WordWacky

I happened across a plea for the etymology of the word sidle in someone’s blog. Happy to oblige.

[Editor's Note: Did you know that your Seattle Public Library card grants you access to the online OED? Callou callay!]

si·dle

–verb (used without object) 1. to move sideways or obliquely. 
2. to edge along furtively.
–noun 3. a sidling movement.

In the 1300s the word is first seen, in one of those strange Middle English spellings (with some unsupported symbols omitted): “yf any connyng man of o Stande stille, or sidlyng can go”

Obviously the word is related to “side,” first used to mean “either of the two lateral surfaces or parts of the trunk in persons or animals, extending between the shoulders and the hips; the corresponding part in fishes, reptiles, etc.” around 725 AD.

The first known mention in its modern spelling was by Sir John Vanbrugh, way back in 1697: (more…)

Check out this cool furniture.

At nearly 2,000 Euros apiece, this photo is as close as I’ll come to owning any. But it’s a great idea, and a great execution. [via If It's Hip It's Here]

1. Write at the same time every day, no matter what.
2. Never, ever use an exclamation point!
3. Have an agent if you want to sell to a big publishing house.
4. Don’t expect to get rich writing — do it because you love it.
5. And conjunctions don’t start sentences.

I buy at least a couple of books on the subject of writing every year. Seldom do I ever pick them up to read them. And even more infrequently, I finish them.

I read Strunk & White in high school or college, and it was a godsend. Through careful editing and rigid adherence to the standards, I could make my writing correct — even if correct did not necessarily mean good.

Strunk & White’s best quality? Its length. The book is about 100 pages long.

As a story addict, a lover of narrative in its true, fictional, and semi-fictional forms, instruction books are the least appealing way to spend my reading hour and my library quarter (library delinquent that I am). That includes instruction books on writing. Yet who doesn’t wish for a few guiding principles, a checklist which is guaranteed to make a piece better?

Roy Peter Clark, author of Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer, has posted a collection of 50 solid tools to add to your craft toolbox. Thirty-two of them are even podcasts — you can “read” them in the car driving to work. [via Writers Unbound]

“Learn the rules, then you can break them.” That this idea would only tame the unkepmt talent! The argument is that by choosing when and if you break a rule, you can use the rules themselves to say something about the story, the characters, the setting, whatever you choose. I subscribe to this idea, and my most exciting moments in literature often happen when rules are carefully broken.

The prescriptivists would say that standards are the keepers clarity, the basis of common understanding of new ideas, while the descriptivists think the linguistic mores of this time are fleeting, at best, and will always be broken.

Keep this in mind: if language changes from the bottom up, the writers are the last to catch up.

There’s nothing more to say about this book, it’s true. Yet I also believe my reading experience is enhanced by a multitude of ideas around a single work.

This is the book your creative writing teacher wants you to write. It is sparse, and the verbs are active. Epic without being overwritten, it has a verbal landscape that exactly mirrors the charred country the protagonists traverse.

Yes, it’s apocalyptic; yes, it’s man versus man — along with man versus nature (himself?). It is every paranoid’s fantasy taken to its impossible, right-around-the-corner conclusion. It is predictable in this way.

You won’t care.

This is a story of love and commitment under the harshest imaginable conditions. Our unnamed heroes walk on, always at the brink of unthinkable deaths, and still there are lessons, a father’s lessons, his legacy to his son, a son’s lessons of innocence for his father.

Most of the insights of the father go unspoken, however: “The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and is gone.”

McCarthy doesn’t use quotation marks to mark dialogue. His commas are so infrequent, you almost believe they’re completely absent (on two full pages of complicated sentences, I counted two). All of the -n’t contractions lack their apostrophes. Many to-be verbs are just missing. Civilization has broken down completely, and with it all order, says McCarthy with these omissions.

The placement of text on the pages — lone paragraphs and vacant expanse of page — contribute to the barren landscape of the characters’ worlds.

A paragraph separated by breaks on either side:

In that long ago somewhere very near this place he’d watched a falcon fall down the long blue wall of the mountain and break with the keel of its breastbone the midmost from a flight of cranes and take it to the river below all gangly and wrecked and trailing its loose and blowsy plumage in the still autumn air.

I had to read this paragraph several times, inserting mental commas as I went. I enjoyed every reading of it more than the last.

What do you want when there’s nothing left to want? Who do you trust when there’s nobody left to trust and the rules you learned to live by no longer fit — how would you even figure out who to trust? What would you do — or not do — to survive?

These are worn out questions that are haunting and dusty and new and familiar in The Road.

Writer’s block is a controversial idea among writers. While some struggle for days, months, years to slay the beast, others mock it as fiction: so much Sasquatch.

You can count James Frey in that latter camp, and an off-the-cuff, quotable comment he made at a reading has injured the feelings of — not writers, but bankers.

Frey is easy to pick on — even Oprah, the guardian angel of modern American women, has had her turn. And unlike Oprah, the field of banking has never been known to champion the underdog, so it’s not surprising that they’d resurrect his past “mistakes” [Editor's note: I believe these same mistakes to be present in all memoirs, to a greater or lesser degree.] and call him a “Fake Writer.” A fake writer he is not.

From Dealbreaker:

At a reading last night, when asked by an audience member if he ever found it difficult to come up with material, he responded, “Writer’s block is for chumps. To me this is a job, like being a banker, or a teacher. You never hear of banker’s block.”

