The Colonel never knows what title the editors of The Eye will give his submissions. He can only hope they have some relation to the content of the piece, and aren't cynically slapped-on with the only goal of getting clicks and eyeballs. Anyway, here's some inside baseball:
Being an established writer
with a column in The Eye, The Colonel receives innumerable, often
indecipherable manuscripts, poems, curricula vitae, photographs, ostraka,
marriage proposals, requests for advice, autographs, and
monographs, requests for DNA samples from prisoners claiming
innocence, requests to write students’ homework, term papers, love letters,
doctoral theses, memoirs, autobiographies, best-sellers, cryptograms, etc.
The Colonel does what he can to
help these souls, usually by publishing their work as his own, as long as
there’s no evidence that it was sent certified. Why look for trouble?
On occasion, it seems prudent
to send the author a copy of his or her own manuscript (certified) with a cover
letter to the effect that The Colonel just finished writing the enclosed
manuscript and wonders what he or she thinks of it. Never too soon to think
about how to win litigation.
Anyway, it now seems efficient
to publish a few hints ‘n’ tips ‘n’ tricks to help aspiring writers. The
Colonel plans to print a postcard of them like Edmund Wilson’s and mail it to
submitters.
“Thank you for your
correspondence. Please forgive the cold indifference of this canned response.
Please resubmit your manuscript after revising it to conform to following
guidelines:
“1/ Eliminate adjectives and
adverbs, especially definite and indefinite articles, to give work feel of
translation from Slavic language.
“2/ Be sure passive voice is
excised from sentences in which it is used.
“3/ In poetry, never rhyme
‘tree’ and ‘industry.’
“4/ Never worry about ending a
sentence with preposition, because last word in sentence automatically becomes postposition.
“5/ Never hesitate to split
infinitive. Lincoln, great writer, was famous for splitting. Okay, he split
rails, but you can adapt. Originality is but adaptation. Lincoln was vampire
hunter, so you can become apostrophe hunter. Adaptation - get idea?
“6/ Foolish hobgoblin is
consistency of little minds, so don’t feel you must always use (a)
double-quotes, (b) single quotes (inverted commas -- very pukkah), or (c) no
quotations marks at all (Joyce hated them). Don’t be afraid to strike happy
compromise, as by using double quotes to open quotations and single quotes to
close them. Or no opening quotes but double closing quotes. Eventually you will
find your own unique voice.
“7/ When spell check gives you
alternatives, pick third one, as you do on multiple-choice tests when you don’t
know answer. Microsoft is as naive as SAT people and always puts correct
answer in third position. Like old Soviet embassies: third assistant secretary
was always real boss.
“8/ Check facts, check facts,
check facts. Recall words chiseled into archway over entrance to New Yorker
magazine fact-checking department: “Accuracy is Next to Godliness, and Cabots
Speak Only to God (Lodges? Lowells? Whatever.)”
“9/ Unless your work is in form
of weather report, or is weather report, don’t begin with mention of
weather, and don’t end with suicide, unless you are Goethe and main character
is young Werther, or you are J.D. Salinger and main character is Seymour Glass,
perfect bananafish guy. Oops -- belated spoiler alerts. If weather and suicide
are essential to composition, start with suicide and end with weather. ‘First
shall be last and last shall be first.’
“10/ Speaking of Bible, please
not to let your participles dangle. Gird them up as if you are going on
journey. Don’t quote Bible unless comfortable doing so. If comfortable quoting
Bible, don’t, because King James Version no longer intelligible, and later
English translations (Ivan, how say 'nekulturny' in English?) barbarous. So lay
off Bible, but is not okay to substitute quotations from Nietzsche.
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