On rules, and breaking the hell out of them (and more on Blake Crouch)

(Just so you know, this post was started Monday. It is now Tuesday. THAT is my life.)

Friday night, I finished Blake Crouch's breakneck story, RUN. It's awesome. A review is coming post haste, as soon as I can find five spare minutes between editing photos and buying groceries. Likely tonight, part two of Castle isn't on (I have a rabid crush on Nathan Fillion), no one has a project due tomorrow, and I should be able to give the children enough Dimetapp to get them to fall asleep and stay asleep. (Children's Nyquil is pretty effective, too. Just sayin'...)

What I want to address now, however, separate from the proper review of Crouch's work, is the importance of rules when writing: learning the rules, understanding the rules, and then breaking said rules.

Here is a cursory list of rules UNrelated to writing that I have been fed randomly throughout life. Maybe you can relate to a few:

1. Don't stick a fork in a toaster that is plugged in.
2. Don't play golf during a lightning storm.
3. Always make sure to have at least one (1) tampon in one's purse at all times.
4. Use adverbs under threat of torture involving bamboo skewers and snake venom.
5. Never marry a man who, a week before the wedding (his second go-round at the altar, your first), tells you that he won't be a "real" cop until he's been married at least three times. Ummm...yeah.


In kindergarten (and possibly before if our parents didn't spend too much time at the golf club's Saturday-night Hit & Giggle with the concomitant hangover that lasts all day Sunday, sometimes into Monday), we learn the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have done unto you. We learn the rules of coloring in the lines and taking turns on the slide (Andy McCarthy didn't learn these rules. He used to cut ALL the time. Jerk face.) Cough into the crook of your elbow instead of your cupped hand; wash after using the restroom (please tell me you learned this one); it is mean to kick animals (especially beagles).

As we advance in our academic careers, teachers outline the rules pertaining to proper use of verbs and adjectives and commas and semicolons. If the teachers are awesome, like so many of mine were, we are taught how to take those glorious parts of speech and form them into melodic, complete sentences. Even if we're writing about the life and times of the common garden slug, we can, if we follow the rules, craft genius. A slug can sound quite glamorous if you put the words in the correct order and jazz up your prose with some interesting editorial on the viscous quality of slug slime. The potential is there. It's up to you to give it life.

But herein lies the dilemma: we become slaves to the rules. We are so worried about violating Strunk & White or even my own version of the bible, the Chicago Manual of Style, that the rules get in the way of our voices. I've heard it enough times in the creative writing classes and programs I've been involved with that it deserves repeating: Learn the rules, and then learn how to break them. With style.

Blake Crouch is one such writer who has done just this. His writing style, his "voice," screams at the reader through the pages. The sentences are incomplete. (I'll bet Word had a field day with all the green underlining to alert the writer to fragments.) The thoughts spill into each other, sometimes with such force that you're not sure if you will be able to keep breathing through the rest of the page. By breaking the rule about forming complete sentences, Crouch establishes a killer pace and visceral tension throughout the entire story, so much so that the reader will experience a physical reaction, likely in the form of a pounding heart, as he/she reads on. THAT is exactly what he wanted to do. The broken rules in his work set the scene for a kick-ass, throat-clenching blitzkrieg that forces you to keep reading. I dare you to put it down. (You'll pick it back up again. The dishes can wait. Tell your kids to eat Cheerios for dinner. Milk's in the fridge...)

The first time I came across this style of writing, where the author intentionally employed broken or fragmented sentences, was with Annie Proulx in The Shipping News. I didn't finish the book for a year because it drove me mental, all the starting and stopping and incomplete thoughts. That was before I was willing, or ready, to accept the notion that just because there are rules out there, shoved in my mouth like a bit, I don't have to be a bite down so damn hard. Blake Crouch obviously knows the rules--dude's got lots of books out there and has co-written with some heavy hitters--and he's an expert at making those rules his bitch. He's not a slave to them; he commands the rules to fuel the adrenaline rush that soaks into every single page. It works. The only bummer thing about it is, you'll finish the book so fast, you're going to want more. (Don't worry. Crouch has an impressive roster of titles from which to feed your need.)

Some writers want to toy with convention in an effort to be avant garde, and sometimes it works. We had a hearty discussion in a writer's group back in '07 about the use of second person ("you") as the protagonist in a story. The only time I've ever seen this work was in Chuck Palahniuk's Diary. Loved that book. I tried to write a short story in second person. It sucked. Big time. But, hey, I gave it a go. I'd be interested to read other second-person attempts, if you know of any that won't make my eyes bleed after the first three sentences. (My story made my eyes bleed. I ruined what could have been a saucy little tale by trying to be all tricky and clever. Dumb me.)

