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JONATHAN FRANZEN'S TOP TEN RULES FOR WRITERS (as given to The Guardian on 20 Feb 2010)

with additional commenty comments by me :


1. The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.

Hmm, well, maybe. I can't think Hugh Selby had very friendly thoughts when he wrote his brilliant Last Exit to Brooklyn, it reads like he wants to shove all of us into a landfill site and have done with the human race. But quite often that's a good attitude for a writer to have. Some books you walk around and poke sticks at, they're designed that way; some books you take your machete and hack into the meat and the filth and the hell with any bystanders getting splattered, they shouldn't be bystanding so close if their fine suits mean that much to them. Some books you can have round for tea with mama. So I disagree with rule 1.

2 Fiction that isn't an author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn't worth writing for anything but money.

Garrison Keillor musta got a real fat wad for Lake Wobegon then. Likewise Dickens. I'm not sure what this rule really means. Maybe it's just like a tie with a drawing of a fish on it.

3 Never use the word "then" as a ­conjunction � we have "and" for this purpose. Substituting "then" is the lazy or tone-deaf writer's non-solution to the problem of too many "ands" on the page.

Okay JF okay. Deep breaths - put your head between your legs.

4 Write in the third person unless a ­really distinctive first-person voice ­offers itself irresistibly.

Agreed - I recently jacked in a novel because I found to my horror that it was written in the SECOND person. You do this, you say that. Nooooooooooooo! That's just wrong. Only one book gets away with that, which is An American Tragedy by Theodore Drieser, which is quite brilliant. But after that one - no second person! You is fired!

(Now... E Annie Proulx - look away now!)

5 When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it.

Naw, I think I see what he's getting at but naw. If you marshall your research well, you create a world, you're doing good. Who was that woman who lived in a box in England and wrote about Alaska? I reviewed it too - my memory is going down the drain. Ah yes, The Tenderness of Wolves. Anyway, that was pretty good. So no to rule 5.

6 The most purely autobiographical ­fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more auto­biographical story than "The Meta­morphosis".

Sounds like bollocky bollocks to me. Does this actually mean anything?

7 You see more sitting still than chasing after.

Ah, grasshopper, you have much to learn. Come on, JF, you're a great writer, don't bullshit us.

8 It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.

Also wrong because these days employers can firewall all porn and gambling and social networking sites. (But here, they don't think of Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ as a social networking site, so shhhh, don't tell them....!)

9 Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.

He's galumphing again.

10 You have to love before you can be relentless

That's from a Christmas cracker, i bet.


****

Anyway, The Corrections is one of the few books which made me want to find out what the guy wrote next, which was Freedom (what a crap title).

The Corrections has one really naff section, where it turns into a stupid farce about post-Soviet Lithuania and gangsters and stuff, really bad. Otherwise I thought it was tough, tender, relentless even, but sadly, full of interesting verbs. Fail yourself, Jonathan.