Tools not rules

So let me repeat, once more: literature not only breaks the rules, but makes us realize that there are none.

Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer

Writing in Reading as a Writer, Francine Prose says she taught creative writing classes using rules until she realized the best writers broke those same rules on their way to creating masterpieces. Anton Chekhov's classic short story "The Lady with the Dog" is famous for breaking rules.

Another writing teacher, Roy Peter Clark of the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, puts the focus not on rules but rather on tools. His valuable guidebook for writers of all kinds, amateurs and professionals alike, is Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer, published in 2006. The word essential in the subtitle is unfortunate, for it implies something mandatory, and thus a rule. A tool, on the other hand, is something that may be useful sometimes, but not always. A handyman doesn't necessarily use both a hammer and a screwdriver on every project.

In St. Petersburg I once heard Clark speak on the subject of writing, and he spoke at length on a six-word sentence written by William Shakespeare in Macbeth and discussed early in this book: "The Queen, my lord, is dead." He noted that Shakespeare might have ordered the same six words differently, "The Queen is dead, my lord" or "My lord, the Queen is dead." So what makes Shakespeare's order the best one? Because it places the subject of the sentence near the front, where it usually works best in a clear sentence, and saves the key word, dead, for the end, where it will have the most impact.

Roy Peter Clark

"Order words for emphasis" is the second tool in Clark's toolbox. Others include "Activate your verbs" (but notice Shakespeare chose a passive verb for his sentence), "Fear not the long sentence," "Vary the length of paragraphs," "Work from a plan" and "Learn from your critics."

Clark advises against reading his book in one sitting, although it may be short enough for some readers to accomplish this. A carpenter in training cannot master all the tools in the toolbox at the same time, and neither can a writer in training, and that includes anyone who opens this book. I took his advice and read one chapter a day, but that still may be too quickly to master many of these tools. Many take time both to digest and to implement, such as that one about learning from one's critics. Even the best writers may never master that one.

A novel with detours

Michael Frayn's Headlong (1999) turns alternately from comic novel to lively art history and back again. The novel is terrific, except for those repeated interruptions, and perhaps the same could be said for the art history, if art history were one's purpose for reading a novel.

The story concerns a British philosopher, Martin Clay, who with his wife, Kate, flees to the country to work on his book. She has her own project to work on, plus a new baby to occupy her. No sooner do they arrive at their county house than they are invited to dinner by Tony and Laura Churt, who have a motive other than pure neighborliness. Tony wants a free appraisal of some art he claims was given to  him by his deceased mother. He also wants help selling the art for maximum profit without having to pay the commission to someone like Sotheby's.

The Clays don't want to get involved, that is until Martin glimpses what he becomes convinced is a missing Bruegel masterpiece. Never mind that his wife is the art expert, Martin wants to do this on his own. He concocts a plan to acquire the painting for a fraction of its worth and sell it for a fortune. He convinces himself this would not be cheating Tony Churt but rather a public service.

Of course, things get complicated. For one thing, Laura Churt mistakes Martin's interest in the painting for an interest in her. Why else would he keep coming to the house while Tony was away?

Yet the biggest complication turns out to be all that art history that Frayn inserts into the novel. Although this is a work of fiction, the history appears to be true. If so, it is good stuff, at least for anyone with an interest in art history. For those of us just interested in the story about the Clays and the Churts, it proves an annoying detour.

With less history this could have been a first rate comic novel. With less plot it could have been a first rate art history.

Precious objects and holy spaces

But when all is said and done, holding a printed book in my hands can be a sacred experience -- the weight of the paper, the windy sound of pages turning, like a breeze. To me, a printed book is like a cathedral or a library or a beach -- a holy space.

Anne Lamott, By the Book, edited by Pamela Paul

Anne Lamott

In the same book, E.L. Doctorow refers to paper books as "precious objects." Doctorow and Anne Lamott are authors, so of course they love books, yet clearly this feeling that books are holy spaces or precious objects goes far beyond those whose livelihoods depend on them.

