Beyond the Elements of Style

Where’s My White Book?

Some time ago, I read an article about opening scenes that summed up, for me at least, the perfect beginning to a novel. It summarized the requirements:

1. Introduce the story-worthy problem
2. Hook the readers
3. Establish the rules of the story
4. Forecast the ending of the story.

I still think that those are worthy goals. They’re not, however, rules. Beginning writers are often desperate for rules, for something that will tell them What To Do.

Once, in another lifetime, I was community relations manager at a Barnes & Noble bookshop. My friend Rachel kept calling me, eager to be informed as soon as the new big white Emily Post manners book arrived (this was in the days before the internet, when one couldn’t pre-order from Amazon, as most simply do today).

I was curious about her interest in the book, since Rachel had never particularly struck me as caring all that much about manners. But she loved her Emily Post white book. “The answers are all there,” she breathed reverently. “Isn’t it nice to know that, somewhere in the world, definitive answers to What To Do are available in one place?”

A lot of us are like Rachel: wanting to have the definitive book, be it about manners, grammar, how to raise a child, or getting forward in one’s career. And it’s a truism that part of becoming an adult is accepting that there aren’t any perfect answers to life’s myriad problems and challenges. Yet beginning writers, I find, cling to that hope as tenaciously as Ahab ever set his sights on the great white whale: somewhere, they believe, there’s a set of definitive rules that will enable them to write Pulitzer-Prize-winning material. There’s a final answer to what story structure works and what does not. There’s a usage guide that will faithfully tell them where to place commas.

And I’m here to say that there isn’t. The opening story structure at the beginning of this article is splendid, but how many good novels eschew it? How many great ones do?

I’m not saying that there aren’t some rules, and woe to the writer who decides to ignore them: rules need to be learned and studied and incorporated before anyone has the experience necessary to decide to go against them. But the perfect rules for the perfect book? No matter what earnest writer’s publications tell you, the essence of great writing is precisely that it isn’t formulaic.

Still, I’ll confess that I have a copy of the Emily Post white book in my bookcase, too, and from time to time I glance up at it or run my finger over its spine, grateful that in one place, at least, there’s a repository of rules telling me What To Do. The world seems a little safer place that way.

Learn the rules but don’t become their slave, and you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

Tony Hillerman RIP

So I’ll digress this week from my usual talk of writing and publishing and SEO to note with sadness the death this month of novelist Tony Hillerman, who has provided me (and countless other readers) with hours of wonderful entertainment, along with opening up a world that I might otherwise never have known about.

A colleague remarked that it’s not just Hillerman who died, it’s also his characters, people we’ve come to know and love, in particular Joe Leaphorn, the “Legendary Lieutenant” of the Navajo reservation, and Jim Chee, torn always between his career as a Navajo Tribal Police officer and his inclinations toward becoming a shaman. I nodded when I first read my colleague’s words, feeling sadness that there won’t be any new adventures involving these two men; but now I’m not so sure.

I’m not sure, in fact, that any well-written fictional character ever dies. We may have already read a particular book, but if the character has come to life for us once, he or she will do so again: that’s the promise of good writing. Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee (along with myriad other names like Antigone and Madame Bovary and Ivanhoe and Philip Marlowe and … well, you get my drift) won’t die until people stop reading the books in which they appear — a very slim chance, given Hillerman’s terrific storytelling ability.

Perhaps that’s part of the magic of books, their ability to touch the eternal, to keep a time and a place and a group of characters in our minds and our hearts long after their creator is gone. And if that’s true, Tony Hillerman was a magician par excellence.

If you haven’t read Hillerman, you have a world of pleasure ahead of you. Get to a bookshop or a library as quickly as possible and do so. And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

And Even More Resources

So I’m doing my annual clean out the cobwebs and go-through-internet-bookmarks-and-see-which-sites-are-still-there routine, and it seems an apt time to share some of the ones that are still, in fact, available. Here are a few, in no particular order:

Need a literary agent? Don’t ask your favorite author for a referral to his or hers — it puts that person in an awkward position (I know whereof I speak; I’ve been there). Instead, visit Agent Query and click the resources link. You may also wish to check out the Association of Authors’ Representatives both for listings and for a sense of how the industry views particular agents.

