On writing: A few random rules

by David Benjamin

“The good writer seems to be writing about himself (but never is) but has his eye always on that thread of the Universe which runs through himself, and all things.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

MADISON, Wis. — No writer who feels secure is likely to be very good at what he or she is doing. When I read Dostoyevsky, for example, I get the sense that every word is infused with terror — a fear that he’s incompetent, sinfully verbose, disorganized and an embarrassment to his mom. 

In that respect, I try to assume a Dostoyevskyan air of self-doubt whenever I pick up my quill. Every time I post one of these essays, I invite the one devastating comment from a stranger in cyberspace that will shatter my confidence beyond repair and render it impossible for me to ever scrawl another slovenly syllable. 

In other words, I’m your typical writer. 

Show me one of that rare other breed — who’s cocksure that he or she is God’s gift to literature — and I’ll show you one who couldn’t slash an escape from a wet paper bag with a gold-plated Mont Blanc. 

Part of the reason writers who’ve been writing for thirty, forty, fifty years still aren’t entirely confident in their craft is that there’s no manual. Yes, there are thousands of professors out there teaching “creative writing.” There are textbooks about this alleged “discipline.” Trouble is, anyone who’s read a few dozen novels knows that in any serious story, the author’s deviations from the precepts of proper exposition tend to infest every chapter, confound the rules and fascinate the reader.

Consider Dostoyevsky. 

I do have rules, of course. But they apply mainly to me and I’d hesitate to impose them on anyone. As for measuring the quality or propriety of other writers’ work, I’m both judgmental and incoherent. I’m like Justice Stewart on pornography. I know it when I see it.

For example, I recently bought a book online by an unfamiliar author. This was a mistake. Normally, when I’m in a bookshop, reading blurbs, feeling a book’s heft, even plunging my face into the spine to smell the ink and wood pulp, I always apply one absolute test. I read the first page, not to see — as agents and editors do — whether the writer has kicked off with a “grabber, but to look for sour notes.

There’s a tune and rhythm to good writing. For example, consider the first ’graph of Raymond Chandler’s short story, “Red Wind.” 

“There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.”

This is no mere paragraph. It’s a song, a paean, a dark and impious hymn. It hits not one bad note. It inspires in another writer an emotional tempest common to every-ink-stained wretch: jealousy, admiration — no!, awe, and love. I don’t know much about Chandler’s life. He might have been irresponsible and lazy, hit his wife, neglected his kids, missed his deadlines and drank himself to death. I don’t care. I’m going to just plain love anyone who can write a paragraph like that. 

So, when I browse, I pore over Page One, looking for clinkers, for ill-fitted sentences, for meter that doesn’t quite scan — because a prose writer who hasn’t read a thousand pages of verse has no music in his pen, no flow across her pages. 

When I opened up the novel I’d bought sight unseen, I found not one but several jarring notes on the very first page — at which I dismissed the back-cover praise, forsook the story and dropped the book into my Goodwill bag. If an author can’t give me a simple melodious ten-finger exercise the moment we meet, we’re finished. James Joyce said, “Life is too short to read a bad book.”

The rules I follow tend to be my own, and might apply to nothing another writer is doing. Crafting one of these “screeds,” for instance, I never open with the first-person singular. I might indeed be writing about me, but I’ve always felt it presumptuous to put myself first, atop the page, above all that follows. Herman Melville helps to explain this tendency. Moby Dick might be the most important first-person novel in American literature. Melville, however, begins his epic with an imperative verb, placing the reader ahead of the hero: “Call me Ishmael.”

Another candidate for the great American first-person novel, starts with an even stronger second-person deflection: “You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer…”

An echo of this device sounds insouciantly in one of the 20th century’s best-loved, most-studied coming-of-age classics: “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap…”

In each opening, the author subtly puts the reader foremost, bestowing on the protagonist a spurious air of self-deprecation. Which explains why, when I’m strutting my stuff, I never start with “I.”

Another rule I’ve come to observe, subconsciously, for most of my life, is to ground everything in a self-styled reality. Since I began my first (unfinished) novel in third grade, I’ve preferred stories rooted in real life rather than fantasy realms rife of knights, dragons, damsels, magic, monsters, zombies and various forms of flying carpets. In this respect, I’m obeying Rule #9 in Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses. Mark Twain notes that the “nineteen rules governing literary art… require that the personages of a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausibly set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable.”

When I talk to young writers, I encourage this loose adherence to realism and suggest that their stories should derive from their own lives. But I also say that when you’re making stuff up, even based on true-life adventures, you don’t have to be entirely honest. I’ve told stories about myself that had only a passing acquaintance with what really happened — much of which I don’t even remember anymore.

This is where research comes in. When writing subjectively about, say, an argument — unwitnessed by anyone else — with my sister Peg when I was ten, I can put words in our mouths that neither of us could possibly recall. But, as long as — to quote Twain’s fifth precept — “the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances, and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject at hand, and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say,” who’s gonna know how much of the conversation I made up?

However, when there are objective facts in the story, like which candy bars I used to steal from Peg’s Halloween stash (Milky Way, Baby Ruth) and which I shunned (Zagnut, Charleston Chew), I check and doublecheck that these items were present and available at the time. If I do not thus cover my ass, there are nitpickers out there — namely, Patrick Pollino and Jacques Kauffmann — watching me, waiting to pounce, ready to shame me before my audience…

… And remind me that my competence is tenuous and my insecurities overwhelming.