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Evacuation Plan: An Interview With Joe O’Connell

In Joe O’Connell‘s debut novel Evacuation Plan: A Novel From the Hospice (Dalton Publishing, 2007), a young screenwriter, Matt, goes to a hospice “in search of a good story.” He finds several poignant stories as he interviews the hospice residents, their families, and the hospice staff. In turn, Matt discovers he has to come to terms with his own father’s death.

Told in a novel-in-stories style, the novel draws on O’Connell’s experiences as a participant in a project by visual artists and writers to tell the stories of the terminally ill at Christopher House in Austin, Texas.

You mention in your Acknowledgments that some of the stories in Evacuation Plan date back to when you were a student in the MFA program at Southwest Texas State University(now Texas State University-San Marcos). The other stories originated from your experience at Hospice Austin‘s Christopher House. How did the individual stories begin to merge into a novel?

When I did the Christopher House project—a group of writers and visual artists chosen to tell the stories of the terminally ill in a residential hospice—I wrote poetry about the experience. But I knew I wasn’t done with it. I was later chosen for a residency that allowed me the time to complete

Joe O'Connell

Joe O'Connell

this work, and in many ways I adapted the poetry into the novel, as odd as that may sound! The larger narrative grew from one story, which is the main narrator Matt’s. I just kind of took it from there, figuring out which stories would work where. It was a bit of a jigsaw puzzle that I solved as I created.

You chose to present multiple narratives, a novel-in-stories form. What led you to chose this form?

I read Tim O’Brien’s novel July July, which is about a 30th college reunion, but digresses into the stories of what has happened to different classmates in the interim. I saw here a novel-in-stories structure that would allow me to tell the full story of the hospice. I wanted to make the place itself a character. O’Brien, by the way, teaches in the MFA program I graduated from, but came on board after my time, and I’ve never met him. I do consider him one of our best writers and a major influence.

I do know that the novel-in-stories format is tough for some readers, the same readers who have a hard time with story collections. We’re indoctrinated as novel readers to follow the same characters along the way, so it can be tough when we dip in and out of lives in this manner. But I urge readers to be open to something a little different.

The dough that holds the collection together is Matt’s narrative. How did Matt’s narrative come about? And why did he become the central figure that pulls the collection together?

Matt’s story is part of a novel I started and got stalled on, a coming-of-age story. The relationship he develops with an older man, Charlie Wright, who is dying in the hospice, gets at a lot of what I was trying dig into. This is really a book about family and how death often signals how we must forgive in order to move on. Matt looks to Charlie as a surrogate father in this area, and Charlie is looking to Matt as a scribe, a means of passing on his story.

Why did you choose to make Matt a screenwriter?

Matt also allows me to write a bit about the creative process and to take a broader look at the hospice. The notion is that he is in search of a story for his next script. I have what I call my Black Hole Theory of Writing. When I’m in the zone, anything that crosses my path can get sucked in. In this case, while working on the book I was also preparing to teach a course in screenwriting. Some of that got sucked in. But, again, I’m really into the notion of each of us having a unique story to tell. I wanted to write of those pivotal moments in our lives.

The subtitle for the book is “A Novel From the Hospice.” What do want readers to learn about hospice care?

The oddest review my book has received is that there’s not enough death in it. Exactly! Hospice workers will tell you that 10 percent of what they do is about death. The rest is about life. Hospice is about empowerment. The dying have the opportunity to be in charge of their own deaths and to say a proper goodbye. What else could we ask?

You work as a journalist and as a teacher. How do these professions affect your fiction writing?

As a newspaper reporter I had Saturday festival duty. The reporters would take turns working Saturdays and writing about the rodeo, the corn festival, the train festival—you name it. I learned some strong lessons in fiction writing from this. You can either tell the macro story—a good time was had by all—or the micro story, which uses individual people to tell the story of an event. Character is king, even in newspapers, and the stories of what makes people tick is where it all starts. I’m a free-lance film writer these days for both the Dallas Morning News and The Austin Chronicle. I had a cover story in the Chronicle a few months back about the film industry’s problem in Texas, and the big compliment was when the former state film commissioner said I’d put a face on the film industry. I’d learned that “character” lesson!

