Category Archives: Writing

Should we be worried that Jonah Lehrer’s ebook has melted into air, into thin air?

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. . . and leaves not a rack behind?

Jonah Lehrer, you may recall, is the young author who made up some Dylan quotes in his book Imagine and was caught self-plagiarizing on his New Yorker blog and elsewhere.  See here and here.  It’s not a good time to be Jonah Lehrer.

Imagine, not surprisingly, has been withdrawn from the market, without any online explanation of what happened.  Now an Atlantic writer worries that the disappearance of the ebook from ebook shelves is a bad thing.

There are now links to used copies on both Amazon and Barnes & Noble; original links to the items are still inactive, and at the original time of writing, there were no links at all, used or no. Lehrer’s author site on Amazon still does not link to any of the marketplace vendors.

She connects this situation to the time Amazon disappeared copies of some editions of Orwell novels from readers’ Kindles because of copyright violations.

When Orwell pulled a Kindle disappearing act, David Pogue called Amazon’s actions, “ugly for all kinds of reasons.” Even though (as far as I know) no purchased copies of Imagine have disappeared off of electronic readers, the ugliness is just as strong in the current reaction to Lehrer’s missteps. It is worrisome that the book has virtually disappeared from the most prominent online retailers—and the publisher itself. A simple note saying that sales have been halted pending further verification, or something to that effect, would have been a much more honest, transparent solution. When contacted for comment on the specifics of the decision, Amazon stated simply that, “At Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s request, we halted sales of ‘Imagine’ in all formats.” No reply was made to the specific issue of how the request was handled. HMH did not provide a response, nor did Barnes and Noble.

To me, this seems like much ado about nothing (to bring Shakespeare into the post again).  Imagine is still easily available as a used hardcover on the Internet.  No one has removed the existing ebooks from peoples e-devices.  So Imagine is certainly leaving a rack behind. (In this sense a rack, the Internet tells me, is a fast-moving cloud, a vapor.)

I suppose in some ways it’s easier to disappear ebooks than to destroy physical books, but as readers at Andrew Sullivan’s site point out, in other ways it’s much easier to save an ebook, if you think it’s worth saving:

Jonah Lehrer’s book was bought and downloaded by thousands of readers before it was recalled. The tools to remove an e-book’s DRM encryption are freely available and trivial to use, even for a low-tech buyer with a cheap PC. Once the book is decrypted, it’s just another file on a computer, as easy to copy and send around as any photo or Microsoft Word document. E-book files are tiny compared to other commonly-pirated media like movies and music; most are under 10 megabytes, which is small enough to send as an email attachment. And if they’re stripped of their fancy formatting and converted into plain text, they get even smaller. Project Gutenberg’s entire collection of over 40,000 public-domain titles would fit comfortably on an average iPod.

And then there are the increasing numbers of ebooks (like mine) that don’t even have DRM.  I’m basically trusting that most people aren’t jerks.

And here’s another angle: I wonder if Lehrer would have any difficulty getting the rights to Imagine back from the publisher.  If he did that, he could get rid of the made-up stuff, write a new introduction explaining that the devil made him do it, mistakes were made, or whatever, and sell the ebook for $2.98 or some other fraction of the publisher’s original ebook price.  I’m sure he’d sell a bunch of copies!  Step 1 in his rehabilitation.

When I started my ebook venture, I went looking for an unpublished novel of mine that I thought might be worth self-publishing as an ebook.  Couldn’t find the hardcopy.  Could only find softcopy of the first draft.  Yikes!  I vaguely remembered sending a copy to my friend Jeff, so I dashed off a desperate email.  Twenty minutes later I had my novel back.

Computers are our friends.

“Maine,” “Sunrise,” and Verisimilitude

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Verisimilitude is tricky.  I find myself caring deeply about how realistic a work of art is in some contexts, not at all in others. A couple of evenings ago I watched the silent film Sunrise, then started the contemporary novel Maine, and I had completely opposite reactions to their lack of verisimilitude.

Sunrise, subtitled A Song of Two Humans, came in fifth in the recent poll of the greatest movies of all time.  It was made in 1927 by the director F. W. Murnau (working in Hollywood for the first time);  Murnau also directed the silent vampire film Nosferatu.  Sunrise is a sweet love story; it is also completely bonkers.

