Month: October 2012

Short Takes

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Everybody knows that in the history of English prose fiction, there are important authors you shouldn’t miss.  Unfortunately, some of those important authors wrote mostly “damned, thick, square books” (as the Duke of Gloucester was supposed to have said of Edward Gibbons’ Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire), and actually setting out to read one of those doorstops can be an intimidating exercise.

Fear not — most authors of important doorstops have written shorter stuff which is also valid for getting your Have Read Important Author ticket punched.  The shorter stuff will also give you an idea as to whether or not you might actually enjoy reading some of the author’s longer works (or, conversely, whether the mere thought of reading another paragraph by a certain author is enough to make you break out in hives.)  Herewith, a tasting flight, as it were, of shorter works by a quartet of important authors:

Herman Melville, Typee.  Moby-Dick is, of course, the Big Important Melville novel, just as Billy Budd is the Important Later Work, but Typee is the book that made him famous.  It’s loosely based on Melville’s own experiences when he jumped ship off the whaler Acushnet in the Marquesas Islands, and is best described, in my opinion, as what a reader of science fiction would describe as a “first contact novel” — two cultures coming into contact at a historically significant moment.  It made Melville briefly famous as “the man who lived with cannibals”; his fans, predictably, were disappointed when his next book wasn’t about cannibals at all.

(No, I’m not going to recommend “Bartleby the Scrivener“.  But it’s even shorter than Typee, if that’s your main criterion.)

James Joyce, Dubliners.  A collection of short stories, this time, by the author of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake.  They’re written in a considerably more straightforward manner than any of the later works, but should suffice to give you an idea of Joyce’s favorite topics and themes.  If you don’t want to read the whole collection, go for “Araby” and “The Dead”; if you want more Joyce after you’re finished, move on to Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Henry James, The Beast in the Jungle.  Henry James specialized in the painstaking depiction of subtle emotions and complex relationships; his prose style is somewhere between exquisite and maddening depending upon your tolerance level.  (H. G. Wells memorably described it as “a magnificent but painful hippopotamus resolved at any cost, even at the cost of its dignity, upon picking up a pea that has got into the corner of its den.”)  But the last paragraph of this novella hits like a hammer in spite of it all.  If you decide that you like James — and many writers do — go on to The Golden Bowl and The Ambassadors.

William Faulkner, The Bear.  Faulkner’s longer works are notorious for their dense prose and their complex story lines, but The Bear is about as straightforward a Faulkner story as you’re going to get.  It’s also a story in which exciting stuff actually happens, since it deals with the hunt for the giant bear Old Ben — so you’ve got guns and knives and bear hounds and good old boys running around in the woods and killing things.  If you like The Bear, there’s a lot more Faulkner out there waiting for you (but I’d advise working your way up to novels like The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom.  Some books are like marathons . . . you’ve got to get into training for them, first.)

Fatal Verbs

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There are a couple of verbs — both of them used at times for dialogue attribution — which might as well be specialists in character assassination.

One (and I have Teresa Nielsen Hayden to thank for the tip) is “whined.”  As soon as a character whines something, he or she loses the respect of the reader.  Heroes don’t whine.  Strong villains don’t whine, either.  If you want your readers to dislike some character, all you need to do is hint that the person might have whined at some point.

The other verb is “to smirk.”  Only smug, self-satisfied characters smirk.  Likeable characters don’t. A smirk is not a smile; nor is it a grimace; and it doesn’t substitute for either one of them.

(I’ve been fighting that fight for going on four decades now.  I’m nothing if not persevering about these things.)

Character Control

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You have to keep an eye on your secondary characters, because some of them are sneaky — there’s a couple of kinds, especially, who’ll take over the plot if you let them.

