Can I marry a stockbroker?

"It is true that if you want to write well and live well at the same time, you'd better arrange to marry a stockbroker or a rich woman who can operate a typewriter."

-Flannery O'Connor

When one first begins writing, one hears lots of advice:

"Never end sentences this way: example."

"Never ever do this in this situation: example."

"And above all, show, don't tell."

As a young writer, I didn't realize that much of this advice drew from public opinion of the moment. True, lots of it is good advice when one looks at it from the viewpoint of having one's manuscript accepted by a big-time editor and put on the New York Time's Bestsellers list. I've read many books but I will admit that, till recent years, the majority of what I had read was written pre-1950. That meant that my literary examples were of the old style. My literary education was performed at an old school. While popular tastes demanded the modern cosmopolitan flair of Manhattan Prep from White Collar, I spent my school years at something with more of the flavor of Eton, to use a great school in a loose analogy. Naturally, I came to the class reunion talking slang from years back and finding "yo dawg" was not exactly what people these days go around saying. And yes, I felt as cheesy as that sounded. How is a girl to write the way she has been taught without sounding like an ancient tome? Because I have picked up books by authors who obviously had a similar literary education to my own and have thought, "Yeah, I wouldn't choose to publish this either." In many ways, the advice I was given was exactly what I needed to hear.

It is true that the modern reading public has a shorter attention span than in the days of Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo. I consider myself a fairly patient reader and even I had to have three go's at the unabridged Les Miserables before I could finish, and even then it was a terrible struggle to push through his ponderous lectures to get to the heart of the story.
It is true that modern readers expect a certain hook at the front of the book and look for page-turning plots. The books I put down are inevitably the books that bore me to tears. If you can't capture my attention within the first chapter or two, how am I to trust you with my valuable reading-time not to continue to bore me throughout?
It is true that it's always nice to show instead of tell. We all like details. Details! Juicy, fat, details.

 I'm here to say that though much of what the modern writer is taught is good advice, pleasure remember that it is just advice after all. It is someone else's idea of how to you ought to write. Perhaps this other person is more qualified than you to say what sells, what readers like, and what will attract the attention of a worthwhile publisher. But when it comes down to whether modern taste is Holy Writ, I'm here to say it is not. To illustrate my point: at a coffee shop the other day I chose an old, weathered book off the community shelf. I picked this book because the illustrations looked similar to those in a P.G. Wodehouse novel. My Ten Years in a Quandary by Robert Benchley. Between rounds of mancala I read the first two chapters. Nothing much happened in those two chapters. Gasp. Rob Bell would have a fit. But the book entertained me well enough to the point that I left a note inside at the place I left off for the next reader. How? Nothing happened! The plot did not advance in the slightest and I can hardly see how each sentence mattered to the whole of the book's events. Here's the secret power of this book and the best of the those in the old style: they didn't arrest a reader by virtue of action, but activity. Benchley's voice in the first two chapters of his book is anything but passive. It romps about with as much energy as The Hunger Games could possibly give, though in the latter you're thrown right into the midst of a world gone mad.
I also know from experience that I don't mind character-driven fiction. Sure I like things to happen and plot is terribly important. Glaring at you, The Notebook. But if the characters are well-drawn, the voice lively enough, and the story-world interesting, I am one-hundred percent okay with a sauntering pace. Just like I don't run marathons because I prefer walking and enjoying my surroundings (and let's be honest: I'd feel like I was dying), I almost prefer a story that, while well-constructed, leaves me time to savor the summer pace of its pages. I think of some of my favorite films (Cinderella, The Devil Wears Prada, The Help, Saving Mr. Banks, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, The Hundred-Foot Journey, Miss Potter, Master & Commander...) and realize that though plot is present and well-formed, the real reason I am invested is the strength and color of the characters.
I'd been throwing these thoughts around in my head and waiting for them to gel before writing a blog post when the final driftwood was thrown onto my seaside fire: Flannery O'Conner (yes, that paragon of all things Southern) gave me a lift in denouncing the prophetic law that the Modern Reader has tried to make of "Show, Don't Tell":

