She might be cut out of cabbage

Today is the 303rd anniversary of the birth of that quintessential 18th-century curmudgeon Dr. Samuel Johnson, the literary lion of Georgian London for much of his lifetime (1709-1784). A poet, critic, lexicographer, and wit, Johnson compiled the first respectable English dictionary between 1747 and 1755, following several years of writing critical articles for London magazines such as The Idler.

He was the master of the insult:

Of Polly Carmichael, a member of his household:
I took to Poll very well at first, but she won't do upon closer examination... Poll is a stupid slut. I had some hopes for her at first, but when I talked to her tightly and closely, I could make nothing of her. She was wiggle waggle: and I could never persuade her to be categorical.

Of Lady Macdonald of Sleat:
...she was as bad as negative badness could be, and stood in the way of what was good; that insipid beauty would not go a great way... and such a woman might be cut out of a cabbage, if there was a skilful artificer.

Of a man hired to sit with him during a convalescence:
The fellow's an idiot; he is as awkward as a turn-spit when first put to the wheel, and as sleepy as a dormouse.

Of Thomas Sheridan:
Why, Sir, Sherry is dull, naturally dull; but it must have taken him a great deal of pains to become what we now see him. Such an excess of stupidity, Sir, is not in nature.

It's not a sin to make a living

"Don’t be content just to call yourself a writer and then bitch about the crass publishing world that won’t run your stuff. We’re still a capitalist country, and writing to some degree is a capitalist enterprise, when it’s not a total sin to try to make a living and court an audience…

"I think that maybe what young writers have lost is the sense of writing as a trade. When I was young it was still a trade. There were enough magazines — middlebrow magazines, so-called general interest magazines — they ran articles but also fiction, and you felt that there was an appetite out there for this sort of fiction. The academic publications run fiction, but I don’t think they have quite replaced them in this sense. Fiction is in danger of becoming a kind of poetry. Only other poets read it. Only other fiction writers care about it. 

"So I don’t sneer at writers like Stephen King who have managed to capture the interest of a large audience. Any way that you can break through. I figure if you don’t have any audience you shouldn’t be doing this. Tom Wolfe, the journalist, has spouted off very eloquently about the failure of the American writers to galvanize readership the way he thinks Zola and Dreiser and some others did. I think you can force this. We can’t do Zola now exactly. Somehow it just doesn’t sing. So you’re sort of stuck with being a — whatever — post-modern…"

-- John Updike

How to write good like Papa

Ernest Hemingway's five rules for writing:

1. Use short sentences. Hemingway was famous for a terse minimalist style of writing that dispensed with flowery adjectives and got straight to the point. In short, Hemingway wrote with simple genius. Perhaps his finest demonstration of short sentence prowess was when he was challenged to tell an entire story in only 6 words:

For sale: baby shoes, never used.

2. Use short first paragraphs.

3. Use vigorous English. Here’s David Garfinkel’s take on this one:

It’s muscular, forceful. Vigorous English comes from passion, focus and intention. It’s the difference between putting in a good effort and TRYING to move a boulder… and actually sweating, grunting, straining your muscles to the point of exhaustion… and MOVING the freaking thing!

4. Be positive, not negative. Since Hemingway wasn’t the cheeriest guy in the world, what does he mean by be positive? Basically, you should say what something is rather than what it isn’t. This is what Michel Fortin calls using up words: By stating what something isn’t can be counterproductive since it is still directing the mind, albeit in the opposite way. If I told you that dental work is painless for example, you’ll still focus on the word “pain” in “painless.”

• Instead of saying “inexpensive,” say “economical,”

• Instead of saying “this procedure is painless,” say “there’s little discomfort” or “it’s relatively comfortable,”

• And instead of saying “this software is error-free” or “foolproof,” say “this software is consistent” or “stable.”

5. Never have only 4 rules. Actually, Hemingway did only have 4 rules for writing, and they were those he was given as a cub reporter at the Kansas City Star in 1917. But, as any web writer knows, having only 4 rules will never do. So, in order to have 5, I had to dig a little deeper to get the most important of Hemingway’s writing tips of all:

“I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit,” Hemingway confided to F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1934. “I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.”

