Category: Books and Reading

They Can’t All be Winners

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It happens to every reader at least once . . . they pick up the hot new thing that everyone’s talking about, or the landmark classic that everyone says is a must-read, and as far as they’re concerned it might as well be a plate of spinach.  And not the yummy kind that goes into spinach-egg-and-bacon salad, or Something Delicious Florentine, or white lasagna.   No, it’s the limp and bitter kind that gets served up from cafeteria steam tables to defenseless schoolchildren who decide on the basis of the available evidence that spinach isn’t a vegetable, it’s a plot against humanity. Samuel Pepys hit the nail on the head, back in the 1600s:

And so to a booksellers in the Strand, and there bought Hudibras again, it being certainly some ill humour to be so against that which all the world cries up to be the example of wit; for which I am resolved once again to read him, and see whether I can find it or no.

I’m betting he probably didn’t.

It wasn’t Hudibras that did it, in my case, but I’ve certainly had the experience of just not getting the appeal of whatever it is that everybody of my acquaintance currently seems to like. I tried Dune three times – once in high school, once in college, and once in grad school – before deciding that whatever its attraction, I was constitutionally immune.

Middlemarch is another one that didn’t work for me.  I got fifty pages into it, looked at the four hundred and fifty more pages of painfully small type waiting for me up ahead, and said to myself, “Life is too short for this.  I will take my chances with the Cliff Notes.”  But I know that it’s not the book, it’s me, because no book can be a match for every reader.  I’ve got at least one good friend whose taste in many ways marches with mine, who loves Middlemarch with a passion; on the other hand, she can’t stand Moby-Dick, which I love.

(I try to remember this truth when somebody doesn’t like something I’ve written.  Occasionally I even succeed.)

 

Opening Moves

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Some of my favorite first lines:

There once was a tall, skinny, straggly-bearded old wizard named Prospero, and not the one you are thinking of, either.
– John Bellairs, The Face in the Frost

There was a man named Mord whose surname was Fiddle; he was the son of Sigvat the Red, and he dwelt at the “Vale” in the Rangrivervales.
– Njal’s Saga

I love this saga. It’s a long way from Mord Fiddle to Njal Thorgeirsson and all his sons getting burned alive in their house, and it’s all interesting. Some people speak dismissively of the Icelandic sagas as being about nothing but “fighting and flytings”, to which all I can reply is, “Yes. And your point is?” I have low tastes, I suppose.

Listen! We have heard of the glory of the kings of the Spear-Danes in days gone by….
–Beowulf

Beowulf is one of those furniture-of-the-mind books, for me – along with Njal, it was part of my introduction to the Northern Thing, and had I never read it, I would probably be somebody else entirely than I am today.

In summer all right-minded boys built huts in the furze-hill behind the College–little lairs whittled out of the heart of the prickly bushes, full of stumps, odd root-ends, and spikes, but, since they were strictly forbidden, palaces of delight.
– Rudyard Kipling, Stalky & Co.

Although my very favorite Stalky line comes later on: “You’ve been here six years and you expect things to be fair? My hat, Beetle, you are a blooming idiot!” For some reason, it gave me great comfort during my own high school years.

Stalky in general did; there’s nothing like the confirmation that somebody else’s school days were even worse.

Mr. C(lavius) F(rederick) Earbrass is, of course, the well-known novelist.
Edward Gorey, The Unstrung Harp; or, Mr. Earbrass Writes a Novel

This is the single most truthful book about writing that there is. Period. Favorite line, at least this week (concerning the conversation at a literary reception): “The talk deals with disappointing sales, inadequate publicity, worse than inadequate royalties, idiotic or criminal reviews, others’ declining talent, and the unspeakable horror of the literary life.” As they say in some quarters: Word.

