Month: April 2013

A Sad Fact

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Years ago, for my sins, I was a grad student teaching freshman composition† at a large university. One day, I was cornered after class by a student to whom I had given a B+ on her most recent essay. She wanted to know why, if I hadn’t marked off any errors on the essay, I hadn’t given it an A. I explained that as far as I was concerned, an essay required something more than just technical proficiency to lift it out of the “B” range and up to an “A”.

A stricken expression came over her face. “You mean I have to be interesting, too?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m afraid you do.”

Needless to say, for fiction writing at the publishable level, this truth is not just doubled, it’s squared.  Maybe even cubed.

†I forget exactly what they were calling the freshman English writing class that year — Introduction to Rhetoric, it may have been. The name of the course changes from year to year and school to school, but when you lift up the hood and look at what’s inside, it’s still freshman composition underneath.

Stet

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Stet is Latin for “let it stand.”  It’s also a word of power for dealing with copyeditors who have — in the author’s opinion — overstepped the limits of their job.

A good copyeditor is the author’s friend.  He or she will do things like keeping track of a whole extended family of fictional characters across a multi-volume series, with accompanying fictional place-names and scraps of invented language, so that even if the author fails to do the math and accidentally keeps the same minor character twenty-five years old for almost a decade, the mistake will be fixed before the book hits print.   Characters who enter a scene wearing a t-shirt and jeans will not leave it wearing khaki cargo pants and a flannel button-down, unless they’ve been witnessed changing clothes in the interim.  The setting sun will not shine in through what can only be an eastward-facing window (if the author has supplied enough detail for a reader to infer the layout of the manor house, a good copyeditor will keep that layout in mind.)

In short, a good copyeditor will make you look smarter than you really are, and will ensure that your book is as good as it deserves to be.  If you get a particularly good or face-saving copyedit, it’s a kindness to tell your editor to pass along your thanks to the copyeditor — rather like sending your compliments to the chef — and to mention that if they’re free the next time you have a book come up on the schedule, you’d love to work with them again.

Bad copyedits . . . let’s just say that it’s almost impossible to be a professional writer and not fall victim to at least one staggeringly awful copyedit.    Authors gather in bars and tell copyeditor horror stories.  (To be fair, the group at the other end of the bar is a gang of copyeditors, telling author horror stories.  If no man is a hero to his valet, no author is a hero to his copyeditor.)  At times like these, it helps to keep in mind that the book is, in the end, your book, and to remember the magic word.

Stet.

Not Really a Day for Writing

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Actually, that’s not true.  If you’re doing this thing for a living, every day is a day for writing, no matter how bad the world gets.

But some days, current events don’t leave much room for chitchat and casual banter.

Stay safe, people, wherever you are.

Mirror, Mirror

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One of the hardest things to do with first-person narration (apart from the problem of how to tell the reader about important things that happen where the POV character can’t see them) is describing the narrator’s appearance. With third person, it’s relatively easy — you can slip in a detail here and a detail there as the opportunity arises, or you can say the heck with subtlety and provide a couple of descriptive sentences about the character shortly after he or she is introduced.  But with first person, you’re not just following the character around and eavesdropping on their thoughts when it’s convenient.  You’re inside their head all the time . . . and most people, unless they’re either really vain or really insecure, don’t spend that much time thinking about the fact that they have, say, brown hair and hazel eyes and a nose that’s just slightly crooked because they broke it falling off a seesaw back in second grade.

So what can you do?

Well, you can always not bother with physical description of your first person narrator.  It’s surprising, really, how irrelevant brown hair and hazel eyes are to a lot of story lines.  (For the story lines where they are relevant, the narrator will tell you about them — in fact, if he or she thinks that the crooked nose and the unexceptional hair and eye color are why they are still tragically without a date for the senior prom, they  are probably not going to shut up about it.)

But what you don’t do (and don’t do it with third person narrators, either) is have your first-person narrator look at themselves in a mirror and describe what they’re seeing.  And for “mirror” read also lake, pond, mud puddle, silver bowl, shop window, the eyes of the beloved, or any other reflective surface.  Because that has been done.

A Plaintive Query

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Doesn’t anybody know how to use the past perfect any more?

(I’m reading slush these days, along with everything else.  All aspiring writers should do some slush reading if they get the chance.  It’s an enlightening experience, and far more entertaining than, say, grading freshman essays, which I’ve also done in my time.  Even the worst slush in the world was written by somebody who actively wanted to be putting words on paper, or pixels on screen; even the very best freshman essays, on the other hand, have a certain forced, gun-to-the-temple quality about them.  Also, when you’re reading slush, once you get to the point where you’re convinced that a piece is hopeless, you can stop.  With freshman essays, there’s no such release.)

Mr. Melville Submits a Proposal

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Any writer who’s ever tried to put together a proposal package for an editor or an agent knows the unpleasant truth:  Writing a proposal sucks.  You have to make up a summary version of something that you’re telling at novel length because you haven’t got any way to say it that’s shorter; and you have to put the prose equivalent of false eyelashes and fishnet stockings onto something that is — you devoutly hope — subtle and understated, or at least is naturally flashy and dazzling and not some tasteless imitation of the real thing.

Take heart.  And consider the example of Herman Melville, who in 1850 wrote to his English publisher:

“In the latter part of the coming autumn I shall have ready a new work; and I write you now to propose its publication in England. The book is a romance of adventure, founded upon certain wild legends in the Southern Sperm Whale Fisheries, and illustrated by the author’s own personal experience, of two years & more, as a harpooneer. Should you be inclined to undertake the book, I think that it will be worth to you 200 pounds.. Could you be positively put in possession of the copyright, it might be worth to you a larger sum — considering its great novelty; for I do not know that the subject treated of has ever been worked up by a romancer; or, indeed, by any writer, in any adequate manner.”

