Charlie’s Rules for Riting
If anyone was ever dumb enough to let me teach fiction writing, these are the rules I would scrawl on the chalkboard (do they still use those in school?) at the start of the first class:
- There are no rules. I would probably jump around the classroom singing to the tune of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony: “There! Are! No! Rules! There! Are! No! Rules! There are no rules there are no rules there are no rules! There are no rules there are no rules there are no rules! There are no rules, there are no rules, there are no rules, there are no rules, there are no rules, NO RULES!!!!” That would probably give me ultimate credibility with my students, if any. But seriously. It’s all just suggestions.
- Action = character. You reveal more about your characters by the things they do than by telling us about their favorite color. Or having them stare into space, or have generic pop culture conversations.
- Plot = story = meaning. Or maybe, plot is the mechanics of story. You might have a story you want to tell, but the plot is the part that gets character A and character B in the same place at the same time, so something important in the story can happen. The story should drive the plot, not just sort of cling to the plot’s neck wailing like a drunken goose.
- Good prose is transparent. This means that good prose doesn’t draw attention itself and cry out for you to say, “wow, what good prose!” Note: “Transparent” doesn’t mean plain. I’m not endorsing one particular writing style. You can be fancy and transparent. Just look at Michelle Tea’s writing. It’s super fancy, but when you read a paragraph-long description of a nasty guy eating instant noodles, you get a super in-your-face vivid image of the disgusting noodle-eating. Likewise with the fancy literary author of your choice. If she’s any good, her prose hits you with an image or an insight or a feeling or an idea. It doesn’t say, “look at me, I’m prose!”
Can you tell I just read a zillion short fiction submissions for issue #11 of other magazine? Fun fact: way too many of the submissions for issue #10 were about fat people who were evil or misguided (and their fatness was an outward sign of their inward corruption). In the issue #11 slush pile, no fat=evil stories. Instead, lots of stories about people obsessively looking at Internet porn. It makes me wonder what will be the unofficial theme for the issue #12 slush.
let me just do a little PSA for Francine Prose’s new book “Reading Like a Writer”. (And BTW, Francine is in fact allowed to jump around and call out “Look at me! I’m Prose!” because it’s true.)
Her book is sort of the anti-writing-advice book. She talks about how most teaching in creative writing is given in the form of negative examples: discussions of what you’ve done wrong, of what not to do. So, instead, she quotes passages of amazing, wonderful, virtuosic writing and dissects exactly what is GREAT about it. In one of the final chapters, she talks about all the various “rules” she gave to students, only to discover that Chekhov broke all of them to great effect.
I’m now reading a Henry James novel, which I never would have done if I hadn’t read her book.