As a creative writing teacher, I learn as my students learn. In a sense I get paid to be a student alongside the other students. It does very much help me to continue honing my own craft. I’m inspired by my students, and that’s a great feeling.

You’ve mentioned that Charles Baxter‘s A Feast of Love and Tim O’Brien’s July, July inspired Evacuation Plan, especially its form. How were those novels inspiring?

O’Brien was primarily about the structure, but he is a master writer. Baxter, whom I’ll go out on a limb and call the best short story writer alive today, is about going deep. Fiction writing is tough work, and we shouldn’t be easily satisfied as writers. I talk often about the search for the “little truths” of what it is to be a human being. O’Brien, Baxter and the late Andre Dubus, who was my long-distance mentor while I was in graduate school, do it better than anybody I can think of.

How important is reading to you as a writer?

It’s essential. You can’t expect to be a good writer without reading. My classes always include a lot of reading, which allows me to constantly uncover writers whom are new to me. See? I’m always also the student.

Who are some of your favorite writers? What are you reading now?

Along with the ones I’ve mentioned, I’m a big fan of John Irving, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, John Updike, ZZ Packer, Edward P. Jones, Jhumpa Lahiri, Flannery O’Connor. Some folks I’ve been reading of late are the essayist Tony Earley and the fiction writer Dan Chaon, who really blows me away. I’m coming late to George Saunders, but his style is a challenge to take chances. Great stuff.

What projects are you working on now?

I’m writing this after a very interesting day. I spent the last couple of days in Jefferson, Texas, talking about my book at the Pulpwood Queen’s Book Club annual convention, Girlfriend Weekend. Today, I traveled to a small town in Louisiana that is home to my mother’s family and their secrets-which supposedly include a couple of murders. She died recently and this morning two of my brothers scattered her ashes in the Pampa River in South India. A few years before her mind faded with Alzheimer’s, she’d asked me to interview her about her life, which was quite remarkable. She wanted me to write her story, and I’m mulling how to do that. The result may be an odd mix of fiction and nonfiction, but the project is very much intriguing me. I’ve also got a completed mystery novel I’m trying to place, and I’m working on a sequel to it that’s set in the “weird” Austin, Texas, that is quickly disappearing.

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Joe O’Connell is an award-winning short story writer, who teaches
writing to graduate students at St. Edward’s University and undergrads at Austin Community College. Evacuation Plan is his first published novel, and is both a Violet Crown Book Award finalist and a Pulpwood Queen’s Book Club bonus selection.

Answering Why: An Interview with Karen Harrington

With her debut novel Janeology (Kunati, 2008), Karen Harrington invites readers to explore the questions, Why would a mother take her child’s life? and How does the past influence a person’s present?

Combining a legal thriller with family history, Janeology takes up the story of Tom and Jane Nelson after Jane has murdered her toddler son, and has been committed to a mental hospital for her crime. Prosecutors then argue Tom Nelson failed to protect his son because he was aware of Jane’s emotional breakdown that led to the boy’s murder. In Tom’s defense is attorney Dave Frontella, who proposes Jane’s emotional breakdown and latent violence is linked to her family history. Using multiple narratives, Harrington gives voice to the past in order to answer the present’s “Why?”.

Central to Janeology is Jane Nelson’s crime, the murder of her infant son. The murder evokes similarities to recent cases such as Andrea Yates and Susan Smith. Were such cases the germs seeding this novel or was it something else?

In many ways, the answer to that question is yes. Like most people, I heard these stories and couldn’t stop wondering how a mother could harm her children. That was the question that kept me up at night and made me want to explore the idea further. I think for most writers, they choose a novel

Karen Harrington

Karen Harrington

subject based on a question they would like the answer to. This was certainly my experience after reading about Yates and other mothers like her.

You were a speechwriter and worked in corporate communications. Were you working on Janeology then, or did the book come later?

As strange as it might sound, I didn’t start working on Janeology until I was a stay-at-home mom, having left my corporate career behind. Around the same time I became a mother for the first time, my own mother died. I think this circle-of-life connection pushed me to explore many of the genetic inheritance ideas in the novel. You can’t help but look at your kids and wonder how much of your own mother is within them.

Did speechwriting and corporate communications influence your fiction writing in any way?