What a waste of paper.

How to write a great story

Kurt Vonnegut's tips:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.

5. Start as close to the end as possible.

6. Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Why didn't Dickens explode?

"It’s a wonder Charles Dickens didn’t explode and perish long before his death in 1870, at age 58. Quite apart from the act of composing his novels, he was a whirlwind, living a life that is nearly unmatched in its vigor. He had one entire career as a magazine editor, another as an actor and manager of theatrical productions, still another as a philanthropist and social reformer. The record of his private engagements alone — dinners, outings, peregrinations with his entourage of family and friends — is exhausting to read. The novels stand out against the backdrop of hundreds of other compositions, all of them written against tight deadlines.

"Dickens’s energy, which he made no effort to husband until he was nearly dead, was inexplicable. Call it metabolic if you like. Perhaps it was a reaction to the uncertainties of his childhood and the shame of his days as a child laborer, when he knew that as a precocious young entertainer he was already a spectacle well worth observing.

"He was driven by gargantuan emotions, and the ferocious will needed to keep them in check, to release them in the creation of characters he loved more than some of his children. He could drive himself to anguished tears while writing the death of Little Nell, in “The Old Curiosity Shop.” And yet he could also coldly disown anyone who sided with his wife, Catherine, when they separated, including his namesake son.

"Even Dickens didn’t understand his energy. He grasped that there was a wildness in him, and so did nearly everyone who knew him. When Dostoevsky met Dickens in 1862 — a meeting that is hard to imagine — Dickens explained that there were two people inside him, 'one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite.'"

-- Verlyn Linkenborg

The dog ate my draft

Advice to would-be writers: Do not own a dog. John Steinbeck's setter cost him two months' labor on "Of Mice and Men" in the mid 1930s when one night the pup tore apart the half-finished manuscript. The text on the savaged pages, as we learn in Celia Blue Johnson's "Dancing With Mrs. Dalloway," was so badly mauled that Steinbeck was forced to rewrite a large portion of the book. Jack Kerouac was doing equally well with "On the Road" (which he was typing on sheets of paper taped together to avoid having to reload his typewriter) until his housemate's cocker spaniel chewed up a few feet of the scroll. One almost expects to discover that Joseph Conrad's Chihuahua was responsible for the extensive revisions to "Heart of Darkness." As abetters of literary inspiration, dogs clearly rank very low—unless you happen to be John Steinbeck, who took along a canine companion for "Travels With Charley" in 1960. By then the setter had perhaps wisely been replaced by a poodle.

-- Elizabeth Lowry in The Wall Street Journal

Stuttering and the writer

"The disorder teaches different things to writers, such as how a sentence can fly when it is freed from the requirements of speech. Writing as a vocation tends to attract control freaks, pathological introverts, and uneasy narcissists—the sort of people, basically, who don't mind spending hours alone at a desk, trying to make their own ideas sound good on a piece of paper—but for stutterers, the endless possibilities for voice control on the blank page carry especial appeal. Give a stutterer a pen and some practice and, suddenly, what seems imperfectible in speech is a few scribblings and crossings-out and rescribblings away. 

"This anxious guilty blockage in the throat," Updike wrote. "I managed to maneuver several millions of words around it." Even a partial list of stuttering writers points to certain correlations between the impediment and the development of literary voice: Updike, Drabble, Jorge Luis Borges, Robert A. Heinlein, W. Somerset Maugham, at various points Christopher Hitchens and the Dunne brothers (John Gregory and Dominick), Philip Larkin, John Bayley, Elizabeth Bowen—and so on, back to Henry James.

