In a mirror darkly – or writing tips to diss (carefully)

Is it only because my to-be-read-pile of books is getting low that I notice good writers -- or at least well-read authors -- breaking rules I’ve often been told to avoid? Some of these are derived from respected sources, for example, that late saint of writing, Elmore Leonard’s “10 Rules for Good Writing.” Others came from who knows where, parroted endlessly by writing critique groups. In the public interest, here are a few I’ve seen smashed to bits with good results. But before we all go out and do likewise, we’d better have some really, really (oops – excessive use of adverbs) good reasons to break them.

Here’s #1 from Leonard’s rules: Never open a book with weather. May I submit in evidence to the contrary Nancy Pickard’s The Virgin of Small Plains, which opens, yep, with weather. Not, however, any ordinary sunny day weather, but a blizzard in which a woman’s body is discovered.  So, caveat #1: Never open with weather -- unless it’s damned interesting weather.

image by Ria Sopala from Pixabay

While Elmore Leonard is spinning in his grave, let me pick on his rule #2: Avoid prologues. But what if they’re prologues that are essential to the story, such as exhibit #2, the opening chapter of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone? I admit, J.K. Rowling – or possibly her editors -- didn’t label this “prologue,” but it has familiar marks of the dreaded “P” – a different point of view and several years’ distance in time from the main story. Is labeling what would otherwise be a prologue, “Chapter 1,” enough to avoid the dreaded prologue curse? Exercise caution!

Here’s a rule that’s not on Leonard’s list, but that I’ve encountered (and heard dissed) more times than I can remember: Never open with a dream. And its corollary, never open with a character waking up. These are what started my current rant, from Ruth Ware’s The Woman in Cabin 10, which opens both with what looks like a prologue – “In my dream. . .” followed by (and labeled Chapter 1) “The first inkling that something was wrong was waking in darkness. . .”

I’ll expand on these because Ware does such a masterful job with both. First, she lets readers know that the character is dreaming. Do I need to point out how much more honest this is than stringing readers along for paragraphs or pages before doing the dream reveal? Anybody old enough to remember the original Dallas TV series will understand the frustration of the “it was all a dream” formula which was revealed after an entire season. At least those writers had the excuse of believing one of their major actors was about to jump ship. Novel writers do not.

Second, when Ware’s protagonist wakes up, it isn’t her ordinary waking up episode or even because she’s such a ditz she couldn’t remember to set her alarm. No, it’s something very wrong that causes her wake up and foreshadows an even more devastating wake up later in the book. As with the “weather” opening, reserve “waking up” for the essential and interesting awakenings.

Here’s yet another rule-breaker from my recent reading -- #7 on Leonard’s list: Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. To which I add, unless it’s absolutely necessary to the story, as in Joe R. Lansdale’s historical novel, Edge of Dark Water. Lansdale is from Texas, and as a regional writer, regional dialect is essential to his stories. However, he doesn’t fall into the 19^th century trap of writing dialect phonetically. (Seriously, do not!) (Hmmm – Leonard’s #5: Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.)

Or take a tip from another historical novel, Colson Whitehead’s Nickel Boys, and drop dialect in according to the “sparingly” part of Leonard’s dictum to add to the characters’ essence. And don’t forget that dialogue in dialect still needs to be interesting. And essential. (Have I used the word “essential” too often?)

I don’t remember reading this next rule but I’ve certainly been hit over the head with it enough during writing critiques: Don’t let your character describe her/himself by looking in a mirror. Maybe this comes from Leonard’s #8: Avoid detailed descriptions of characters. Or maybe it’s just lazy, as in 50 Shades of Grey, whose protagonist describes herself, yes, while looking at her reflection in a mirror. (Hey, I opened by stating that these rule-breaks can come from well-read writers, not just good writers. Did any other reader slam 50 Shades closed at that point? Probably not.)

But what about readers who feel a desperate need for a physical description of a character? It’s several decades too late for writers to go omniscient, as Margaret Mitchell did in the opening of Gone with the Wind, “Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm. . .” with more to follow about Scarlett’s hair, eyes, freckles, waistline and, of course, clothes.

For more modern books with multiple point of view characters, it’s perfectly permissible to have one character describe another. A similar ploy I’ve seen used to good effect in recent years is to have a POV character describe herself with reference to another character as in, “she was my age, 35, but looked a decade older.” Or “about my height, build, hair color, etc.”

Ware, however, isn’t afraid to put her character in front of a mirror when she needs to describe something that isn’t that character’s usual appearance, for instance the ghastliness of her face after a string of sleepless nights and too much to drink. As always, use the mirror trick sparingly and with caution.

I’ll finish with a final Leonard dictum, #4: Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said,” and Ware’s break from it: “‘. . . it wasn’t me,’ Eva said, but quite kindly.” And continues, “There was no trace of the slightly tribal defensiveness the girls downstairs had betrayed.” (Just noticed that this quotation is a two-fer break with many critique group rants – modifying the “said” verb and multiple uses of adverbs. Sharp eyes may notice that “quite” is also an adverb, although critique readers usually only jump on adverbs ending in -ly. As always, use sparingly, wisely, and only when absolutely, positively essential!)

For more rules to abide by – or break wisely – check out Elmore Leonard’s full list at the Gotham Writers Workshop site. Read, write, and feel free to share some of your most- and best-broken rules.

