freedom and franzen

I'm so excited. It will be delivered to my kindle tomorrow. Sometimes I just wish he'd stop acting like such a jackass, but then other times, I love him. The way he comes off in his girlfriend's Granta Magazine essay (which I've written about before-- you should read this essay. It's amazing.) 


I still love his rules for writing (one of many writers who submitted them for an article in The Guardian) especially the last one. Which I have quoted over and over again.  

1. The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.
2. Fiction that isn't an author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn't worth writing for anything but money.
3. Never use the word "then" as a conjunction – we have "and" for this purpose. Substituting "then" is the lazy or tone-deaf writer's non-solution to the problem of too many "ands" on the page.
4. Write in the third person unless a really distinctive first-person voice offers itself irresistibly.
5. When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it.
6. The most purely autobiographical fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more auto biographical story than "The Meta morphosis".
7. You see more sitting still than chasing after.
8. It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction (the TIME magazine cover story detailed how Franzen physically disables the Net portal on his writing laptop).
9. Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.
10. You have to love before you can be relentless.

Tomorrow will be one of those days, brimming with potential, when I love him for giving me a huge new novel as I embark on my world travels. It's conveniently called Freedom. (Or, more annoyingly-- as I've previously mentioned-- Freedom: A Novel.) And NPR has some interesting things to say about it, which I can't help but feel parallel a few things I'm feeling right now:

Two of the most frequently repeated words in Freedom, Jonathan Franzen's much-anticipated fourth novel, are "freedom" and "mistake," and they're curiously linked. For Franzen's characters, freedom means, in part, the liberty to make mistakes — mistakes that are examined, dissected minutely, and, occasionally, corrected.