"All the sentences in Madame Bovary could be examined with wonder, but there is one in particular that always stops me in admiration. Flaubert has just shown us Emma at the piano with Charles watching her. He says, 'She struck the notes with aplomb and ran from top to bottom of the keyboard without a break. Thus shaken up, the old instrument, whose strings buzzed, could be heard at the other end of the village when the window was open, and often the bailiff's clerk, passing along the highroad, bareheaded and in list slippers, stopped to listen with his sheet of paper in his hand.' The more you look at a sentence like that the more you can learn from it."

Yes, dear Flannery O'Connor. We can learn that the editor at Harper & Row would fling the papers into Flaubert's satchel and say, "Try again some other time when you've learned the market." Yet one of the most well-respected writers of Southern fiction goes on past the quote I shared and continues to praise a very obvious lapse of POV and showing vs. telling. Now I don't mind so much. I'm accustomed to that kind of description and that kind of description is, in fact, what I tried for when I first began writing. But such a thing would admittedly not stand up in today's court again a jury of modern readers. I suppose the point of all this is to show you that there is both wisdom and error in the advice given to the modern writer. Wisdom, in that the current marketplace wants a certain thing and if you want to engage in commerce, you must learn to cater to their whims. Error, in that the modern way is the only way to write well. Flannery O'Connor reminded me that in each era there is, speaking of literary technique, a temporary right and wrong. Each era's faux pas were different. Our era's are one thing...fifty years from now it will be another.

For now....just try not to write like Flaubert.

Life-Hack for the Writer

In life, there are few things I like better than knowing that some of the people I love best sometimes take the short-cuts I love. There's a trend going around on Pinterest - how repetitive that feels! - of people posting these things called "life hacks". I don't exactly want my life hacked, but I think what it means is Ways To Do Things That Make Life Easier. Today, I'm here to give you a Writer's Life Hack from P.G. Wodehouse himself:

Ask for Help

We, as writers, value our independence. Some of us have self-published and are therefore terribly conscious of our space, our needs, our turf, and our lack of marketing reach. How short is the reach of an arm that lauds itself! (That sounds like some ancient proverb. It isn't. It's a new one I just made up but it thoroughly represents the trouble of marketing your novel on your word alone.) But I'm not here to talk about the difficulties of marketing your work. Independence. 

I am going to assume that each of you gets stuck in your writing process sometimes. Not writer's block, exactly (I heard someone say once that Writer's Block is a disease that affects amateurs), but the sticky mires of What The Heck Comes Next? For some of you it might be character creation, or the research that must go into your setting. For me, it's plot and structure. I can have all the bright baubles of humor, wit, sass, great characters, promising setting, and nothing for all these fine-feathered blokes to do. When you get to such a spot, it is quite easy to panic and figure that successful writers (or, on a bad day, "'Real Writers") never experience the same. I surely never assumed that someone like P.G. Wodehouse would ever have found himself short up on plot or, if he did, he drank some Jeeves-esque cocktail that jolted him out of it and into a success like Something Fresh.

Recently, I read P.G. Wodehouse: a Life in Letters edited by Sophie Ratcliffe. I found many interesting things among this prolific writer's correspondence, but the most surprising and, hence, most gratifying, was the number of times he begged plotting help from his colleagues and gave it to them in return:

"If you have a moment of leisure, here is a bit of a story that is bothering me. I want a tough burglar to break into a country-house and there to have such a series of mishaps that his nerve breaks and he retires from the profession. The conditions can be anything you like, - e.g. Pekingese on the floor who bite his ankle, etc. It ought to be one of my big comic scenes like the flower-pot scene in Leave it to Psmith. Don't bother about it if you are busy, but if anything occurs to you send it along."

and later:

"Listen, laddie. Have you read 'Pig-Hoo-o-o-o-ey'? I have a sort of idea you once wrote a story constructed on those lines - i.e. some perfectly trivial thing which is important to a man and the story is apparently about how he gets it. But in the process of getting it he gets entangled in somebody else's love story and all sorts of things happen but he pays no attention to them, being wholly concentrated on his small thing. If you never did a yarn on these lines, try one with Cap Crupper. It's an awfully good formula."