A recent post on Jane Friedman's blog, (janefriedman.com) reports that sales of paper books went up again during the first half of 2017, 2.6 percent over the same period in 2016. Meanwhile ebooks have "lost about $1 billion of their value as a format for traditional publishers since 2013." Since that year ebook sales have been in decline, even though many of us during that same period have been fearing that traditional books will disappear from the scene, obsolete in an age when virtually everyone carries an electronic object in their hands capable of downloading almost any book anyone might want to read.

E.L. Doctorow

Also in By the Book, Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer at Facebook, confesses she prefers paper books to ebooks, even though her career is in the tech industry. "I travel with an iPad, but at home I like holding a book open and being able to leaf through it, highlight with a real yellow pen, and dog-ear important pages," she says. Thus it is the sensory experience of holding a paper book, as well as the almost mystical experience that Lamott and Doctorow speak about, that keeps people buying books they can hold in their hands, when ebooks offer convenience and economy.

All this suggests that books, the old fashioned kind, will be around for awhile yet.

Admiring Woody Allen movies

Diane Keaton and Woody Allen in Annie Hall

Not even Woody Allen admires all Woody Allen movies, as we learn from reading Woody Allen: Film by Film by Jason Solomons, an analysis of every movie (up to Irrational Man, 2015) Allen has ever had anything to do with as director, writer or actor, and even documentaries made about him. One thing I like about this book is that while Solomons doesn't admire every Allen film either, he finds something admirable about most of them.

Some people who review films give the impression that, in general, they don't like movies at all. Solomons isn't like this. He loves movies, and Allen movies in particular. Like a parent with a misbehaving child, the offender may disappoint but doesn't alter the love.

Dianne Wiest Mia Farrow and Barbara Hershey
with director Woody Allen on the set
 of Hannah and Her Sisters

If anything, Solomons may use too many superlatives, and not just with the widely acknowledged Allen masterpieces like Annie Hall and Manhattan. Hannah and Her Sisters "is about as perfect at Woody Allen gets," he says. Crimes and Misdemeanors is "perhaps the most skillful and soulful picture of his career." He calls Radio Days "one of his funniest." And so on.

I love it that Solomons loves such gems as Radio Days and Alice that get little attention from other critics when they are ranking Allen's best movies. Solomon's doesn't try to rank them. To use the parental analogy again, it would be like ranking one's children.

Allen, now in his 80s, has been making movies since the mid-Sixties at a rate of about one a year. Few of these movies have been box office hits, and few even have been critical favorites, although Allen has had amazing success on Oscar nights, especially in the screenplay and best actress categories. The parts he created have sweetened the careers of many actresses, especially Diane Keaton, Mia Farrow, Dianne Wiest, Mira Sorvino and Cate Blanchett.

Although his best years seemed to be behind him after such box-office flops as The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, Melinda and Melinda, Scoop and Whatever Works early in the new century, Allen surprised his critics with masterful films like Midnight in Paris and Blue Jasmine in his old age. He's still at work, and who can say what other surprises he may have left.

Organized chaos

When we bought a spacious three-bedroom home in the city in the late Seventies, I claimed the unfinished attic for my expanding library. Even with all the stuff that normally accumulates in attics, there would still be plenty of room for lots of shelves and lots of books. Or so I thought at the time. As the decades passed and my books continued to multiply (the result of both my purchases and the fact that publishers sent me a number of books each week for possible review), the available shelf space gradually disappeared. So that led to stacks of books on the floor, stacks that get so high they sometimes topple. See the photograph for a glimpse of a small portion of my library.

To anyone else this looks like clutter. And in fact it is clutter, but to me it is beautiful clutter. I am never more content than when I am reading amid this clutter. The photo shows the view from my reading chair.

As unorganized as my library may appear, there actually is some order to it, and I can usually find the book I am looking for quickly, even if I may have to move stacks of books to reach it. I actually use several different organization systems.

1. Fiction is shelved alphabetically by author.

2. Stacked fiction, mostly novels still unread, also reflects some alphabetical order. The stacks shown in the picture include an F stack (written by authors whose names begin with F), a G stack, an HIJ stack and a JK stack.

3. Biographies, autobiographies and memoirs are shelved in alphabetical order according to their subjects.

4. Other nonfiction is grouped according to subject, more or less. History is here, natural history over there, sports in this corner, show business on that shelf, etc. As books accumulate, this order becomes more and more disorderly.

