that telling in a brothel?  Rather than explanation, why not sexplanation?  It has meant that the actress that plays the local prostitute of Winterfell has far greater exposure (sorry, couldn’t help it) than her role in the book would have suggested but all in the name of carrying the story forward.  What I can’t help but wonder is whether the words in these scenes have the audience’s full attention.

Hand me pen and paper, I'm happy!

If you’re happy (and you know it) do you write more?  This was (essentially) the question that was posed to a group of writers (don’t ask me who since the forum was ages ago).  The interviewer’s bias was clearly that it was more likely that it was the unhappy who wrote: perhaps not commercial, formulaic, genre fiction, but the kind of fiction that was, you know, more than just cheap entertainment.  The interviewer’s bias largely seemed to be borne out by that group of authors – to be truly inspired, you had to be down in the dumps.  I find that unfathomable.  Sure maybe a little sadness, a tinge of nostalgia, a smidgen of sentiment are all good for setting you on the road, but I can’t imagine writing if I were truly down.  I would struggle to get out of bed.  It all puts me in mind of a quote from Bertrand Russell, “Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.”  I did pose this same question to the writers in my writers group and they all uniformly answered the same way: “I write when I am sufficiently disciplined to sit down and just do it.”

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Lilla

Gotta love anything with Sean Bean in it.

I was once in a play (Reckless by Craig Lucas) where the main character struggles with whether “things happen for a reason”.  She finally comes around to the decision that they do, despite grappling with such vagaries as her husband taking a contract out on her life for being too perky.  Despite playing this character, I have my doubts.  I along with many others suspect that life consists of a lot of random shit, rendering it not pointless but perhaps meaningless.  This, I think, is part of the reason why books (and TV series) like Game of Thrones are such hits (apart from the scantily clad women and the valiant men who are true to their word).  Sure bad things happen to good and innocent people, but when they do, a crow pecks out a third eye (figuratively) and you know the precipitous fall was not all for nought (even if you don’t find out why until books later).  We can take comfort in that.

Ze plain, ze plain. I mean, ze plane, ze plane.

I was recently subjected to one and half torturous days of “Plain English” training.  One can hardly argue with its intention: to teach “writing that conveys information clearly and concisely to the intended audience with the necessary impact and appropriate tone of voice.”  It did not, however, teach anything useful that was not more clearly and concisely conveyed in Mr. Richards’ grade eight English class.  Of course, the real issue* is that not everyone has benefitted from a Mr. Richards-type class on how to write an essay (or don’t recall it), and so the workplace is rife with bad writing.  (I note that Plain English was mandatory for all in my workplace.  I wasn’t special.)  Fair enough.  The problem is that in an attempt to “use familiar words”, “repeat first-choice words” (e.g., consistently call a document a memo, and not a memo and a report), “edit glue words” (e.g., “more” instead of “a greater number”), and “use verbs instead of abstract noun phrases” (e.g., “provide” instead of “make provision for”), the incredible flexibility and range of English, its scope for nuances, subtlety, and just plain variety can be lost (oops, my plain English teaching tells me this sentence is way too long).  

*Issue, by the way, is a “no-no” word.  Too imprecise.

One never hears about impressing publishers with a real zinger of a closing sentence.  I suppose the rationale is that if the publisher has read that far, you’ve got them.  But I imagine there is the odd publisher who is only skim reading (yes, I’ve heard this actually happens) and so may be won over by your closing words.  And aside from publishers, what you finish with can make the book.  Imagine the Great Gatsby without its closing paragraph?  I would argue that that paragraph makes a good book truly exceptional.  But, nonetheless, closing lines don’t tend to have the opening sentence’s mystique.  This, I think, is because they are inevitably out of context, while an opening line can stand on its own having had nothing come before it.  Take the closing line of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises: “Yes,” I said, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”  Pretty meaningless on its own, pretty devastating in the book.  Still, there are some wonderful last lines that don’t need a preamble, for example Charles Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities (which also has a fantastic opening sentence): “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”  And I continue to have a soft spot for the last words in The Catcher in the Rye: “Don’t ever tell anybody anything.  If you do, you start missing everybody.”

Every unpublished novelist (and perhaps the published ones as well) stresses about their opening sentence.  Publishers (and agents) give you so little scope to impress that if you don’t have them at hello, you could be done for.  And I, too, admit to occasionally judging the buying-worthiness of a book by its first sentence if not its cover.  But what makes a good first sentence is not clear.  The most famous include the opening line of Pride and Prejudice (“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”) and that of Anna Karenina (“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”)  The former still makes me smile and the latter always makes me think, “No, I don’t think so, and that’s a lot of pages to be reading about unhappiness.” (which might explain why I’ve never gotten past the first page of Anna K (good thing for Tolstoy, publishers in his day were willing to read further)).  A Neil Simon play I was once in had the protagonist wax on about the opening line of Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead – “Nobody could sleep.” – which isn’t bad but, when it comes to sleep references, I prefer the opening of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca (“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”).  This sentence I notice didn’t make it on “100 best first lines of novels” as decided by the American Book Review (http://www.pantagraph.com/news/article_a125216a-649f-5414-88b5-76a688ea3b6a.html).   Another favourite however did: “It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.”( Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar).  Strangely enough it speaks to me of youth.