All thumbs

RULES OF THUMB:

73 Authors Reveal

Their Writing Fixations

Edited by Michael Martone

and Susan Neville

Writer’s Digest Books, 245 pages

 Writers may be the most supers-titious people going. We hear about their obsessive-compulsive habits — their special cups for sharpened pencils, or multicolored ballpoint pens, or selection of baseball caps, or specially brewed coffee, which they always keep on hand next to the computer. Writers are creatures of habit, and have to be, to continue writing regularly.

I’ve always thought of myself as an “on-the-fly” writer: I’ll use what’s available, when available. I work on airplanes, while waiting at the dentist’s office, even — yes — in the bathroom. I’ll scribble notes on any blank surface I can find, jot down entire articles on the spur of the moment, and consider it a “first draft.” It usually all gets cleaned up when I transfer it to the computer: spellings get corrected, thoughts get expanded and clarified. I’ve never thought much about adopting any sacred “writing rituals.”

But Rules of Thumb can make any writer a believer. Editors Michael Martone and Susan Neville have assembled short essays by 73 well-known, and lesser-known, published fiction writers. Their tips range from the merely facetious to much deeper waters. Some rules are nutty enough to make Jack Nicholson’s character in As Good As It Gets seem well-adjusted (like the essay entitled “You Must Eat Broccoli Before You Begin”). But surprisingly, much of this stuff will inspire any writer to become better.

It opens with John Barth’s “The Ink-Stained Thumb.” Barth was a metafictional god in the ’60s, so it’s interesting what he recommends to today’s aspiring writers: “1. Insert set of Mack’s earplugs from a supply in worktable drawer. 2. Slide self-ward toward the worn, stained, and battered three-ring loose-leaf binder procured during freshman-orientation week at Johns Hopkins in 1947, in which has been first-drafted every page of my fiction since those green undergraduate days. 3. Open the ‘serviceable old thing’ (as W.H. Auden fondly addressed his aging body) either to the page in progress or to the blank next,” and so on. It’s not too surprising that someone who still uses a loose-leaf binder from his freshman year also relies on a fountain pen, not unlike our resident “Penman,” Dr. Butch Dalisay. Barth prefers using a Parker 51.

There are practical suggestions for creative writing students, as in Alyce Miller’s “Take This Job and Show It.” She notes that “in much of the student fiction I read, characters often seem strangely jobless, moving through their fictional worlds weightless and unmoored… Characters never seem to need to be at their workplace!” Miller advises her students to think hard about what their characters do for a living — and don’t rely on props, like “a pair of fireman’s boots in the closet or a stethoscope close at hand.” I couldn’t agree more, but it may be too much to ask students who have never held day jobs to imagine what it’s like to flip burgers or sit still in an office for eight hours a day. 

Robert Rosenblum gives advice on naming your characters (“Names ‘N’ Such”), while another writer offers a more, uh, technical treatise (“The Semicolon and the Infrequency of Its Use” by 3rd Bed editor Vincent Standley). And Jill Christian warns us not to use the word “very” very much. (“Very is like a red flag waiving in your prose. Hello? Hello? This writer didn’t work hard enough here. This writer knows she hasn’t chosen the right word.”) Most of these technical rules will apply to both nonfiction and fiction writers.

Over a dozen entries in Rules of Thumb harp on a familiar theme: procrastination. It’s the bane of our generation, which believes firmly in the “all-nighter” and the “photo finish.” Unfortunately, those two habits are recipes for terminal mediocrity. Thank God we’ve got Pulitzer-winning Robert Olen Butler to set us straight with his essay, “You Really Don’t Have Anything Better To Do.” (“Your fingernails do not need to be clipped until after the day’s production of words is done. You don’t need to organize your tax receipts for next year. You don’t need to clean the toilets.”) It’s a mantra taken up by those who have learned to write, not just for a living, but in order to live: “Write every day.” Other variations: “Regularity is as helpful with the muse as with the bowels.” (Barth) “Write even when you feel lousy. Pain does something interesting to the brain.” (Dinty W. Moore) “Every sentence must pay, must somehow thrill. Every one.” (Frederick Barthelme)

(Note: Most of the essays assume you’ve worked out how to commit time to writing, even with a full-time job, a marriage and kids factored in. Good luck on that one. Let me know how it works.)

I myself was a longtime devotee of late-night writing: I felt the mind, as tired as it is after 10 p.m. or midnight, could still churn out the words, albeit from a different, less-logical portal. But the writing still got done. I hated morning writing. After encountering this book, though, I’ve made it a habit to set aside two hours at the start of most days for some sort of writing. Then you can navigate through most of the day with a free mind — and a clear conscience.

Rules of Thumb has a homegrown quality — with its whimsical design by Grace Ring, it suggests early editions of McSweeneys literary journal — but what’s truly special about it, as opposed to cartloads of other writer’s guides that I’ve read, is that it really takes us under the hood of fiction writing, to the real problems that plague writing. There’s “Make It More Complex” by Peter Turchi, who notes that writing with a specific story idea in mind can set imaginative limits; it’s useful, at the end of your fictional road, to ask yourself, “What happens next?” And then branch on to the unexpected.

Perhaps the most bluntly useful essay is Janice Eidus’ “We Are Not Your Mother,” where she castigates student writers (again, those troublesome student writers) who force us — we, the readers — to confront their many whining characters, and presume we have an interest in their petty, little fictional problems. Eidus is strictly common-sensical about this, as if she really were our mother:

“Dear Writer, we readers were not present at your birth (nor at the birth of your fictional alter ego). We haven’t nursed you through measles and chicken pox, haven’t applauded your first baby steps. We don’t love you like a mother, and we never will. However, if you work really, really hard at seducing and engaging us on the page, we might just fall a little bit in love with you and your character(s) — at least for the duration of your novel.”

Chicken soup for the writer’s soul, indeed.