Fast & Dirty

I pulp, you pulp, we all pulp.

• I wince when I see writers on here and the other socials (wince again) boasting about how many words or pages they deleted in their writing sessions. Or how they wrote 100 pages to finally get to the beginning of their novel, scrapping the previous work.

• Oh please.

• You’re a perfescti…a perspft…a perfectionist, are you? You labor and cry over each sentence? You revise for a YEAR? Guess what? The reader doesn’t care. In fact, if the reader is thinking about how much you labored and cried, you did it wrong. The best thing we can do as writers is disappear while we tell the story. The reader is hopefully too involved to think about how I wrote it. Personally, I prefer to watch my movies without commentary tracks, and same for reading books.

• Are you telling me the dozens of Ed McBain novels he wrote in a hurry are nothing to sneeze at? The classics of Simenon, beyond the Inspector Maigrets, (which were a feat in themselves)? The sci-fi geniuses of the 1950s and 60s pumping out amazing ideas on a deadline? And for all the pretty sentences out there, I’m absolutely sure plenty of romance writers can write circles around us when it comes to stories that captivate audiences. I wish I was drinking whatever fueled Danielle Steele (once again, I should probably Google “What did Danielle Steele drink?” But I won’t).

• Is it self-deprecation? An attention grabber (“Look how hard I work! I wrote it…then deleted it!”)? A plea to the muses for immortality (“That author writes one book every ten years. What an artist.”)?

• With the AI turmoil over one short story prize going on - and wow, you love wasting time pontificating about that one, don’t you? - and everyone scrutinizing writers’ styles with a magnifying glass, I’m reminded of something my writing professor, Frederick Barthelme, once told us:

• “Anyone can write pretty sentences. Tell me a story, fast and dirty.”

• At this point in time, he was very much into movies, and I mean pretty much any movie. Arty, popcorn, genre, Oscar-bait. I’m not even sure he liked most of them, but he watched the hell out of them. The best ones don’t waste time. They tell a story. They’re efficient. They’re addictive.

• Are they as complex as novels? Not most of the time. But as storytelling vehicles, they’re Italian sportscars. Even with breakdowns, they’re a wonder to behold.

• I can’t write as fast as my heroes McBain and Stark (Westlake). Hell no. I wish I could. Unfortunately I have a day job and, during time-off, no discipline. The older I get, the more I’d like to try, though. I edit my pages maybe three times before sending them out, but there comes a point where your own eye being the only critical eye hurts the writing more than helps, I think.

• If you’re throwing out more than you keep day-by-day, what are you doing? Try finding the gems in those discarded pages. I’m sure there are some. Can you save them? Can you polish them nice and shiny? Or is it something more masochistic? It hurts so good to throw out thousands - tens of thousands! - of words? I don’t know. Seems like a waste to me.

• And so on I go, adding about a thousand words a day to Lafitte 5, pushing forward knowing I’ll go through it again a couple or few times later. But right now, I’ve got a story to tell. A fast and dirty one, at that.

• Here’s a pic of a new Lay’s flavor I love. Please make more of this - Brazilian Garlic Sauce Chips.