If the literary agent sites don’t tire you out and you still want to move toward publication, then sample some of the fare at Sensible Solutions, where you can click the — wait for it — “especially valuable links”!

Do you do children’s writing? Then it’s essential for you to know about Harold Underdown’s Purple Crayon site; it’s a fabulous website itself but also gives you helpful links to still more. Also be sure to check out the Children’s Literature Web Guide.

Are you a poet? Then take a look at the Poetry Society and click the resources link.

Here’s a site that’s filled with links to publishers, journals, conferences, magazines, and lots more: it’s the Literature Line.

Bookwire has a number of resources for writers under its “featured links” section.

Google as always needs to weigh in: check out its writers’ resources … but only if you have a lot of time to spend following links!

Good luck with all of it, and as always, feel free to share your own “especially valuable links” with me; I’ll be sure to credit you and your website for a little free SEO in the bargain. And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

Resources for Magazine/Freelance Writers

Need to do some market research? Find new venues for your work? Here are a couple of places you can start:

A lot of magazine writers subscribe (for a fee) to
Freelance Success, partly for its market guides,
guides to various markets (individual publications, what they want, who to pitch to, etc.), based on interviews.

Similar market guides are available from the American Society of Journalists & Authors (ASJA), which is more expensive to join (and not always easy to get into).

Writers Weekly has a great list of both jobs and gigs for freelance writers.

The Great Britain-based Burry Man Writing Center not only has gigs but hosts a terrific networking site for writers called Inked-In.

One of the best resources for finding magazine and journal submission requirements that are up to date is subscription-based, but well worth the cost: it’s Meg Weaver’s Wooden Horse Database.

These reources are a great place to start … and I’ll share more as I come across them. Remember that diligence and Google are your friends! And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

More on the Double Spaces

My friend and colleague Dick Margulis — who knows far more about such things than I ever shall — sent me some more information to share with those of you who are still disbelievers.

He disagres with me about the readability of text written with only one space between sentences (”It is still true that for greater readability extra space after a sentence is desirable”); but that disagreement nonwithstanding, it’s a nice encapsulation of this history.

Read it, and you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

No Double Spaces, Damn It!

Some very smart people hire me to either write for them or to edit what they have written. I call these very smart people “clients,” and I like to think that I provide a valuable service to their businesses. Most of them appear to believe that I do, as I have ongoing contracts with many of them; in several cases, I’ve been writing for the same companies for ten years or more.

And yet I occasionally find that these same smart people do not actually trust the very person … in whom they’ve theoretically put their trust.

It usually has to do with something that they all believe they “know to be true.” In these cases, I apparently play the renegade by trying to change something that everybody “knows” to be correct. And it almost always has to do with the old rule of placing two spaces between sentences. Time and time again I write or edit client copy, placing only one space between sentences, only to have the client gently correct (and, occasionally, admonish) me about it.

I may have pointed you to this site before; if so, bear with me. Read it. Read other articles. Read Robin Williams’ books. You do not have to take it on faith that I’m correct: do your own research.

And then repeat after me: It is incorrect to place two spaces between sentences. In fact, according to a colleague of mine, it has been incorrect in the typesetting world since 1954; if that’s true, then the change in practice is not even due entirely to the advent of computers (and the subsequent demise of monospaced type).

The simple truth is that your eye doesn’t need those two spaces to know that another sentence is about to begin. Your brain is smart enough to sort that out.

So, smart people, unite: learn the rules of usage so that you can write correctly, or — alternately — keep on employing me to do your writing and editing … and trust that I know what I’m doing! And then you’ll be .. beyond the elements of style!