It did in the sense that writing for a living and on deadline is a great discipline. Also, when you write speeches or straight news stories, as I did for an employee newsletter, your writing must be lean and to the point. I’d like to think I learned a lean style on the job.

Had you written fiction before Janeology?

Yes, I had written more than 20 screenplays, a novel and countless short stories. In other words, many a tree died in the name of learning this skill.

Had you always wanted to write a novel?

Yes. I always wanted to see if I could actually do it, even if no one read it. I think it was John Irving who said that the first novel is the test of whether or not you have the stamina to do it.

You chose multiple points of view to tell the story. What led you to decide to use multiple points of view?

When I first conceived of Janeology, I knew it would be a series of linked short stories that formed a picture of one family tree. I wanted the reader to imagine that each of the ancestors was unique and believable. So, each of the stories had to have a unique point of view. This was actually one of the most enjoyable parts of developing the novel.

Did you work from an outline?

Yes. First I created a time line to get a picture of the dates and places of all of Jane’s ancestors. This served as the outline.

How much research was involved?

A great deal, both on the subject of infanticide and how the Texas courts treat this crime. And of course, I did quite a bit of research into the different time periods in which my characters lived. Since I grew up in New England and Texas, getting to know more about these places for the novel was a pleasure.

What was the most difficult part of writing the novel?

I think it was imagining how to piece together all the stories and bring the whole of the piece together. Many of the original short stories were left behind. I had so many doubts if what I was attempting would even stand together as a whole. I wondered if I had taken on a project that was too ambitious for my ideas. Since then, I’ve discovered these are the growing pains of most writers.

What was your writing schedule like?

When I was writing Janeology, my girls were just babies so I wrote during their naptimes and every night from 9-10. Now that they are in school, I can write during the day or in other spare moments.

You’ve mentioned that once you completed the manuscript you worked with an editing service. What did you learn from working with an editing service?

Hiring a professional editor was the smartest career move I’ve ever done. The value of a good editor is having someone point out your strengths and weaknesses. In my experience, my editor pointed out all the areas where I had overwritten, underwritten, needed additional internal commentary from my protagonist and whole sections that needed to be simplified to keep the pace going. I think it takes an objective third party to identify these flaws in any project.

What writers have influenced you?

Hemingway was a big influence early on because all my writing professors loved him and wanted to be a minimalist writer like him. Today, I’ve realized I still like a minimalist style, but with a little bit more meat on the bones. Michael Ondaatje and Tim O’Brien are contemporary writers I think are masters of the kind of style I love to read. I won’t even say I want to write like them because it seems impossible. Elizabeth Berg is also a writer whose style I am growing to love. I love how her stories just begin and keep going as if you are actually living them with the characters. I don’t know how she does it. And Stephen King is a writer whose perseverance continues to inspire me. He’s a true example that even an artist needs a solid work ethic.

What are you reading?

Right now, I’m reading The Glass of Time by Michael Cox. It’s the follow-up book to The Meaning of Night, which is a great period mystery set in England. Next up is a non-fiction book called Blue Genes by Christopher Lukas. It’s a memoir about the ways in which depression ran throughout the genes of one family. I’ll say it for you: I’m weird. I can’t seem to stay away from family history stories.

What projects are you working on now?

I’m working on the edits for my next novel, Prodigal Son. I’m also putting together notes on changes to the NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) novel I wrote in November, which is the follow-up to Janeology, featuring Jane’s daughter during the summer she turns twelve.

What insights about writing have you gained from writing the novel?

There’s a great deal of satisfaction in just completing a novel, much less publishing one. I think anyone who has once said they wanted to do it should go for it. I think the biggest insight I have now is that I’m capable of finishing a larger project. I’ve also learned that my favorite part of the process is the beginning. Editing a piece is meaningful, but it’s hard, analytic work and isn’t as much fun as creating the story world and discovering characters and ideas for the first time.

