Bagombo Snuff Box Read Free

and then at City College in New York. Joseph Heller, author of Catch-22 , was teaching at City College also. He said to me that if it
hadn’t been for the war, he would have been in the dry-cleaning business. I
said to him that if it hadn’t been for the war, I would have been garden editor
of The Indianapolis Star .
    Now lend me your ears. Here is Creative Writing 101:
    1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or
she will not feel the time was wasted.
    2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root
for.
    3. Every character should want something, even if it is only
a glass of water.
    4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character
or advance the action.
    5. Start as close to the end as possible.
    6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your
leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader
may see what they are made of.
    7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and
make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
    8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon
as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete
understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the
story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.
    The greatest American short story writer of my generation
was Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964). She broke practically every one of my rules
but the first. Great writers tend to do that.
    Ms. O’Connor may or may not have broken my seventh rule, “Write
to please just one person.” There is no way for us to find out for sure,
unless, of course, there is a Heaven after all, and she’s there, and the rest
of us are going there, and we can ask her.
    I’m almost sure she didn’t break rule seven. The late
American psychiatrist Dr. Edmund Bergler, who claimed to have treated more
professional writers than any other shrink, said in his book The Writer and
Psychoanalysis that most writers in his experience wrote to please one person
they knew well, even if they didn’t realize they were doing that. It wasn’t a
trick of the fiction trade. It was simply a natural human thing to do, whether
or not it could make a story better.
    Dr. Bergler said it commonly required psychoanalysis before
his patients could know for whom they had been writing. But as soon as I finished
his book, and then thought for only a couple of minutes, I knew it was my
sister Allie I had been writing for. She is the person the stories in this book
were written for. Anything I knew Allie wouldn’t like I crossed out. Everything
I knew she would get a kick out of I left in.
    Allie is up in Heaven now, with my first wife Jane and Sam
Lawrence and Flannery O’Connor and Dr. Bergler, but I still write to please
her. Allie was funny in real life. That gives me permission to be funny, too.
Allie and I were very close.
    In my opinion, a story written for one person pleases a
reader, dear reader, because it makes him or her a part of the action. It makes
the reader feel, even though he or she doesn’t know it, as though he or she is
eavesdropping on a fascinating conversation between two people at the next
table, say, in a restaurant.
    That’s my educated guess.
    Here is another: A reader likes a story written for just one
person because the reader can sense, again without knowing it, that the story
has boundaries like a playing field. The story can’t go simply anywhere. This,
I feel, invites readers to come off the sidelines, to get into the game with
the author. Where is the story going next? Where should it go? No fair! Hopeless
situation! Touchdown!
    Remember my rule number eight? “Give your readers as much
information as possible as soon as possible”? That’s so they can play along.
Where, outside the Groves of Academe, does anybody like a story where so much
information is withheld or arcane that there is no way for readers to play
along?
    The boundaries to