Top Ten Books for Writers (recommended book #2)

I’m reviewing my library of hundreds of books of writing advice for top recommendations for your library. Here’s my take on essential works, IMHO, for writers. (Full list on a permanent page of this blog.)

I’ll tell why I think a particular book makes the top list.
Here’s the second (in no particular order) likely candidate:

A Writer’s Coach:
The Complete Guide to Writing Strategies that Work
by Jack Hart (2006)
[Note: the hardcover edition had a slightly different subtitle.]

To order from Amazon.com, click here.

Focus: Nonfiction (Journalism)
Audience: Writers at all levels

Why I’m recommending this: I learn something every time I pick up this amazing book.

Jack Hart is editor at large for The Oregonian and has coached writers for many years while mastering the craft himself. His book is a clear, well-organized set of great advice on how to craft the journalistic report or story (and by extension, many other forms of writing).

The Table of Contents shows the approach: Method, Process, Structure, Force, Brevity, Clarity, Rhythm, Humanity, Color, Voice, Mechanics, Mastery.

A reviewer on Amazon.com (Roy Wenzl, reporter from Wichita, KS), says:

What appears underneath those simple chapter headings is some of the best instruction anyone could have about how to become a skilled writer, and Jack does it by bringing clarity to the most complex ideas.

I love any list for what good writing needs that includes force, brevity, clarity, rhythm. Too many writers can produce run-of-the-mill work, but haven’t learned to elevate their work to the next level.

Jack Hart’s techniques will help you.

Best of all, he practices what he preaches. The book’s succinctness is wonderful.

For example, in just a dozen pages, in the Method chapter, his advice on finding Ideas is brilliantly outlined into precise, useful methods: from very structured brainstorming . . . to distinguishing topics from ideas . . . to finding the thematic focus of your piece.

Or check out his brief explanation of types of “Report Leads” (Summary, Blind, Wraps, Shirttail) . . . or “Feature & Story Leads” (7 types) . . . or “Dangerous Leads” (dangerous for the writer!) . . . and “Loser Leads.”

This is one of the least-fluff, most bang-for-the-buck book on writing I have on my bookshelf. I’ll second the quote on the book’s front cover by Susan Orlean, author of The Orchid Thief:

Wise, practical, and smart, A WRITER’S COACH is an exceptional book, offering advice with good humor and great insight.

Did I make it clear I love this book? It’s definitely one of the best books on craft for nonfiction writers. Get it. You’ll read it many times . . . and enjoy it each time.

Top Ten Books for Writers (recommended book #1)

I’ve decided to review my library of hundreds of books of writing advice and put together a list of a small number of top recommendations for your library. I’ll review my favorites and compile a list of the essential works (IMHO) for writers (to be kept on a permanent page of my blog).

I’ll tell why I think a particular book makes the top list.
Here’s the first (in no particular order) likely candidate:

The First Five Pages
A Writer’s Guide to Staying Out of the Rejection Pile
by Noah Lukeman (1999, paperback 2005)

To order from Amazon.com, click here.

Focus: Fiction, but with application for nonfiction projects
Audience: Emerging writers

Why I’m recommending this: it delivers lucid, crucial knowledge about writing well. But most of all, it drives home the industry imperative: you must make a (nearly) perfect impression in the first several pages. It’s how the industry works. And as a practical principle, it holds water. If the first 5 pages don’t impress, why would the rest? If you doubt this, pick a favorite book from your bookshelf and read the first 5 pages. Are you impressed?

Let’s face it, many books pitch well. A great several-paragraph pitch to an agent can be written for most projects. A bigger test comes in the first reading at the agency (or publisher). This will be done by a very busy person, one who has an incredible quantity of other works at their fingertips to consider.

So the real value of this work on craft is in combining the issues of craft (found elsewhere) with that filter of always keeping in mind the realities of the business: you need to impress the influential people in the middle (agents, editors) . . . and you need to always remember that all readers are busy, easily distracted, unwilling to part with their hard-earned money and precious time, and that there is a ton of competition easily available. Impress (and do it from the beginning), or readers will turn elsewhere.