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Karen Harrington was born and raised in Texas, where she still lives with her husband and children. She received a B.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of Texas at Dallas. Her first writing gigs were in corporate America as an editor and speechwriter. Her fiction writing has been recognized by the Hemingway Short Story Competition and the Texas Film Institute. She wrote and published There’s A Dog In The Doorway, a children’s book created expressly for the Dr. Laura Schlessinger Foundation’s MyStuff Bags.  My Stuff bags go to children in need who must leave their homes due to abuse, neglect or abandonment

Time Bending: An Interview with Audrey Niffenegger

The Time Traveler’s Wife (MacAdam/Cage 2003) explores an unusual relationship, that of Henry DeTamble and Clare Abshire. Like many love stories, the novel develops the relationship from courtship to marriage, but, adds a twist. A genetic disorder causes Henry to time travel, thus interrupting the ordinary patterns of his and Clare’s life — the couple first meets when Clare is six, and Henry, as an adult, has traveled back thirty years — and challenging notions of free will (Henry is unable to change events, and the couple seems almost fated to develop their romance). The novel also diverges from some love stories, exchanging sappiness for a realistic, though sometimes dark, portrait of a relationship.

I invited the book’s author, Audrey Niffenegger, to discuss the novel, her current projects, and her recent reading.

Below is the interview:

You’ve mentioned that The Time Traveler’s Wife originated with the title. How did the story evolve from there?

I wrote the ending, then the scene in which Clare loses her virginity, then a prologue which I later ditched,

Audrey Niffenegger (Photo by Christopher Schneberger)

Audrey Niffenegger (Photo by Christopher Schneberger)

then I stopped and tried to think how to structure the thing. I made a sort of list of scenes, organized them into three acts, and then started randomly working them until there was enough to see what it might be. The manuscript leant itself to being repeatedly restructured.

How did you manage the novel’s structure?

Originally it was thematically organized, but early readers found that confusing. Several people suggested following Clare’s chronology, which is mostly what I ended up doing. The story itself is very simple: courtship, marriage, Henry’s death, Clare’s life after that. It seems complicated because it is told out of order.

Present tense seems perfect for this novel. To me the choice of present tense seems to indicate that every action is in the here and now or suspends time. Which certainly seems true for Henry. Why did you decide to use present tense?

I couldn’t figure out when the present was; there was no baseline, no now, no past. By putting it in present tense the reader experiences what the characters experience, so that resolved all sorts of problems.

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The Power of Attraction: An Interview With Rebecca Lawton and Jordan Rosenfeld

Compare their biographies (see below) and authors Rebecca Lawton and Jordan Rosenfeld seem on different journeys as writers, one leaning predominantly toward essays on natural science, the other toward freelance journalism and fiction. Brief biographies, however, are only surface geologies in the strata of a writer’s life. Each has layered her creative life with the power of attracting such a life by writing down her desires. Discovering this power of attraction was significant enough in their evolution as writers that after they met, both decided to share their discovery with other writers, first as a seminar and then through the book Write Free: Attracting the Creative Life (BeijaFlor/Kalupi, 2007). The book’s central idea is that a writer can attract the life he or she wants, and at the same time he or she can be un-mired from negative energy: negative energy, indeed, is the culprit that denies us our dreams. The book helps writers, or any creative person for that matter, focus on what they want by writing down their desires and acting on them.

While reading the book, I had some follow-up questions for Becca and Jordan, which they graciously answered. They also graciously agreed to an interview via e-mail to talk further about the book and their writing lives.

Below is the interview:

You both have diverse backgrounds as writers. Once you met, how did Write Free come together? Did you have different approaches to writing the book?

RL: Write Free, the book, came together as a result of our putting together a writer’s retreat at Wellspring Renewal Center on the Navarro River, California. Writers came from all over the country to share in our launching the Write Free work.  Jennie Landsfield arrived from Chicago — in the very moment Jordan and I

Rebecca Lawton

Rebecca Lawton

met her, she envisioned a book we’d be writing together. The subject: using writing to attract our ideal lives — writing lives, it turned out. We not only set to work on the book immediately after the retreat, we dedicated it to Jennie. We split the work of writing chapters down the middle, reviewed and revised each other’s work, and brought the diverse chapters into one piece. It came together fairly seamlessly.

JR: We had a startlingly easy time writing this book. Before we wrote the book we decided to organize a teaching-style retreat to share what we had discovered was happening in our own writing lives. We held our first ever Write Free retreat at the magnificent Wellspring retreat center in 2006, and from there the idea for the book just flowed. It felt like we were in synch when writing the book, even though, if you read carefully, you can feel tone and voice differences when Becca is writing, or when I am. Certainly we bring different lenses to bear on the subject, but I think Becca would agree we had (and have) a great synergy.

