Specccie Number2846 The write stuff
 

I shall lie doggo and see what other people do. I forgot to say by 30 April. If anyone knows how to do that, do it friend.

No. 2846: the write stuff


George Orwell’s famous six rules for writing have been doing the rounds on Twitter. You are invited to invent the six rules for writing of a well-known author, living or dead, of your choice. Please email entries of up to 150 words to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 30 April.

This is depressingly similar to Comp. 2740, which was based on Henry Miller's "Work commandments". Apparently, it's not only competitors who go in for a spot of recycling.

For ease of reference, here are Orwell's rules:

1 Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

2 Never use a long word where a short one will do.

3 If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

4 Never use the passive where you can use the active.

5 Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

6 Break any of these rules sooner than say anything barbarous.

Orwell's rules wouldn't work very well for Nabokov. In fact Nabokov hated Orwell. And it would doubtless have been vicde-versa had Orwell lived long enough.

A competition! Write Lolita in the style of Orwell. Nabokov has already rewritten 1984. I think Bend Sinister is better.

Orwell's rules seem pretty tongue in cheek to me - the last is simply absurd. Win or lose, I am really going to go to town on this comp.

William Faulkner's Six Rules for Writing:

1. Never write a clear sentence.

2. Never attach a relative clause not succeeded by a sequence of a dozen more of increasing complexity

3. Never write more than six pages without the appearance, at least once, of the word: "inviolate"

4. Never clarify place, time and person

5. Never conclude the story at the conclusion

6. Never imply that the race might survive the modern world.

T.S. Eliot's Six Rules for Writing

1. Look on the world with the eyes of a saurian.
2. Write a few lines in a manner Victorian.
3. Fill them with languor and well-bred futility.
4. Hammering Jews has undoubted utility.
5. Old stuff in Sanskrit is good to come out with.
6. Send it to Ezra to bugger about with.

Bend Sinister actually came out before 1984 and is the better piece of literature by far. Orwell's novel is probably more important than Nabokov's because it introduced the world to Big Brother and Newspeak, but its biggest flaw is its lack of humor. Nabokov knew that corrupt and oppressive governments are also ridiculous and funny. Just think of that news item floating around last week about the 9-month-old boy charged with attempted murder and political upheaval by the Pakistani government. Or Putin as parody of machismo. Or Kim Jong-il being himself.

Ah, Orwn, but is importance so very important? An English philosopher said that.n a good day I could tell you who.

I love the bit in BS where the Professorial hero, urged to sign a petition, says he never appends his signature to anything he hs not himself written.

Samuel Beckett
1: Subtract from stream of consciousness until a trickle.
2: Set light, weather, scenery, backstory at absolute minimum.
3: Have your narrator doubt everything, own existence first and especially.
4: Have him or her - probably him: doesn't matter - perform philosophical or arithmetical contortions to reach wrong or (preferably) no answer.
5: Sparingly deploy odd words to suggest flavour; viduity, goitre and the like
6: Fizzle out.

James Joyce:

1. Bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonner-
ronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenth ur-
nuk!
2. Be a tegotetabsolver!
3. Be an earwitness to the thunder of arafatas.
4. Mind your hats goan in!
5. Make strake for minnas!
6. Avoid excessive adverbs.