5. Books are also sorted according to size. Mass market paperbacks are shelved separately from hardcover and trade paperback books, again with the fiction kept apart from the nonfiction. Large books, whatever they happen to be about, are kept on shelves big enough to accommodate large books.

6. Unread nonfiction is kept mostly in stacks behind my reading chair. These stacks lack any order whatsoever, which is not all bad. I never know what treasures I might find when I dig into them.

When we bought a Florida condo a couple of years back, it provided a modest amount of additional book space but also more complication. No matter where I happen to be, I never have access to my entire library. Usually that's not a problem, but sometimes I want a book that happens to be a thousand miles away.

Organizing books

The more books one owns, the more important organization of those books becomes. Also, the more difficult it becomes.

If your personal library consists of just 20 books, or even 50 or 100, there's not much point in sorting them according to author or topic. You will always be able to find the book you are looking for with ease. As libraries expand, however, it becomes necessary to order them in some way, even if it's something as basic as fiction here, nonfiction there.

Hannah Gerson, in an article she wrote for The Millions (themillions.com) in July, suggests 10 ways to organize a bookshelf: chronologically, by date published; by color; artful piles; by subject/genre; geographically; in order of importance and/or goodness; secretively; alphabetically; randomly and autobiographically.

Most of these suggestions make no sense at all to me. A random organization is really no organization at all. Shelving books according to their publication date would soon become a burden, especially if you happen to own more than an armful of books. Imagine returning from a used book sale with 20 volumes and having to find where on your shelves they belong. And how would you find a particular book you are looking for?

By "secretively," she means placing the spines of the books toward the wall. She says this would make it difficult for anyone to borrow your books. Or it could prompt curious houseguests to take virtually every book off a shelf to see what the "secret" is. And again, how would you find the book you are looking for?

Placing books in "artful piles" or sorting them by color has more to do with decor than books. If that is where your priorities lie, then go to it, but why are you reading book blogs?

Autobiographical shelving, Gerson says, was suggested by a character in Nick Horby's novel High Fidelity. The idea is to order your books in a way that makes sense to you but nobody else. Books you read while you were in college might go on one shelf, books in the early years of your marriage might go on another and those from your child-rearing years on still another. We can often remember when and where we read particular books, so this method may actually work for some people. Not for me, however. There are just too many books, many of them still unread.

Shelving books geographically might also work for some people. If a book is about Africa or is a novel set in Africa, then place it on the African shelf. The trouble is, some books are about several different areas, or no area at all. You could shelve it according to where the author is from, but some books have two authors from two different places. This system just seems too complicated to be practical.

Ordering your books by their quality or importance might be workable, except that it would require a value judgment each time you place a book on a shelf. Ranking 100 books might be fun, but a thousand books or more? And what do you do with those books you have yet to read?

That leaves ordering books by subject or genre, the most sensible of the 10 ideas. Gerson herself says she uses this one, although some books don't seem to fit into any category, so she just stacks them in a miscellaneous pile.

Maybe next time I'll write about my own method of library organization.

Literature both contemporary and historical

As I like to say, all literature is contemporary literature. It is read and preserved by those to whom it continues to speak.

Scott Turow, foreword, By the Book

Scott Turow

These words by Scott Turow, the author of popular legal thrillers, could serve as a definition of literature: stories that speak to every generation. Some stories don't even speak to their own generation. Others speak only to the generation in which they were written but have little to say to later ones. Real literature has staying power. It speaks anew to each succeeding generation, although what it says is not necessarily the same to each generation. Thus, as Turow points out, it seems contemporary, however old it may actually be.

It may even take a few generations to discover whether a particular book qualifies as literature or not. Some novels are widely read and appreciated when they are first published, but then are quickly forgotten. Sometimes these books are rediscovered and their literary value recognized years later. With most books, however, once forgotten, always forgotten.

A few weeks ago I read Anthony Trollope's 1879 novel Cousin Henry. The fact that the book remains in print indicates somebody recognizes its literary value. And I found, as I wrote in my review (July 24), that the story spoke to me, even though it was about people in a different time and place and about a situation, a contested will for the inheritance of a large estate, that I will never experience. Even so I could relate to these people and their attitudes and behavior. It seemed contemporary to me.