Were the principles of attraction shared? Were there ever any conflicts?

Jordan Rosenfeld

Jordan Rosenfeld

RL: We discovered the principles of attraction somewhat serendipitously — as we say in the book, we noticed that the things we desired for our lives seemed to come into being once we’d written them down, thereby defining them, and held them in a confident space.  A friend of mine who already knew of the work

of Lynn Grabhorn recommended we read Excuse Me, Your Life Is Waiting. We read that, and Grabhorn’s Playbook, sharing the journey of learning through weekly meetings either by phone or in person.  We only stopped meeting regularly when Jordan’s baby Ben was born, and no doubt we’ll soon be back on a schedule for meeting about our work. It’s been definitely a partnership, very smooth and conflict free.

JR: If you mean did we share the principles of attraction with others, yes we did in workshops and in classes. If you mean did we share the principles among ourselves, that’s a yes too. When we came to the work, we both had had “power of attraction” experiences already in our lives and were drawn to similar

material. We both felt a great connection to the idea for the book and I’m proud to say we really didn’t have any major conflicts.

As I’ve read the book and worked through the activities one word seems to stand out — “focus”. How important is focus for a writer to attract the creative life he or she wants?

RL: Attracting the life you want requires having the clearest possible picture of it you can muster. Focus is essential in that it distills and directs your energy toward having what you want. I believe your focus will change: some things will sharpen as you acquire more information and mature, just as other things will go out of focus. That’s evolution.  At any point in your evolution, it’s critical to take time to joyously and intuitively work out the focus for your next steps.

JR: Very. Focus is the way we communicate to the universe (and to ourselves) what we want. Setting an intention requires focus. Getting down to the act of writing requires focus (diverting one’s attention away from the many clamoring aspects of our lives, like jobs and spouses and children). Focus is an important key, and each of us does it differently but I think without it you can’t really get very far toward any creative project.

Thinking of maintaining focus, it seems that a lot of negative energy comes out of distraction? How can writers overcome distraction, especially everyday distractions: jobs, money, children, etc.?

RL: The best response to this I’ve heard yet is the poet Terry Ehret‘s solution for the distractions in a writer’s life: integrate them.  If money is an issue, write about it.  If children speak to you as you’re working, let the essence of what they’re saying flow on to the page.  These everyday distractions are the stuff of life — they’re material you can use, if you remember that you’re a writer first and foremost.  For many of us, families top our lists of what’s key to our lives.  Remembering that, and finding structure in your time that allows both their loving support and your writing, you’ll integrate distraction.

JR: This is one of those answers that’s like a Zen koan — you overcome distraction by doing the opposite of it — which as you point out, is focusing. I think part of the problem many writers have in terms of being distracted from writing comes from fears/beliefs we hold about how hard/scary, or even exciting (thus shameful) it is to write. A lot of people feel guilt for wanting to take time to themselves for something that doesn’t necessarily bring material wealth or immediate results. By doing the writing exercises in our book we hope to help people crystallize their passion for writing so that they see how much is missing from their lives without it. (And you could easily substitute painting, dancing or sculpting for writing).

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Writing with Spunk and Bite, and Ming-the-Merciless Revision: An Interview with Arthur Plotnik

With amazing grace The Elements of Style (aka Strunk & White) saved me, scoured clean the mucus clogging my prose. An enthralled disciple, I bowed to this iconic writing rulebook. I put myself in the background; I omitted needless words; I spared figures of speech.

Often, I shunned taking risks, unlike the writers I was devouring: the fiction of Cormac McCarthy, Charles D’Ambrosio, Francine Prose, Don DeLillo; the essays and journalism of Stephen Harrigan, John McPhee, Joan Didion, Susan Orlean, and Patrick Beach and Brad Bucholz at the Austin American-Statesman. Whosoever took risks committed naughtiness was the Strunkian mantra that had seeped into my writing and editing (oh, I sinned, but felt guilty later).

Over and over I sought advice from various writing gurus about how to invigorate my writing, punch it up with spunk and bite — a favorite was Richard Rhodes’s How to Write. And a recent bout with writer’s malaise led me to read Arthur Plotnik’s Spunk & Bite: A Writer’s Guide to Bold, Contemporary Style (2007 paperback). Reading the book was like attending an old-time tent revival. The spirited prose and Plotnik’s advice zinged into my soul. I felt absolved, washed of Strunkian dogma.

