Writers: Mark Twain's Tips; Why Greil Marcus Writes; Some Grammar

 I have put together several posts where I have collected advice from other writers. Eighteen Rules on Writing by Mark Twain (Narrative) came to me after those posts and may be the oldest. Some of the ones I particularly took to heart:

5. The personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances, and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject at hand, and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say.

6. The author describes the character of a personage in the tale, the conduct and conversation of that personage shall justify said description.

***

10. The author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and in their fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones.

11. The characters in a tale shall be so clearly defined that the reader can tell beforehand what each will do in a given emergency.

I ponder over the last item. My conclusion is that it still applies.

What worries me about all this advice is this: how to keep it in my head so I can use it in my own writing. 

Perhaps some day I will put all the lists of advice into one giant list.

Tips for Developing Your Voice in Writing (Writing Forward)

Here are some tips for developing your voice in writing:

1. Study literature. You can do this in a formal setting, but you can also study on your own. Read several works by the same author. Take notes about the identifying features of the writer’s voice. Compare the voices of two or more authors.
2. Describe authors’ voices, including your own. After reading a piece, make a list of five words that describe the author’s voice. Was it serious? Funny? Witty? Review your own work and do the same.
3. Talk to someone. Not literally. Your tone and manner changes, depending on whom you’re speaking with. You probably don’t talk to your grandmother the same way you talk to your best friend. Now apply that to your writing. Who are your readers? How do you talk to them?
4. Get an outside opinion. Show your work to some friends and ask them to describe your voice in three words or fewer. Do their descriptions of your voice in writing match the voice you want to project?
5. Be your best self. Try writing as naturally as you can. Don’t think too much as you put the words down. Focus more on the thoughts, ideas, and images that you’re expressing. Review the piece to examine your voice. Is that the real you? Are there parts of your voice that you want to work on, like phrases you repeat too often or words that are unnecessary? Fine-tune your voice in writing.
6. Personality: If you’re writing a history text, the style should be without any discernible personality. But in creative writing, readers connect with prose that shows style and personality. Does your writing match your personality? Does it take on a new persona, depending on what you’re writing? Ask some friends if they detect your personality in your prose.
7. Emotion: Many creative works are emotional. Horror stories often have a scary or brooding tone. Romance can range from passionate to humorous. Does the emotional tone of your voice match the emotional tone of your work?
8. The best way to develop your voice in writing is to simply pay attention. Examine other writers’ voices as well as your own. Ask challenging questions about how your voice comes across, put some effort into crafting a voice that is identifiable and uniquely yours, and keep writing!

 I do not know that I have developed a voice. As I am doing the line edits for "Theresa Pressley", I have to wonder if I have any idea of how to write - burying the lead, convoluting my syntax. However, I have done 1 and 8, tried doing 5–7, and had not thought of 2–4. I am already calculating who I can ask about my voice.

Maybe I have developed one, but mostly I think I share an emotion with Muddy Waters.

One more from Writing Forward, of which I will just pass along without more ado: Grammar Rules: Split Infinitives. 

Here, the split infinitive to truly understand is replaced with stronger, more precise wording. Instead of truly understanding English grammar, we want to master it! This sentence is far clearer than the original. It has more punch, it doesn’t include a (somewhat questionable) split infinitive, and it communicates the exact same idea.

Some other articles on the subject: Churchill might not have put up with that, but he liked to pedantically oppose this by Brian J. White (Medium)

John McIntyre of the Baltimore Sun said this about the no-split-infinitive rule: “A hoary shibboleth. If your English teacher warned you off this, she was wrong. If your first editor forbade this, he was wrong. If you own a book that prohibits this, get rid of it.” And Craig Lancaster of the Billings Gazette has a whole slew of links about the issue here.

Most of What You Think You Know About Grammar Is Wrong (Smithsonian)

It’s a great story, but it’s a myth. And so is that so-called grammar rule about ending sentences with prepositions. If that previous sentence bugs you, by the way, you’ve bought into another myth. No, there’s nothing wrong with starting a sentence with a conjunction, either. But perhaps the biggest grammar myth of all is the infamous taboo against splitting an infinitive, as in “to boldly go.” The truth is that you can’t split an infinitive: Since “to” isn’t part of the infinitive, there’s nothing to split. Great writers—including Chaucer, Shakespeare, Donne and Wordsworth—have been inserting adverbs between “to” and infinitives since the 1200s.

