Category: Books and Reading

Peeve of the Day

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Another thing a lot of writers get wrong:  cold.

Film and television writers are particularly bad in this regard, possibly because so many of them live in southern California, where cold is something that you make a day trip to visit and then drive home again.  But they aren’t the only ones.

Cold — true cold — isn’t charming and picturesque.  It’s dangerous and debilitating; it drains your energy and makes you stupid and has no compunction about killing you dead.

A few writers have gotten it right, notably Jack London in “To Build a Fire.” (The fantasy novelist Sean Stewart also got it right, in an elegant homage to London’s work that appears in his novel The Night Watch.)

Further Causes of Reader Disgruntlement: Tone/Plot Mismatch

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Sometimes, clothing the plot of one kind of story in the tone of a different and contrasting kind of story can  produce startling and unusual effects that give pleasure to the reader.  Other times . . .  well, at other times, the reader is more likely to conclude that the writer was trying to be clever, and failing.  This tends to make the reader unhappy.  (See John Scalzi on the failure mode of clever.)

This was brought home to me when I watched the 2009 film Duplicity, a complexly-plotted movie about corporate espionage and double-dealing which left me sufficiently disgruntled that I spent most of a long drive home from the movie theater trying to figure out what had gone wrong.  My ultimate conclusion, at least as far as my own disgruntlement was concerned, was that the tone and the plot of the film didn’t match. The tone was romantic comedy with a side order of intrigue, while the plot more properly belonged to a Cold War era spy thriller in the Le Carre or Deighton mode — the sort of film that gets shot with a monochrome filter and you count it a win if anybody even vaguely likeable is still alive when the credits roll.

The proper ending for a romantic comedy/caper flick is for the sympathetic characters to finish it up drinking champagne and eating strawberries and chocolate in bed on high-thread-count sheets in a luxury hotel someplace with no extradition treaties. Nothing else counts as a win. With a Cold War spy thriller, just having the sympathetic characters (if there even are any) come out of things alive at the finish is enough to keep it from being a stone downer, and alive-and-together is enough to count as a win.

Similarly, the reader of a Cold War thriller will accept betrayals and skullduggery and sympathetic people doing morally-ambiguous things because the fate of nations is at stake — if things go wrong enough, it won’t just be a few people sold out and bleeding, it’ll be whole armies of them, and civilians as well.  The reader of a romantic comedy is unlikely to be as accepting.

(Does this mean you should never play mix-and-match with tone and plot?  No.  It means that if you’re going to do it, be certain you can carry it off — and keep in mind the consequences of the failure mode.)

Peeve of the Day

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Today’s peeve falls into the Annoying Plot Developments category.

Say you’ve got a character who has been told by the bad guys, “Don’t go to the police or else very bad things will happen.”  Or a character who is being pressured or blackmailed by the bad guys into doing something that will jeopardize their relationship with their one true (and presumably competent) love.

Do they, at that point, go straight to the authorities or the one true love and say:

Sirs/My Darling [as appropriate]–

The villainous kidnappers/my wicked uncle [as appropriate]

Want/wants me to steal government secrets/hide him in the hayloft [as appropriate]

Which will naturally cause you to believe that I am a spy/am meeting a secret lover [as appropriate]

No, they do not.  And a goodly chunk of the middle of the novel is taken up with the resulting unnecessary running-around — which may have been the reason for the annoying plot development in the first place.  But it is a sloppy and clichéd way to handle the problem, and your readers deserve better.

What He Said.

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I was going to write a post about this:  ‘Libraries Have Had Their Day,’ Says ‘Horrible Histories’ Author.

But then I went on the road for a week, and when I came back the estimable John Scalzi was already on the case:  A Personal History of Libraries.

I can’t help but think that there are two kinds of people who believe that shutting down public libraries is a good idea:  the ones who, not being bookish people themselves, have no idea how important libraries are to people, bookish or otherwise, on limited budgets; and the ones who know exactly how important library access is to such people, and have their own selfish reasons for wanting to deny it to them.