There are so many instances of advice begged and advice given that I'm holding this book rather close and taking notes. Is there anything like correspondence between writers to give one a peek into what made them successful? With so many occasions of P.G. Wodehouse begging help, I had to acknowledge that there might be something to the idea. What then? Why would it be a good idea to beg someone to help you out of your rut? The answer is obvious:

Other writers are gifted in other areas.

It amazes me how many spiritual parallels one can draw from writing. I suppose I shouldn't be so surprised - Dorothy Sayers did much the same thing (though in reverse) with The Mind of The Maker. We are told that within the body of Christ, we are given various gifts and talents:

"For in fact the body is not one member but many. If the foot should say, 'Because I am not a hand, I am not of the body,' is it therefore not of the body? And if the ear should say, 'Because I am not an eye, I am not of the body,' is it therefore not of the body? If the whole body were an eye, where would be the hearing? If the whole were hearing, where would be the smelling? But now God has set the members, each one of them, in the body just as He pleased. And if they were all one member, where would the body be?"

- 1 Corinthians 12: 14-19

Continuing this mental exercise, each of us is gifted in a certain realm of writing talent. There are very few - indeed, show me one - who are good at all of it all of the time. We must choose someone, one person if you cannot bear the idea of more, and ask for help at some point in time. The trick is that we have to be humble enough to take their suggestions and adapt them to fit our idea. That is probably the toughest part of the whole thing. I feel so independent that it can be a struggle for me to not reject ideas based on the fact that I did not think of them first. I know that sounds ridiculous, but it is true. I suppose it comes from some shadowy fear of plagiarism, or not being able to say, 'I wrote this book' because one aspect of it - heck, even a phrase - was not my own but was brought to mind by someone else. However, there is a difference between plagiarism and between, as Austin Kleon says, "Stealing like an artist". There is a way to accept ideas and even pay homage to other authors' work without copying just as there is a way to take fashion advice and inspiration without having to buy the $1253 dress from Michael Kors.

Yesterday, I asked Jenny for plotting advice. Last week, I got a whole email full of advice for Anon, Sir, Anon from Elisabeth Foley and what's more, I intend to examine and apply some of it. I didn't come to this point easily. It still isn't comfortable to go to a friend and say, "Look, I haven't the foggiest what I ought to do with this, but if you can figure it out and tell me, I'll work with it." But sometimes that is what you need and that could possibly be the only place you'll find that perfect idea.

If anyone ever criticizes you for this method, send them here. You know what I'll tell them?

"P.G. Wodehouse did it."

That'll probably shut them up.

At the cost of destroying them.

Finding your voice is one topic I've covered at length in various other posts, but in the event that there is one of you whom has not found his voice, I will do a recap:

Your voice is not Jenny Freitag's voice. (unless you're Jenny)
Your voice is not Sarah Sundin's voice. (unless you're Sarah)
Your voice is not Kathryn Stockett's or C.S. Lewis's  or  anyone else's voice but your own.
This might seem a bit of an ambiguous explanation, but the the truth is, your voice is the flavor of your writing, and the only way to find it is by blocking out the recipe of everyone else's brew and taste-testing your own.