Furthermore, learning to please and impress and tempt in the first 5 pages is a skill that can be repeated, once you know how, throughout the book.

In a 2000 interview with Catherine Tudor at Prairie Den, Lukeman summarized the rationale:

. . . [W]riters should worry about their craft before plot. I can’t tell you how many queries I receive where writers emphasize what great stories they have; that may be so, but nevertheless, if the craft isn’t there, if the execution isn’t up to par, it doesn’t matter. It’s like someone who has a great idea for a song, but doesn’t know how to play the piano.

Here’s an excerpt from the book’s introduction, explaining why 99% of unsolicited manuscripts end up tossed the reject pile:

When most professional literary agents and book editors hear the title of this book, they grab my arm, look me in the eyes and say, Thank you. I can see their pent-up frustration at wanting to say so many things to so many writers and simply not having the time. I’ve come to understand this frustration over the last few years as I’ve read thousands of manuscripts, all unbelievably with the exact same type of mistakes. From Texas to Oklahoma to California to England to Turkey to Japan, writers are doing the exact same things wrong.

While evaluating more than ten thousand manuscripts in the last few years alone, I was able to group these mistakes into categories; eventually, I was able to set forth a definite criteria, an agenda for rejecting manuscripts. This is the core of The First Five Pages: my criteria revealed to you.

Thus, despite its title, this book is not just about the first five pages of your manuscript. . . . It assumes that if you find one line of extraneous dialogue on page 1, you will likewise find one line of extraneous dialogue on each page to come.  . . . This book will teach you the step-by-step criteria so that you, too, might develop that acute ear and make instant evaluations. . . .

For the rest of this excerpt, click here:

Author Credentials: Noah Lukeman runs Lukeman Literary Management Ltd, a New York–based literary agency, founded in 1996. His clients include winners and finalists of the Pulitzer Prize, American Book Award, National Book Award, Edgar Award, Pacific Rim Prize, and multiple New York Times bestsellers.

Cliches, Irritating Phrases, and Inflated Claims

At the end of the day, I personally, at this moment in time and with all due respect, want to say something fairly unique. Although it’s absolutely a nightmare to even try, but certainly not rocket science . . . let’s face it, I shouldn’t of started this literary blog for good writing advice, available 24/7, unless I was up to the task!

There! I’ve now officially used all of the “Top 10 Most Irritating Expressions” in the English language, per researchers at the University of Oxford.

For the record, here are the ten phrases that most irritate the good folks of Oxford:

1.  At the end of the day
2.  Fairly unique
3.  I personally
4.  At this moment in time
5.  With all due respect
6.  Absolutely
7.  It’s a nightmare
8.  Shouldn’t of
9.   24/7
10.  It’s not rocket science

In an Underwire (Wired Blog Network) blog post by John Scott Lewinski, he says the list is from a new book, Damp Squid: The English Language Laid Bare, by Jeremy Butterfield, a British lexicographer, looking at “the world’s largest language databank, the Oxford Corpus, which contains more than two billion words – to determine for the first time definitively how the English language is used.”

If you follow that Damp Squid link, the Oxford University Press claims in its online catalog [emphasis mine]:

This entertaining book has the up-to-date and authoritative answers to ALL the key questions about our language. Butterfield takes a thorough look at the English language and exposes its peculiarities and penchants, its development and difficulties, revealing EXACTLY how it operates. We learn, for instance, that we use language in chunks of words – as one linguist put it, “we know words by the company that they keep.” For instance, the word quintessentially is joined half the time with a nationality – something is “quintessentially American” or “quintessentially British.”

Wow! Did they really say “authoritative answers to all the key questions about our language”? And “revealing exactly how it operates“?

And what do you mean, “our language,” Kimosabe?

Must be quintessentially British to make such claims, don’t'cha think?

And how would you describe something that is closer to being unique than to being a very common thing or cliché? “Fairly unique” is the kind of thing we say here in the quintessentially American Midwest, where we tend to think some qualification is good. (And how do you prove that something is unique? I guess if you have “the world’s largest language databank” . . . ?)

