to every creative writer is some experience of life. This usually means getting out of the house for longer than to pick up the newspaper from the porch. Very little happens on the porch, in most neighbourhoods, with which to flesh out a novel.
“Living it up in order to write it down,” as I mentioned, is a formula that should involve buying accident insurance. Which may not be tax-deductible. But grist to the mill is not a closet harvest.
True, some fiction writers — not many, but a noteworthy few — have achieved literary success without looking for material outside their study. Virginia Woolf, for instance, by all accounts didn’t get out much socially, but lived inside her own head, probably a contributing factor in her ending up afloat in the river, sadly deceased.
On the other hand, it is easy to excuse an extravagant social life as a source of raw material. During the 1930s, swarms of American novelists descended on Paris, a site believed to be the motherlode of uninhibited sexual adventure. Later, after Hitler had cooled off Paris as the horny pilgrimage destination, some North American writers made the hegira to Mexico, where the siesta is institutionalized as a major element of the workday. This mecca has since waned in popularity, however, as the peso woke up and started acting like real money.
More recently, the Far North (anywhere not south of Toronto) has attracted travel writers who have an independent source of thermal underwear. Inuit no longer bother hunting seals, finding it easier to skin the writers herding poleward in search of frostbite.
For the neophyte novelist, the terra incognita lies in troubled relationships with other mammals. Especially people. But how can you be sure the other person isn’t just using you as the basis for a character given to weird sexual behaviour? Some ominous signs:
• Your subject asks to borrow your pen while you are engaged in intercourse.
• She, or he, insists that your romantic camping trip won’t be complete without a tape recorder.
• You have reason to suspect that your subject calls you “darling” because she is unable to remember your name.
All things considered, there is good reason for concentrating on some other species as novel material, even at the risk of being suspected of bestiality. Very few dogs can afford to hire a lawyer.
WHAT’S NOT APPROPRIATE
Whatever it is that you are writing — novel, newspaper editorial, in fact, anything but a shopping list — it is essential to maintain the same tone throughout. Many a person voicing the eulogy at the funeral of a loved one has yielded to the impulse to tell a funny story. Very rarely does this aberration succeed, the yarn joining the deceased.
Reason: the interjection was inappropriate. Like wearing sneakers with a tuxedo, the attention it draws is negative. This is why good writing is as much resistance to impulse as it is response to inspiration. Yes, it takes a strong will to reject the pun that begs for admittance to your article on male impotence. But writing is not for those who, like Oscar Wilde, can resist anything but temptation.
Another shallow in the stream of consciousness is imitation.
Which, sayeth the old saw, is the sincerest form of flattery. But if what we write imitates the work of someone else, particularly a person who isn’t deceased and has access to a lawyer, the flattery may get lost in litigation.
Plagiarism. This is an offence to be avoided at all (including legal) cost. Yet it is easy, nay, natural, to borrow entire sentences, if not paragraphs, from another’s work and forget to grace them with quotation marks. Not all of us have a photographic memory, Your Honour. We remember some things better than others. And sometimes the subconscious mind rides roughshod over assiduity so that before we know it we have written deathless prose that has already joined the immortal.
JARGON
Word-wise, not every sentence serves the writer, but too often the writer should be serving a sentence. For committing jargon.
Jargon — words used to impress rather than inform — corrupts non-fiction more than stories. If you are a doctor writing a book about your adventures in people’s internal organs, you have to avoid medical jargon — one of the most potent narcotics a reader can take.
The writer is particularly susceptible to this vice if he judges his output by the number of words he has written in the day. This is called the quota syndrome. If one day he fails to write his quota — because of some nuisance like a sudden death in the immediate family, or his computer going into menopause — the writer suffers guilt. And will try to compensate the next day by doubling that day’s quota, even though this severely depletes his supply of adjectives.
Using a computer compounds the risk of jargon by documenting how many words, total, the author has written in the workday. It is right there, accusingly, at the bottom of your screen: “19.” Which is another argument for writing everything first in longhand: no blabbermouth word count.
Another consort of jargon cited by Quiller-Couch: the case of “in the case of.” Nothing should be in the case except your bottles of lager. This is why legal briefs — the underwear of justice — are 90 percent jargon, 10 percent substance. Without jargon our system of jurisprudence would be accelerated to a pace inimical to the income of lawyers and magistrates.
However, if the writer wants to produce material for the average reader not wearing a wig, she or he will check every word to ensure that it is pulling its full weight of meaning.
To this end the writer may be tempted to coin words (neologism) as a surrogate for coining money. Words are minted mostly in the popular media such as newspapers or TV, or by drug companies. A bit presumptuous, therefore, for the amateur.
As a general rule, one should avoid using a word, or phrase, that draws too much attention to itself. Cuteness. It is sadly easy for the writer — like the party show-off who dons a lampshade — to win attention while losing respect.
Finally, words are cheap, yet are one commodity that can cost the writer dearly if not chosen with the economy of a Dutch housewife.
EMPHASIS
Not to be confused with the disease contracted from smoking tobacco or other field produce, emphasis is very important! Even if it requires the exclamation mark, aka “the schoolgirl shriek,” every writer wants his work to have impact. The all-too-common devices (besides “!”) to achieve this emphasis are:
1. putting certain words in italics
2. putting other words in CAPITALS
3. underlining whole passages
These contortions may be appropriate in certain literary milieus, such as the warning labels on drugs, but they rate as overkill in prose or verse aimed at adults with an IQ superior to that of a gerbil.
Other writers seek emphasis by keeping their sentences very short. Like this. Staccato. Sometimes called “Chicago style.” The reader has no chance to get bored with those rapid-fire periods peppering his attention span. This terseness does have the virtue of helping to keep the reader from dozing off — one of the reasons for the drying up of the stream-of-consciousness novel.
However, there are less jerky ways of achieving emphasis. One of these, cited by Quiller-Couch, is the judicious placement of words in a sentence. Sometimes this