But finding your characters' voices....ah. That's a different breed altogether. See, to effectively write a book, there must be the author's trademark voice murmuring beneath the surface, but if you ever hope to let the world fall in love with your book-people, you must let them speak. As such, their voices will vary widely, and it's the most amazing thing to sit down with a book and encounter several different voices in the pages as the viewpoint switches from character to character. I'm not talking about literal "voices" as in specific accents, speech impediments, etc. I'm talking about a more...well, for lack of a better term, a more spiritual voice. The mental voice. The world-view voice. Who is your character and how do they perceive the world? What brought them to this stage in their lives? What effected them to the point that they behave in this manner and none other?
A crime some authors commit is to make their characters come alive only when they open their mouths or when we can read their thoughts. A blessing other authors bestow is having the character's personality transcend even into the narrative. Keeping my preferences on this subject in mind, here are a few examples of narrative from several of my stories, and a brief sketch of the scenario:

The Glass Half-Full and A Lemon-Wedge: an optimist and pessimist collide in the city and discover their lives are a bit more entwined than they'd expected.This bit is from the Lemon Wedge's narrative at the very beginning of this story:

A small town is near about the hardest place to hide anything, but a big town is ten times worse. I know, because I tried to hide the fact that I didn’t know what the heck I was doing, and The Glass Half Full found me out exactly three hours before I admitted it myself.

“Miss Garibaldi,” he said, and actually took off his glasses to say it (which is rather an uncommon thing)”I don’t believe you know what you’re doing.”

From now on I’ll refer to him as T.G. (The Glass) because everyone knows that trees are dying and if there aren’t trees there won’t be oxygen, and because I am dictating this to a secretary with stubby fingers and a wilted collar and he’s breathing like a racehorse with the blows, I would rather not waste extra words on the already diminishing atmosphere.

As you can see, this character is stressed, high-strung, and flips out about anything and everything she can get her claws into. Notice the fact that the Lemon Wedge uses run-on-sentences. Her life is out of control and she's at the point where venting is her coping system.

The Green Branding: my new historical fiction project. A shy, unready girl of the Colonial era is called upon to save her county from the marauding terrors of Banastre Tarleton and his men.

She seldom thought about Nathaniel’s leg since he’d lost it the year the War began. It had been four years since, and their beautiful corner of Virginia--the Isle of Wight--had changed little. The young men had disappeared by twos and threes, but then, Mary had never been bold enough to take much notice of gentlemen. Perhaps that was the reason she was nineteen and still unwed. So many girls fretted night and day that all the lads were gone to war and would likely be killed, and then there should be no men to marry. Sometimes Mary found it easy to forget there was such a thing as a War of Independence.

Easy, at least, in the daytime. It was the nightmare that plagued her and made her shun the River.

The same dream.

The same face floating  in the weeds.

The same sense of shame when she admitted the war inspired her with nothing but a wish to flee the county and fly somewhere far away where the only neighbors were red-winged blackbirds, and she was alone with none but Nathaniel for company.

Mary is an admitted coward and shrinks from Society. This will, of course, be one of the things that makes the task required of her so difficult. Her mental process is clouded and drear because she is living under the sense of a calling she refuses to fulfill. Recurring dreams in which she feels herself summoned to some fearful task...the knowledge that there might approach a time that demands her to break out of her comfortable shell of self-sufficiency and do something heroic for everyone else...

Fly Away Home: (yes, you knew Callie would appear, didn't you?) A buried past is not always a dead past. Callie Harper is set on a career of glamour and glitz. Will she sacrifice everything--even the reputation of her only friend--to attain it? A historical romance set in 1950's NYC.

      But even raspberry creams could not minister to a mind diseased. I swallowed my half only because I hated to waste perfectly good chocolate, and curled up in a tight ball in the chair. Life was miserable. I was miserable—more so, because I had come to a decision. I would have to go apologize to Mr. Wade Barnett. I wondered how humble pie tasted? But it wasn’t the humility that hurt the most—it was the fact that I was in the wrong. I had always prided myself on having the upper-hand of my emotions in every situation. Not so today. And I had hurt the only man I’d ever met who remotely seemed to care about me. Just peachy. I was certainly not a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize the rate I was going.