So, is this List of Irritating Expressions unique? Or fairly unique?

Let’s face it, it’s not rocket science. Language is language. The test is what works.

And irritation is in the eye of the beholder.

Read Your Work Out Loud

In a 2004 interview with Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate (2004-06), on the PBS News Hour, Kooser talked about writing with clarity – so that a piece or passage (in his case, a poem) could be understood by the average person. He recalled how early in his career, when he worked in the insurance business, he would bring a poem in to work and read it to his secretary:

I’m always revising away from difficulty and toward clarity. [. . .] I’d write every morning very early, and then I would bring my work in [to the insurance company where I worked] and I’d say, “Joanne, does this make any sense to you?” And if she said, “Well, no, it doesn’t,” then I would try to find out where it fell down for her.
– Ted Kooser

In an article I did not long ago for my Great Lakes Lit newsletter on the value of reading stories aloud, I mentioned a similar story from a few centuries earlier. The intro to the 1786 edition of Gulliver’s Travels refers to Jonathan Swift asking two menservants whether they understood the meaning of passages read out loud to them.

Swift’s desire: to ensure that his meaning was clear . . . not just to him but to a broader audience.

So often, we fail to recognize how our words force a new reader to stumble, or be puzzled, or to roll their eyes at some intrusion of purple prose or a lame cliche.

Reading passages of your work aloud, whether to your writing group or to a spouse (so few of us have valets, let alone secretaries, to listen to our drafts), is an excellent way to test at least the opening lines of a story or the key paragraph in your pitch letter.

Even if the audience is an imaginary one, reading aloud on your own will allow you to hear your words afresh, using a different part of the brain (and one that was less invested in writing those words . . . and more likely to find a few clunkers that can be improved).

New Writer’s Handbook, Vol. 2, Now Available!

News flash! My latest project, The New Writer’s Handbook, Vol. 2, is just hitting the streets.

(By “streets,” I mean the polished hardwood shelves of your favorite indie bookstore just around the corner . . . or the mocha-loving halls of big chain booksellers (Barnes & Noble or Borders, for instance) . . . or the ethereal Amazonian shelves of Internet bookstores.)

If you’re new to this blog, or didn’t grab the first volume released in Fall 2007, what is the Handbook?

It’s my vision of how we writers might share best advice (yes, through my selective lens) for our craft and career, in a concise, not overblown fashion (short pieces, with concentrated nuggets of useful thoughts), in a reasonably priced paperback ($16.95) and with lots of points of view (65 articles).

I’ve always seen it as an annual refresher, a professional-development seminar in a book. Much of the book might be most useful to early-stage, emerging writers, but a good number of pieces I think are useful and thought-provoking for experienced writers as well.

My goal: that any writer would find at least one piece here that would really make a difference in their writing career in the coming year . . . and a good number of other pieces that would help improve their results in many small ways.

(And many professional writers also need teachable ideas to share with students and apprentice writers . . . so this Handbook also serves as a pretty good teaching tool.)

But, as my motto goes: the proof is in the pudding. I believe books shouldn’t be over-hyped, that readers are the only judge of how useful a book is to them and their specific needs. As Mark Twain said,

Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she laid an asteroid.

I’ll do a few posts in coming days with more glimpses of this year’s contents, to help you decide if this book is one that can help you.

In the end, I hope you’ll consider picking up a copy of this year’s New Writer’s Handbook and will use it to become a better writer.

And as always, let me know if there’s any other way I can help you in achieving your writing goals.

Women’s Soccer and Stereotypes

Hats off to the U.S. women’s soccer team that just pulled off an amazing 1-0 victory over Brazil to win gold in the Olympics!

(And in the heart-stopping extra 30 minutes of overtime, no less.)

Somehow, the Americans’ gutsy, swarming defense managed to thwart the powerful Brazilians, led by Marta whose control of the ball was very scary to watch if you were rooting for the U.S. I was afraid the Americans would get worn out chasing Marta and others whose seemed to be able to thread in and out of traffic with impunity.

