WARREN’S LAWS

by James Lincoln Warren

1. Criticism says more about the critic than the piece being criticized.

2. Length of critical comments are directly proportional to the size of the critic’s ego.
3. Good criticism is terse and specific.
4. Uninformed opinions are meaningless.
5. Creativity without craft is futile.
6. Craft without creativity is dull.
7. The problem with living in your head is that you’re the only one there.
8. Economy in writing is not the shortest way to express something; it is the best way.
9. Today’s hip phrase is tomorrow’s cliché.
10. Experience cannot replace intelligence.
11. Intelligence cannot replace talent.
12. Talent cannot replace experience.

The last place I posted Warren’s Laws was on The Mystery Place Forum, just over a year ago. Today I tweaked Law #3 (by changing “short” to “terse”) and added a new #6 to reflect that invention is the mother of necessity, and bumped the ones following the new addition up a number, giving me an even dozen literary Laws. So it seemed time to reprint them.

My Laws do not really serve the same purpose as Elmore Leonard’s Rules: his are about writing effectively, whereas mine are about literary judgment. I don’t use my rules as a guide telling me how I should compose fiction — actually, I use them to keep my ego in check when someone has asked me to critique their writing. It is easy for a critic to be fatuously sophisticated. The Laws remind me not to be tempted.

But occasionally, I am reminded of one of the Laws when I read something bad, especially if that something bad has received lauds from other readers. As I have said before, I do not publish direct criticism of other writers’ work, or I should say more candidly that when I do I never mention their names. (The one surefire way to get my eyeballs rolling is to use “snuck” as the past tense of “to sneak”, a vile practice that drives me absolutely nuts, and which I found three times in book I read this week that has been praised to the skies for the skill and beauty of its prose — prose which I found either pedestrian or overwrought, for the most part, although there were some fine passages hidden in the midden. The past tense of “to sneak” is “sneaked”! Why is that so hard? Another way to get me to grind my teeth is to use the word “enormity” to mean “large scale”, a barbarism especially favored by TV reporters: “the enormity of the task.” Oh, please. “Enormity” refers to “deviation from moral or legal rectitude; extreme or monstrous wickedness.” Its close relative is “monstrosity”. You would never say “the monstrosity of the task,” would you?)

These reactions on my part are usually a reflection of Law #8 (the former #7), which deals mostly with diction or word choice. Some words have become unusable. You can’t use “gay” in its original sense any more, especially if writing about children. Children are sexualized far too often in American media as it is. Queer studies is not the academic pursuit of weirdness, which it seems it ought to be. Who wouldn’t want a semester of that? And because of its application to the Nazis’ horrific genocide of the Jews, a true act of enormity, few people remember that “holocaust” is essentially nothing more than a synonym for “conflagration”. Can’t use that word to describe a house that burned down without there being powerful and painful echoes.

And some words are just too precious. I took a little heat for using the unusual word “contumeliously” in this column last week, something I rather expected, especially since last year I did criticize an author for his recherché vocabulary. But I liked “contumeliously” in context (OED: “With insolent contempt; with the infliction of dishonour”). It exactly fit the piece in a way that the mere “contemptuously” would not quite have reached. Plus, I like its root, contumely, a noun that seems like it’s disguised as an adverb. It ought to be roared by a wigged barrister in court, voicing outrage: “Such contumely is not to be borne, my lord!”

I just got a contract in the mail from AHMM for a story I first gave Linda a year ago. She had asked for me to rewrite some portions of it and I was only to happy to oblige — as I have heretofore mentioned, to me getting the check is the most important thing. Most of the rewriting involved removing prose that didn’t forward the action. I wound up excising just over 300 words — about one page of double-spaced typescript. The hardest thing for me to was to selectively remove the verbal tumors without leaving scars, by which I mean making sure that the missing parts didn’t show up as obvious gaps in the narrative, since the piece depends much more heavily on the tone of the narrator — half Huckleberry Finn, half Damon Runyon — than is usual for me.

So I looked at the Laws, especially at my new #6, which reminds me that being good with words is not enough, that you also gotta have something to say. The story is well-crafted, even after surgery, and I know it’s creative, because I stole the plot from Robert Louis Stevenson, and you can’t get much more creative than that.

It’s reminded me of another (oft misquoted) law, this one courtesy of T. S. Eliot: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.”

I am content.