The characters have no names.  The man has fallen in love with the Woman from the City.  Following an unbelievably awesome tracking shot, he meets her by the shore.  She wants him to come to the City with her.  But what about his wife?  Well, you should drown her!

Drown your wife, already!

Er, isn’t there a less drastic approach?  Like, er, divorce?  And, er, what about the man’s baby?  No matter!  He must drown his wife!  So he trudges around thinking about drowning his wife.  Apparently Murnau made the actor wear lead weights in his shoes so he’d look like a man thinking about drowning his wife.  Not that his wife notices.  She tells her maid: “Yay!  We’re going out for a boat trip!  Don’t wait up for us!  Someone else will do the chores on the farm!”  And so on.

But, you know, it’s a great movie.  I wouldn’t put it in my top ten list, but many images from it are going to stay with me.  I haven’t watched a lot of silent movies, but Netflix and Turner Classic Movies are helping to remedy the gap in my education.  The ones I’ve seen seem much like grand opera — big emotions, very static, and completely unrealistic.  (I love it in opera when you get big arias from characters who have just been suffocated, as in Aida and Rigoletto.)  You just have to go with the flow.

And then there’s Maine.  It’s a big, realistic novel about three generations of an Irish-Catholic family with a summer home in Maine.  The structure is to alternate chapters from different points of view among four female characters representing each of these generations.  You see each character in the present, but their memories fill in seventy years or so of family history.  A reasonable structure.  And the characters draw you in–it doesn’t take long for you to want to find out how everything turns out, even though the point-of-view women characters are either jerks or idiots.  But in a novel like this, verisimilitude counts for a lot.  There isn’t much plot–there is just life as it is lived.  And here, the author makes enough mistakes in the parts of life that I know something about that it really interferes with my enjoyment of the novel.  I don’t know about vermiculture in California, or the life of young singles in Manhattan (two areas that the novel covers), but I do know about Irish-Catholic families around Boston, and here I think the author just doesn’t have things quite right.  A few examples:

  • She has the grandmother going to daily 10:00 Mass in her summer home.  But parishes don’t have daily 10:00 Masses anymore.  (And it just takes you a minute to look this up on the Internet.)
  • The grandmother’s parish in her hometown of Canton, MA has closed, so she goes to Mass in Milton, instead.  That’s nuts.  Why would she drive all the way to Milton to go to Mass?  There are plenty of Catholic churches closer to Canton than that.  (The church she would be attending in Milton was the church where I was married.)
  • The grandmother’s son is supposed to have graduated sixth in his class from Notre Dame.  But I’ve never heard of any university publishing a rank in class like that.
  • One of the daughters complains that the son got sent to an expensive private school, while they had to go to public school.  Presumably they went to Canton High–a pretty good school!  And the son went to B. C. High–also a good school!  But not that much better, and actually not that expensive–I happen to know that tuition was $400 per year in the time period when this took place.  Anyone who lived in Canton could easily afford it.

And so on.  OK, all this stuff is trivial.  But it’s more annoying than the more idiotic lack of verisimilitude in Sunrise, because Sunrise doesn’t even pretend to be realistic.  I don’t think these glitches make Maine a bad novel, but the author could have done a little more research and made it a much better one.

Help! I need a title!

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And it can’t be Revenge of the Fluffy Bunnies, because that’s already taken, dammit.

For those of you just tuning in: I’ve got a sequel to my post-nuclear-war private eye novel Dover Beach; it is tentatively titled Locksley Hall.  I’m not convinced that the title Dover Beach ever did me any favors, and I’m even less convinced that Locksley Hall will be any better.  This post explains.

The hero of both novels, Walter Sands, is a bookish guy, so it makes sense that he would come up with a bookish title.  Locksley Hall, a poem by Alfred Tennyson, surely qualifies as bookish.  But I’m pretty convinced that no one is going to want to read a book with that title, unless maybe it’s a Regency romance.  On the other hand, I don’t want to give the novel a boring, self-explanatory title, like Walter Sands’s Second Case.

Locksley Hall is a weird poem in which the narrator is trying to come to grips with being dumped by his beloved.  He ends up getting past his personal unhappiness and giving a typical Victorian paean to the future and its wondrous possibilities.  Here is a couplet from near the end of the poem:

Not in vain the distance beacons. Forward, forward let us range,
Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change.