(We need a better class of robber baron for this new Gilded Age of ours.  At least Andrew Carnegie built libraries, instead of trying to tear them down.)

If Wishes Were Horses

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Two things I wish that writers wouldn’t do:

Tell readers what, and how, they should think about their books.  Believe me, I understand the impulse.  One of the hardest things to accept, if you’re a writer, is that once your story is out there loose in the world, you have absolutely no control over how other people incorporate it into their own heads. The readers who excoriate you for crimes you had no idea you were committing are bad enough; the ones who really like your books for reasons you find repulsive are even worse; and sometimes the urge to tell everybody that They’re Doing It Wrong becomes well-nigh insurmountable.

Go back and rewrite their earlier works to make them better.   I can understand this impulse, as well.  We all like to think that we’ve improved in our art since we started working at it, and our novice-writer gaucheries can make us wince.  But rewriting one’s early stuff to bring it up to standard doesn’t usually improve it enough to make it worth the loss of the energy and reckless endeavor that often characterize newbie work.  (I know there are things that I tried to do, and at least came close to carrying off, in my early stuff that I wouldn’t attempt to do now because I know how low the odds are for success.)

As for writers who go back and revise their earlier work to bring it more into line with their later political or philosophical convictions . . . they depress me.  Sure, you don’t think that way now, I want to say to them; but an earlier version of you once did.  Trying to bring those thoughts and words around to the current standard always strikes me as like trying to kill that earlier you.

Peeve of the Day

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I don’t like novels or short stories where the author deliberately withholds stuff from the reader.

I’m not talking about mysteries, where part of the fun is in the puzzle and in the timing of the revelations; also, part of the thematic point of most mystery novels — even more than questions of innocence and guilt and justice — is the revelation of truth.  I’m talking about stories where there is something significant about one of the characters, or about some aspect of the general milieu of the story, or about the resolution, that the author clearly knows but doesn’t choose to tell, instead toying with the reveal like a fan dancer in the burlesque.

Stories where the gender of the main character or first person narrator is kept hidden — especially if it’s revealed, gotcha!-fashion, at the end — are a particular irritant as far as I’m concerned.  This, I will admit, is mostly a matter of personal taste, since I have known discriminating readers for whom such stories were like catnip to a Siamese.  And it’s not even an absolute thing with me; I’m quite fond of the mystery novels of the late Sarah Caudwell, who never did reveal the gender of their first-person narrator, Professor Hilary Tamar.  (I always pictured Professor Tamar as looking rather like an anthropomorphic sheep as drawn by Sir John Tenniel for a missing scene from Alice in Wonderland . . . in the absence of data, the human mind does strange things.)  But Caudwell is a case of good writing plus good story trumping almost everything else; but a story that isn’t top-notch in both those areas is going to lose me before it goes very far.

Almost as irritating, where I’m concerned, are stories where the resolution is left open, in “The Lady or the Tiger” fashion, especially when the story seems to be offering the reader a deliberate ambiguity in order to establish some sort of literary street cred.  Again, some people find endings like that to be right down their alley; I’m just not one of them.  Instead, such endings make me cranky and resentful, because I always suspect in my heart that the author knows the true ending and is deliberately holding out on me — I think it’s because, as a writer, I can’t imagine not knowing the true ending of something I’ve written.

The moral of the story, if there is one:  Don’t ever be accidentally ambiguous.  If you’re going to do it, do it on purpose, in the full awareness that you’re probably going to lose some of your audience that way, and in the firm belief that whatever you’re trying to do or say with your story is worth the risk.

The Fire in Fantasy Rant

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In honor of the first day of December, a few words on a subject near to my heart (or to my chilly feet and fingers, anyhow):

One of the persistent errors of cheap genre fantasy (along with horses that are really motorcycles and ships that have late 19th-century rigging and construction in an early-medieval environment) is a complete unawareness of how complicated a process heating with wood actually is.  The way fantasy characters build and light fires in the mere blink of a subordinate clause, you’d think they were using gas logs or an electric space heater.  What’s worse, once the fire is going nobody pays it a bit of attention thereafter.

