Lessons from the Master

I enjoy observing pomposity. Join me, won't you? Lileks is writing a book, and if he does say so himself:

This thing has been so briskly paced and tightly constructed I realized I had to admit what would be obvious to the reader . . . but of course when you admit these things, the reader knows there must be more.

Ah, The Master Novelist! No wonder he's a permanent fixture on the NYT Best-Seller list. Here's another big surprise:

...part of the charm – I hope – of this novel is the digressions, the side stories, the little unessential things that give you the place and the time, the people, the flavor of 1980.

Wow, you mean to say that he's doing something set in THE PAST? Gasp!

I’ve spoken before about the Difficult Middle, the part of the book where you’ve set everything up, and you have to fill time with hugger-mugger until you can get to the galloping last third, where it’s peril / revelation / escape / peril / revelation / victory.

Ah yes, the classic parts of a story:

1.)Beginning
2.)Difficult Middle
2a.) Hugger-Mugger
3.) Galloping Last Third
3a.) Peril
3b.) Revelation
3c.) Escape
3d.) Peril
3e.) Revelation
3f.) Victory

You can lose the reader with too much padding, or you can use the Difficult Middle to bring your secondary characters to life, get a few points across, hang meat on the bones.

Duuuuh, gee, can you??? He then laments, for the 500th time, that a collection of disjointed, rambling short stories he wrote about a guy - FROM THE 1950's! - named Joe Ohio got rejected.

I’d have the same trepidation here, but the book has a secret weapon. The sort of hook that makes editors feel Brilliant for buying it.

Why, it's the greatest story ever told!

As for poor Joe, well, your support of the site is sufficient. When it’s all done next year perhaps I’ll try to sell it again; by then it will be a 150,000 word work, and surely there’s an editor who can understand the idea of a novel in short-story form. Or vice versa.

Ah, if only there was someone smart enough to appreciate how great it is! To even understand its revolutionary structure! Then, a day later, describing writing the end of his precious Joe Ohio saga:

...and then Joe did something simple, so perfect, and my hands were actually shaking as I wrote the last few sentences. I wrote the last one and I felt myself tear up, and I stepped back from the table and looked at it, and said:

That’s the end of the story.

Lileks has no style of his own. He can ape Hemingway with his little sentences; he apes Cormac McCarthy with bunches of "ands." But that's all he can do. Not an original bone in his body. Although I thought this was funny:

But the story absolutely has to stop where it stops, at the Reichenbach Falls Cafe – oh, but I’ve said too much.

I chuckled - if this guy stuck with humor, he'd be tolerable. Check out the comment left by some guy named RPD:

Hmmn, the Reichenbach Falls Cafe. Is that named after where Sherlock Holmes died, or is there a town in Ohio named that?

RPD and Mike Morsch would get along really, really well.