I have made this the epigraph of the novel. You will notice that, in the context of a novel that takes place after a limited nuclear war that has made a mess of everything and everyone, the Victorian optimism of the couplet is absurdly ironic. On the other hand, as we see by the end of the novel, it is not completely ironic; after many setbacks and a lot of self-doubt, the hero has solved his second case and is finally starting to feel good about his personal future, even if the world he inhabits is still a mess.

So how does the title The Distance Beacons strike you?  The first thing that you might notice about the title is that the grammar is misleading.  The tendency is to think of “beacons” as a plural noun–so what the heck are “distance beacons”?  Is that confusion bad?  Sometimes a title that grates on you a little is a good thing.  Think of The Sun Also Rises, which is a quote from the Bible that really doesn’t make a whole lot of sense until you really ponder the novel.  What is that “also” doing there?  (OK, OK, I’m no Hemingway.)

I’d love to know what you think.

Here, by the way, is the scene where Walter discusses titles with his friend Art, proprietor of Art’s Filthy Bookstore.  Walter is taking refuge there after being shot and chased by Federal soldiers.  “TSAR” is a shadowy group that calls itself “The Second American Revolution”.

**********

My friend Art is a pleasant-looking little old man with a long white beard. He is also a smut-peddler, but everyone’s got to eat. His store is filled with books and magazines that let people fantasize about a world they can never experience. He has his own fantasies, but they aren’t sexual: he dreams of literary soirées, of long philosophical discussions over a glass of sherry in faculty lounges, of a world where people can contemplate great ideas and meditate on the mysteries of life instead of brooding about the past (like Henry) or struggling just to stay alive. He feels that I am a kindred spirit, and I think he may be right.

“Walter!” he cried out when I staggered inside. “What happened to you?”

“Long story,” I mumbled. The prospect of finally getting some relief made me realize how exhausted I was.

He led me through the bookstore and into the back room where he lived. I lay down on his cot and closed my eyes while he bustled about, trying to find something he could use to bandage my arm. “I should tell you that you might get into trouble if the Feds find out I’m here,” I said. “They aren’t happy with me at the moment.”

I’m sure this didn’t please Art, but he was brave about it. “Then we’ll just have to keep the Feds from finding out,” he replied. He sat down next to the cot and began tending my wounds. “Now tell me everything,” he said.

I summarized for him the case so far. He shook his head in wonder as I described what I’d been through. “Why don’t you write about these things instead of living them?” he asked.

That had been Henry’s advice, too. “Maybe I will, if I ever get the chance. But right now I’ve got to figure out how to find Gwen before sunrise, or else TSAR says they’re gonna kill her.”

This was the kind of reality that made Art uncomfortable. It didn’t make me feel very good either. “But what can you do, Walter?” he asked. “How can you find her?”

I tried to think. I had no more theories. The only thing I could do was to find out what Gwen’s theory had been. How had she managed to find TSAR when no one else could? But to find out Gwen’s theory I had to somehow get to the Globe. “Have you got a bicycle, Art?”

“Well, yes, but—”

I struggled dizzily to my feet. “I’ve gotta go to Dorchester and talk to Gwen’s editor.”

“Don’t be a fool, Walter. You’ve got to rest. You won’t help Gwen if you collapse on the way—or if the Feds capture you again.”

I supposed he was right. “But I can’t just stay here,” I said.

“Look,” Art said. “Why don’t I send someone over to Bobby Gallagher’s place? Mickey can come pick you up and drive you to Dorchester.”

Bobby and Mickey once again. I decided to buy my own car once this was over and learn how to drive. Couldn’t I accomplish anything without help? “I dunno,” I said. I took a step; it wasn’t a very steady one. I sighed. “All right.”

“Good. Now rest.”

I sank back onto the cot and rested.

* * *

Art got a teenaged boy who lived next door to make the trip to South Boston for us. His payment was an ancient copy of Playboy, which sounded like a pretty good deal to me. While he was gone, Art cooked me some food and tried to keep my spirits up. “Have you thought about a title for your case yet?” he asked.

A title. When I had started on the case, I hadn’t thought it deserved one. Now, well—a title couldn’t hurt. But I sure was in no mood to come up with one. “Any suggestions?” I asked.

Art brought some scrambled eggs over to me, and I wolfed them down. He sat on a wooden chair next to the cot and considered. This was the sort of thing he enjoyed. “Your case really starts with the president and her dream, right?” he said after a while. “She thinks the referendum is the start of a great new age for America and the world.”

“I suppose so.”