Callie's voice is jaded, but with unexpected springs of humor and whimsy that haven't entirely died under the pressure of professional life as a "liberated, modern woman." As she works alongside Wade Barnett, her voice softens--this was one of my favorite parts in writing Fly Away Home... getting to show the cultivation of a character's perceptions as her life changed.

This is the great beauty of being an author--and, of course, the great responsibility of it:

"Nevertheless, the free will of a genuinely created character has a certain reality, which the writer will defy at his peril. It does sometimes happen that the plot requires from its characters certain behavior which, when it comes to the point, no ingenuity on the author's part can force them into, except at the cost of destroying them."

-Dorothy Sayers The Mind of the Maker

The quote was, of course, talking more about events and scenarios into which the author tries to force the characters, but the same thing can be said of creating your character's voice. In a way the character creates his own voice. Or--to be clearer--the character's voice grows along with his personality. Just as the events of your life and your upbringing have effected the your perception of things today, so also runs the course of your characters' lives, and their mental state. You can't force a certain voice onto a character any more than you could force yourself to think like another person. Let the voice come naturally--it will. As you write you will become familiar with the people in your stories, and will be able to hear and write their own keen twist on life. It is such a fun thing, and one of the best moments for me in the whole writing process: when I have realized at last the way this or that person ticks, and how to incorporate that into the narrative.

Do your characters have distinct voices? Whom was the most fun to write?

"Don't dash off a six-thousand-word story before breakfast..."

I have been traveling, ladies and gents. That being said, today's post is late. In fact, I sat down and didn't quite know what I was going to write about, so I committed the seventh deadly sin of all writers and decided to "check Facebook" quickly before getting to work. Contrary to the general run of luck, checking Facebook was exactly the thing I needed to do because my brother's girl's sister-in-law (but we shall refer to her as Abby) had posted a link on my timeline that I found rather apropos. The link lead to The Art of Manliness which (while for the gents) is hilarious, informative, and full of good, old-fashioned tips on how to be a real man. I read it occasionally and pass the information I glean on to my brother and cousin and anyone else who will listen. It's seriously entertaining! Anyway, the link was a bit of writing advice from the legend, Jack London, in an article written 1903 called "Getting Into Print" and it was such good advice all around (though we might differ in a philosophy) that I had to "reprint" it here:

       Don't dash off a six-thousand-word story before breakfast. Don't write too much. Concentrate your sweat on one story, rather than dissipate it over a dozen. Don't loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don't get it you will none the less get something that looks remarkably like it. Set yourself a "stint," [London wrote 1,000 words nearly every day of his adult life] and see that you do that "stint" each day; you will have more words to your credit at the end of the year.
       Study the tricks of the writers who have arrived. They have mastered the tools with which you are cutting your fingers. They are doing things, and their work bears the internal evidence of how it is done. Don't wait for some good Samaritan to tell you, but dig it out for yourself.
      See that your pores are open and your digestion is good. That is, I am confident, the most important rule of all.
       Keep a notebook. Travel with it, eat with it, sleep with it. Slap into it every stray thought that flutters up into your brain. Cheap paper is less perishable than gray matter, and lead pencil markings endure longer than memory.
      And work. Spell it in capital letters. WORK. WORK all the time. Find out about this earth, this universe; this force and matter, and the spirit that glimmers up through force and matter from the maggot to the Godhead. And by all this I mean WORK for a philosophy of life. It does not hurt how wrong your philosophy of life may be, so long as you have one and have it well.
        The three great things are: GOOD HEALTH; WORK; and a PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE. I may add, nay, must add, a fourth--SINCERITY. Without this, the other three are without avail; with it you may cleave to greatness and sit among the giants.

-Jack London "Getting Into Print" 1903

Achilles' Heel

Every one of us wants to be a successful writer--we want to know our strengths and weaknesses. We want to rely on the strengths but we want to shape our craft so that our weaknesses grow stronger with each book.

