“The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.”

– Vladimir Nabokov

I shall not endeavor to convince you that I am not a fan of Jonathan Franzen. I am. I am.

If, by some election of a contained mind, you have read Jonathan Franzen and are not enamored of his particular style: That’s cool. We can still be friends.

Franzen is known for a coupla quirky things.

• Publishing on the Pynchon model, ergo dropping one monstrously perfect novel every decade that makes a bajillion dollars in sales.
• Giving Oprah and her book club machine the middle finger.
• But mostly, a writing style that doles out the entire backstory from cradle-to-epilogue of every single character in a manner so subtle that the reader doesn’t mind the info dump. It’s a delicious info dump tart filled with marmalade gastrique and served with crème fraîche on top. Yummy. Can I have more backstory, please?

As a result, you get characters so rich that you have to actively remember that you don’t actually know them as real people. I have a timer that goes off in my head for contacting old friends.

“Gosh, haven’t talked to Christine in a while. Better dial her up and see what’s shaking.”

“Geez, are Lisa and Kevin ever going to get together with me and my wife for a dinner date? Better email.”

“Hmmm. I wonder how Denise’s new gig as a chef at that restaurant in Philly is– Oh wait. Denise is fictional. Never mind.”

And that. kiddies, is why JF is rich as Rockefeller from a mere two opus novels. (He’s written others, but two mainstream category killers.)

Franzen’s style is so distinctive that he’s an excellent perennial for the writer game;  WHAT IF _(author name)__ WROTE __(newspaper column or genre) __ .

Q: What if Vonnegut wrote Obituaries?

A: Every entry would be four words long: “And so it goes.”

Q: What if Salinger wrote OpEds?

A: Every third word would be emphasized with uber-condescending italics.

Q: What if Franzen wrote for the ESPN website?

A: The first twenty-seven column inches would be the backstory of the security guard at the press gate entrance to the stadium.

I’ll take Things Writers Do In Bars for $1200, Alex.

Way back when, when I did my little blog screed on smut novels, I was tumbling the genesis of my current WiP, Where it All Went Wrong. My WiP seeks to answer a question that nobody has asked.  “What if Franzen had written a Greenleaf Classics jerk novel, circa 1970?”  That’s what I’ve been wasting my time on for the last four months.

If you run into Franzy at a reading do NOT ask him any of the following four cliché writerly questions. Asking one of the following questions is a sure way to move Franzy from your list of Literary Heroes to your list of Dicks I Have Met:

• Who are your influences?
• What time of day do you work, and what do you write on?
• I read an interview with an author who says that, at a certain point in writing a novel, the characters “take over” and tell him what to do. Does this happen to you, too?
• Is your fiction autobiographical?

Those four warnings won’t help you be a better writer. Here are Franzy’s thoughts on that, lifted from his Wikipedia:

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 autobiographical story than “The Metamorphosis”.
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 [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.

Each of those could be it’s own blog post. Provocative thoughts. Interesting stuff.