“Then how about Locksley Hall for a title?” He smiled and quoted from the poem. “‘For I dipped into the future, far as human eye could see,/Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be.'”

“That’s some serious irony,” I said. I quoted from another part of the poem. “‘Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rained a ghastly dew,/From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue.'”

“Irony is good in titles,” Art pointed out, and he topped my quote. “‘Till the war drum throbbed no longer, and the battle flags were furled,/In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.”‘

The Parliament of man, the Federation of the world. The president was having some difficulty with her vision of the world. All we had gotten so far was the ghastly dew.

“It’s a bit obscure, don’t you think?  We’re probably the only two people in Boston who know that poem.”

“Why should that matter, Walter?  It’s not like anyone is going to read the book.”

“That’s a very good point.”

I finished my eggs, and we waited for Mickey.

 

Empathy, Good Writing, and Mitt Romney

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Beyond basic writing skill, the quality fiction writers need most is empathy.  You need to get deep inside the characters you write about and understand what makes them the way they are. This doesn’t mean that all your characters need to be sympathetic.  You can have villains–but villains without interesting, understandable motivations belong in comic books.

And of course the goal is to make your readers understand what you understand, feel what you feel. Here‘s the novelist Jane Smiley recently in the New York Times:

Reading fiction is and always was practice in empathy — learning to see the world through often quite alien perspectives, learning to understand how other people’s points of view reflect their experiences.

(I can’t really keep up with Jane Smiley’s output, but I can really recommend Moo and A Thousand Acres. Ten Days in the Hills, not so much.)

As a writer, I have thought a lot about politicians in my time, and it seems clear to me that a successful politician also needs to be empathetic.  Or, at least, he (or she) has to be really good at faking empathy.  This is somewhat tricky at the presidential level, where the candidates tend to be wealthy, accomplished, and far removed, at least in their personal lives, from the problems that confront everyday voters.  But of course presidential candidates are also supposed to be pretty good politicians.

Mitt Romney’s speech to campaign donors is shocking because it is such clear proof that he is utterly lacking in empathy for ordinary, struggling people. Here is Ezra Klein:

The problem is that he doesn’t seem to realize how difficult it is to focus on college when you’re also working full time, how much planning it takes to reliably commute to work without a car, or the agonizing choices faced by families in which both parents work and a child falls ill. The working poor haven’t abdicated responsibility for their lives. They’re drowning in it.

Way before this latest incident, The New Yorker commented on Romney’s empathy problem:

But it’s getting harder to escape the conclusion that there’s a pattern to Romney’s behavior, that he has a real problem understanding and caring for those with whom he can’t easily identify. As Amy Davidson writes, “This story [of bullying a gay kid] is resonant because one can, all too easily, see Romney walking away even now, or simply failing to connect, to grasp hurt.” That may or may not be a fair conclusion—we are none of us mind readers—but given what we know about him, it’s certainly a reasonable one.

The additional problem that Romney faces is that he’s such a bad politician that he can’t even convincingly fake the empathy when not talking to his rich donors.  And we (most of us, anyway) are so easy to deceive–especially if we want to be deceived!   President Reagan was known at the Great Communicator, but recall the essay by Oliver Sacks in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, recounted here:

In the mid-eighties, Sacks studied the reaction of people with aphasia as they watched a televised speech by the actor-turned-president. Despite being unable to grasp the skillful politician’s words, the patients were convulsed with laughter by his bogus expressions. As Dr. Sacks explains,

“One cannot lie to an aphasic. He cannot grasp your words, and so cannot be deceived by them; but what he grasps, he grasps with infallible precision, namely the expression that goes with the words, that total spontaneous, involuntary expressiveness which can never be simulated or faked, as words alone can, all too easily.”

“It was the grimaces, the histrionics, the false gestures and, above all, the false tones and cadences of the voice which rang false for these wordless but immensely sensitive patients. It was to these (for them) most glaring, even grotesque, incongruities and improprieties that my aphasic patients responded, undeceived and undeceivable by words.

This is why they laughed at the President’s speech.”

Conversely, Sacks remarked on a woman with tonal agnosia who was also watching the address, but sat in stony-faced appraisal. Emily D., a former English teacher and poet, could have no organic emotional reaction to the speech but was able to judge it from a neural vantage point. Emily summed Reagan up thusly:

“He does not speak good prose. His word-use is improper. Either he is brain-damaged or he has something to conceal.”