Brazil was on attack and kept the ball in the U.S. half of the field most of the game. It reminded me (though not quite as bad) as a match I watched a few years ago: Brazil v. Iceland. Poor Icelanders. The ball was in the Icelandic half maybe 89 of the 90 minutes. Seriously, they could have sold seats for a few hundred people to sit in folding chairs on the Brazilian half of the field and would not have interfered with the game.

Today, the U.S. spent most of the game chasing golden-jerseyed first-name-only Brazilians like Marta, Renata, and Erika, and got only two or three real shots of their own, but managed to drill one past Barbara, the diving, outstretched Brazilian goalie, to score the only goal. Wow!

For writers . . . (oh, right, the focus of this blog) . . . the Olympic final I was watching (in Spanish on Telemundo) was called Final Futbol Femenino.

Feminine football?

In the English language, while women’s refers to the gender, feminine traditionally refers to a special attitude (often assumed inescapable), an evolved, deep-seated pattern of acting differently from men.

How many of us unconsciously always adopt that assumption when creating female characters? Do we expect our best women characters to act differently . . . more emotional, romantic, weaker, indirect, indecisive? And if they act otherwise, are they assumed to be not-so-positive characters? Indeed, that’s often the case . . . in novels.

But what if the real world is changing? And what if we allowed women in novels to be like women in soccer: strong, confident, focused, playing by the same rules as the men?

What if their behavior was just situational, that they employed strategies of “feminine wiles” only when they wanted to (not because it was somehow bred in the bone)?

Of course, age, culture, upbringing, and past experiences play a role. And we’ll want to create strong and successful women characters, yet also others that try and fail, and others more weak and flawed.

But in the end, if you want to craft some powerful women characters, I’d suggest you get out and watch a women’s soccer match. Then go write . . . with a broader vision of what it means to be feminine.

Throw Away the Thesaurus (on Repetition)

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

What is notable about that famous opening line?

Repetition.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. . . .
– Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

Repetition is a device pulled from oral tradition, from the bedtime stories of three Bears or Pigs or Billy Goats Gruff to inspiring speeches by the likes of Winston Churchill:

We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.

The success of this technique is rooted in its simple language. As Argentine fabulist Jorge Luis Borges noted:

At the beginning of their careers many writers have a need to overwrite. They choose carefully turned-out phrases; they want to impress their readers with their large vocabularies. By the excesses of their language, these young men and women try to hide their sense of inexperience. With maturity the writer becomes more secure in his ideas. He finds his real tone and develops a simple and effective style.

Maturity in a writer doesn’t mean throwing around a lot of fancy words.

A secret of successful writers? The ability to recognize and tell a story . . . in a way that focuses on the story, not on you as a brilliant writer, pulling strings like a poorly concealed puppeteer.

Here is a passage by E.B. White, a true craftsman of clear, beautiful language. He is introducing a barn, but not just any barn. It is Homer Zuckerman’s barn in Charlotte’s Web, the setting where much of the novel will take place, where Charlotte the spider, lives.

Note how the passage starts with simple, repetitive sentences.

Then White builds on that. He introduces the sense of sweet patience that is the barn itself. We pause to enjoy the diverse scents, taking them in, as we begin to image the place fully for ourselves. We learn who shares the space: the cat, the cows, horses, sheep.

The barn was very large. It was very old. It smelled of hay and it smelled of manure. It smelled of the perspiration of tired horses and the wonderful sweet breath of patient cows. It often had a sort of peaceful smell – as though nothing bad could happen ever again in the world. It smelled of grain and of harness dressing and of axle grease and of rubber boots and of new rope. And whenever the cat was given a fish-head to eat, the barn would smell of fish. But mostly it smelled of hay, for there was always hay in the great loft up overhead. And there was always hay being pitched down to the cows and the horses and the sheep.

The barn was pleasantly warm in winter when the animals spent most of their time indoors, and it was pleasantly cool in summer when the big doors stood wide open to the breeze. The barn had stalls on the main floor for the work horses, tie-ups on the main floor for the cows, a sheepfold down below for the sheep, a pigpen down below for Wilbur, and it was full of all sorts of things that you find in barns: ladders, grindstones, pitchforks, monkey wrenches, scythes, lawn mowers, snow shovels, ax handles, milk pails, water buckets, empty grain sacks, and rusty rat traps. It was the kind of barn that swallows like to build their nests in. It was the kind of barn that children like to play in. And the whole thing was owned by Fern’s uncle, Mr. Homer L. Zuckerman.