First, you have all those characters whose main role in the plot is to be a source of help and knowledge:  fairy godmothers, wise old men, kindly librarians who happen to have exactly the book the protagonist needs, colorful informants who can tell the detective about the word on the street, and all their fictional ancestors and descendants.  It’s necessary to make them interesting in their own right if they’re going to have more than one appearance in the work, lest their true nature as plot devices be discovered; the danger is that once they’re fully-rounded characters they can start to overshadow the hero or heroine they’re supposed to be assisting.  The cure is to strictly ration their helpful appearances, and to let them be wrong or unhelpful once in a while, so that asking for their assistance isn’t the first thing that the protagonist (and the reader) inevitably thinks of in a pinch.

More dangerous than the helpful secondary characters, though, are the ones who exert such a strong magnetic pull that they’ll warp your intended plot out of shape around them if you don’t watch out.  My co-author and I have had to deal with characters like that once or twice — one of them, we hit on the head with a piece of rebar and put into a multi-chapter coma, and he still damn-near took over what was supposed to be somebody else’s book.  With another such character, we had to arrange the plot so that he was well out of the way of the main action when the crisis hit, because if he’d been in place during the crisis he would have dealt with it handily and there wouldn’t have been another book-and-a-half to the story.

(We also had to promise to write him his own book later, when we were done.  That also works.)

Cranky Thought for the Day

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Most science fiction and fantasy authors aren’t interested in writing what used to be called (and may still be called, for all I know) “teen problem novels.” It’s okay, apparently, to have a young adult protagonist who is in some way different, provided that the difference is what the book is about. There has to be angst, and discrimination, and Dealing With Issues† — the non-default protagonist is not allowed to have a story that isn’t all about his or her non-default qualities.

Or, to put it a bit more snarkily, the non-default character is not allowed to enjoy his or her life, or go on adventures, or have fun. If science fiction and fantasy are part of the literature of escape, then readers who are in one way or another not default-normal are constantly being told by the gatekeepers of young adult fiction that freedom is for other people, not for them.

Which is — just in case anybody was in any doubt as to my opinion on the matter — bad.

†Like Dancing With Wolves, only not as much fun.

Back Again

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I’m home from a week spent teaching at the Viable Paradise writers’ workshop on Martha’s Vineyard.  As usual, I did as much learning as teaching; a stretch of time spent in the company of other writers is always invigorating.

It’s also exhausting, especially when you have to plunge directly into a couple of editing gigs and a heavy deadline.

But I’ll try to keep y’all posted, as it were.

(Yes, my native dialect is one of the many variants of American Southern, tempered by seven years of grad school in Philadelphia, fifteen years as a camp follower Navy spouse, and a couple of decades’ residence in far northern New England.  What this means, in practice, is that I have access to an actual second-person plural, which is something that a functioning language really ought to have.)

 

Homonym of the Week

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Because I’ve been bumping into this one all over the place lately.

Things that are discreet are quiet, unobtrusive, not-noticed, and don’t draw attention to themselves.  “Smith made discreet inquiries into Jones’s financial history.”

Things that are discrete are separate and distinct from each other.  “Jones set up discrete budgetary categories for his various expenditures.”

Got that?

Good.

 

On the Road Again

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Posts here are likely to be thin on the ground for the next week and a bit, because I’m on Martha’s Vineyard, gearing up to teach at this year’s Viable Paradise workshop.

But I’ll be back, I promise.

 

Metaphor Made Edible

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Let’s start with the recipe.  It’s another one of those Busy Writer Crockpot Specials, this one known formally as Cheesy Kielbasa Potato Soup (“cheesy” in recipe-land, appears to be a code word for “contains Velveeta”.)

Ingredients

1 (30 ounce) bag frozen hash browns
14 ounces kielbasa, cut into bite sized pieces
4 cups chicken broth (for a 32 oz bag of hash browns, make it ~5 cups)
2 onions, diced
8 ounces Velveeta cheese, at room temperature

Directions

In crock pot, combine hash browns, kielbasa, broth, and onions. Stir well and cook on low 6-8 hours.

30 minutes before serving, cut Velveeta into cubes and stir into soup. Cover and cook on high 30 minutes or until cheese is melted.

This recipe can be seasoned further by individual diners with hot sauce, or sour cream, or horseradish, or whatever they want.