"In retrospect, James' impediment seems to gape back at us from every lavish, stylized page of his prose. Who but a speech-blocked writer would devote so much energy and ink to writing, rewriting, and overwriting such a body of work? Who else would dwell so hungrily on the rhythms and refracted meanings of the social sphere? As much as James is a literary paragon, he is the person many stutterers spend their whole lives trying not to be: the eagle-eyed wallflower, the brilliant nonparticipant, a man so disengaged from normal social congress that there's been scholarly debate on the extent to which he was straight or gay or, as one theory has it, neutered on a fence. This is the final and most insidious way stutterers fear being misunderstood: They worry that their speaking voice, and the behavior that accompanies it, will be taken as a window onto something like their personality."

-- Nathan Heller

Itching for a good fight/write

Boxing. You can press the language out of it. The sweathouse of the body. The moving machinery of ligaments. The intimate fray of rope. The men in their archaic stances like anatomy illustrations from an old-time encyclopedia. The moment in a fight when the punches slow down and the opponents watch each other like time-lapse photographs—the sweat frozen in midair, the blood still spinning, the maniacal grin like the teeth themselves have gone bare-knuckle.

Thus begins Colum McCann's delightful essay on writers' fascination with boxing.

Writers love boxing—even if they can’t box. And maybe writers love boxing especially because they can’t box. The language is all cinema and violence: the burst eye socket, the ruined cartilage, the dolphin punch coming up from the depths.

Language allows the experience, and what you have with a fight is what you have with writing, and they each become metaphors for each other—the ring, the page; the punch, the word; the choreography, the keyboard; the feint, the suggestion; the bucket, the wastebasket; the sweat, the edit; the pretender, the critic; the bell, the deadline. There’s the showoff shuffle, the head spin, the mingled blood on your gloves, the spitting your teeth up at the end of the day.

Literature re-creates the language of the epic. And what’s more epic and mythological than a scrap? For those of us who can’t fight, we still want to be able to step into a fighter’s body. We want to walk off woozy to the corner and have our faces slapped a little bit, then suddenly get up to dance, and hear the crowd roar, and step out once more with a little dazzle.

Read all of it.

Victorian novelists would have been good shrinks

As it turns out, one set of 19^th-century writers had insights into human nature so nuanced and profound they still ring true today.

“Victorian authors do seem to be good intuitive psychologists,” concludes a research team led by psychologist John Johnson of Pennsylvania State University, DuBois. According to a large-scale study published in the Journal of Research in Personality, the authors’ depiction of the personality traits, mating strategies and goal-oriented behavior of their characters “largely mirrors the view of those variables as revealed by modern research.”

Hundreds of raters assessed, among other things, the degree to which characters reflect five essential personality traits, including “extraverted, enthusiastic,” “critical, quarrelsome,” “dependable, self-disciplined” and “calm, emotionally stable.”

By crunching this data, the researchers created psychological profiles of these fictional characters. For example, the title character in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre scored “very low on extraversion, well above average on agreeableness and emotional stability, and high on conscientiousness and openness to experience.”

Jane Austen is hip

A watercolour and pencil sketch of Jane Austen

It's remarkable the Mark Twain continues to draw the crowds 100 years after his death, but here's another infatuation with a long-gone writer.


Jane Austen, the English novelist best known for Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, has been dead since 1817, yet she is drawing a cultish pack of young people, especially young women, known as "Janeites" who are dedicated to celebrating all things Austen.

The appeal? Ms. Austen's tales of courtship and manners resonate with dating-obsessed and social-media-savvy 21st-century youths, says Nili Olay, regional coordinator for the New York Metro chapter of the Jane Austen Society of North America, or JASNA. Ms. Austen counts roughly 89,000 fans on Facebook, compared with 45,000 for Charles Dickens, and just 9,000 for the Brontë sisters.

Young women, in particular, find meaning in Ms. Austen's work, according to Joan Klingel Ray, author of Jane Austen for Dummies. They may be "trying to figure out how to find Mr. Right," says Ms. Ray, an English professor at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs. "You can almost vicariously experience this through her heroines."

RIP: James J. Kilpatrick

We lost four noted men of words in 2010, as Ben Zimmer writes in The New York Times. One was James J. Kilpatrick, a newspaper columnist. Zimmer:

James J. Kilpatrick (b. 1920) had a distaste for pompous and hackneyed language, and he never shied away from expressing his opinion vociferously — no surprise to anyone who read his prickly political commentary or saw his rants in the “60 Minutes” debate segment “Point-Counterpoint.”