If all literature is contemporary literature, as Turow argues, I would add that all fiction is historical fiction. When Cousin Henry was written, it was a contemporary novel. Nearly 150 years later we read it both as being about us now but also about a culture that no longer exists. Historical writers today may attempt to capture something of 19th century England, but Trollope did that for us while writing about his own time.

Working mother

Working mothers sometimes have to take their kids to work with them, which can become problematic when a mother works as a police detective. When I reviewed the first book in Michael Hiebert's Alvin, Alabama series of mysteries, Dream with Little Angels (April 11, 2014), my objection was that Detective Leah Teal took her 11-year-old son Abe to too many crime scenes and interrogations to be believable. Even a bad mother would be unlikely to do this, and Leah is portrayed as a good mother.

Abe is 12 years old in the second novel in the series, Close to the Broken Hearted, and while he remains a main character and the narrator of much of the story, both Hiebert and Leah show better sense in keeping the boy, who thinks he's a better detective than his mother, away from most of the action. However, both Abe and his older sister, Caroline. happen to be in the car when their mother gets the call that sends her rushing to the novel's violent climax.

The story centers on Sylvie Carson, a young mother who has been emotionally disturbed since Preacher Eli accidentally killed her younger brother years before. Now the preacher has been released from prison, and Sylvie claims he is harassing her. Strange things are happening at her home, open doors and odd noises, and Sylvie keeps calling the police department to complain about Preacher Eli. Only Leah believes these complaints are not just in Sylvie's imagination.

Meanwhile, Abe and his friend Dewey provide comic relief, playing with their wooden swords and spying on Preacher Eli while disguised as trees. A subplot involves discoveries about Abe's father, who died when the boy was very young. Hiebert gives us a compelling story and lots of small town Alabama atmosphere. What's hard to believe this time is not children being taken to crime scenes but the fact that the author hails not from Alabama but from Canada.

Not so easy A

Although I devoted my career to newspapers, my college major was actually magazine journalism. The toughest journalism class I took was magazine writing because the professor didn't give A's. Only magazine editors gave A's. To get an A in the class a student had to sell an article to a magazine, then show the acceptance letter or the check to the professor.

A few days ago, in a vain attempt at housecleaning, I happened upon the articles I wrote for that class and the rejection letters I received from magazine editors. Most of the latter were form letters probably sent out by the dozens each day to frustrated writers, although the one from Dick Kaplan, managing editor of Pageant, at least said, "Please forgive this impersonal reply." Henry W. Hough, editor of The Poetry Forum, said, "Sometimes we send back good poems because we're overstocked at the moment." Such phrases seemed somehow reassuring even though they were in form letters and so meant absolutely nothing. Most letters, like those from Redbook, P.S. magazine, the Diners Club Magazine and The Reader's Digest, weren't even signed but just came from "The Editors." Somebody at December Magazine simply wrote the word "SORRY" on a 3-by-5 card

The best rejection letter came from David E. Kucharsky, news editor of Christianity Today, who wrote, "Thank you for letting us see your manuscript on the dormitory Chaplains at Ohio University. It is interesting enough, but I doubt if there is enough significance here on a broad scale. Space pressures are such that we are not able to handle the more local issues." At least I knew that what I had written was actually read by somebody and rejected for a good reason.

As for the other rejected articles, one was called "Saucers, Sea Serpents and Such," another "Edison and the Aeroplane" and another "You Don't Want to Keep This Job You Got," which is what a kindly police chief told me after he picked me up for attempting to sell encyclopedia in his town, in which door-to-door sales turned out to be illegal. I took his advice and quit the job that night.

The rejected poems included the following:

how are you

said one

in greeting

fine thank you

said the other

in suffering

i'm glad to hear that

said the first

in passing

Yet not all my efforts were rejected. On Jan. 12, 1966, Paul Fromer, editor of His, a Christian magazine aimed at college students, wrote, "Thanks for your sensitive article 'The Gift of Shyness.' We want to use it and I am enclosing a check." The article was short, just one page in the magazine, and the check was small, just $7.50, but it was the first money I earned as a journalist and, more importantly, earned me an A just before the semester ended.