This is an effective proposal — the publisher in question bought the book.  Consider what it does:   It lets the publisher know when the projected work is going to be finished; it describes the nature of the book in terms of how it would appeal to the reading public (it’s a “romance of adventure” in an exotic setting — “the Southern Sperm Whale Fisheries”); it lets the publisher know of the author’s special qualification through personal experience “of two years & more”; it demonstrates that the author can think of the project in commercial terms and is willing to negotiate.

Wisely, the proposal doesn’t say, as Melville later did when he wrote to Nathaniel Hawthorne:

This is the book’s motto (the secret one), Ego non baptizo te in nomine – but make out the rest yourself.†

Melville didn’t enjoy the commercial side of writing (“Dollars damn me,” he wrote — to Nathaniel Hawthorne, again; the long-suffering Hawthorne deserves a gold star) but he could make himself do it when he had to.  And if he could, so can we.

†Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli — “I do not baptize you in the name of the father, but in the name of the devil.” It’s one of Captain Ahab’s memorable lines from Moby-Dick.

Another Thing Not to Do

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If you’ve got a character speaking a line of dialogue and also performing an action, don’t get into the habit of always putting the action into a participial phrase  tacked on after the dialogue tag:

“This is an important announcement,” she said, taking her place at the podium and opening her notebook.

No.  It needs to be either:

“This is an important announcement.”  She took her place at the podium and opened her notebook.

or

She took her place at the podium and opened her notebook.  “This is an important announcement.”

Save the participial phrases for occasions when the dialogue and the action are truly simultaneous:

“Listen up, people!” she snapped, slamming the notebook down on the podium.

or when the action’s mostly a bit of stage business, there for characterization or setting-establishment or pacing:

“Listen up, people,” she said, shooing away a moth that was trying to fly into the Coleman lantern.

(Who gets to decide what’s important and what’s stage-dressing?  You do.  It’s your story.  Just remember to keep on listening to what it’s telling you.  And remember, audiences like variation.)

Not Something You Hear Every Day

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Ever since the rise of the novel in the 18th century, mimetic realism has been the unmarked state for fiction in English (of fiction in other languages, I lack the authority to speak.)  Everything else is genre — science fiction, fantasy, romance, mystery, moribund genres like the western and nearly extinct ones like the nurse novel — and yes, literary fiction.  The fact that literary fiction occupies a position of high prestige doesn’t exempt it from having its own tropes and clichés and habits of thought, and doesn’t exempt it from Sturgeon’s Law.†

But it’s not often you encounter a writer of literary fiction actually admitting to the fact in public, as J. Robert Lennon does in the March 29th issue of Salon.

†Named after the science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon, to whom someone once said, “Ninety percent of science fiction is crud.” To which Sturgeon replied, “Ninety percent of everything is crud.”

Feast and Famine

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I’ve said more than once that there are two basic states in the freelancing life:  the state of too much work and the state of not enough money.  Usually it’s either one or the other, though sometimes, painfully, it can be both at once.

In theory, there should also exist a balancing state of not enough work and too much money, but I don’t think freelancers get to go there.

(Which is a roundabout way of saying that I have a backlog of editorial work that I need to get done, so for the next little while my entries here may be somewhat brief.)

Unnecessary Endings

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Thanks to the magic of home video, I finally got a chance to watch Spielberg’s Lincoln — which is not, despite its title and its director, a sprawling epic biopic.  It’s actually, for the most part, a tightly focused docudrama about the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, in which Abraham Lincoln employs every political tool in the book, up to and including bald-faced lies and outright bribes, in order to secure the crossover votes in the House of Representatives necessary to bring about the abolition of slavery.  The story ends with Mr. Lincoln leaving a gathering of his political associates in order to join Mrs. Lincoln for a night out at the theater, in a lovely moody shot of the President walking down a darkened White House corridor toward the lighted doorway at the end.

Unfortunately, the movie goes on for several minutes after that.

We get the assassination — well, actually, we get an audience at a different performance in another theatre being told that the President has just been shot.  (I suppose this was meant to be clever film-making, but it felt to me like a bait-and-switch.  Mileage, of course, may vary.) We get Mary Todd Lincoln weeping at the deathbed.  We get “Now he belongs to the ages.”  We get a final Inspiring Voiceover Montage.  And I’m damned if I know why the movie needed any of that stuff, unless it was for the historical enlightenment of the three or four people in Outer Mongolia who don’t already know that Abraham Lincoln was assassinated while watching a play at Ford’s Theater.

The whole thing reminded me of another movie with an equally unnecessary ending — First Knight, the Arthurian film with Richard Gere as Lancelot and Sean Connery as King Arthur.  Except for the assumption that any woman in possession of her right mind could possibly prefer Gere† to Connery, First Knight was a perfectly serviceable film adaptation of Chrétien de Troyes’s The Knight of the Cart, and would have worked just fine if they’d left it at that.  But the film-maker stuck a Mort D’Arthur sequence onto the end of it, presumably because nobody involved trusted the audience to remember what was going to happen a few years down the fictional road.

One of the good things about being in the business of making novels and short stories instead of films is that we can get away with putting a bit more trust in the intelligence — and the literacy — of our audience.

†Of that vintage, at least. Perversely, as Gere’s gotten older he’s acquired a kind of sleazy shopworn charm that is attractive in its own right. But I digress.