Archives for October 26, 2007

Playing in the gutters over at TEV, I came across this little gem, originally published in the Times Literary Supplement in 2001 and kindly reproduced by Mark in the comments to a recent discussion. I like Elmore Leonard novels but I hate rules for fiction, which so often read like instructions for making a polyester blend sweater: Follow them unswervingly and you will end up with something serviceable, yes, but a little slick and uniform and itchy.* So this was satisfying:

NB J.C. 27 July 2001 
The fashionable crime writer Elmore Leonard has published his ten rules for writing fiction. Here they are: 1. Never open a book with weather. 2. Avoid prologues. 3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue. 4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said”. 5. Keep your exclamation marks under control. 6. Never use the word “suddenly”. 7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. 8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters. 9. Ditto, places and things. 10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. 
The eleventh rule is: If you come across lists such as this, ignore them. The rules may sound sensible enough, but, with the exception of No 5, each could be replaced with its opposite, and still be reasonable advice. Leonard complains that, while reading a book by Mary McCarthy, he had to “stop and get the dictionary” – as if it were a form of pain (William Faulkner, who broke most of these rules whenever he wrote, complained of Hemingway that he “never used a word you had to look up in the dictionary”). And what is meant by “leave out the part that readers tend to skip”? If every writer tried to be as exciting as Leonard, there would be no Brothers Karamazov, no Anna Karenina (remember those exquisitely boring sections on agronomy?), and the shelf reserved for Dickens or Balzac would measure about a foot. Banish patois, and we lose a library of fiction stretching from Huckleberry Finn to Trainspotting. As for dialogue, if Leonard samples Henry James, he will find “remarked”, “answered”, “interposed”, “almost groaned”, “wonderingly asked”, “said simply”, “sagely risked” and many more colourful carriers (these from a page or two of Roderick Hudson). Should they all be ironed out into “said”?

As for the first rule, see the opening of Bleak House.
* As I prepare this post, a hyperbolic amount of ire keeps creeping in. I keep wanting to type things like “bane” and “vile” and “slavish devotion to mediocrity,” like there is a tiny English countess inside me who really has it in for writing rules. (Her glittering opus rejected, her resplendent accounts of the weather unhailed.) I blame too many workshops spent across the table from adherents to the rule that the active voice is always better than the passive voice. The countess says: Their heads would be better off.

Chicago is hot! Read all about it in today’s Wall Street Journal drama column, in which I review Chicago Shakespeare’s revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Passion and Strawdog Theatre Company’s revival of Brian Friel’s Aristocrats:

Chicago Shakespeare’s revival of Stephen Sondheim’s “Passion” gains immeasurably from being performed not in the company’s grand Elizabethan-style theater but in its upstairs house, a black-box performing space that has been set up for this production in a compact three-quarter-round seating arrangement. Taking his cue from the space, Gary Griffin, the Chicago director best known to New York audiences for his work on “The Color Purple,” has reconceived “Passion” as a chamber piece accompanied by five instrumentalists, with results as illuminating as were John Doyle’s similarly scaled productions of “Sweeney Todd” and “Company.”
Part of what makes “Passion” so well suited to such treatment is that it its scale is already modest–though the emotions it portrays are unabashedly operatic. One way to approach this 1994 Sondheim-James Lapine collaboration is as a trope on a couplet by W.H. Auden: “If equal affection cannot be,/Let the more loving one be me.” Here the unequal partner is the sickly, unattractive Fosca (Ana Gasteyer), who becomes obsessed with Giorgio (Adam Brazier), a handsome soldier who is having an affair with Clara (Kathy Voytko), a beautiful but unhappy bride who cannot live with Giorgio save at the cost of losing her child. Fosca’s passion is so violent and all-consuming that it threatens her life. It also proves seductive to Giorgio, who has never known the disorienting sensation of being loved without limit: “Loving you/Is not a choice/And not much reason/To rejoice,/But it gives me purpose,/Gives me voice,/To say to the world:/This is why I live.”
Nothing in Ms. Gasteyer’s oddly miscellaneous resume–among other things, she spent six years on “Saturday Night Live”–prepared me for her anguished performance as Fosca, a notoriously difficult role which she interprets as memorably as did Donna Murphy and Patti LuPone before her….
If you think Chicago Shakespeare’s upstairs theater is snug, wait till you see the headquarters of Strawdog Theatre Company, an L-shaped black box in a dingy storefront walkup. Yet that company, which is celebrating its 20th season, has a reputation that lured me to its production of “Aristocrats,” Brian Friel’s great 1979 play about a family of Irish Catholics who have sunk from upper-middle-class comfort into desperately shabby gentility. Rarely have my expectations been more satisfyingly surpassed. Strawdog’s “Aristocrats” is one of those revivals so excellent as to leave a critic with nothing much to do but order you to drop everything and go see it at once–and its excellence, like that of “Passion,” is deeply rooted in its clarifying smallness of scale. I saw it from the front row of the theater, sitting within arm’s length of a cast whose acting was so direct and unmannered that I felt as though I were dining with them….

No free link. Do it. (If you’re already a subscriber to the Online Journal, the column is here.)

“Revolution in art lies not in the will to destroy but in the revelation of what has already been destroyed. Art kills only the dead.”
Harold Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New