Good storytellers know the value of throwing away the thesaurus and using one of language’s most beautiful forms of expression: repetition. As Ursula K. Le Guin pointed out in her wonderful book on writing technique, Steering the Craft:

Repetition of words, of phrases, of images; repetition of things said; near-repetition of events’ echoes, reflections, variations . . . all narrators use these devices, and the skillful use of them is a very great part of the power of prose.

C.S. Lewis is another who uses a storytelling prose to good purpose in his Narnia books. He has no fear of repetition and simple words to deliver deep concepts; to use, as Le Guin says, echoes, reflections, variations. As in the samples given above, Lewis uses the technique to communicate great power and confidence. Here, early in The Silver Chair, heroine Jill Pole awakes by a steam to meet the lion, Aslan, lying nearby, “head raised and its two fore-paws out in front of it, like the lions in Trafalgar Square.”

“If you’re thirsty, you may drink.”
They were the first words she had heard since Scrubb [her friend] had spoken to her on the edge of the cliff. For a second she stared here and there, wondering who had spoken. Then the voice said again, “If you are thirsty, come and drink,” . . . and the voice was not like a man’s. It  was deeper, wilder, and stronger; a sort of heavy, golden voice.  . . .
“Are you not thirsty?” said the Lion.
I’m dying of thirst,” said Jill.
“Then drink,” said the Lion. . . .
“Will you promise not to – do anything to me, if I do come?” said Jill.
“I make no promise,” said the Lion. . . .
“I daren’t come and drink,” said Jill.
“Then you will die of thirst,” said the Lion.
“Oh, dear!” said Jill, coming another step nearer. “I suppose I must go and look for another stream then.”
“There is no other stream,” said the Lion.

Instead of trying to dazzle with fancy verbal fireworks, great writers from C.S. Lewis to Ursula K. Le Guin, from E.B. White to Charles Dickens, know how to use the tools of beautiful language. One of the most powerful is that of repetition: the flowing cadence of an orator, the soothing lilt of “come hither and I’ll tell ye a tale.”

A bit of repetition can resonate and create an intimate bond . . . to draw the reader into the circle of your story.

Oh, Lovely Rotten Apple!

Without leaving the house I know the whole universe.
- Lao Tzu

I discovered the secret of the sea in meditation upon the dew drop.
– Kahlil Gibran

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars,
And the pismire [the ant] is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren . . .
– Carl Sandburg, in Leaves of Grass

These writers all share something in common: a belief in the amazing power of commonplace details to hold greatness. Or as American poet (and doctor of medicine) William Carlos Williams said, “Write what’s in front of your nose.”

Williams is famous for the line, “No ideas but in things.” His work touches on Zen-like notions that the “ordinary” is the same as beauty or enlightenment. Here’s a short, elegant poem by William Carlos Williams:

PERFECTION
0 lovely apple!
beautifully and completely
rotten,
hardly a contour marred–

perhaps a little
shrivelled at the top but that
aside perfect
in every detail! 0 lovely

apple! what a
deep and suffusing brown
mantles that
unspoiled surface! No one

has moved you
since I placed you on the porch
rail a month ago
to ripen.

No one. No one!

Williams takes a common image – an apple – but with a twist. The poem celebrates the apple’s rottenness. But then Williams moves from the thing into the idea, some deeper questions of blemishes or beauty perceived.

Details, details, details! These are the elements that bring out the uniqueness in the everyday, the quirky in the commonplace. The idea in the thing.

Successful Writers: Pig-Headed and Obstinate

Isak Dinesen said, “I write a little everyday, without hope and without despair.”

She meant that writing is not a matter of hope or wishful thinking, but of the discipline of doing it.

Writing. A little every day. Pen to paper, finger to keyboard.