The great big American novel

The "great American novel" is a form which Americans respect, not only because it seems equal to the "grandeur" and size of the country and the universal implications of its history, but because in some way its looseness, its broodingness, its very size seem about to yield up the secret, the essential truth of American life.

Alfred Kazin, "The Great American Bore," Contemporaries

Alfred Kazin

For decades in the middle of the 20th century, the idea of the great American novel referred not so much to literary greatness as size. A great novel had to be huge, or so we can assume from the thickness of so many of the novels being produced by American writers of this period. Literary critic Alfred Kazin examined this assumption in his hard-hitting 1958 essay "The Great American Bore."

Most of those hits were directed at John O'Hara and his massive novel From the Terrace which had just been published. I don't know that I have ever read a book review as negative as this one.

Kazin called the novel "mercilessly repetitive and meaninglessly detailed."

He said it "makes no great demand on anyone's mental faculties."

"There is no plot, no dramatic unity of any kind to enforce suspense or even tension," he wrote.

The book, he said, "is simply a large piece of American history in our time, ripped out of the reference books."


Mostly Kazin focused on the novel's length: "Nine hundred pages! Nine hundred pages of characters who appear for a paragraph and are forgotten; nine hundred pages of rapacious females who talk about sex like college sophomores discovering that 'sex is nothing but sensation anyway.' Nine hundred pages of detail about rich men's stables, what workmen ate for lunch in a Pennsylvania steel mill in 1900, of careful notations about lemon phosphates and who was mad at whom and who slept with whom, and what people ate at a prep-school lunch in the 1920s ..."

O'Hara was not alone in churning out these massive, door-stopper novels. Kazin refers to Thomas Wolfe, Irwin Shaw, James Jones and other writers. He could also have mentioned lesser writers such as James Michener, Irving Wallace, Harold Robbins and any number of others from that period when bigness seemed to equate to importance or value or even greatness in the eyes of publishers, readers and even the authors themselves.

Long novels are still being written, of course. I usually read one or more such novels each year. Sometimes they seem padded, other times they tell stories equal to the length of the books. Yet when I enter a bookstore today, as I in fact hope to do later today, I don't have the sense that size dominates story in the books I see on shelves and tables. Great American novels are still being written, but great size no longer appears to be the primary objective.

Novel instructions

The failure of Tender Is the Night never stopped hurting him. So when he inscribed copies of the book, he would give people instructions on how to read it.

Matthew J. Bruccoli, quoted in Every Book Its Reader by Nicholas A. Basbanes

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Honors English at Ohio University in 1962 meant skipping freshman English and instead taking sophomore-level classes in American literature. One of the many books we read in these classes was F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night. Meanwhile a roommate took freshman English. One day I heard him raving about The Great Gatsby, another Fitzgerald novel that had been assigned by his professor.

I thought Tender Is the Night an OK novel, more interesting than some we read but hardly the best either. And I never heard anyone in my class praising it the way my roommate praised Gatsby. For the first time I felt a pang of regret at being stuck in honors English while other freshmen got to read Gatsby.

Since its publication in 1934, Tender Is the Night has failed to generate as much excitement as The Great Gatsby (1925). It hasn't sold nearly as many copies. Critics haven't given it as much attention. Movie producers haven't been as eager to turn it into films. The late Matthew J. Broccoli, once the foremost expert on Fitzgerald and his work, told Nicholas A. Basbanes that the failure of Tender Is the Night broke the author's heart. He so obsessed about the book that he decided he had structured it wrong. At the time of his death a copy of the novel was found that had been torn apart, the chapters reordered in a way that, in Fitzgerald's view, made the novel easier to follow.

When he inscribed the book, he began to include instructions that the reader begin reading at page 151, then go back to the beginning. Later Fitzgerald's revision of the novel was published, but it was received by critics and readers with no more enthusiasm than the original.