Tell me about it! Sacks goes on to explain the implications regarding soothsayers and politicians:

“We normals, aided, doubtless, by our wish to be fooled, were indeed well and truly fooled. And so cunningly was deceptive word-use combined with deceptive tone, that only the brain-damaged remained intact, undeceived.”

I’d be interested in seeing the reactions of aphasics to a Mitt Romney speech.

In which Wikipedia gets annoyed with my friend Jeff

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In response to the Philip Roth brouhaha, my friend Jeff fixed an error in my brief, uninteresting Wikipedia entry.  The fix is still there, but it clearly annoyed Wikipedia, which has now added this statement:

This article relies on references to primary sources or sources affiliated with the subject. Please add citations from reliable and independent sources.

So there.  I guess I could add some references to secondary sources about the publication date for Marlborough Street, but learning their editing model will take more time than I care to give it just now.  WYSIWYG it isn’t.

Does a real living breathing human being look at all these changes and pass judgment on them?  This is either very impressive or very depressing.  Probably both.

Wikipedia standards and the Roth affair

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Here we discuss Philip Roth’s open letter to The New Yorker to get Wikipedia to change the “Inspiration” section of its article on his novel The Human Stain.  For those of you who just can’t get enough of this story, here is a deep dive into the back and forth in the revision history of the article, where we see the editors actually adding more detail to the incorrect discussion of Anatole Broyard possibly being the basis for the novel’s main character.

The post clears up one point for me.  Roth couldn’t have just posted his “open letter” on his own blog and claimed it was a secondary source.  Wikipedia is wise to that one:

Anyone can create a website or pay to have a book published, then claim to be an expert in a certain field. For that reason self-published media—whether books, newsletters, personal websites, open wikis, blogs, personal pages on social networking sites, Internet forum postings, or tweets—are largely not acceptable. This includes any website whose content is largely user-generated, including the Internet Movie Database (IMDB), Cracked.com, CBDB.com, collaboratively created websites such as wikis, and so forth, with the exception of material on such sites that is labeled as originating from credentialed members of the sites’ editorial staff, rather than users.

So Roth had to transform himself into his own secondary source by getting his letter published in The New Yorker.  That worked.  (We’ll probably never know why Roth felt the need to go to these lengths to correct the article. Presumably he didn’t write letters to the editor complaining when all those reviews raised the possibility that the novel was based on Broyard. And the fact that the reviews did raise the possibility is sort of noteworthy in its own right–perhaps not about the novel itself, but about the context in which the novel was written.  That’s a point that the Lawyers, Guns & Money blogger raises at the end of his post.)

I’m OK with Wikipedia’s policy on secondary sources, although I haven’t thought deeply about it.  Crowd-sourcing content obviously has its limits, and Wikipedia obviously has had to figure out a way to avoid complete anarchy.  I’m not sure I could come up with a better solution than they have.

So where are we with my little Wikipedia problem?  Jeff has kindly fixed the error in the publication date for Marlborough Street, and the fix is still there a day later.  The article uses this site as its source, which also has the date wrong, so that’s the problem.  But then there are any number of other sites offering used copies for sale and listing the publication date as 1987.  Do they count, I wonder?

Philip Roth writes a letter to Wikipedia, and we should all read it

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This is pretty funny, and a little sad.  Philip Roth came across an inaccuracy in the Wikipedia article about his novel The Human Stain.  The article stated that the novel was “allegedly based on the life of the writer Anatole Broyard.”  But it wasn’t.  Roth informed Wikipedia of the error, but the Wikipedia refused to make a change:

Yet when, through an official interlocutor, I recently petitioned Wikipedia to delete this misstatement, along with two others, my interlocutor was told by the “English Wikipedia Administrator”—in a letter dated August 25th and addressed to my interlocutor—that I, Roth, was not a credible source: “I understand your point that the author is the greatest authority on their own work,” writes the Wikipedia Administrator—“but we require secondary sources.”

So he wrote an open letter to The New Yorker instead, giving the background of the novel, which is about a college professor who gets caught up in a political correctness scandal.

Anatole Broyard was a literary critic who never acknowledged that he was of African-American ancestry.  The main character of The Human Stain is a professor who never acknowledged his African-American ancestry.  So that’s where reviewers made the connection.  But Roth goes to great lengths to make the case that this connection isn’t correct. “Novel writing is for the novelist a game of let’s pretend,” he says.  He took a germ of an idea–a muddle-headed remark made in class by a friend of his at Princeton, and its consequences–and populated a novel from it.