Call me Ishmael.
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

Moby-Dick is one of the major exceptions to my general lack of fondness for modern novels – but then, considered as a modern novel Moby-Dick is a weird and atypical specimen, and I suspect that the things I like about it are the things that make it atypical. I like the long digressions about whales and whalefishing, for example; in a science fiction novel, that would be the point where the author takes a break to spend a couple of pages talking about the hyperdrive equations.

Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans.
Homer, The Iliad

I know it looks pretentious, but I honestly did read the Iliad – in a prose translation, to be sure, but the whole thing and not some wimpy version expurgated or redacted for the kiddies – when I was twelve, and it blew the top of my head off for weeks.

This is the story of the different ways we looked for treasure, and I think when you have read it you will see that we were not lazy about the looking.
E. Nesbit, The Story of the Treasure Seekers

I like all of E. Nesbit’s stuff, both the fantastical – especially The Enchanted Castle – and the non-fantastical, like this one. Never mind that this is a children’s book; Oswald Bastable is one of the great narrative voices in English prose fiction.

I suppose that the high-water mark of my youth in Columbus, Ohio, was the night the bed fell on my father.
James Thurber, My Life and Hard Times

James Thurber is one of my Style Gods – Thurber, and the Icelandic Sagas, which has to be one of the more warped pairs in the history of literary influences, but there you are.

Hazards of the Course: Endings

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It happens with any long-running and popular sequence of stories, whether it’s a film trilogy, a television show, or a series of novels. The final entry in the sequence could cure cancer, end world hunger, and bring about peace in our time, and people still wouldn’t like it.

I call it the Write-Your-Own-Ending effect. Fans of any long-running series – whatever the medium – are going to invest themselves heavily in their own ideas/speculations/opinions about how the series ought to end. Satisfying all of them at once is going to be impossible. Satisfying any one of them completely is going to be almost as hard, since there’s always going to be something left over that doesn’t please. (“He/she never thanked him/her for this/that/the other damned thing!” “Why wasn’t so-and-so part of the Big Group Hug at the end?” “The ending was all about Titular Hero! Joe/Jane Sidekick barely got a mention! That just goes to show that Titular Hero really is a jerk, just like all us Joe/Jane Sidekick fans were saying all along!” And so on and on.)

The longer the dedicated readers or viewers have been waiting for the conclusion, the stronger the effect is going to be.  Because they will not have been waiting passively all that time — they will have been making their own ending in their heads while they waited.  Some of them will have actually gone so far as to commit their endings to pixels or paper; but even those who don’t take that final step have still been thinking and speculating and developing their own opinions about how things ought to turn out.  So when it comes time for them to evaluate the actual conclusion to the work, they’re not just going to be holding it up against the previously existing material to see how well it fits — they’re also going to be holding it up against their own internally-developed Best Possible Ending, and the further it deviates from that ending, the more unhappy they’re going to be.

Where You Buy Books

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This is not a post where I wax nostalgic for the small independent bookstores of old.  The reason for this is that I didn’t grow up in Boston or New York or Philadelphia (fine cities that they all are), or in any of the other big cities that actually supported independent bookstores back in those days.  I grew up in a medium-sized small town in north Texas, about eighty miles north of where Dallas was back then — these days, it’s urban sprawl almost the whole way, covering what used to be good farmland where you could raise winter wheat and Black Angus cattle, and that’s one of the reasons I don’t go back to Texas any more.  And back then, there was no independent bookstore closer than the Doubleday store in the Northpark Mall.

What we did have, in that small town, was a corner news stand, which is another thing that’s vanished with the passing years.  It sold the local newspaper, and the Dallas and Fort Worth newspapers, and national papers like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and the Christian Science Monitor, and magazines both respectable and raffish, and cigars and cigarettes and chewing gum, and paperback books in wire spinner racks.  Once a month, on the first Monday, the owner would put up the new science fiction and fantasy releases — I know it was the first Monday, because after my best friend and I had been conspicuously haunting and combing over those spinner racks in search of new stuff for several months, the owner told us so.  After that, we made a point of showing up every first Monday like a two-person horde of book-hungry locusts.

