This post's purpose is to collect my common tags in one place, so readers (and I!) can easily access entries on several subjects.

Tom Purdom reminded me of this awesome, awesome bit from Patrick O'Brian the other day, from the Aubrey-Maturin series. In this section, Jack Aubrey is speaking to Stephen Maturin about some new music he's acquired.

( Bach had a father. )

Justine Larbalestier talks about finishing writing projects.

"My immediate response is that no book is ever "well and truly done." They could all be made better. Every single one of them, yes, even Pride and Prejudice. There is not point at which "you shouldn't tamper with a story anymore."

Problem is that if we all took that attitude we'd all be working on the same book our entire lives and it'd only find its way into print when we carked it. Not very satisfactory. So, yes, at some point you have to let your story go. It may not be a forever letting go. It may just be letting go to send out to agents and/or editors. If it does sell it will be return to you and you'll be rewriting it again. I know some writers who continue to revise books after they've been published.

However, as a writer who's had several books under contract, deadlines are my signal to stop."

I also loved this quote, because it matches what I do:

"I stop working on a manuscript when

a) it's due, or
b) I can't stand it anymore."

She also talks about degrees of being finished.

Tom Purdom told me of the Age of Pulp, "when writers were iron and stories were wooden."

"That is the dematerializing control. And that, over yonder, is the horizontal hold. Up there is the scanner, those are the doors, that is a chair with a panda on it. Sheer poetry, dear boy. Now please stop bothering me."

--The Doctor, "The Time Meddler"

"The erotic is a measure between our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.

It is never easy to demand the most from ourselves, from our lives, from our work. To encourage excellence is to go beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our society is to encourage excellence. But giving in to the fear of feeling and working to capacity is a luxury only the unintentional can afford, and the unintentional are those who do not wish to guide their own destinies.

This internal requirement toward excellence which we learn from the erotic must not be misconstrued as demanding the impossible from ourselves nor from others. Such a demand incapacitates everyone in the process. For the erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing. Once we know the extent to which we are capable of feeling that sense of satisfaction and completion, we can then observe which of our various life endeavors bring us closest to that fullness.

...

Beyond the superficial, the considered phrase, "It feels right to me," acknowledges the strength of the erotic into a true knowledge, for what that means is the first and most powerful guiding light toward any understanding. And understanding is a handmaiden which can only wait upon, or clarify, that knowledge, deeply born. The erotic is the nurturer or nursemaid of all our deepest knowledge.

...

In touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial."


The entire essay can be found in Sister Outsider and online, at least most of it, here.

"I write when I can and I don't write when I can't . . . I wait for inspiration . . . The important thing is that there should be a space of time, say four hours a day, when a professional writer doesn't do anything but write. He doesn't have to write, and if he doesn't feel like it he shouldn't try. He can look out the window or stand on his head or writhe on the floor, but he is not to do any other positive thing, not read, write letters, glance at magazines, or write checks. Either write or nothing. It's the same principle as keeping order in a school. If you make the pupils behave, they will learn something just to keep from being bored. I find it works. Two very simple rules. A) You don't have to write. B) You can't do anything else. The rest comes of itself."

-- Raymond Chandler to Alex Barris, 1949

"And of course I am afraid, because the transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation, and that always seems fraught with danger."

--Audre Lorde
Sister/Outsider, 1984

Words of Raymond Chandler:

"A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled."

"Would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of bar-room vernacular, that is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed but attentive."

"Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love."

"The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time. It pays off slowly, your agent will sneer at it, your publisher will misunderstand it, and it will take people you have never heard of to convince them by slow degrees that the writer who puts his individual mark on the way he writes will always pay off."
--Raymond Chandler

"Without readers, books are just lumps of finely shaved wood."

--Duane Swierczynski, Philadelphia City Paper, 10/6/05

The "Muppet Morsels" glosses on my season one Muppet Show DVDs are sometimes only loosely related to the episode, so it's hard to remember where this one came from.

I paraphrase: "every skit ends with either an explosion or a digestion." Something blows up, or somebody gets eaten.

It seems to me this could be generally applicable.

What, exactly, makes prose transparent? And why is this good? Or bad? Should I worry if I'm told my prose is transparent?

Here are some comments from other people.

Maureen McHugh from Tangent Online, quoted by David Moles back in 2003.

"Transparent prose is a particular style in American English science fiction where vocabulary is somewhat anglo-saxon rather than highly Latinate (except for technical language, often invented for the story.) Characterization is simplified...Sentences tend to be subject verb object...It also relies on established conventions of the genre to avoid explanation."

Ken Follett says: "My aim in constructing sentences is to make the sentence utterly easy to understand, writing what I call transparent prose. I've failed dreadfully if you have to read a sentence twice to figure out what I meant.

I don't feel that all writers should have my approach. ..."

Norman Spinrad, in an Asimov's column: "In the SF field in [1970], there was a dominant critical and editorial notion that persists and perhaps even remains dominant today, namely that science fiction and fantasy should be written in "transparent prose." That is, well-crafted but more or less standard prose that does not call attention to itself, which disappears into the woodwork, which is esthetically invisible."

"I have noticed that in books this sort of stalemate never seems to occur; the authors are so anxious to move their stories forward (however wooden they may be, advancing like market carts with squeaking wheels that are never still, though they go only to dusty villages where the charm of the country is lost and the pleasures of the city will never be found) that there are no such misunderstandings, no refusals to negotiate. The assassin who holds a dagger to his victim's neck is eager to discuss the whole matter, and at any length the victim or the author may wish."
--The Sword of the Lictor, Gene Wolfe.

J. just passed this quote on to me.

"Every novelist who has slept with the Bitch (only poets and writers of short stories have a Muse) comes away bragging afterward like a G.I. tumbling out of a whorehouse spree-- 'Man, I made her moan' goes the cry of the young writer. But the Bitch laughs afterward in her empty bed. 'He was so sweet in the beginning,' she declares, 'but by the end he just went, "Peep, peep, peep.'"
--Norman Mailer, THE SPOOKY ART, p. 58

"Sure, it's simple, writing for kids . . . Just as simple as bringing them up." --Ursula K. LeGuin

"A book worth reading only in childhood is not worth reading even then." --C.S. Lewis

I'm currently reading Arthur Plotnik's book The Elements of Editing: A Modern Guide for Editors and Journalists, which I acquired from coffeeandink. It's a riot. I am laughing my ass off while I read this book, and it's useful as well, even if you're not an editor. It well deserves its cover, which pairs it visually with Strunk & White's The Elements of Style.

( Selected quotes. )

At TorCon, I was told Jim Gunn said this:

"If you're stuck, hurt your characters."

Heh.