The Human Stain is great, but I particularly admire the shorter novels he been writing lately.  The Humbling was too over-the-top with the standard Roth sexual fantasies for my taste (and that of most critics, I think).  But Nemesis, about an imagined polio outbreak in Newark in 1944, was powerful and moving.

But back to Wikipedia.  Its article about The Human Stain is now up to date, citing Roth’s explanation of the novel’s genesis.  They don’t waste any time!  And now I may be inspired to tackle an error in my brief and uninteresting Wikipedia writeup: it says Marlborough Street was published in 1975, but it was actually published in 1987; I still hadn’t learned how to write in 1975.  They’ve got secondary sources that also list the book as being published in 1975, so apparently they’re not going to take my word for it.  I have no idea where that date came from.  I wonder if they’ll accept this blog post as a source?  I suppose I could post a photo of the copyright page . . .

Eschew utilization of obfuscatory verbiage, and other obvious rules everyone should follow

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I’ve been reading Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow.  It’s great!  Kahneman is not quite as funny and entertaining as Dan Gilbert, but he makes a huge amount of fascinating research understandable.  And the guy won a Nobel Prize, so you’ve got to give him props for that.

He has a brief section about how to write a persuasive message.  It’s related to the concept of “cognitive ease” vs. “cognitive strain”.  Cognitive strain makes your brain work harder, forcing you to move from System 1 to System 2, in his terminology.  If you want people to believe you, you want to minimize their cognitive strain.  He says:

The general principle is that anything you can do to reduce cognitive strain will help, so you should first maximize legibility.

This seems undeniably true.  I read a lot of rèsumés, and if I had one piece of advice for job seekers, it would be: Don’t use 10-point Times New Roman!  It’s hard to read!  Especially for people over 40!  The harder I have to work to get through your life story, the less I’m interested.

Here’s another obvious rule:

If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do.

And he cites a Princeton study showing that “couching familiar ideas in pretentious language is taken as a sign of poor intelligence and low credibility.”  The study’s amusing title is “Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly.”

Why don’t people understand this?  The rèsumés I review are usually from writers, and I can’t tell you how many of them say “utilize” instead of “use,” and use “author” as a verb instead of “write.”  And of course there is the endless repetition of buzzwords like “leverage” and “synergy.”  How does that help their cause?

Here are a couple of other, less interesting rules Kahneman cites from research:

  • In addition to making your message simple, try to make it memorable.  A study showed that aphorisms that rhymed were more likely to be taken as insightful than when they did not.
  • If you quote a source, choose one with a name that is easy to pronounce.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that people will believe something nonsensical just because it rhymes, or is written in a nice font.  But it helps.  There is also probably something of a halo effect in play, which Kahneman doesn’t talk about in this section but brings up elsewhere in the book.  If something is beautifully written, your admiration for the writing will probably leak over into a stronger willingness to believe what the writing is about.  That’s something I worry about; see my post on Ayn Rand and Malcolm Gladwell.

Ayn Rand, Malcolm Gladwell, bad writing, and bad politics

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A few years ago I decided I should try to read Atlas Shrugged.  I felt as if I was missing out on a part of my political education.  The novel, and Rand’s philosophy, seemed to have changed the lives of a lot of important people–probably some who were a lot smarter than me.  It came in first in the readers’ poll of the top 100 English-language novels of the twentieth century.  Alan Greenspan was a Rand acolyte, and he was a Very Serious Person.  Maybe if I read the book my life would be changed, too!  So I gave it a shot.

I managed to get through about a hundred pages before I had to give up.  The book was just terrible.  I would have thrown it across the room if I’d had the strength to chuck the thing that far.  Rand can write a decent paragraph, but her characters bear no resemblance to any human beings I had ever met.  I couldn’t even get to the philosophy part, because the philosophy was clearly going to be based on the characters (or the characters were based on the philosophy), which meant the philosophy would be as bad as the characters, as far as I was concerned.  Because good writing matters to me.

I sometimes wonder if that’s a mistake, when it comes to judging philosophy or anything else.  I am willing to believe Dan Gilbert about anything after reading his delightful book Stumbling on Happiness; I’m pretty sure that’s a good judgment.  But what about Malcolm Gladwell? He is another delightful writer, but he’s come in for his share of criticism.  Here is Steven Pinker’s assessment of Gladwell’s What the Dog Saw from the New York Times a few years ago.