I think, in retrospect, that the bookstore owner must himself have been a science fiction fan, or at least a regular reader in the genre, because he stocked all the new releases from all the houses then publishing sf and fantasy, and also stocked all the major sf magazines — F&SF, Analog, and Galaxy, in those days, plus Galaxy‘s kid sibling, If — and the four or five second-tier mags as well.

Later, of course, our town got its own shopping mall, a small one shared with the next town over, but enough to support a B. Dalton’s with a lot more shelf space for paperbacks than the corner news stand (where the sf and fantasy spinner rack had occupied a couple of square feet near the back of the store, right next to the soft-core porn.)   Later still, I left Texas to live in places that actually had small independently-owned specialty bookstores catering to a variety of tastes.

But the wire racks at Triangle News, and the books I found on them — The Hobbit;  A Wizard of Earthsea; The Witches of Karres; Babel-17; The Moon is a Harsh Mistress; so many of the works that made me into a reader, and later a writer, of science fiction and fantasy — remain close to my heart.

Chewed and Digested

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Books that influenced my life in one way or another (in no particular order):

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
I encountered this book in fifth grade – pulled it off the shelf in the school library because the title intrigued me – and ran head on into symbolism and allegory for the very first time at the Stone Table. I’m immensely grateful, in retrospect, that I didn’t have anybody around to explain things to me, because noticing and figuring out all the connections made the top of my head come off, in a good way: I’d never had any idea, before then, that you could do that sort of thing with a story. For a long time afterward, it felt like this nifty thing about the book that nobody knew but me.

Little Women
Because, of course, I wanted to grow up and be a writer, like Jo March. (Be careful what you wish for. You may get it.)

The Iliad and The Three Musketeers
I think of these as a pair, because I read them both in the sixth grade, in unabridged translations, and  between them they shaped my expectations of great literature . . . I think I was lost to the modern  mainstream at that point. After that, I wanted grand themes, and larger-than-life characters, and panache. I  loved the Odyssey, too, but it didn’t move into my brain and take over large chunks of its processing power for several days after the first reading, the way the Iliad did. Although Odysseus was, in some ways, one of my  first literary crushes – I was then as I am now, a sucker for brainy heroes.

My Life and Hard Times
James Thurber became one of my style gods early on. I think that by the time I graduated from high school I’d already read through most of his available works at least once, and by the time I graduated from college I had whole swathes of it memorized.

Ordeal in Otherwhere
The first science fiction novel I read with the conscious awareness that it was a science fiction novel. After that, I read pretty much all of Andre Norton that I could track down.

The Miracle of Language
This was a paperback edition of a popular book on historical and structural linguistics, and how it came to be in stock on the wire rack in the local newsstand that was all my small Texas hometown had for a bookstore, I’ll never know. But I found it, one summer while I was in high school, and it was my first  introduction to linguistics as a scholarly discipline. If one of the key experiences of adolescence is that moment when you realize that your elders have been lying to you all along about something – well, this book did it for me. I read it, and I realized (with the traditional unforgiving clarity) that all the stuff that they’d been telling me for years in English class about the way the language worked was Wrong, and that yes (cue the light bulbs and fireworks!), some of the insights I’d had all along were Right. I’ve been a language nut ever since.

Dragons, Elves, and Heroes
Lin Carter’s anthology for Ballantine Books of excerpts from the medieval source and analogue material for Tolkien’s works. I read the anthology because I’d read LOTR, but after I read the anthology I became interested in the source materials for their own sake. It was, more even than Tolkien’s work itself, the thing that kicked me in the direction of becoming a medievalist.

In Search of Wonder
Damon Knight’s collection of critical essays about science fiction. I found it in the university library my freshman year, and read it repeatedly. It did more to inform my science fictional literary aesthetic than almost anything else.