“When I conclude that a particular usage is execrable, I can execrate at the top of my lungs,” he wrote in the introduction to his 1984 The Writer’s Art, also the title of his long-running syndicated column.


The usage guru Bryan A. Garner told me that he long admired Kilpatrick’s pugnaciousness and iconoclasm. After Garner published the first edition of his Dictionary of Modern American Usage in 1998, the two men found that they were kindred spirits in language matters.

But they didn’t see eye to eye on everything: they had an ongoing debate over beginning sentences with “and” or “but” (Garner was in favor of the practice; Kilpatrick dead-set against it). Ultimately, as befits the author of “The Writer’s Art,” Kilpatrick’s appreciation of language was an aesthetic one. In his waning years, he gave Garner this advice on ending a column: “End it on an accented syllable, preferably with a long vowel.” In other words, not with a whimper but a bang.

How John McPhee became a writer

John McPhee has published more than thirty books, work that first appeared in the pages of The New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer since 1963. He has received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and he won the Pulitzer Prize for Annals of the Former World, his comprehensive survey of North American geology. His work has inspired generations of nonfiction writers, and he has distinguished himself especially as a teacher of literary journalism.

How did he become a writer? From an interview with Peter Hessler in The Paris Review:

When did you first start to think about devoting yourself to writing? 

There weren’t any very early signs. My biggest preoccupation in childhood was sports, mostly sports you could play with a ball. My father was a doctor of sports medicine, and Princeton was his employer. As I was growing up, we lived very close to the campus, and in the afternoons I would go with him to the university sports practices—football, basketball, baseball. I hung around a lot of football players who were ten or fifteen years older than I was. After a while they made a Princeton shirt for me with orange and black stripes on it, just like the big guys had. I was number thirty-three.

One miserable November day I was down there on the sideline, wet, cold. And I looked up to the top of the stadium, and there was the press box. Shelter! I knew they had heaters in there with them, and these people were sitting there in complete comfort while we’re miserable down here on the field. They’re writing, they’re typing, and they’re warm. Then and there I decided to become a writer.

Now that story, which I have often told, is about three to five percent apocryphal. The rest of it is absolutely true.

Everyone's writing a novel. Why?

Novelist Alix Christie figures it this way:

A quarter of a million new novels are published annually across the globe, 100,000 of them in English. This represents, in turn, a quarter, maybe, of the manuscripts that agents try to hawk. Agents, as all writers know, take only a small proportion of the work they’re sent, perhaps a tenth. Ten million scribes in search of a reader may not be so tall a tale.

So what keeps her going?

I have been helped by a lesson I learned years ago, apprenticed in a printer’s shop (a subject I returned to for my second novel, about the birth of printing and medieval guilds). I’ve come to see how helpful it can be to see ourselves as striving toward some mastery in craftsmen’s terms. The guilds have always known that it takes years to become skilled at a craft. The standard term was seven, split into years of formal training and then the “wander years”. Learning from mistakes has always been an inevitable part of the education.

What helps keep me going, though, is literature itself. With its heft, its moral purpose and its beauty, it is a counterweight to our increasingly flighty and commercial world. And in this, I’m very far from all alone. Most writers gird themselves with courage from like-minded souls. My writers’ group, my agent and the fellow writers I share work with all provide more than an eagle eye. They offer succour and seriousness of purpose, and a shared sense that writing is the most intense and most important brainwork that we do.

I have never forgotten a comment made at a workshop by Karen Joy Fowler, a wonderful, successful writer. “I was neither the most talented nor the most clever writer in my writing group,” she told us. “But I was the one who stuck with it.” When things feel especially bleak, this becomes my mantra.

"It is an act of faith," she writes. "Each day we legions of the unknown, we ten million, rise and face the blankness of the page. And in the painful act of making worlds, we make ourselves."