Adventure classics -- A pair of yearlings

The Yearling

by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

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“I will bring a live rattlesnake and drop it on your desk if you are ever polite about my stuff and I catch you at it,” Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings teasingly wrote to her editor, as she agonized over what would become her most famous novel, The Yearling.

She was living on the small farm in Florida where she and her newly-divorced husband had moved early in their marriage. Drawn by the romance of the state’s still-wild scrubland and its moonshine-brewing inhabitants, Rawlings wrote short stories and two novels about the region. But editor Max Perkins intrigued her, biographer Elizabeth Silverthorne writes in Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings: Sojourner at Cross Creek, with his suggestion for “a book about a child in the scrub, which would be designed for what we have come to call younger readers.”

At first resistant, Rawlings became enthusiastic as she gained experience -- including a rattlesnake hunt -- about the marginalized lives of her neighbors in the scrubland. But she insisted that the book must never be labeled as “juvenile,” wishing to appeal to adults as well as children with the story of a year in the life of a boy and the fawn whose life and death usher him into adulthood.

Set in the decade after the Civil War, The Yearling tells the story of Jody Baxter, the twelve-year-old son of Ezra “Penny” Baxter and his wife Ora.

Injured in spirit by his war experience, Penny returns to his wife and Jody, their youngest, and only surviving child, and takes them from the semi-civilized life they have known to the scrub, “with gratitude for its peace and isolation.”

The many dead and stillborn children before Jody have embittered his mother. But for his father Penny, this last, late-born child is a source of unending delight.


So, although with foreboding, Penny allows Jody to bring up the fawn orphaned when rattlesnake-bitten Penny kills its mother, using her flesh to absorb the poison from his wound.

For a single year, fawn and lonely boy live together, through the backbreaking labor of farming, the devastation of flood, and the depredations of bears and wolves on the family’s livestock. But as Jody wavers on the outer edge of childhood, the fawn’s wild nature reasserts itself. When its destruction of their crops brings the family to the brink of starvation, Penny must give an order that will push Jody unwillingly into manhood.

With her farm’s orange crop lost to late freezes, Rawlings was delighted by the revenue generated when The Yearling was chosen as the Book-of-the-Month Club’s selection for April 1938. It would get a Pulitzer Prize and be made into an award-winning movie, brining Rawlings the friendship of fellow Southerner (and fellow Pulitzer winner) Margaret Mitchell, and enough fame to cause confusion between the characters created by the two writers.

As Rawlings observed with self-deprecating humor, while the movie was being filmed, “a middle-aged former southern belle flounced up to her at a cocktail party and said, ‘If I was just ten years younger, honey, I’d be right out there in Hollywood this minute, playing Scarlett in your book.’”

The book, the movie, and Silverthorne’s biography of Rawlings are available at
www.amazon.com/.

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics begins a March of thrillers and suspense with Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca.)

Adventure classics -- Peggy Mitchell's Civil War baby

Gone With the Wind

by Margaret Mitchell

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What strange conjunction of stars presided over the writing of Peggy Mitchell and John Marsh’s enduring legacy, the Civil War novel Gone With the Wind? It was the only novel from Miss Mitchell, an Atlanta, Georgia, debutante who had a short-lived career in journalism before marriage to her second husband, and muse, John Marsh.

How did a single book -- even at more than a thousand words -- launch a craze for all things 1860’s-ish that still lingers nearly eighty years after its 1936 publication?

Others, after all, had written about the American Civil War before Peggy Mitchell’s husband bought her a typewriter to distract her from a spate of illnesses. Even Miss Mitchell, who labored over the novel for nearly a decade, doubted anyone would want to read a romance about a character she thought no one but herself could like, depicted against the background of the war that killed more Americans than any other in history.

Possibly part of its allure stemmed from the realization -- like that behind the more recent, seemingly-insatiable demand for information about World War II -- knowledge that a watershed event in American history was fading from living memory.

Or from the total immersion in a culture that, to quote the title, was gone with the wind. Miss Mitchell and John Marsh crisscrossed the state of George searching for material, even to the extent of compiling notebooks of regional dialects, according to Marianne Walker’s biography of their marriage, Margaret Mitchell & John Marsh: The Love Story Behind Gone With the Wind.

(The use of the author's maiden name, Mitchell, was a change late in the book’s preparation for publication. Other changes readers can be glad of -- the book’s working title during most of its writing was Tomorrow Is Another Day. And the heroine’s initial name -- “Pansy.”)

And then, of course, there’s the lure of the sexual tension between a heroine with the unforgettable name of Scarlett O’Hara and piratical Rhett Butler, tension hot enough to have burned down Atlanta without any help from the Union Army.

(Really short synopsis -- Bad but sexy Rhett pursues Scarlett, who’s infatuated with unattainable nice guy Ashley Wilkes, only to dump Scarlett among the crowd of refugees fleeing the battle-scarred city of Atlanta.)

It’s easy to make jokes now about the GWTW (as fans know it) phenomenon, but it almost single-handedly saved the American publishing industry during the Depression, selling 201,000 copies its first month in print. (Even though publisher Macmillan complained that the book’s length forced it to raise its price from $2.50 a copy to $3.) During World War II, it also sold incredibly well in Axis-occupied countries during World War II, earning the distinction of being banned by the Nazis.

I don’t even need to tell you, do I, that GWTW, in book and movie versions (starring Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable) is still widely available? Or that Civil War battle reenactments probably wouldn’t have become such tourist draws without it?

(Next Wednesday -- Adventure classics looks at another bad girl heroine, Justine, in the first volume of Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet.)