I felt better about myself as a writer, and I decided I needed to know more about Arthur Plotnik and Spunk & Bite, so, a week ago, more or less, I sent him an e-mail, asking him if would be interested in an interview via e-mail that I would post here. He wrote back, saying yes.

Below is the interview:

What was the catalyst for Spunk & Bite? As an editor were you seeing gaggles of writers attached to Strunk & White, and not taking risks?

Some of the writing I saw would have made the gods create Strunk & White — if only to save the universeArthur Plotnik from collapsing. My authors included tight-collared academics in love with jargon and obfuscation, and non-writers gone giddy with the chance to speak in print. The principles of S&W (The Elements of Style) helped me bring some clarity and concision to these, er, writings.

But, yes — when I tried to push inert prose into something more dynamic, I’d often get Strunked and Whited by authors who felt I didn’t know right from wrong and was out to humiliate them. I was sympathetic to a point. How many writers trust, under their byline, someone else’s risk-taking? But at the same time I might have been losing it for S&W as an editor’s best friend.

When you set out to write Spunk & Bite did you intend to write something as a challenge to Strunk & White or did the idea come in the process of revision?

Originally, my challenge to S&W consisted of one short piece in The Editorial Eye, for which I wrote regularly in the late 1990s. I wasn’t the first no-name punk to question The Elements of Style; but in my annual visits to the sacred tome I was growing weary of E. B. White’s 1950s conservatism — his attachment to rigid conventions, his disdain for organic, adventurous language.

In writing Spunk & Bite (which includes an expansion of the original piece) I needed to counter S&W’s dictates with abundant examples of acclaimed, rule-breaking prose. I sought brief examples and found plenty to patch into drafts of the book. As I revised, I was able to unify the theme, the examples, and my own shtick into one concussive spunkification.

On the subject of revision: I’ve read several interviews in which you talk about your revision process, and it sounds very meticulous. What is your process for revision? Do you use a different process when editing others?

Well, I am the guy who wrote The Elements of Editing (1982), in which I forced myself to codify some of the editing/revising techniques I’d developed by trial and error.

Revision has many levels, depending on time available and one’s purpose relative to an audience. A newspaper feature gets some revision in the lead, maybe a late update — and it’s on to the next day’s feature. A short story is tuned again and again to the sensibilities of a literary audience, to the requirements of its arc, the credibility of its characters, and so on.

Usually, revision starts with a re-reading of the whole piece some time after it was written. With the likely audience in mind, one kills anything irrelevant to the desired effect and beefs up the parts that need to be emphatic. (Beefing up might mean tightening loose structure, introducing live verbs, replacing laboriously modified words with words that do the job by themselves.)

I am Ming the Merciless in revising my own writing. I go schizophrenic, detaching myself from Plotnik-the-writer. It is Plotnik-the-editor who must be pleased. He beats, burns, and destroys everything that strikes him as crap. He kills with impunity Plotnik-the-writer’s most precious darlings. He lays down mandates for the writer’s next draft — which he will edit just as savagely.

When I edit others, I am much more considerate. I don’t want to interfere with their “voice,” but just help it come through. Help the fire show through the smoke, as I’ve put it. If I sense an excessive “pride of authorship,” however, I beg off the job. No one can fight writers who love their locutions unconditionally. To be revised means: Lose the pride, weigh other possibilities.

One small tip: After you’ve revised a manuscript on screen, print it out and read the hard copy. Guaranteed you’ll see some necessary changes you hadn’t noticed in pixels.

When I first started out as a daily newspaper editor, I must admit I tended to fundamentalize many of Strunk & White’s rules, especially “Omit needless words,” when working with reporters. I also saw the tendency in other editors to follow Strunk & White as if it were holy writ. How can editors become spunkier when editing other writers?

That’s a tough one. The editor-author relationship is one I’ve called an “uneasy alliance.” Ideally, as with co-authors, each partner enhances the other’s strengths and attacks the weaknesses.

Applying S&W to the attack — against needless words, passive voice, wandering modifiers, etc. — will usually do some good, even abet spunkiness. But using the iconic little rulebook to cast down the unruly is simply compulsive behavior. Out the window go personal asides, slang, offbeat modifiers, freaky imagery — in short, distinctive personality.

