The Accidental Author, The Basics, Part 1
Night of the Laughing Eyeball
Well, since this blog is supposed to be about writing, I’d better start, uh, writing. And given I’m writing about writing, there’s probably no better place to start than with Robert A. Heinlein’s first two rules of writing from his essay “On the Writing of Speculative Fiction” (Of Worlds Beyond, 1947). They are:
1. You must write
2. You must finish what you write.
Sound advice which, as you’ll know from some of my previous postings, I’ve not always had the easiest time following. That Rule number 2’s a killer.
Sound as the Rules are, though, the list could use a bit of tweaking after, lo, these seventy years.
In particular, I’d like to insert a corollary to Rule 1 — namely:
1a. You must write right.
… That’s if you want to have a prayer of seeing your work in print, anyway — or even just see it being read. Minimally grammatical writing is such a critical factor in starting and keeping the pages turning that I’m going to devote this whole second Book of the “Accidental Author” blog to the Basics of nailing a sentence together.
Let me begin, though. by setting false modesty aside and saying that “writing right” (correctly, grammatically, properly) has always come pretty naturally to me. I knew more or less what the rules were, and how to bend them when called for. That’s not to say I don’t do a humongous amount of self-editing to polish the prose. I must’ve read Singularity straight through twenty times or more before sending it out the door.
Even still, those pesky grammar gremlins are forever crouching behind the inkwell, poised to pounce. Case in point: in Singularity Chapter 10, “A Visit to the Smithsonian,” our hero, ueber-consultant and former US-Soviet exchange student Jonathan Knox, is recalling how, on his last night in Moscow, his friend Sasha had showed him “the greatest book he had ever read, bar none,” whereupon:
Knox’s eye strayed to the author’s name — Deyl Karneghi — and choked back a laugh just in time.
I’d like to think I would have spotted it sooner if it hadn’t been for that damned hyphenated phrase (with its transliteration of “Dale Carnegie”). As it was, that blooper made it all the way into the galleys, for Chrissake! And even then I didn’t catch it till I had to read the text aloud for the audiobook version. For those of you having the same difficulty seeing it as I did in all those twenty plus scan-throughs, the problem is that, if you take the sentence literally, then what’s choking back a laugh here is … Knox’s eye!
There was still time to fix it for the final printed version, thank God. Just inserting “he” before “choked” did the trick.
Still, that laughing eyeball comes back to haunt me every time I’m moved to criticize someone else’s grammar, style, or usage. On the other hand, what fun’s a treatise on the craft of writing without a few horrible examples to liven it up? My sporadic stylistic peccadillos would hardly do. I needed an ever-flowing fount of industrial-strength, laughing-eyeball-magnitude solecisms. I needed prose passages gone so utterly awry that they run off the road and into the ditch, crash and burn and have to be shoveled over with dirt.
But where does one find such an anti-paragon, what Ursula K. Le Guin called a “zero master,” of style and syntax? Well, after due consideration (all of thirty seconds worth!), I decided on a writer big enough, and bad enough to serve.
Perhaps some of you will have heard of him?
Dan Brown, author of a little-known work of theological fiction called The Da Vinci Code.
So if you follow the simple guidelines laid out in the next two or three blogisodes, you too can experience the joy of knowing you not only write right — you write better than a writer who made umpteen gazillion dollars writing wrong.
What’s that worth?
Priceless.
