Review: Stein on Writing

Stein on Writing, St. Martin's Griffith, 2000.

I have my suspicions about Sol Stein. I think that somewhere down deep inside literary Mr. Stein there lurks a sleazy adventure writer trying to get out. At least, that was the impression that I had from the samples of his work.

And oh, how scathing he is of genre writers, those he denigrates as writers of "transient" fiction. That is, writers you've actually heard of and have read, some of whom have books in print decades after they were written.

Yet if one can let the "my way is the only way" attitude slide by, Stein's book contains much of great value for novelists and nonfiction writers alike. Stein discusses resonance, a concept that I've not found in many other books on writing, yet a concept that has great power to create memorable fiction. He warns against using cliches, and shows examples of cliches from modern genre fiction -- and yet in a sample from his own fiction, Stein describes a character as walking across a room "naked and unashamed." Even Stein can slip on his own rules.

The chapters on editing are perhaps the most valuable in the book. Stein has the writer search a manuscript for the weakest chapter, and either pump it up or cut it entirely. It's all too tempting for writers, once past the exciting opening scene, to think, "Okay, now that the reader is hooked, I can get away with putting in the boring bits." Yet losing the reader on page 36 can be worse than losing the reader on page 1. The latter will leave the book behind in the bookstore and stroll on to other selections. The former will fling down the book and go tell friends -- or an entire blogging community -- about how boring it was.

One thing lacking is a discussion of writing for one's audience. Stein quotes a passage from Thomas Huxley and chastizes the writer for using convoluted language and altogether too many words. But had Huxley, a Victorian scholar, written as Stein does today, he would have lost his audience. His Victorian readers expected no less of a scholar. Stein also complains that academic journals are written in dull, passive voice. True enough, but if today's scholars wrote their research papers with the voice of a literary fiction writer, their manuscripts would never get past the review process. Voice is important to the writer, but voice must also be appropriate to the audience.

Stein may be better known for his books on writing than for his novels themselves, but the advice he offers is solid. Ignore the attitude, stay true to your voice and your own writing goals, but do try his advice on plotting and editing. It will make you look at your writing in a whole new way.

Sleep Deprivation

It's my own fault, really. Sitting up too late at night, after I've done my writing for the evening, reading discussion boards and blogs. You'd think I'd known better than to go to bed at 11:30 when I have to get up at 5:30 the next morning. The cats romping around didn't help, either, nor did the DH's snoring. Wear earplugs. Sure. Earplugs don't cut out those bass rumbles. Nor does a pillow over one's head. Only a sharp poke and a, "Roll over!" is effective -- for a while.

So today I'm running on something less than six hours of sleep. If I were in the military, where they claim that sleep is overrated, I'd be praised. But today's Olympic athletes know something that the military would like very much to ignore: no one can perform at their peak when they are sleep deprived.

Athletes, who will do anything to squeeze out that extra edge, to be just a fraction of a second faster than their competitors, know the value of sleep. They know from hard experience that if they don't get enough quality sleep, their performance is affected.

Nor can one "get used to" shorter hours of sleep. We think we can. We get up an hour earlier, or sit up an hour later, and function on six or seven hours of sleep. The fact that we can function at all fools us into thinking that we're doing okay, that we've adjusted to less sleep. But a sleep-deprived brain is no qualified judge of our own performance. Objective tests show that when people get less than a full 8-9 hours of sleep, their performance goes down. Students who pull all-nighters frequently think they're getting more work done, when in fact the quality of their work declines, and it takes them longer to get the same amount of work done because they can't concentrate as well as someone who is properly rested. Learning is affected, too, because sleep has been shown, in scientific studies, to be instrumental in fixing learned material into our brains.

Folklore and military machismo are no places to learn the facts about sleep and human physiology. Instead, turn to Stanley Coren's Sleep
Thieves, a look into the scientific study of sleep. Coren describes his own ill-fated attempt to get along with less sleep, and discovered, through his journals, that when he stole a few hours of sleep from each night in an attempt to use those hours for greater productivity, his real productivity actually dropped. He got far more done when he was well rested, in much less time.

Hence sleep deprivation need not and should not be part of the writer's life. When the blank page mocks us, when we sit up and pound our foreheads for ideas, when our writing seems trite, it may not be writer's block. It may be sleep deprivation.