What Writers Do or Ought to

An old friend, and the man who was my first (and second) publisher before he left publishing, moved to New York, married a literary agent and started producing non-fiction books of his own, has been showing me some chapters from the one he's working on, about creative writing. For anyone interested, this is Richard Cohen By the Sword: A History of Gladiators, Musketeers, Samurai, Swashbucklers, and Olympic Champions, who has also edited Madeleine Albright's and Rudy Giuliani's autobiographies.

The latest chapter he's put my way is from the upcoming book - the creative writing one. It's about Openers: how to start a book (you can surely tell from the first sentence of this blog that I haven't learned much). He gives lots of examples of different ways novelists have begun their books and why they did so: why some of these work, some don't, and some no longer do for modern readers although they did once.

He includes a part of the preface to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn thus: "Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot."

Disingenuous? Just neat? It certainly establishes the voice, most wonderfully. But did Twain wish to be taken seriously? There's been some slightly heated discussion in the Bookish group about Huck Finn...these lines give me pause.