There are several spheres that I consider "strengths or weaknesses" for writers. They are as follows:

Plot

Dialog

Characterization

Description

My greatest strength has been (and I assume will always be) characterization. It makes sense because since I am always people-watching whenever I'm around people (and I'm a people-person) I get a deal of research done. It's really important as a writer to pinpoint your greatest strength and then try to find the places that need work. My nemesis, I think, is plot. My first book--written at age twelve--was entirely plotless. My second, A Mother for the Seasonings, is a very simple tale. (though a good one!). I got half-way through two other books that are still languishing in their word document files, but never finished them. You see, one had too much plot, the other not enough. By the time I reached The Scarlet-Gypsy Song I knew I needed a plot that could carry me through a novel without seeming stretched thin. "Like butter scraped over too much bread," as Bilbo says. And though I was able to spin out a tale with a plot that I liked very much much, it was still lumpy-bumpy and will take a deal of editing to make palatable. I will admit that even in this book my character-love came out first. You see, I didn't have a plot when the book was born. I had a phrase:

"There was Nannykins to begin with, but she had a bad knee and left for the North."

I mean honestly. What does that have to do with a father whose children get into his fictional world and his princess who gets out of it, and massive travail and bloodshed and angst and beauty? Nothing. But somehow I came up with a plot and the phrase and the rest lies in the bloodied pages of the Gildnoirelly. 

All this to say, I know that plot strength is a weakness for me. So I've been doing a deal of reading this summer in hopes of getting a little better at it. I just finished reading a book called The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner. She is not a Christian writer, but her skill is certainly a force to be reckoned with. I loved the plot anyway, but she put this huge twist at the end that left me reeling and marveling and wishing I knew enough to do the same.When we do research like this, it's helpful to ask yourself several questions:

Where did I think the plot was going?

How did she tailor my opinion one way so that she could whip the story around?

What was the most dynamic scene in the story?

How does the characters' personality/character play into the way the plot turns out?

I am excited. I've done my research and I have a good, strong plot for Scuppernong Days. I actually sat down and wrote it out in my writing notebook so that I know where I'm going. Y'see, my worst part is getting only major events and having difficulty stringing them together with important nothings. Of course there is wiggle-room for the plot changing and your characters changing and your idea changing, but for myself I find I can keep plot weakness to an ebb if I structure my story. :) What are your strengths/weaknesses? How do you strengthen your weak parts?

"Be sure of only two things: yourself and the ropes beneath your hands."

 -Mr. Nesbit, First Mate of The Scuppernong

Grit, Wit, It

It just so happened that before the June Crusade began, I had been re-re-reading (get that?) James Scott Bell's Revision and Self-Editing. It's a fabulous book, and one that I think every aspiring author (and even old-hands) ought to poke their noses into now and then. One point that I am always struck by is his section on what he terms "Grit, Wit, and It" Witness his introduction to this section:

"What is it that makes these characters unforgettable? In analyzing hundreds of memorable characters, I believe three factors prevail above all. I call them grit, wit, and it."

Obviously the first one leads perfectly into one of Mr. Bell's pet-peeves. NO WIMPS! Your protagonist should never be a wimp. Maybe he starts off weak in strength, but there is a way to write weakness that is as strong as strength. You have to put fight into your characters. Never let yourself write a wimp. You'll never get over it.

Point Two: Wit. This is something that I see precious little of in books, but when I do see it I cheer. There is nothing like a bit of wit thrown in unexpectedly. By wit, I mean something unexpected, clever, and throw-away. Something even so obscure that you don't even notice it's there the first time. Here, Mr. Bell talks about "wit":

"Wit is something that everyone warms to when it's natural, not forced. An easy way to do this is by making the wit self-deprecating. If the character as the ability to laugh at himself, wit will come naturally, as when Rhett Butler chides Scarlett O'Hara, 'Why don't you say I'm a damned rascal and no gentleman?'
Wit can also make light of an overly sentimental situation..."