An eclectic essayist is necessarily a dilettante, which is not in itself a bad thing. But Gladwell frequently holds forth about statistics and psychology, and his lack of technical grounding in these subjects can be jarring. He provides misleading definitions of “homology,” “sagittal plane” and “power law” and quotes an expert speaking about an “igon value” (that’s eigenvalue, a basic concept in linear algebra). In the spirit of Gladwell, who likes to give portentous names to his aperçus, I will call this the Igon Value Problem: when a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong.

I loved What the Dog Saw!  Now what do I do? Good, clear writing is a reasonable marker for good, clear thinking.  But there obviously has to be more.  I have a feeling that Ayn Rand could have written a terrific novel, and I still wouldn’t have bought into her philosophy, as I understand it.

And the fact that the Republican vice presidential candidate is so enamored of Atlas Shrugged terrifies me.  Maybe this is another bad idea, but I think a candidate’s literary tastes say a lot about him.  If you enjoy novels with two-dimensional characters like the ones Rand created, you’re not going to be able to see the complexity of human existence, which seems to me to be critical to wise leadership.

So, anyone want to guess what Mitt Romney’s favorite novel is?  Click here to find out.  I dare you.

Rule 9: Strive to eliminate skimming

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Here’s another in my randomly numbered rules for fiction writing, which apply to folks who aren’t good enough to break the rules.  That includes you.  And me.

This rule came to mind as I considered the Ohlin/Giraldi bad review controversy, which I wrote about here (and which generated a lot of search hits–it’s a popular topic!).  First, there was the review itself.  When I read a book review, what I want to find out is whether the book is worth reading–not whether the reviewer is clever.  So I found myself skimming the first paragraph, which quotes Ezra Pound and throws in references to Middlemarch and Don Quixote and calls entirely too much attention to itself.  Just tell me about the book!

But when he finally does start to discuss Ohlin’s work, he makes what seem to be valid points.  If an author’s prose is flabby–if her descriptions and narrative are filled with clichés–then why bother reading that prose?  If I ever do read the book, I know I’m going to start skimming. (Of course, I did read the first chapter of Ohlin’s novel and didn’t skim, which makes me wonder if the reviewer was overstating his case.)

If readers aren’t going to read your words, why bother writing them?  The only way you’re going to find out if readers are skimming is to get yourself some readers–and that’s another rule, which I haven’t written yet–maybe because it’s so obvious. Short of that, here are some things worth thinking about–at least, they’re the kind of things I think about:

  • Have I eliminated all unnecessary words?  This is standard writing hygiene.  Make every word count.  Don’t say “in order to” if you can just say “to”; don’t say “all of” if you can just say “all”.  It makes the prose tighter and clearer.
  • Have I right-sized my descriptions?  This probably deserves to be yet another rule, but the idea is to make your description the length that is appropriate for the significance to the story of the person or thing or event you’re describing.  For example, minor characters don’t deserve fully developed back-stories; we don’t need to know exactly what they’re wearing or where they grew up or what their politics are.  If a meal isn’t a major event, we don’t need to know what everyone ordered and what kind of wine was served.
  • Are my descriptions too ordinary?  This is one thing Giraldi complained about. You can’t just say, “She was medium height, with brown hair, green eyes, and white teeth.”  Why bother?  Typically, a physical description has to merge into characterization.  For example, if you describe someone’s teeth are “impossibly white,” you are starting to say something about that person.
  • Have I de-clichéd my prose?  This is another Giraldi complaint.  If you’re going to say “Nice guys finish last,” you’d better have a good reason for it–for example, it could be funny or ironic in context. Otherwise it’s pure deadweight.

My first drafts tend to be underwritten–I’m too eager to get through the story and reach my destination.  I add detail and depth in succeeding drafts. But sometimes I overwrite, which will happen when you’re not sure of yourself–you’re describing a character for your own benefit, not just for your readers.  Then you need to prune ruthlessly.

I sometimes worry that I worry too much about skimming.  I recall taking out a lot of detail in the final draft of Replica, concerned that the pace was too slow for what was supposed to be a breakneck thriller.  When I re-read it recently in the process of turning it into an ebook, I thought maybe I had gone a little overboard.

There are no right answers; that’s why they call it art.