Another writer who has toyed with convention, successfully, is Chris Cleave in Incendiary. The whole fantastic story is told in the form of a breathless, ranting letter to Osama bin Laden, in the voice of a woman who has lost her son and husband in a terrorist attack. I didn't know what to expect when I picked it up back in '06, though the early reviews glowed. I bawled by the end. It was incredibly powerful.

The point of all this: Turn off your inner editor. Pick up an ax and do a little chop-chop-chopping of the rules. See what happens. Just don't be like that douche I saw at a writers' conference once, the guy who stood up when it was his time to address the speaker and went off on how he didn't have the learn how to spell or form sentences because one day, we'd all be standing in line to read his bestseller and to breathe his air, simply because he was THAT much of a genius. Did I mention he was a douche?

Now, go write something. I have to edit pictures from my headshot sessions last weekend before I have parents chopping down my front door with their pick axes. I leave you with my dear duck Jovie and her best friend Zuzu enjoying a spot of coffee at Duckbucks.

Flu...in summer?

Second to the last week of school, one of the kindergartners shows up hacking his brains out. As often happens with the younger crowds, the communicability was, shall we say, considerable. Everyone got sick. Lucifer brought it home, shared it with Bueno, who shared it with Princess. By proxy, Dad got it, and because we breathe the same air for eight hours every night, I got it. Which is weird, 'cuz I rarely get it. I think this time I was the biggest baby, though, believe it or not, flat on my back for two whole days last week feeling super sorry for myself. But that was soooooome headache, dude, seriously.

Back in the saddle here, though, and catching up on all the crap I didn't pay attention to while I was whining away the hours. Watched The Eclipse (Ciaran Hinds, Aidan Quinn) as promised, and while it was good, it didn't make it for review this week. Wrote and submitted A Single Man for the ChicMom column (should be up sometime in the next few days), with Colin Firth and Julianne Moore. I'll keep you in suspense and send you to the review itself before telling you if I loved it or not.

I've been watching so many friggin' movies lately--I do that when I'm stumped on a writing project, hoping it will provide inspiration. Managed to get hold of Girl With the Dragon Tattoo--terrific film, if you can handle the subtitles. I <3 Lisbeth Salander! Caught up with an oldie from 2002--Sam Rockwell in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind--if you haven't seen this, it's definitely worth picking up. Sam Rockwell is THE most underutilized actor in Hollywood, and certainly in the top three BEST actors out there. Dude is a chameleon. Coincidentally, we watched Moon last week, too, another Rockwell flick (we're on a Rockwell kick around here), and while the premise was a little weak, his acting is grade A.

I'm embarrassed to admit we watched Hot Tub Time Machine and laughed our asses off, but don't watch it with the kiddos around. LOTS of swearing and sex. I found myself blushing with my 16-year-old on the couch next to me. "Cover your ears, Princess!" If you were at all a John Cusack fan wayyyyy back in the '80s, you will get a chuckle out of HTTM. Ridiculous but good for a laugh.

Took the kiddos to see Despicable Me on Sunday. Great film. Tight writing, awesome comedy, even some terrific subliminal stuff tucked in for adult enjoyment. (Gru, the super-villain, played by Steve Carell, is walking into the Bank of Evil for a loan. The sign reads: BANK OF EVIL / Formerly Lehman Brothers. I laughed out LOUD and embarrassed my whole family. Seems I was the only one who caught it, which is understandable considering the average age in the theatre was probably, like, nine, but Lehman Bros., as you will recall, was the banking and investment firm that initiated the most recent global economic meltdown. Bank of Evil is right!) Fun film, adorable little kids to yank at those heart strings. We loved it.

For this week, there are so many titles to choose from (it IS DVD Tuesday today!) -- Chloe (Liam Neeson, Julianne Moore, Amanda Seyfried), The Greatest (Pierce Brosnan, Carey Mulligan, Susan Sarandon), Greenberg (Ben Stiller), 8: The Mormon Proposition (award-winning documentary I will NOT be missing!), and Our Family Wedding (America Ferrera, Forest Whitaker -- looks cute). I'm definitely going to need a bigger column. I should talk to my editor about that...

Again am entrenched in the waiting game, waiting to hear back from queries sent to agents. Had some bad news last week--these two messages literally arrived within 30 seconds of one another, no shit--a hard-core rejection from an agent I thought may have liked me, and news from my oldest child that he will be deploying to Afghanistan in Feb 2011. THAT was a rotten day. But move forward, I must, and the feedback I've had from a few early readers has been really positive. Really the only thing that has kept me going on this project at all. I love it so much, but what if no one else does? What if it ends up in the round file like so many other projects have? I've long passed that million-word benchmark the veterans tell us we have to write. I'm not a newbie. I just haven't ever tried to publish anything because I've been too...scared. Now I want into the game, but the game is being fickle. As hell.