Well, the first twelve years we lived in our current house, we heated it by means of a wood-burning furnace lurking like Moloch down in the basement, and I can tell you from experience that it doesn’t work that way.  Even with the aid of matches and butane-powered firestarters and similar modern innovations, building a fire is still a fiddly process, involving a lot of messing around with tinder and kindling and carefully putting two or three bigger sticks on top of the resulting tiny blaze — which just went out, so you have to start over with the tinder and kindling and then the two or three bigger sticks again — and then you have to keep the smaller sticks going until the bigger ones catch fire, and then you can start putting on some serious logs and if you’re careful and put the structure together right the first time the logs won’t crush the whole thing and snuff it out — and God help you if you’ve got wet or green wood, because then the whole process is going to take twice as long and put out only half as much heat.

And once the fire’s actually going you have to keep feeding it more logs at regular intervals, and — especially in an open fireplace — keep rearranging the logs so that they’ll burn better, not to mention periodically clearing out the ashes. (Which in a pre-modern society would be saved for soapmaking and other uses, but which these days are a pure nuisance to get rid of.)

A wizard with a reliable fire-starting spell could probably eat for free at any kitchen table in the kingdom.  Especially if he had a reliable flea-and-bedbug-eradicator in his other pocket.

Causes of Reader Disgruntlement: an Intermittent Series

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(“Intermittent” meaning, “I’ll deal with them as I think of them.”)

We will assume, for the moment, that you don’t want your readers disgruntled; that you want to keep them pleased with your work so that they will, you hope, keep wanting more of it.  I will grant that there are writers whose goal, at least for a particular piece of writing, is something other than pleasing the reader — the desired effect may be a justifiable anger at the system, or a fuller understanding of the futility of it, or something else along that line — but for the purposes of this blog I’m assuming a less rarefied, but more common, goal.

One of the primary causes of reader disgruntlement is simply this:  The reader feels that the author has not fulfilled the implied promises he or she made at the start of the story.

For an example, let us consider a popular novel in the romance genre.  I’m using romance as an example not because I have anything against romance novels — far from it; I read them even though I don’t have the knack of writing them — but because a typical romance novel is as formal in its structure as a sonnet.  There will be A Heroine; there will be A Hero; the primary action of the novel will involve their relationship, its Trials and Misunderstandings and Ultimate Consummation (with all-out steamy sex or with a single significant kiss, depending upon the overall hotness level of the text); and there will be a Happily Ever After.  A story that lacks one of these things may be a failed romance novel, or it may be something that only looks on the surface like a romance novel — but readers who picked it up and read it in the understanding that what they were getting actually was a romance novel are not going to be pleased.

They will, in fact, be severely disgruntled.

It’s possible, of course, that the author of the story intended to subvert the romance paradigm in exactly that manner — but the intended audience in that case is not the community of romance readers, but the community of readers who derive pleasure from subverted or inverted or otherwise tinkered-with paradigms.  (Who can get just as disgruntled if they’re promised a subversive experience and don’t actually get one.)  Someone who’s been promised a steak doesn’t want artfully manipulated tofu, any more than a committed vegetarian wants to be slipped a piece of meat unawares.

About the only way a writer can get away with not delivering what was, by implication, promised is by giving the reader something even better — and not just any something even better, but the kind of something better than a reader who had his or her mouth set for the original dish is also going to like.

(Nobody ever said this job was going to be easy.)

 

A Literary Blast from the Past

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To be specific, it’s the original contract between Harper&Brothers — one of the ancestor firms of current publisher HarperCollins — and Herman Melville for Moby-Dick.

Publishing contracts haven’t changed all that much since then; they’ve just gotten longer and more complex.  Melville, wisely, had representation, in the person of his-brother-the-lawyer.  (Literary agents in the modern sense — if Wikipedia is to be believed — didn’t become common until the 1880’s, and Moby-Dick was published in 1851.)

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.)