In another spot Mr. Bell talks about a line of biting wit being "the perfect counterpoint to what could have become maudlin self-pity." I will admit, I'm not one who can write heavy drama. I just don't do it well. I've never liked melodramatic stories and I can't write it myself. Even in Fly Away Home when Callie is fleeing in tears from a humiliating moment when she loses it in front of America's most famous journalist, she can't help but find a tiny bit of humor:

"I continued my flight, weaving through the late lunch-crowd of my fellow journalists, hoping no one saw the tracks of tears in the powder on my face. I wiped my cheek with Annamaria’s napkin that I had somehow forgotten to let go of, and considered my options. I could leave the country. No—that wasn’t exactly doable. I had no money—besides. Mr. Barnett had already kindly pointed out that I was ignorant in all forms of second-langauges. And I didn’t suppose there was a secret island of Roman swine that would be willing to have me write articles in Pig-Latin for them. Nah—I didn’t recall reading anything of that sort in my high-school geography book."

Wit is definitely something that can add spice to a situation that might otherwise be run-of-the-mill.
The third and last component in creating unforgettable characters is "It". This is something that can be classified (in my mind) as charm. That thing in a person that causes people to flock toward them like bees to honey. As J.M. Barrie said: "It's a sort of bloom on a woman. If you have it, you don't need to have anything else; and if you don't have it, it doesn't much matter what else you have."
The characters with personal magnetism are the best. The ones that linger in your mind because even you can't help but be attracted toward them. Give your characters personality. Let them sparkle and snazz and do things you have no idea how you thought up. Let them be themselves and give them hearty helpings of Grit, Wit, and It with every meal. You'll never forget it. ;)

Wouldn't you love to get a letter from *him*? :)

This girl...yes, that one ^ is off to a girls' retreat tomorrow, so you shan't hear from me till the week's end at the earliest. :] *Cue weeping, wailing, gnashing of teeth*... ;) No, I am sure you will do very very well without me. Your feed might even get a rest which might be nice. But I found something positively brilliant that I had to leave you with. Here's hoping it will inspire and uplift you, and help you love our dear old Jack better than ever...I found it on Narniafans.com, and thought it was such profoundly simple yet intricate writing advice from one of the best authors ever that I had to post it here to show you girls. :)

The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
26 June 1956

Dear Joan–

Thanks for your letter of the 3rd. You describe your Wonderful Night v. well. That is, you describe the place and the people and the night and the feeling of it all, very well — but not the thing itself — the setting but not the jewel. And no wonder! Wordsworth often does just the same. His Prelude (you’re bound to read it about 10 years hence. Don’t try it now, or you’ll only spoil it for later reading) is full of moments in which everything except the thing itself is described. If you become a writer you’ll be trying to describe the thing all your life: and lucky if, out of dozens of books, one or two sentences, just for a moment, come near to getting it across.

About amn’t I, aren’t I and am I not, of course there are no right or wrong answers about language in the sense in which there are right and wrong answers in Arithmetic. “Good English” is whatever educated people talk; so that what is good in one place or time would not be so in another. Amn’t I was good 50 years ago in the North of Ireland where I was brought up, but bad in Southern England. Aren’t I would have been hideously bad in Ireland but very good in England. And of course I just don’t know which (if either) is good in modern Florida. Don’t take any notice of teachers and textbooks in such matters. Nor of logic. It is good to say “more than one passenger was hurt,” although more than one equals at least two and therefore logically the verb ought to be plural were not singular was!

What really matters is:–

1. Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn’t mean anything else.

2. Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one. Don’t implement promises, but keep them.

3. Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean “More people died” don’t say “Mortality rose.”

4. In writing. Don’t use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was “terrible,” describe it so that we’ll be terrified. Don’t say it was “delightful”; make us say “delightful” when we’ve read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers, “Please will you do my job for me.”

5. Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say “infinitely” when you mean “very”; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

Thanks for the photos. You and Aslan both look v. well. I hope you’ll like your new home.

With love
yours
C.S. Lewis