Instead, an editor might join the rebellion, help it out, give an audience something fresh and daring: Spotting an author’s attempt at whimsy, the editor suggests, “How about we take ‘horse’s ass’ a step further? Say, ‘unicorn’s ass?’” “Spunky!” says the author. “But ‘unicorn’s booty’ is funnier.” “Perfect,” says the editor.

How did you learn to be a spunkier writer and editor?

These things evolve in mysterious ways, like the writer’s “voice” — the sum total of all the hundreds of language choices in a manuscript. The general readership itself has grown spunkier, embracing slang and pop and funkiness where standard English once ruled. But writers may want to cross these expanded boundaries with caution. Much spunkiness is ephemeral, like slang or pop that goes from cool to cringey in a nanosecond. Too much spunkiness is a turn-off — what S&W might have meant by too much “breezy” writing.

Spunkiness may be best when it erupts from quieter context, thus yielding elements of surprise, contrast, and edge. Run-on spunkitude sounds like a couple of dudes on cell phones at the Hard Rock Café.

It’s a delicate balance. One must dance through it and not fear the pratfalls.

The samples demonstrating punchier writing are my favorite elements of Spunk & Bite. You draw on writers in all genres, from contemporary novelists like Martin Amis and Jonathan Franzen to samples from journalists like Mark Singer. Obviously you value reading. How should writers read?

Like hungry motherf*ckers. Hit every eating joint, savor every morsel, and take some home (for your journal). Lick your chops over fresh metaphors and other juicy tropes. Stop and take note of how old dishes are made newly mouthwatering.

I like to own books so I can mark passages; but I also write down or photocopy passages from the many library books I borrow. All this marking and copying makes one pay attention to language. That’s the key. Pay attention to the words. Don’t let plot carry you away from the language craft.

What are you reading now? Who are some of your favorite writers and why? Any recommendations?

You might guess that I favor writers who have a way with language, with expressiveness, along with skills in characterization, plotting, and exposition. And among the language masters, I love writers who can mix dictions — high with low, sacred with profane. Juno Diaz is the man of the hour in this respect, pouring out mixed-diction gems like this one from The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007):

. . . so keen was he about learning that any new piece of knowledge, no matter how arcane or trivial, could send his ass over the Van Allen Belt.

Mixed diction is, of course, in danger of becoming a trend. You hear it on once-staid campuses, you see it in The New Yorker. But among those authors who can still thrill me with it are Martin Amis, Richard Price, E. Annie Proulx, and Chuck Palahniuk.

Outside of diction, I’m drawn to the usual virtues: sensuality, inventiveness, humor, freshness and intensity of observation. My recommendations for today would be The Bad Girl (Mario Vargas Llosa), The Book of Dave (Will Self), Delirium (Laura Restrepo), and Brief Encounters with Che Guevara (Ben Fountain). From Fountain’s collection of stories, I copied these goodies into my journal:

Mason [in the presence of "new wave gangsters"] sensed a sucking emptiness in them, the void that comes of total self absorption.

The Ghanian soldiers stared back with scathing indolence.

Other than Spunk & Bite, are there writing advice/craft books you would recommend?

Constance Hale’s Sin and Syntax is both solid and liberating. My usage bible is Garner’s Modern American Usage by Bryan A. Garner (who says lowercase “bible” when it’s not a proper noun). I find Sheridan Baker’s The Practical Stylist a more useful standard guide than Strunk & White.

And, what the hell, Library Journal called my own The Elements of Expression “humorous, thought-provoking, and right on the mark.” And now it’s cheap besides.

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Arthur Plotnik is the author of seven books, including the acclaimed Spunk & Bite: A Writer’s Guide to Bold, Contemporary Style and two Book-of-the-Month Club selections: The Elements of Editing and The Elements of Expression. Among his hundreds of published items are award-winning essays, biography, short fiction, and poetry. He studied under Philip Roth and Vance Bourjaily at the Iowa (Graduate) Writers’ Workshop and worked as a reporter, government editor, and — for the American Library Association and others — as a magazine and book editor. He served as a contributing editor for The Writer magazine and is now on its Editorial Board.