Ten rules for writing fiction

Get an accountant, abstain from sex and similes, cut, rewrite, then cut and rewrite again – if all else fails, pray. Inspired by Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing, we asked authors for their personal dos and don’ts

Elmore Leonard: Using adverbs is a mortal sin

1 Never open a book with weather. If it’s only to create atmosphere, and not a charac­ter’s reaction to the weather, you don’t want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead look­ing for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways than an Eskimo to describe ice and snow in his book Arctic Dreams, you can do all the weather reporting you want.

2 Avoid prologues: they can be ­annoying, especially a prologue ­following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in non-fiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want. There is a prologue in John Steinbeck’s Sweet Thursday, but it’s OK because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: “I like a lot of talk in a book and I don’t like to have nobody tell me what the guy that’s talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks.”

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All That Is, by James Salter, review

James Salter: we are “born in disregard of the times”

Long admired by Roth and Bellow, James Salter is set to join their ranks. David Annand hails the great American writer’s first novel in thirty years.

For 50-odd years James Salter has been the writer’s writer. Richard Ford calls him “the Master”, Bellow was an admirer, Roth, too, and all over Brooklyn satchels bulge with copies of Light Years and The Hunters.

It was something, I suspect, that always worked better for us than it did for him. We got that insider buzz of knowing that we were part of the cloistered few. He got lots of writerly plaudits about the precision of his sentences, but was denied, perhaps, the deep thematic engagement that comes with central cultural import.

Either way, it’s over. In a late flurry he has picked up The Paris Review’s Hadada Prize, the PEN/Malamud lifetime award, and, now, to coincide with the publication of what will surely be his last novel, across-the-board adulation.

You might have thought it irritating for old Jim that all this has happened deep into his eighties, past the age when you would want to take full advantage of the perks of full-blown literary celebrity. But really it’s of little consequence – he’s already done enough living and then some. Improbably masculine and accomplished, he was a combat fighter pilot in the Korean War. He became an accomplished skier (he wrote the screenplay for Robert Redford’s Downhill Racer); a daring mountain climber (Solo Faces, a novel, appeared on the topic in 1979); and found time to write five novels, dozens of short stories, non-fiction and some poetry.

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ALA Unveils 2013 Finalists for Andrew Carnegie Medals

The American Library Association today announced six books as finalists for the 2013 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction, awarded for the previous year’s best fiction and nonfiction books written for adult readers and published in the U.S.

The 2013 shortlisted titles, (selected from a longlist of impressive books) are:

Fiction:

Canada, by Richard Ford (Ecco).

The Round House, by Louise Erdrich (HarperCollins).

This Is How You Lose Her, by Junot Díaz (Riverhead).

Nonfiction:

The Mansion of Happiness: A History of Life and Death, by Jill Lepore (Knopf).

Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis,” by Timothy Egan (Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, by David Quammen (W. W. Norton).

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Leading writers publish bad reviews of themselves

Anne Enright, Richard Ford and Rachel Cusk among authors confessing worst literary sins to Dublin Review

By John Dugdale

Self-flagellation by authors is a long and distinguished tradition, with Tolstoy (who dismissed Anna Karenina as sentimental, “serving no purpose” and “bad”) and Kafka (for whom The Metamorphosis was “imperfect almost to its very marrow”) among its illustrious exemplars. Yet the appearance of startling ruthlessness is deceptive, as it is a younger self and his or her efforts that are usually being punished, whether by criticism or self-parody. The implicit message is: these are mistakes I wouldn’t make now.

The same is true of the confessions collected by Robin Robertson in his 2003 book Mortification: Writers’ Stories of their Public Shame. Most of the tales of disastrous experiences are from the start of the authors’ careers, as with Julian Barnes’s anecdote about a literary party that couldn’t have gone worse for him, or Margaret Atwood’s account of an early signing session in the men’s underwear section of a department store and a TV appearance in which she followed a woman from the Colostomy Association. You don’t believe the shameful memories still keep them awake today.

This makes the self-rubbishing under the heading “What’s Wrong with Me?” in the latest Dublin Review more radical, as the authors who responded to its invitation (to reveal “what they do that causes them dismay, or what they wish they could do but can’t”) are exposing abiding, apparently ineradicable, flaws – not long-ago humiliations, or callow books, or problems since conquered.

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Stuart Evers’ top 10 homes in literature

Stopped clocks and cobwebs … Miss Havisham (Martita Hunt) at home in David Lean’s Great Expectations. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext

From Miss Havisham’s decaying domicile to Jekyll and Hyde’s shared space, fictional homes are as varied as their inhabitants.