What does this have to do with writing?

First, let me tell you about the time I made a much more authentic (i.e., it contained neither frozen hash browns nor Velveeta) potato soup from scratch, including the part where I peeled and diced 8 cups of potatoes.  It turned out as it was supposed to, but the only person in the family who liked it was me — and at that point in time we were six people around the dinner table, so I wasn’t going to put a dish that labor-intensive into permanent rotation when the majority verdict was at best meh.

Some time later, I found this recipe, and because I still liked potato soup, I decided to give it a try.  It wasn’t terribly expensive — the kielbasa was on sale — and it looked dead simple to make.  Kind of low-rent, what with the Velveeta and all, but this time I wasn’t going for Genuine Potato Soup, I was just going for a quick and easy dinner.

The family cleaned their plates and went back for seconds.

“Do this one again!” they all said.

And the way in which my potato soup experience is like unto the writer’s life experience is this:  You can never predict which one of your works, or what part of a work, your readers are going to like based on how much effort you put into it.

It Varies

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The quality of the layout and typography in commercially published e-books, that is.  (So does the quality of non-commercially-published e-books, but those are beyond the scope of this post.)

To a large extent, the quality of an e-book depends upon whether the publisher is working from an electronic version of the manuscript as originally submitted (a lot of publishers these days ask for either electronic-only MSS or a combination of electronic and hardcopy), or whether they’re working from a scanned hardcopy version of the published book.

It used to be mostly pirates who worked from scanned hardcopy. These days, though, a number of legitimate publishers are working on bringing their backlist titles out as e-books, and a number of authors are doing the same thing with their own works for which the rights have reverted. In both cases, if the original book was produced during the typewriter era, or in the early days of word processing, scanning a sacrificed hardcopy may be the only way — short of re-keying the whole thing — to get an electronic text.

A lot also depends on whether or not the publisher bothers to have somebody proofread the e-book before it’s released. Dead-tree books are copyedited, and have the copyedited MS gone over by the author before being set into type, and then the typeset MS is gone over again by both the publishing house and the author before being sent to the printer. Even so, errors will creep in. Sometimes it’s just because no matter how many sets of eyes look at a thing, something’s going to get missed; other times, very bad stuff can happen at the printer’s end and not get noticed until angry book buyers start sending back their copies. Turning hardcopy into e-text, if the publisher is converting something that never had an electronic MS, often involves taking apart a physical copy of the book and scanning it page by page, which not only preserves any existing errors but opens the way for even more.

Some publishing houses clearly take care with the process of turning hardcopy into an e-book; others just as clearly don’t do much more than pour the however-generated e-text into a standard template and don’t bother much with it after that.

Your best bet is probably to write to the publisher about any errors you find. It’s not likely to get you a better version of that particular book, but it might encourage them to take more care with the process in the future.

Some Things Just Don’t Translate

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Written and visual storytelling are two different things, and something that works just fine in one medium may not work at all in the other.  Imagine trying to do the classic music-plus-montage transition sequence beloved of film-makers everywhere with nothing but words on paper, for example.  Writers being the creatures they are, some of them have probably tried it, and it’s possible one or two of them may have succeeded — but it’s bucking the odds.

Over on the written-to-visual adaptation end, you get all sorts of problems with adapting interior action — stuff that’s going on mostly inside the protagonist’s head — into an effective visual form.  The key word there being “visual”; voice-over narration is not usually a good answer.  In my opinion, any director who’s thinking about using voice-over narration should stop and think about it some more before going on with the project. The whole point of a movie is that it tells the story through visuals and action; throw in explicit first-person narration and you might as well have a radio play with illustrations. And that goes double for noir-detective-style first person.  Stuff that reads on the page as moody and atmospheric and full of character-building through voice and tone tends to come off as purple and pretentious when spoken aloud. Especially when spoken aloud with pictures.

Sometimes, granted, Hollywood does make changes in written source material just because it can; but a lot of the time, the changes are made because something interior and/or verbal had to be translated into external action in a visual medium.