Instructions on how to read a book are not uncommon in nonfiction. Writers will sometimes give us an outline of the book in their introduction, even to the point of telling us what each chapter is about and summarizing the main points. They may go as far as to suggest that certain chapters can be skipped altogether because they contain mostly technical information that won't interest every reader.

In fiction such advice from an author is rare, considered a no-no except sometimes in first-person narratives where the advice seems to be coming not from the author but from the fictional narrator.

A notable exception is Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, at the beginning of which Mark Twain placed two notes. The more famous one says, "Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot." In the second he explains the various dialects he uses, adding "I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding."

Most of us, I'm sure, have read novels that we wish had come with the authors' instructions on how to read them.

Something greater

Books are writers' way of becoming something else, something more, something greater.

Anna Quindlen, By the Book, edited by Pamela Paul

Anna Quindlen

The above comment by Anna Quindlen comes in response to a question about which writer, living or dead, she would most like to meet. Like the question of what books we would most like to have with us on our proverbial desert island, this is something serious readers may sometimes like to ponder. Others may fantasize about a dinner with Hollywood stars, famous singers or their political or military heroes, but for some of us our fantasies are more likely to revolve around literary heroes. Wouldn't we love to have a face-to-face chat with Mark Twain, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson or some other great writer?

But Quindlen recognizes the risk in this. What if, as would most likely be the case, the person did not measure up to the work? What if Twain were in one of his dark moods or the reclusive Dickinson declined to utter a single word in response to our questions or Shakespeare turned out to have an unpleasant personality? Would we gain more from this experience than we would lose?

Don't most of us view our work as our way of "becoming something else, something more, something greater"? Whether we build birdhouses, bake cakes, sing arias, program computers, sell cars or write novels, we want the result of our labor to make us seem better than we are. Our work may have imperfections, but they are probably not as obvious as the imperfections in ourselves. Quindlen suggests focusing on the written work, not those who wrote it.

If meeting Dickens or Austen is something we can only imagine, reading the biographies of these and other writers is something we can all do. To follow Quindlen's logic, it is something we should avoid, however. The writers we read about may not measure up to their work either. I have read numerous literary biographies and I know this to be true. Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. and Pauline Kael, to cite just three examples, were not as admirable as their writing. This could prejudice us against their work, but should it? Would you cease to admire the beauty and workmanship of your own home if you discovered the architect or builder was a despicable human being?

Making oneself into a better person is difficult, and we may settle for "becoming something else, something more, something greater" in the work we do.

War comes to England

It is the unexpected note that makes the poem.

Helen Simonson, The Summer Before the War

A major war impacts everyone in a country at war, and one thing Helen Simonson's fine second novel The Summer Before the War (following the popular Major Pettigrew's Last Stand) accomplishes is to show this impact at every level of society in England in 1914, from the upper classes to the outcast Gypsies.

It seems a perfect summer when Beatrice Nash, Simonson's central character, comes to Rye in Sussex to become the new Latin teacher. Agatha Kent, wife of a British diplomat, has stuck her neck out advocating for Beatrice, when others favor a male teacher. And Beatrice is prettier than the ideal female teacher, for women are tolerated as teachers at that time only if they are spinsters. Beatrice promises to remain unmarried, a promise she regrets after she falls in love with Hugh, one of Agatha's nephews who is training to become a surgeon.

Another nephew, more favored by Agatha than his cousin, is Daniel, a promising poet with a reputation for getting into trouble and, with Hugh's help and his own charm, getting out of it. Of course, we readers know before they do that these bright young men will soon be going to war, as will others of Simonson's characters. Despite what the title suggests, war comes before the midway point of the novel.

Rye was something of literary hotbed at the time this story takes place, the area being home to Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, Virginia Woolf, E.F. Benson and others. Simonson's Henry James stand-in is  Mr. Tillingham, an aging American writer who has been living in England for many years. Tillingham outlives James, who died in 1916, but otherwise seems closely modeled after the great writer. Beatrice herself is an aspiring writer, so along with the poet Daniel, Simonson's characters capture something of the flavor of that time and place.

Simonson gives her readers one major surprise and a few minor ones. Yet on the whole her novel, as enjoyable as it is to read, seems predictable. The "unexpected note that makes the poem" may be the only thing lacking.