Ideas of home are nebulous, ranging from “where the heart is”, to the slightly less warming sentiment of Robert Frost: “The place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” Over the course of writing If This Is Home, I spent a lot of time thinking about how people attribute places, people and areas to “home”. But for the purposes of this very personal top 10 I had to cut it down somehow. I decided to restrict it to traditional homes in novels – ie buildings in which fictional characters live. With regret, therefore, I’ve had to leave out William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, Richard Ford’s Haddam, Patrick Hamilton’s The Midnight Bell, Joan Didion’s house in The Year of Magical Thinking, every home that Alice Munro has ever described, not to mention the prisons, bars and hospitals that are as much homes as they are establishments.

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Most Anticipated: The Great 2012 Book Preview

2012 is shaping up to be another exciting year for readers. While last year boasted long-awaited novels from David Foster Wallace, Haruki Murakami, and Jeffrey Eugenides, readers this year can look forward to new Toni Morrison, Richard Ford, Peter Carey, Lionel Shriver, and, of course, newly translated Roberto Bolaño, as well as, in the hazy distance of this coming fall and beyond, new Michael Chabon, Hilary Mantel, and John Banville. We also have a number of favorites stepping outside of fiction. Marilynn Robinson and Jonathan Franzen have new essay collections on the way. A pair of plays are on tap from Denis Johnson. A new W.G. Sebald poetry collection has been translated. And Nathan Englander and Jonathan Safran Foer have teamed to update a classic Jewish text. But that just offers the merest suggestion of the literary riches that 2012 has on offer. Riches that we have tried to capture in another of our big book previews.

The list that follows isn’t exhaustive – no book preview could be – but, at 8,400 words strong and encompassing 81 titles, this is the only 2012 book preview you will ever need.

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Richard Ford: Money and the writer

Richard Ford. Photograph: Murdo Macleod

‘It mattered a great deal more to me that my novel would be published and possibly read than that somebody paid me’

Money is an odd and complex subject to a writer. In America, at least, probably few people get into the writing racket because of the money – I’ll bet not even John Grisham. And for the guys I’ve always hung around with, we got into it because we wanted to write a really good book that people would read and be changed by for the better. If that occurred possibly money would follow along – although how that would happen wasn’t very clear, and probably it wouldn’t happen no matter what we did. The old adage of Samuel Johnson’s that says anybody who writes for any reason other than money is a nitwit, was a status I had to hope would become true of me, before which time I had to try not minding being a nitwit.

The first book I ever wrote sold to its New York publisher for the sum of $3,500 – which didn’t seem like a lot of money, even in 1975. It mattered a great deal more to me that my novel would be published and possibly read than that somebody paid me for it. My wife and I felt like the money was more of a one-time windfall than anything resembling real “earnings”. We certainly had no thought that it portended more money would ever come our way. Although, we knew what to do with it. We drove to Mexico and lived off of it as long as we could (which wasn’t long), and tried to feel as much as possible like Hemingway and Hadley in Pamplona or wherever they’d been – eating and drinking cheap, having a good time, picking up cheques at the American Express office – while I factored up the fantasy of myself being a “working writer”, which wasn’t very persuasive. The money felt like what we Americans call “funny money”: cash you find in a shoe box inside the closet of a house you rented, and promptly blew on drugs or a vintage Porsche or a new sound system – knowing you’d never get it again so why save it? It was real money, okay. But it wasn’t “serious money”. That, you got from a job. And writing wasn’t really a job. It was more of a lark. It was art for art’s sake. Not art for money’s sake.

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Is American Literature Worth Reading?

  By Andrea Defusco-Sullivan

In the past decade, the U.S. has lost a generation of great writers. Among the talented departed are novelists Kurt Vonnegut (“Slaughterhouse Five”), Norman Mailer (“The Naked and The Dead”), J.D. Salinger (“The Catcher in the Rye”), John Updike (“Rabbit, Run”), and playwright Arthur Miller (“Death of a Salesman”), to name a few.

One critic, Anis Shivani, recently wrote in the Huffington Post that, yes, there is a new American literature, and that it stinks.

I cannot agree with Shivani’s assessment. Our contemporary writers are turning out a quality product. They have picked up the torch of their cultural predecessors.

We see Hemingway’s influence in the works of Andre Dubus(“The Lieutenant”) and Raymond Carver (Cathedral”). We see all three—Hemingway, Dubus and Carver—in the works of Richard Ford (“The Sportswriter”). There are smatterings of William Carlos Williams in (poet)Elizabeth Bishop (“North & South”). And there’s a bit of James and a lot of Hawthorne in Joyce Carol Oates (“Them”), Toni Morrison (“Song of Solomon”) and Cormac McCarthy (“The Road”).

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