Christie was a semi-finalist in the 2008 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award and a finalist in Southwest Review's 2010 Meyerson Fiction Prize. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Other Voices, "For Sale, Baby Shoes, Never Worn" (from Foolscap Press) and Southwest Review.)

Never too late to write

Timothy Egan, a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner, looks at writers who were still going in their later years.

For every J.D. Salinger, who published “The Catcher in the Rye” when he was 32, there is a Mark Twain, who brought out “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” at 49. “Huck Finn,” Hemingway said, is the foundation for all modern American fiction, and I agree.

Alan Furst, the literary spy writer who produces atmospheric thrillers every other year or so, is at the top of his game at 69. When he moved to France in 1987 he had yet to make a mark. “I was going to be the best failed novelist in Paris,” he told John Marshall in a Daily Beast piece last year.

Nobody was a better American essayist in the 1970s and 80s than Joan Didion. But the writerly sprint culminating in her late-years memoir “The Year of Magical Thinking” was breathtaking. She finished the book just days after her 70th birthday.

My favorite septuagenarian inspiration is Norman Maclean, who published the most beautiful,
word-perfect novel of the American West, “A River Runs Through It,” when he was 74. And then he had a second book in him, “Young Men and Fire,” published after his death at 87. Old, seemingly doomed, and brilliant — a role model for all second-act aces.

T.S. Eliot: the art of self-promotion

T.S. Eliot

Joseph Epstein has an interesting essay on T.S. Eliot in Commentary, in which he notes that, "The fame Eliot achieved in his lifetime is unfathomable for a poet, or indeed any American or English writer, in our day."

Far from its being accidental, Eliot’s fame was planned for, carefully cultivated, and nurtured once it arrived. From the first volume of Eliot’s letters, newly revised and just released in Great Britain, we learn that, in 1919, when he was 31, he wrote to J.H. Woods, his philosophy teacher at Harvard: “There are only two ways in which a writer can become important—to write a great deal, and have his writings appear everywhere, or to write very little.”

He chose the latter: to write very little but always to dazzle. “My reputation in London is built upon a small volume of verse, and is kept up by printing two or three more poems in a year,” he wrote. “The only thing that matters is that these should be perfect in their kind, so that each should be an event.” 

Eliot worked at Lloyd’s Bank between 1917 and 1925 as the head of a small department stationed in the basement. He felt that, as he put it, he could “influence London opinion and English literature in a better way” by remaining slightly outside of things. The bank, moreover, with its distance from the standard literary life, lent him, as he noted, “aura.”

He wrote to his mother in 1919: “I really think that I have far more influence on English letters than any other American has ever had unless it be Henry James. I know a great many people, but there are many more who would like to know me, and [working in the bank] I can also remain isolated and detached.”

Those are the words of a man carefully but decidedly on the make.

Elmore Leonard's rules for writing

Facing the blank page

Jonathan Safran Foer published his first novel, Everything Is Illuminated. in 2002, winning several literary awards including the National Jewish Book Award and The Guardian First Book Award. His second novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, dealt with a 9-year-old coming to terms with his father's death in the World Trade Center during 9/11.

Here he describes his process for writing fiction.

I begin with nothing and I unfortunately usually end with nothing in terms of the day-to-day process, but you know, it’s just a blank page.  I’ve never had characters before I started writing.  I’ve never had a moral.  I’ve never had a story to tell.  I’ve never had some voice that I found and wanted to share.  Auden, the poet, said, “I look at what I write so I can see what I think.” 

And that’s been very true for me in my process.  I don’t have a thought that I then try to articulate.  It’s only through the act of writing that I try to find my own thoughts.  So, it can be quite scary because you know, it’s... there’s a kind of faith, I guess, that you have to have either in yourself or in the process that something good will come from filling blank pages. 

And it very, very often doesn’t feel that way, but every now and then you stumble upon something.  Some idea which you didn’t know you had, or a feeling that you didn’t know that you had.  And there’s nothing like that revelation and I don’t know of anywhere else in life to find it.