That's the thing that people don't get--if you're a writer, it's expected that you just...write. That you have an endless supply of words. Perhaps for some writers, that's true, but for me, a raging perfectionist with OCD tendencies, every word has to be perfect. I obsess over every combination of letters I choose--too many adverbs (I HATE adverbs!)? Is that adjective necessary? Should that be past perfect or just past tense? What would Hemingway do here? Obviously the obsessive tendencies do not extend to the blog (lucky you!)--this is a different beast altogether. But when I look at recently published titles that have hit the Big Time with Great Fanfare and Giant Movie Deals, some of the writing is...subpar. I don't want to be that writer.

And don't feed me your line of BS that you write because it makes your heart sing. If you don't want to make money doing this, you're a fool. Or maybe your bank vault is already bursting its seams. Mine? Not so much. I write because it's like a cancer. I can't excise it from my body. It's just there, always has been. No matter how much I've ignored it in the past, it rears its ugly head and somehow makes me feel better. Like built-in heroin (though, I must admit, I've never tried heroin. Maybe like built-in Prozac?).

The heroes exist among us, in all genres of writing. And there are so many I love, I cannot even begin to bow low enough to present myself with adequate humility. Maybe if I crawled under the top layer of soil and groveled at their feet... For YA, JK Rowling is phenomenal, as is Meg Rosoff, old-school Judy Blume, my fave up-and-comer Hannah Moskowitz, Suzanne Collins. In fact, Collins' third book in the Hunger Games series (book 3 is called Mockingjay) comes out in August--I cannot WAIT. The Hunger Games is a raw piece of work, brilliantly crafted, genius idea. Lions Gate has optioned the film rights and a screenplay is in the works with novelist Collins at the helm. Fabulous! Yeah, get your hands on it if you haven't. It's pretty hard core stuff for a YA title.

But I digress. (Imagine that.) Bottom line is, if I don't have words, I ain't got nothin'. I want the words to lead to publication, to readership, to strong out-of-the-gate numbers, to consistency, to more work, to more books, to more built-in Prozac. I don't want to be a one-hit wonder, a one-trick pony. What's wrong with wanting it all?

I'm not your bitch, Mr. Adverb, sir...

I can't say anything funny because I'm sitting here with a clarifying mask on, feeling it suck the life out of the pores of my skin, and if I laugh or smile, the mask will crack. Is this what Botox feels like? (How can people inject that crap into their face? Don't they realize that Clostridium botulinum is, uh, super scary shit?)

I should be editing. I'm so stuck on adverbs--what is this hate/hate thing I've got going on with those little words that modify verbs? Why so much hate? Why do I tell anyone who will listen that one of *the* most popular contemporary writers in the world today loves her adverbs like she loves her three children? I mean, c'mon, who am I to judge when her books, stuffed with more adverbs than there are pine beetles in BC forests, have sold over 20 million copies worldwide? Why must I be stalked by nightmares of adverbs chasing me through dark alleys, their "-ly" endings threatening to undo the last shreds of my sanity?

Because adverbs = shoddy writing. A few are okay, but there are purists in this realm of books & such (and not just any folks but those with impressive writing creds and published books on shelves) who have cast adverbs out of their vocabularies and who argue "real" writers should endeavor to do the same.

But it's soooooo hard! Seriously! <---See what I mean?

I'm not trying to be a grammar nazi, although I sort of am. I just want to construct, and read, cohesive sentences that aren't entangled by unnecessary crap. Is that asking for too much?

And yet, as I sit here editing, the same 467 pages again, I am underlining too many adverbs. I feel less than worthy, like Steven Galloway would shake his head for spending all that time trying to make us better writers, and for me to run out and inject more "suddenly," "immediately," and "softly" into the work.

I made the mistake of getting too cheeky in a recent email exchange with a potential agent--I challenged her to find more than two typos in my entire manuscript (she asked for the MS; I didn't just willy-nilly send it to her, folks). I'm a copy editor--I'm good at finding boo-boos--though perhaps not. I've begun anew the process of trying to remove 35,000 words or so (not gonna happen) to make the first book more aligned with industry norms, and I've found more than two errors. Not typos, per se, but grammatical missteps. I'm so ashamed.

I have to go wash the mask off my face. It's bringing too much clarity.