A Wizard of Earthsea
I read this one during the summer between high school and college, and (like The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, earlier) it made the top of my head come off. None of the others in the sequence ever quite measured up to it, and by the time LeGuin got around to Tehanu I found myself wishing she’d left well enough alone several books back . . . but that first book was a wonder.

Thinking About Criticism

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Writers — as I should know, being one — have a tendency to regard literary critics as, at best, players for the other side.  They spend their time, the writer’s mind insists, in pointing out the flaws and failures of more creative minds; the novelist and poet Robert Graves summed up the writers’ argument most memorably in his poem “Ogres and Pygmies.”

It is, I suppose, an unavoidable problem with literary criticism: without meaning to, it gives pride of place to those texts which are productive of analysis. There’s a lot more that can be said about something complex, knotty, and variously flawed than can be said about something clear and simple and damn-near perfect. “Wow. You have got to read this!” is an honest response, and one most if not all writers would give their eye teeth to produce in their readers, but it never got anybody tenure.

But it helps, I think, to remind oneself that hidden inside every piece of literary criticism, no matter how labored or abstruse, is another voice saying, “This nifty bit of writing — let me show you it!”

Guest Post: Learning Curves

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[Today’s post is a guest post, courtesy of Alice Loweecey, because I’m on the road this weekend.]

Learning Curves: They’re Not for the Timid

I’m a mystery writer. Well, not initially. From a wee age I wrote horror. Love the stuff. Started watching Hammer films with my dad when I was five. (Christopher Lee as Dracula can’t be beat.) Love dystopian post-nuke books too. So when I decided to pursue the dream, my first completed book was a post-apocalyptic horror.

That was a learning curve. I rewrote it four times.

Then I wrote a mystery. Which is nothing like writing horror. Learning curve #2. I discovered the joy that is outlining. I knew that I had to plant clues and remember where and when I planted them.

The good thing about the frequent and steep learning curves is that they taught me how to write tight, clean prose with 3-D characters. Those skills helped me get an agent and a three-book deal with the ex-nun Private Eye mystery. You can see their covers here: Force of Habit, Back in the Habit (both in stores now), and Veiled Threat (hits stores 2/8/13).

More characters moved into my head. YA characters.

I’m a mystery writer, I told them. They wouldn’t shut up. I’m a horror writer, I told them. Adult horror. Adult mystery. They ignored me and kept on yammering. I had to shut them up.

Learning curve #3: YA.

And I thought horror-to-mystery was steep and rocky. Hahahahaha!

I broke it down into manageable steps. First: Head to the library and read two dozen current YA books. Because these characters told me they lived in a post-cataclysmic dystopian Buffalo and Niagara Falls, I chose dystopian, paranormal, and UF books.

For one month, I read YA, taking notes on the differences between YA and adult. This placated the characters in my head.

The biggest differences were voice and speed. I’d forgotten that everything is life or death during the teenage years. How important what other people think about you is. How much you obsess over that and clothes and boys and parents and… everything.

The pace of YA is often much faster than adult fic. I saw less introspection and more action. Fewer gab sessions and more Run! Attack! Regroup! Sneak a kiss! moments. Not to say that the latter aren’t to be found in adult fic—not at all. But overall more things happen, and happen faster, in YA.

After I immersed myself in current YA, I returned to my never-fail creation tool: Character Charts. I use the ones from Randy Ingermanson’s Snowflake Method. I have the full version, which was part of my very first large writer’s conference. (Did I say learning curve? That was an eye-opening weekend.)

I start a new book with the MC, his/her love interest/partner, the antagonist, and a short pitch line. When I open the character chart and start with the basics—name, age, height, weight, description—the characters really begin talking to me. They look at the 30-plus items in the chart and tell me what they read and listen to, what they wear and where they work. What their dreams and fear are. This is how I learn about them and the plot—because what they tell me often shows me important plot points.

This was the familiar part of writing YA, because I do the exact same thing for an adult book. So was the next part—writing the outline.