To boldly go for it: why the split infinitive is no longer a mistake (The Guardian)

OK. But surely split infinitives don’t stop being mistakes just because more people use them? Au contraire. In language, that’s exactly what happens, because the meaning of words keeps changing.

Eh? Maybe 100 years ago splitting an infinitive meant, “I don’t know my grammar rules”, because they were usually avoided by people who did. However, now that most people, including language experts, are relaxed about split infinitives, that changes. Indeed, taking trouble carefully to avoid them means: “I’m a bit fussy and old-fashioned.”

Greil Marcus’ Greil Gerstley (Lapham’s Quarterly) probes why he writes and what happens during the process.

I write for fun. I write for play. I write for the play of words. I write to discover what I want to say and how to say it—and the nerve to say it.

The key word for me here is not fun, play—but discover. I live for those moments when something appears on the page as if of its own volition—as if I had nothing to do with what is now looking me in the face.

***

What came down, I think, what appeared, were those words “slow bacchanal.” That was the prize, that was the treasure. I just had to figure out what to do with it, find out what it wanted, what images it was making, what the story was that was hidden in the two words.

So that’s why I write: to reach the state where that can happen, and then to see if I can still find my way in and out of that cave. But of course there’s more to it than that—or anyway another version of the same story.

Writing is not only an odd craft, a keeping company with ghosts giving you songs and visitations giving you words. People may say, to other people or themselves, that they want to become a writer, as if it’s a status or a profession where you get a degree and then you’re a writer. Writers write. They can’t help it. They can’t not. At some point defeated, without readers, or without a subject, without something that calls out to be put into the world, without riding on the belief that nothing exactly the same has been in the world before, they might give up. Then they aren’t writers. People sometimes ask writers if they’re going to retire. You don’t retire from writing any more than you retire from breathing. Perhaps at a certain point you can’t do it anymore. For some people what stops them from writing is whatever it is that stops them from breathing. For ten months in 2022 that was how I lived; for ten months I didn’t write a word that went into the world. I couldn’t believe how easy it was. 

 I first read Greil Marcus when I was in college, certainly before I went off to law school. What he wrote about Stagger Lee, what he wrote about Sly Stone, whatever he has written about music has stuck with me. How much he got under my skin I did not realize until I read this piece. He is there in what I am trying to do with "Chasing Ashes". It is there in my thinking that the story of America is as much in its songs as its prose; that if I want to get at America, I have to include songs.

And one other shocker is realizing how old Greil Marcus is.

sch 8/17

“Do it often, do it badly if you must, just keep doing it.” Yael van der Wouden on the writer’s life. ( Literary Hub)

My Culture Journal: a SoBro writer finds inspiration in horror

The Grand Ballroom Theory of Literature by Lincoln Michel

sch 8/20

Creating Characters That Resonate (Writing Forward)

Tips for Creating Dynamic Characters

• Dialogue and behavior. From the way they talk to how they behave, each character should be distinct. Make sure characters don’t sound and act alike.
• Names. Esmeralda doesn’t sound like a soccer mom, and Joe doesn’t sound like an evil sorcerer. Make sure the names you choose for your characters match their personalities and the roles they play in the story. This will make them more memorable.
• Goals. Some say that characters’ goals drive the entire story. He wants to slay the dragon; she wants to overthrow the evil empire. Goals can be small (the character wants a new car) or big (the character is trying to save the world). Just about every character in a story has a goal.
• Strengths and weaknesses. Villains sometimes do nice things, and heroes occasionally take the low road. What are your characters’ most positive and negative behaviors and personality traits?
• Friends and family. These are the people in our inner circles, and they play important roles in shaping our personalities and our lives. Who are your characters’ friends and family before the story starts? What new friends will they meet once the story begins?
• Nemesis. A nemesis is someone with whom we are at odds. This character doesn’t have to be a villain, but the goals of the nemesis definitely interfere with your main character’s goals.
• Position in the world. What do your characters do for a living? What are their daily lives like? Where do they live? What is a character’s role or position among their friends, family, or coworkers?
• Skills and abilities. Characters’ skills and abilities can get them out of a tight spot or prevent them from being able to get out of a tight spot. What skills and training do your characters have? What skills and training do they lack? Will they acquire those skills?
• Purpose and function. Can you identify a purpose for every character in a story? Do some characters perform one function while others perform multiple functions?
• Fears. An old fiction writing trick is to figure out what your character is most afraid of, and then make the character face it. Give each character a fear, even if they never face it in the story.