Kelly James-Enger, successful freelancer and author of Six-Figure Freelancing and Ready, Aim, Specialize, has said she has a drawing in her office of a man in a sailboat, with an old proverb, “If there is no wind, row.” That’s probably the best advice for writers I’ve heard.

In a similar vein, check out the website of Philip Pullman, author of His Dark Materials trilogy, launched in 1995 with The Golden Compass (Northern Lights in its original British edition).

On his web page About the Writing, Pullman notes the three things that inspire him: (1) Money (as a professional writer with bills to pay), (2) “the desire to make some sort of mark on the world,” and (3) “the sheer pleasure of craftsmanship.”

And he hones in on the prime ingredient of a writer: “pig-headed obstinacy.”

If you’re going to make a living at this business — more importantly, if you’re going to write anything that will last — you have to realise that a lot of the time, you’re going to be writing without inspiration. The trick is to write just as well without it as with. Of course, you write less readily and fluently without it; but . . . Amateurs think that if they were inspired all the time, they could be professionals. Professional know that if they relied on inspiration, they’d be amateurs.

Words to heed, from an obstinate, brilliant storyteller.

A Glint of Light on Broken Glass

“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”
– Anton Chekhov (1860–1904)

According to Britain’s The Guardian:

When 25 noted authors were asked in 1987 to name the most crucial influences on their own work, Chekhov was cited by 10 of them, including Eudora Welty, Nadine Gordimer, and Raymond Carver; he received double the nominations of any other writer. Eudora Welty said “Reading Chekhov was just like the angels singing to me.”

High praise! Here are the beginnings of two Chekhov stories. First, “The Cook’s Wedding”:

Grisha, a fat, solemn little person of seven, was standing by the kitchen door listening and peeping through the keyhole. In the kitchen something extraordinary, and in his opinion never seen before, was taking place. A big, thick-set, red-haired peasant, with a beard, and a drop of perspiration on his nose, wearing a cabman’s full coat, was sitting at the kitchen table on which they chopped the meat and sliced the onions. He was balancing a saucer on the five fingers of his right hand and drinking tea out of it, and crunching sugar so loudly that it sent a shiver down Grisha’s back. Aksinya Stepanovna, the old nurse, was sitting on the dirty stool facing him, and she, too, was drinking tea. Her face was grave, though at the same time it beamed with a kind of triumph. Pelageya, the cook, was busy at the stove, and was apparently trying to hide her face. And on her face Grisha saw a regular illumination: it was burning and shifting through every shade of colour, beginning with a crimson purple and ending with a deathly white. She was continually catching hold of knives, forks, bits of wood, and rags with trembling hands, moving, grumbling to herself, making a clatter, but in reality doing nothing. She did not once glance at the table at which they were drinking tea, and to the questions put to her by the nurse she gave jerky, sullen answers without turning her face.

Or, from “A Joke”:

It was a bright winter midday. . . . There was a sharp snapping frost and the curls on Nadenka’s temples and the down on her upper lip were covered with silvery frost. She was holding my arm and we were standing on a high hill. From where we stood to the ground below there stretched a smooth sloping descent in which the sun was reflected as in a looking-glass. Beside us was a little sledge lined with bright red cloth.

“Let us go down, Nadyezhda Petrovna!” I besought her. “Only once! I assure you we shall be all right and not hurt.”

But Nadenka was afraid. The slope from her little goloshes to the bottom of the ice hill seemed to her a terrible, immensely deep abyss. Her spirit failed her, and she held her breath as she looked down, when I merely suggested her getting into the sledge, but what would it be if she were to risk flying into the abyss!

Note that the advice “don’t tell me, show me” is not taken to extremes. We are told the occasional bit of information for dramatic effect, such as: Nadenka is afraid. But mostly, we are drawn into the story by quick, deft sketches. Reading Chekhov is like looking over the shoulder of a visual artist sketching a quick drawing, using only a few strokes – a setting, a character, an incident about to happen.

“A glint of light on broken glass” is just that . . . a quick flash of a concrete but brief image, an intriguing visual clue that, instead of telling all, draws us in by making us wonder . . . what’s it all about?