It turns out that having a book well-edited and written according to particular stylistic requirements wasn’t necessary to get it to sell well: it was necessary to get it published. And since books which aren’t published rarely sell well, editing and stylistic accomplishment were second-order requirements. Now that a book can be published without meeting them, lo and behold, books which aren’t edited and written in a particular style can sell well.
That isn’t to say that ceteris paribus a book which is well-edited and stylistically proper won’t do as well or better than a book which isn’t. It almost certainly will. But a book which isn’t and has a good story and good characters will do better than a book which is and doesn’t.
—Marc Cabot, in a comment on The Passive Voice
Archives for January 2013
Marc Cabot on why ‘crap’ sells
Death carries a camcorder
The fifth essai in a series, following ‘Teaching Pegasus to crawl’. The original appeared on LiveJournal in May, 2006.
Fiction is, among many other things, a game between writer and reader, a kind of mental strip-tease in which the writer slowly reveals the details of the story, and the reader tries to guess at their significance. Mystery stories exhibit the game in its purest form, of course; but the element of guessing ‘whodunit’ turns up in every kind of fiction.
As stories have grown more complex, and the telling more elliptical and compressed, guessing out the storyteller’s meaning has become a difficult and demanding skill. Usually we don’t think of it in those terms, because as readers, we began to develop that skill early in childhood; it was fun to do, and after all, children can take delight in the most fiendishly elaborate games. Generally speaking, we don’t notice the skill involved until it stops working — that is, until the writer breaks the rules of the game. [Read more…]
How to invent realistic character names
Want just the right name for a character? A name that perfectly expresses his role in the story, without being a spoiler? A handle that reveals his unique quiddity, without revealing too much? A moniker that speaks from soul to soul? A collocation of vocables that grabs the reader right in the kishkes and won’t let go?
Look no further. You can use any one of these.
(Except ‘Dan Smith’. That would be ridiculous.)
You’re welcome.
The rhetoric of Middle-earth
This essay is included in my collection, Writing Down the Dragon. It has previously appeared on LiveJournal.
Do not laugh! But once upon a time (my crest has long since fallen) I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story — the larger founded on the lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing splendour from the vast backcloths — which I could dedicate simply to: to England; to my country.
— The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, no. 131 (to Milton Waldman)
The business of finding and resolving cruxes, of course, is not the only trick in the philologist’s bag, or the only one that Tolkien brought to his imaginative writing. A philologist, in the nature of things, must have a keen nose for style, for the sounds and usages of words. A genuine document is always rooted in the dialect of a particular time and place, modified by the author’s choice of words, rhythms, and turns of phrase. [Read more…]
The gentle art of making eyeballs bleed
The URL about says it all:
http://lousybookcovers.tumblr.com/
Kids, don’t try this at home. Please.
Now, for those who don’t want to end up with their covers being mocked on Tumblr, I can heartily recommend Joel Friedlander’s site, The Book Designer.
J. Gordon Smith on literary fiction
Literary fiction is the fancy wine of the publishing world. The grapes have to struggle against chalky soil and harsh hot days with chilly nights. And then there is the two-buck-chuck blind taste off and what do we have? Or the incident where French and American wines were blind taste tested by French reviewers and the American wines won.
F. Scott Fitzgerald: a letter to Frances Turnbull
Published in F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters. Hat tip to Brain Pickings via The Passive Voice.
I should like to call particular attention to the last sentence of the P.S.:
You have talent — which is the equivalent of a soldier having the right physical qualifications for entering West Point.
This is perhaps the best definition of talent, that obscure and much-abused term, that I have ever read. —T. S.
November 9, 1938
Dear Frances:
I’ve read the story carefully and, Frances, I’m afraid the price for doing professional work is a good deal higher than you are prepared to pay at present. You’ve got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner. This is especially true when you begin to write, when you have not yet developed the tricks of interesting people on paper, when you have none of the technique which it takes time to learn. When, in short, you have only your emotions to sell. [Read more…]
A minor milestone
With the republication of ‘Teaching Pegasus to crawl’, there are now over 200,000 words of content on bondwine.com. I hope you may find some of them interesting, informative, or entertaining.
Teaching Pegasus to crawl
The fourth essai in a series, following ‘Tyrion 13:4’. The original appeared on LiveJournal in May, 2006.
As I said earlier, the choice of an appropriate prose style for a fantasy tale is a decision fraught with peril. We are tempted to choose a style that will convey the proper sense of wonder and adventure, and the air of old times and alien cultures; or would, if we only had the skill to pull it off. If we lack that skill, our stories will sound rather like an untrained singer trying to do the lead in Rigoletto — ambitious, but inept. And this will get us laughed at.
It is safe to say that none of us enjoy being laughed at. So for perhaps forty years past, there has been a reaction in the opposite direction; and I am afraid that is an even worse error. The sensible reaction would be to learn how to produce the effects that we wanted; the real reaction, for far too many writers, has been simply to give up trying and settle for a bland quotidian style. Their stories are inept without being ambitious. And this is worse, for unless they are very lucky, it gets them ignored and forgotten. They may truly be hearing the horns of Elfland in their heads; but they cannot play that music. What they do play is a tuneless mishmash compounded of slovenly description, spin-doctoring, and rhetorical fog. [Read more…]
Defining ‘literary fiction’
Geoff Burling says, in a comment on The Passive Voice (same article as the last):
One problem I have with Friedman’s post was that she insisted on an artificial distinction between “literary fiction” — I’m guessing she means fiction that is written well but is not bestseller material — & “genre” fiction (e.g., romance, mystery, action, science fiction): until a few decades ago, any fiction writer published with the hope her/his book would get on the bestseller lists, that everyone would want to read the book. (I bet even Herman Melville wanted Moby Dick to be a best seller, & was disappointed when it sold poorly.) A work is classed as literature long after the author is dead in most cases, anyway.
I reply:
Actually, the ‘literary fiction’ racket has been going for over a century, and it is, indeed, a racket. It is based not on quality of writing (though, to keep its rights to the moniker ‘literary’, it does tend to insist obsessively on fine details of prose technique at the sentence level), but on exclusion. [Read more…]
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