Well, it turned out that some bankers had heard of banker’s block. Said one particularly eloquent banker:

“I’d like to see how long it would take Frey to try and write a public filing that describes the ass-rape of Bear Stearns without using profanity. Do you have any idea how long I sat there trying to come up with an acceptable alternative? At first I thought, okay, how about the ‘non-consensual fucking of Bear Stearns,” but that didn’t work. Then I tried “backdoor surprise,” but that didn’t cut it either. I literally sat there for hours with nothing but that infernal cursor staring me in the face before deciding to go with “involuntary and immediate liquidity injection requirement.” Late at night, I lie awake and see visions of that cursor. Taunting. Mocking. Making a fool of me. So don’t you dare tell me there’s no writer’s block in banking.”

Is the point that in all pursuits people have lackluster days, days where nothing’s flowing, no progress is made? Or that some people, whatever their pursuit, are chumps, staring at the mocking cursor?

Or maybe there’s more in common between writing and banking than we previously realized, Mr. Frey. Whaddya say? Career switch?

Writer Unboxed, a site Writer’s Digest picks as one of the 101 Best Sites for Writers, is a blog “about the craft and business of genre fiction.”

They maintain a Google Notebook to display their business links for the week. Brilliant!

I don’t consider myself a genre writer, but I have a feeling that’s a little like saying, “But I don’t have an accent!” 

Literary (self- and other-identified) writers often turn up their noses at genre writing. The words “genre writer” are an accusation, a dismissal in certain company. An inflection adds a touch more French to the genre, making it that much more foolish. Or it’s spoken flatly, with no betraying emotion whatsoever.

The problem is, there are plenty of literary mysteries. Sci-fi writers must still labor over their work, struggling for clarity, the right pacing, that perfect verb. Truman Capote created the true crime genre. And I’ve learned a lot from genre writers.

Genre writers have in fact mastered some skills that litfic could take a page from: building an audience and making a living on words alone.

…own a bookstore located on their farm in Wisconsin. It’s not marked; it’s not centrally located. They never advertise, and their only regular hours are 9-5 on Saturday.

They have more than a million titles, which is many more than a shopping center chain store.

This inspiring couple will amaze you.

Lenore says that the most important book of all is Mother Goose’s nursery rhymes:

“If a child knows eight nursery rhymes before the child is four years old, that child will be an excellent reader when he is eight years old.”

(The video is a little slow to start, since there are a couple of intros edited in. But it’s worth it.)

[via My World... My Perspective...]

In a Radiohead-like move, author Paulo Coelho increased sales of his books by offering downloads of them for free. His publishers, inspired by the increase in sales, later did the same.

Coelho himself has an answer to my title question, “Why buy the book…?” from Torrentfreak:

“A (real) book is easy to carry, easy to read anywhere. Reading a book on a monitor on the other hand is very tiresome, and it would be even more expensive to print (considering cartridge prices) than to buy a paperback,” he says.

Coelho considers the downloads previews, and hopes that previewing encourages readers to buy the book. It has, too — in its 34th week on the Bestseller List, The Alchemist is number six.

Never mind that citing Coelho as a favorite will lose you dates, if you believe the readers of the New York Times book blog, Paper Cuts (read the comments). This is the same New York Times that maintains the bestseller list on which Mr. Coelho has managed to rise back up to #6 with a book that is fifteen years old.

[via Shelftalker]

Someone once told me that among writers, there are those who underuse and those who overuse the comma. I am in the latter camp. That there are precise rules to govern comma use is a surprise to some — many liberal comma users like myself are more interested in the pace of their piece than adherence to standards.

According to Lynne Truss, author of Eats, Shoots & Leaves, as quoted in Wikipedia:

A passage peppered with commas — which in the past would have indicated painstaking and authoritative editorial attention — smacks simply of no backbone. People who put in all the commas betray themselves as moral weaklings with empty lives and out-of-date reference books.

While it would be easy to feel offended by this, I am instead encouraged to do things my own way. Strange quote for a book subtitled, “The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.” 

Also from Wikipedia — commas have history:

(more…)

In A.M. Homes’s novel, This Book Will Save Your Life, middle-aged protagonist Richard Nowak has had what he believes is a brush with death, followed by a mid-life crisis.

This is a story we’ve heard before — in fact, Homes is flirting with some real cliche in the subject matter of her book. But it manages to be completely unexpected, anyway.

Bizarre things happen to Richard Nowak. They will make you laugh.

The characters in This Book… are mostly described without any real reference to their physical form. We understand them, picture them because of their actions and dialogue. We imagine we know someone like each of them.

Richard’s position and circumstance (crossed with his near death experience) allow him to be absurdly helpful to others — strangers, family, his housekeeper — and as a worldly cynic, you wait the entire story for this to backfire on him. People can’t just go around being maniacally generous like that, you think. And his life definitely gets more complicated, but it also gets richer.

The prose is simple and unobtrusive, allowing the incredible plot (and I mean that in a couple of ways) and pitch-perfect dialogue to stand out. My critic was forced into hiding, edged out by the characters that had come to life in my mind.

Can a fable take place in modern day LA, with complex, quirky characters that curse and threaten and fuck? A.M. Homes says yes, and she’s proven it to me with This Book….