Outlines aren’t for everyone. I pantsed my first book. But once I outlined a mystery, I was hooked. Some writers say that outlining the book from start to finish takes all the excitement out of it. For me, it’s like a basic knitting pattern. I know the measurements, but what I do with yarn and pattern stitches is new every time.

I kept the outline (an Excel spreadsheet) open in one window and the character charts open in another. New characters jumped into the outline as I wrote it, so I created a character chart for them. Items to research got their own column in the spreadsheet. Whenever I got stuck in the plot process, I switched to research.

Learning curve #4: What’s okay in adult fic isn’t necessarily okay in YA.

Yep, that means explicitness. When the book was ready to send to beta readers, they all advised me to tone it down. That meant the language and a few bits of nookie and innuendo that wouldn’t be a problem in an adult book. My agent had me tone it down even further—twice.

While I was still mulling this book over in my head, I talked to some writer friends who wrote extensively in YA. Their unanimous piece of advice was: Get deep into the MC’s head. Which led to…

Learning curve #5: First person.

All my other books (4 at the time of writing this YA) were in close third. I like close third. It’s my preferred reading and writing choice This YA started out in close third, and it was… wrong. The MC wasn’t alive. The story was flat. The dialogue was stilted. Everything stopped with a whump. I realized why a lot of YA was written in first. It lets the reader dive into the MC’s head and experience everything just as he or she is. I realized it worked especially well with YA’s faster pace.

So I looked first person in the eye and said: I will conquer you. I went back to the library and found half a dozen current YAs in first person. I put the WIP away and read all the books. Then I started over.

My MC opened her mouth and her story came alive. Her world, her family, her fears, her dreams. Four months later, I had a finished book. A month after that, I had beta comments and a revised draft to send to my agent.

That book is on sub to editors now—the final step to achieving the Holy Grail: A book deal

The learning curve—curves, plural—were worth it, no question. I’m a more skillful writer because of it. When (never ‘if’!) the YA sells, I have ideas for at least two sequels. Right now I’m writing a paranormal romance with a touch of steampunk. It’s not YA. But my next book could be. It all depends on who invades my head. And I’ll be able to write it because I didn’t back down from the learning curves.

Alice Loweecey is a former nun who went from the convent to playing prostitutes on stage to accepting her husband’s marriage proposal on the second date. Her teenage sons clamor for dramatic cameos in future books, but she’s thinking they’ll make good Redshirts. She is a member of Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime. Visit her website at www.aliceloweecey.com and check out her books on her author pages at Amazon.com and at Barnes and Noble.

Reading like a Writer

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If you want to be a writer, they say, you first have to be a reader.

And it’s true.  We learn our craft by emulation, observing those who came before us and patterning our works on theirs, taking what they’ve left us for our foundations and building new structures out of our own material.  But before we start reading as writers, with one eye always turned toward observing how the thing is done, we read purely as an audience, as most people who are not themselves writers read — and we lose this, I think, once we learn to read as writers.

Mark Twain knew the phenomenon, though he first encountered it in his days as an apprentice riverboat pilot.  In Life on the Mississippi, he writes of observing a beautiful sunset on the river, and then of watching the same sunset as a pilot would see it:

I stood like one bewitched. I drank it in, in a speechless rapture. The world was new to me, and I had never seen anything like this at home. But as I have said, a day came when I began to cease from noting the glories and the charms which the moon and the sun and the twilight wrought upon the river’s face; another day came when I ceased altogether to note them. Then, if that sunset scene had been repeated, I should have looked upon it without rapture, and should have commented upon it, inwardly, after this fashion: This sun means that we are going to have wind to-morrow; that floating log means that the river is rising, small thanks to it; that slanting mark on the water refers to a bluff reef which is going to kill somebody’s steamboat one of these nights, if it keeps on stretching out like that; those tumbling ‘boils’ show a dissolving bar and a changing channel there; the lines and circles in the slick water over yonder are a warning that that troublesome place is shoaling up dangerously; that silver streak in the shadow of the forest is the ‘break’ from a new snag, and he has located himself in the very best place he could have found to fish for steamboats; that tall dead tree, with a single living branch, is not going to last long, and then how is a body ever going to get through this blind place at night without the friendly old landmark.

