Norman Green

IN THE BEGINNING…

I’ve been reading Mark Twain’s criticism of James Fenimore Cooper.  If you want to have the feeling of having your prose hacked apart, stomped and spat upon by a very smart, very funny and very unforgiving critic, you can have it vicariously by checking out Twain.  The thing is, he wasn’t wrong.  Strunk and White essentially said the same things but with less humor and certainly less sting.  Twain chooses one of Cooper’s paragraphs and then proceeds to leave about 95% of it on the cutting room floor, explaining why as he goes.  It made me laugh when I read it, but it also made me cringe, just a little, knowing that I am fully capable of committing Cooper’s excesses myself (as was Twain, by the way).  But if you are trying to make your prose tighter and tougher, you could do worse than conforming to Twain’s rules of writing, and you won’t be the only one.  I will be reading that piece, along with the rest of Twain’s rules, again, and soon.

Next topic, I finally made a beginning on my next writing project.  When I’m in between manuscripts I tend to fool around with stray ideas and odd characters and sometimes one of them just feels right.  I try to be more logical, not to say mercenary, about the whole thing but more often, as in this case, something I thought was just a throwaway riff begins to rattle around in my skull, I begin to see the characters moving, I hear them talking, and when they start keeping me up at night I have a pretty good idea that I’m onto something.

Of course, I still suffer the same old doubts.

In one of his letters somewhere, I read Norman Mailer bitching about one of his seven figure contracts.  ”It only comes out to about two bucks a word,” he said, or some such.  You could argue that Mailer would have made more per word if he’d perhaps have edited more of them out, but I suppose that’s a matter of taste.  If, however, Mailer’s problem was too many words, mine tends to be too few.  I love a minimalist style but sometimes I think I am in too great a hurry to get to the ending, and I am always plagued with worries that I am going to come up short.  ’The old man and the sea’ was short, maybe could have been shorter.  ’Drive’ was short too, but I think it could have used a little more meat on the bone…  I wish I could table the whole question and just write my damned book, but I haven’t been able to do it yet.

Okay, so here’s my next big idea:  kid lives on Benbow Street, in the Bronx (that name ring any bells?), he’s thirteen, and baseball is his life.  Upstate, a man is released from prison after completing his term.  He was in for manslaughter.  (Funny, how much more impact that word has when you split it into two.)  He’s spent over half of his life institutionalized.  He is ill-prepared for freedom, hunted by the loved ones of the man he went to jail for slaughtering.

Their paths cross…

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