JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

She died two weeks ago, we just found out today. A comic genius. The diaries of Adrian Mole still causes food to shoot out of our nose. Some choice quotes:

Found a strange device in the bathroom this morning. It looked like an egg timer. It said ‘Predictor’ on the side of the box. I hope my mother is not dabbling with the occult.

10am: Woke my father up to tell him Argentina had invaded the Falklands. He shot out of bed because he thought the Falklands lay off the coast of Scotland. When I pointed out they were eight thousand miles away he got back into bed and pulled the covers over his head.

I used to be the sort of boy who had sand kicked in his face, now I’m the sort of boy who watches somebody else have it kicked in their face.

Went to see Hadrian’s Wall. Saw it. Came back.

A telegram! Addressed to me! The BBC? No – from my mother. ‘ADRIAN STOP COMING HOME STOP.’ What does she mean? ‘Stop coming home’? How can I stop coming home? I live here!

If you’re serious about writing, start looking at the world through this frame: Everything is material.

Your train is ten minutes late—why? That’s material. Your boss yells at you for a missed deadline while you are hypnotized by a stain on his awful tie that looks like lipstick—whose? That’s material. The guard lets everyone in the mall without looking, but inspects every inch of your bag—Is it your outfit? That’s material. Suddenly, everything is interesting. The most random, mundane things are charged with potential.

If everything just looks the same to you, forget it.

From our Book of Writing Backwards: Excerpt from the Bene Gesserit Manual in Dune. (In silver ink, hard to read.)

allancarreon: Good work and properly weird, although we wonder why you would portray a haven of books as…that place, and the practice of writing as a form of torment. Conflicted! Horror stories are all about atmosphere, even if the location seems ordinary.

“Behind him, a doppelganger of the man had appeared and was now following Annie closely…” could be made creepier. Don’t say “doppelganger”, describe it. “Suddenly there were two of him, and one was shadowing Annie…”

You are not eligible for the prize as you are the Keymaster of the Social Media Propaganda Ministry.

Helvatica123: Great concept, execution not bad, though this is more a concept paper than an actual story. Grammar and usage need a little work, but nothing the spelling and grammar checking function on Word can’t fix. We like the way you casually let the readers know what the books are made of without hitting us over the head with the information. The nonchalant tone adds to the horror when it sinks in. Keep on writing, we want to see more.

Momelia: Thank you for that tale of real-life horror. Apparently if you ask people to write stories set in libraries, they come up with visions of hell. This is more a diary entry than a story, but you clearly enjoyed writing it, and the bit about the bacon getting Facebook likes could be developed. In fact you could expand this into a story about a character who can’t move until her Facebook friends have affirmed her decision with 200 likes. We’d like to read that.

Check out the short stories of Saki, you’d love him. Sweet and nasty. “Children are given us to discourage our better emotions.”

lois: We have not read The Book Thief but we gather this is inspired by that. Good effort, and we like its ambitious scale. The execution needs work: you explain everything at least thrice and you overdo the dramatic description. However your plot is interesting, and with continued practice you will learn to “hear” yourself. The ability to self-edit comes with time.

joyeah: There’s a fascinating Twilight Zone-ish story in here, but you have buried it under a lot of adjectives and overwrought descriptive passages. It’s a mess. It might be useful to do an outline for this, with short profiles of the characters, and rewrite it. Try writing it in chronological order first, then when you’ve worked out your plot, you can do your structural experiment.

aspiringwriter29: Listen to yourself. “The potentially perpetual grim looming over the spectacle I have for a visage is now all but perpetual.” All that verbal writhing, just to say “The grimace is fixed on my face.” This piece is overwritten, the prose so purple it is overripe eggplant. You’re trying to write in a high, formal style before you have even figured out how to write a clear sentence. Since you’re writing about angels and demons, why not read the Old Testament, esp. Genesis and Exodus, King James Version? The sentences are short, unadorned yet powerful. None of this lurid stuff.

The winner of The Universe is a Library LitWit Challenge is Helvatica123. Congratulations! Post your full name and email address in Comments (It won’t be published) and the elves will tell you how to claim your prize.

Find your Discomfort Zone: the subject that makes you uncomfortable and squeamish, that you don’t want to discuss because you’re afraid people will judge you.

Now pitch a tent there. It is the most fertile place for writing, plus it’s free psychotherapy.

If you thought we meant camping, literally, forget about writing. It requires many levels of meaning, and you perceive only one.

Last week we asked for ideas regarding the disposition of our used, non-vintage, plastic eyeglasses. We took silentfollower’s suggestion and made labels for the stuff.

If you want to write, but don’t know how to get started, and lack either the time or the temperament for a writing workshop, here’s a fast-track D.I.Y. Writing Workshop.

1. Choose the writer whose style you envy the most and wish to emulate. Not necessarily your favorite, most beloved writer, but the writer you want to sound like.

2. Pick a story or novel by this writer.

3. Copy it out in longhand. Every word and punctuation mark, exactly. Through this process you “reenact” the process by which the writer created the work and get insights as to how the structure came about.

The slower version is to read the writer’s work over and over again, until you have absorbed the writer’s rhythms. It’s a lot like listening to an album of songs a hundred times—you’ll realize that you’ve memorized every word, pause, drum fill and riff without meaning to.

When we read a work of fiction, we hear a voice in our head. This is the voice of the work. It does not necessarily sound like the author as heard in old interviews; it is the sound of the narrator addressing the reader directly. If you hear that voice repeatedly, you will get its rhythms and tonalities. First, you will try to replicate them. Later, when you have written a lot and figured out what your own style is, you will adapt them to your requirements. You may even ditch them altogether as they have served their purpose.

In lieu of writing workshops, we read the work of J.D. Salinger repeatedly, not to memorize the books but because we really enjoyed them.

Occasionally we get emails from students writing about our work (Thanks). They ask where we were born and what our lousy childhood was like and how our parents were occupied and all before they had us. Fine, biographical information may be useful, but to really understand, they only need to look closely at the work. The work should be allowed to speak for itself.

This is the first line of the first real short story we ever wrote.

This is the first line of The Catcher in the Rye.

Can you hear it?

Now here’s the first sentence of the short story that got us noticed by the literary grownups.

And here’s the first line of Salinger’s story Teddy, collected in Nine Stories.

Always acknowledge your debts to previous writers. It’s not as if you could hide them.

Read The Man in the Woods, a creepy story by Shirley Jackson (The Lottery, The Haunting of Hill House, We Have Always Lived In The Castle) at The New Yorker. There’s a cat in it.

Read our column, Cat People at InterAksyon.com.