Is the road to Lameness paved in comfort and security? Must I remain unstable and poor for the rest of my life to avoid it?

Am I already lame for reasons outside of comfort and security???

Oh god!!!

hey i just wanted to let you guys know that i’ve checked the mailbox at least six or seven times today and it was empty so i still don’t have a copy of ‘another green world’ or the criterion collection blu-ray of ‘KAGEMUSHA (影武者)’ that i asked for for my birthday so ummmmmmmmm maybe you shipped it through media mail and in that case it does take a little longer than priority mail so i’m going to keep checking the mailbox every day

Elmore Leonard, may he rest in peace, used to have a section on his website that listed his “Ten Rules of Writing.” I can’t find it anymore. I’m going to post them here because, uh . . . they’re real good, and I do my best to keep them in mind when I’m stringing stuff together.

Anyway the following words were written by a great man who is finally free of this awful mortal realm.

•   •   •

TEN RULES OF WRITING
by Elmore Leonard

These are rules I’ve picked up along the way to help me remain invisible when I’m writing a book, to help me show rather than tell what’s taking place in the story. If you have a facility for language and imagery and the sound of your voice pleases you, invisibility is not what you are after, and you can skip the rules. Still, you might look them over.

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 to describe ice and snow than an Eskimo, 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 nonfiction. 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 O.K. 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. . . . figure out what the guy’s thinking from what he says. I like some description but not too much of that. . . . Sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle. . . . Spin up some pretty words maybe or sing a little song with language. That’s nice. But I wish it was set aside so I don’t have to read it. I don’t want hooptedoodle to get mixed up with the story.”

3. Never use a verb other than ”said” to carry dialogue.

The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But said is far less intrusive than grumbled, gasped, cautioned, lied. I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with ”she asseverated,” and had to stop reading to get the dictionary.

4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb ”said” . . .

. . . he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances ”full of rape and adverbs.”

5. Keep your exclamation points under control.

You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.

6. Never use the words ”suddenly” or ”all hell broke loose.”

This rule doesn’t require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use ”suddenly” tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.

7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.

Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apostrophes, you won’t be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavor of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories ”Close Range.”

8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.

Which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway’s ”Hills Like White Elephants” what do the ”American and the girl with him” look like? ”She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.” That’s the only reference to a physical description in the story, and yet we see the couple and know them by their tones of voice, with not one adverb in sight.

9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.

Unless you’re Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language or write landscapes in the style of Jim Harrison. But even if you’re good at it, you don’t want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.

And finally:

10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

A rule that came to mind in 1983. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he’s writing, perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character’s head, and the reader either knows what the guy’s thinking or doesn’t care. I’ll bet you don’t skip dialogue.

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10.

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can’t allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative. It’s my attempt to remain invisible, not distract the reader from the story with obvious writing. (Joseph Conrad said something about words getting in the way of what you want to say.)

If I write in scenes and always from the point of view of a particular character — the one whose view best brings the scene to life — I’m able to concentrate on the voices of the characters telling you who they are and how they feel about what they see and what’s going on, and I’m nowhere in sight.

What Steinbeck did in ”Sweet Thursday” was title his chapters as an indication, though obscure, of what they cover. ”Whom the Gods Love They Drive Nuts” is one, ”Lousy Wednesday” another. The third chapter is titled ”Hooptedoodle 1” and the 38th chapter ”Hooptedoodle 2” as warnings to the reader, as if Steinbeck is saying: ”Here’s where you’ll see me taking flights of fancy with my writing, and it won’t get in the way of the story. Skip them if you want.”

”Sweet Thursday” came out in 1954, when I was just beginning to be published, and I’ve never forgotten that prologue.

Did I read the hooptedoodle chapters? Every word.

I have bad news for a lot of people: trying to be witty is not the same thing as being witty

OKbye~~~

I told Dante a few minutes ago: “Hold my calls, baby. I’m gonna be in the tub.” He gave me this look that he sometimes gives me, where I can tell he thinks I’m an idiot. He really does do this. Anyway he yawned and went back to sleep.

Got the tub all hot and brought a cup of tea in with me. When you’re dealing with hot water you want a cold beverage (and vice versa)—it is one of the nicest sensations the human body can experience as far as I’m concerned—but it is Very Cold outside, even inside the house, so I took all the heat I could get in and around me.

Did You Know: About 30% of the content I produce for this fine website is written in the bathtub? It’s true! Hell, I was a foot and a half deep in delicious hot water and dissolved epsom salts when I drafted this post. Whoa baby, whoa.

OK I still have a bunch of Kurosawa films left to get through so yeeeaaaaahhhh.

People are always getting upset with space and time and death and nature and stuff like that, and man, all those things are totally impartial and indifferent. They don’t care about stupid humans. They are abstract concepts that we have given names to!!! Why don’t you instead get upset with the unfeeling reptiles and their unwitting human servants who govern your life and invisibly bulldoze you into the figurative (for now) meat grinder called Total Ruination???

Just a thought!!!! ahhhhh!!!!

Thoreau said “beware of all enterprises that require new clothes” 100 years before anyone could work at McDonald’s, by the way

When extraterrestrials land on our ruined planet where no living thing grows or runs free any longer, they will sort through the wreckage of a civilization long since passed, and they will find a photograph of a woman flipping off the camera as she sits on a toilet, and beneath this photo will be a caption saying that she enjoyed “whiskey and Bukowski.”

“Let’s just get this over with, man. You’ve got to earn that paycheck, and I’ve got a date with the Almighty.”
—me to the hangman

“You are all fools, and so was I.”
—me addressing the crowd right before they hang me

“I have seen you in my dreams.”
—me to the Grim Reaper as he guides me through the dark void

“Go easy on me, Father. I did my best with what I was given.”
—me upon meeting The Creator of the Universe

arttears

your ancestors crawled through primordial slime, fought enormous deadly animals, faced starvation and disease and human oppression for over 100,000 years . . . so that you could have your artificial tears