Glimpses: Richard Wilbur on inspiration

Richard Wilbur in his study

Poet Richard Wilbur's auspicious 1947 debut, The Beautiful Changes, earned the admiration of two of the most enduring American poets of the era, Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens.  

Since then, Wilbur has received nearly every award and honor available to an American poet, including two Pulitzers, two Bollingen Prizes, a National Book Award, and the office of the U.S. Poet Laureate. 

In an interview with Littorial, he talks about his muse.

"It is good to have something honorable to toil at when you've not been visited by an inspiration. As embarrassing as that word is– "inspiration"– I do think it corresponds to my experience. A poem comes looking for me rather than I hunting after it.


"It just happens when I'm walking about. I just go about my business. Of course some of the time I'm reading other people, and the impulse can come of reading a good poem of Robert Frost's and thinking "I wish I could do something like that." Every poet, I think, has some other poets in his experience who are, as John Holmes used to call it, their "starters." Holmes said when he read Robert Graves it made him want to write his own poems. I think I feel that way for example about Elizabeth Bishop. Reading her makes me want to have the great pleasure of writing a poem.

"I know that in some of my poems I'm a continuator of Robert Frost, and I hope that I belong somewhere in the same ballpark. I think that poets who are worth a damn are in communion, as it were, with a great part of the poetry that's been written in our language and in others."

Happy birthday, Deliverance

Dickey had a cameo role in the movie

James Dickey's lone novel, Deliverance, turned 40 this year, and New York Times book critic Dwight Garner remembers with insight for writers today.

“Deliverance” is the kind of novel few serious writers attempt any longer, a book about wilderness and survival whose DNA contains shards of both “Heart of Darkness” and “Huckleberry Finn.” It tells the story of four mild, middle-class men from suburban Atlanta who embark on a canoe trip, snaking down a remote Georgia river that will soon disappear beneath a dam. In the woods they find boiling rapids and two sinister mountain men. Before the novel is over, the carnage is nearly complete: three men have been crudely buried, one has been raped, and the survivors have had the bark peeled from their modern sensibilities.

These days our culture takes these kinds of narratives, about masculine midlife longing and regret, and de-fangs them, turning them into films like “Wild Hogs,” the benign John Travolta motorcycle trip movie. The novelists who take us into the woods and wilds, Jim Harrison and Thomas McGuane invaluably among them, bring along slapstick and irony as critical mosquito repellent. (Was it Robert Bly, in his “Iron John” phase, who made it impossible for American men to walk purposefully into a forest without feeling as if drums and self-awareness needed to be involved?)

Dickey wrote about men, neither dudes nor (although they were fathers) dads. The men in “Deliverance” meet real monsters and recognize their ability to become, in Dickey’s phrase, countermonsters. 

“Deliverance," Garner concludes, "has its narrative eddies, and moments where its backwoods mysticism is ripe. But Dickey’s moral awareness infuses this book with grainy life; guilt and blame are not easily assigned. The book presents a quagmire none of its characters escape. In 2010, it’s lonely work looking for its serious successors."

John Steinbeck on writing: getting it on paper

Steinbeck

John Steinbeck once said that writers are "a little below clowns and a little above trained seals" and that the writer "must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true."

When the comedian Fred Allen asked Steinbeck's advice on writing an autobiography, the master replied:

Don't start by trying to make the book chronological. Just take a period. Then try to remember it so clearly that you can see things: what colors and how warm or cold and how you got there. Then try to remember people. And then just tell what happened. It is important to tell what people looked like, how they walked, what they wore, what they ate. Put it all in. Don't try to organize it. And put in all the details you can remember.

You will find that in a very short time things will begin coming back to you, you thought you had forgotten. Do it for very short periods at first, but kind of think of it when you aren't doing it. Don't think back over what you have done. Don't think of literary form. Let it get out as it wants to. Over tell it in the manner of detail--cutting comes later. The form will develop in the telling. Don't make the telling follow a form.

Steinbeck echoed this advice in one of his final interviews: "Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on."

-- Richard Nordquist