No, the romance and the beauty were all gone from the river. All the value any feature of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it could furnish toward compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat.

What he had gained in knowledge, he had lost in the ability to see the river as a naive observer.  Writers suffer a similar loss; it makes us tend to admire technical virtuosity, or the ability to carry off what we know is a difficult effect, or a piece of well-managed complexity, and keeps us from experiencing the text in the same way as a non-writing reader would experience it.

Which wouldn’t be a problem, except for the fact that those non-writing readers, in most cases, are the audience that we’re writing for.   So we need to keep firm control of the temptation to play complicated games with our text for the sake of amusing and impressing our fellow writers; or if we must play games, we should remember to give the rest of our audience value for money as well.

On the Danger of Confusing Literary Criticism with Real Life

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There are differences between the two, and they are crucial.

Difference #1: Literary criticism deals with texts; real life deals with people. Texts have no feelings, and can be taken apart and examined from all angles without feeling the slightest pain. People, on the other hand, are apt to find such operations intrusive, especially when performed upon them without prior invitation. Nor does the deconstruction of one text cause sympathetic pain in other texts that happen to share a common author, or reside upon the same shelf.

Difference #2: In literary criticism, authorial intent matters somewhere between very little and not at all. (Since most of history’s authors are dead and beyond interrogation, this perhaps makes a virtue of necessity; but I digress.) In real life, intention matters a very great deal; it is the difference, for example, between accidentally spilling some oil on the basement stairs, and deliberately greasing them.

The Good, The Bad, and the Completely Off the Wall: Thinking about Reviews

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If you’re a writer, you’re going to get bad reviews.  That’s just the way it is.  Bad reviews come with the life.  If ten people read your book and nine of them like it, you’ll be lucky if one of the nine bothers to say as much in public.  The tenth guy, though, the one who found your book so little to his liking that it made his eyes cross and steam come out of his ears . . . that guy will tell all of his friends.  And write about it in his blog.  And quite possibly send you a personal letter.

To which you, if you are wise, will not respond, because arguing in public with critics and reviewers seldom makes a writer look good.  But while you’re sitting there biting down on your typing fingers to keep from posting a reply, you can distract yourself by figuring out exactly which kind of bad review you’ve got.

The simplest kind of bad review is the one where the reader just plain didn’t like your book.  There’s no point in resenting this one; chalk it up to payback for all the books out there — some of them entirely worthy, some of them vouched for by readers whose taste you respect — that you just plain didn’t like, either.

Then there’s the reader who’s mad at your book because it wasn’t the book he or she wanted to read.  It had romance elements, and your reader doesn’t like having a gratuitous love interest interfering with the plot.  Or it didn’t have any romance elements, and your reader thinks that a story without any romantic or sexual interest in it leaves out a major part of the human experience.  Or your story had not enough politics in it, or it had too much.  Or you wrote an entire book about Subject X without ever mentioning Other Subject Y.  It’s harder not to resent this one, because you worked damned hard on that book, including making the tough choices about which things, out of a near-infinity of things, you could put in, and which ones you would have to leave out, and it’s never any fun to be told that you’ve done it all wrong.

From there, you move on to the reader who seems to have read, and disliked, a completely different book from the one you know that you wrote.  There’s not much you can do about that kind of bad review, except to  conclude that your reader must have put on the wrong set of spectacles before turning to Chapter One.

Worst of all, though, is the completely wrongheaded good review, the one where the reviewer likes your book for all the wrong reasons, or for virtues that you could have sworn it never exhibited.   Complaining about this one feels like kicking puppies.