Category Archives for fiction

Albert of AdelaideAlbert of Adelaide by Howard L. Anderson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

To compare the story of a platypus in search of Old Australia to the allegedly deep, profound post-apocalyptic nihilism of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is, it may seem,  an apples-to-watermelons comparison.

But, shave off Cormac McCarthy’s layers of pretentious faux Faulknerway prose, and humans-reduced- to-pronouns nihilism, and you have the story of a journey through the heart of darkness that is just darkness and virtually no story.

With Howard L. Anderson’s Albert of Adelaide, on the other hand, you get a journey into and out of the heart of darkness, as seen through the eyes of a platypus, Albert, escaped from the Adelaide Zoo to search for a promised land known as Old Australia. What Albert finds instead is a pyromaniacal wombat, drunken bandicoots, a militia of kangaroos (bent on preserving the purity and superiority of marsupialness over other species)and various and sundry misadventures in a barren desert settlement known as the Gates of Hell.

Unlike McCarthy’s dark, soulless novel, Anderson has achieved with Albert of Adelaide what few supposedly literary novels do—give readers a story and characters to care about, even as they are committing atrocious acts of violence, and a protagonist worth caring about, as he preserves his humanity (or would that be platypussity?). Something McCarthy’s The Road, his protagonists, fails to do.

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The First Rule of Beginning a Story . . .

. . . don’t start with strangers bashing each other in the mouth or the nuts or anywhere else. “[I]f you plunge instantly into the action, you risk losing the reader,” writes Damon Knight in Creating Short Fiction. “It is hard to take much interest in absolute strangers, no matter how enthusiastically they may be bashing each other.”

Of course, there are always exceptions to the rules of Write Club, as Chuck Palahniuk demonstrates in the opening of Fight Club:

fight 2Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, after that Tyler’s pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die. For a long time though, Tyler and I were best friends. People are always asking, did I know about Tyler Durden.

Why does this beginning work, though the narrator has a gun shoved in his mouth in the hook? (Also note the comma splice. Does that work for you? Why? I like it; it speeds the beginning, alerts you to the roller coaster ride you are about to begin, and tells you you’re about to get your nose bloodied, or worse, much, much worse.) I think Palahniuk’s beginning works, because, if you are like me, you’re suddenly asking who is this person who gets you a job then shoves a gun in your mouth? What kind of psycho is this? It raises suspense.

But Knight is probably right. You have to begin a story and make the reader care about the narrator. And unless the narrator has a gun in his mouth, you probably won’t be interested. You don’t have to have someone in such dire straits to get your money for  nothing and your beginning for free. You do need tension and suspense or provoke interest, as  Knight confirms, “The opening must establish character, setting, situation, the mood and tone of the story; it must provoke interest, arouse curiosity, suggest conflict, start the movement of the plot—all this in about two hundred words.”

What do you think? What makes a good beginning?

—Todd

Writer Iain Banks Terminally Ill

A bit of literary news for you today readers. From the Guardian:

Iain Banks Diagnosed With Gall Bladder Cancer

I thoroughly enjoyed Banks’ darkly funny novel, The Wasp Factory. I haven’t read any of his SF, but I like his example of being a writer who moves between genres fluidly.

It will be a great literary loss, but here’s to Mr. Banks and his family and friends. May the rest of his days be joyful.

John Scalzi on Writing

I have to recommend John Scalzi’s blog Whatever for any writer—fiction no matter the genre (and I’m not really sure why you don’t read science fiction), non fiction, copywriting, or whatever. Not only does he share insights about writing, but also gives other writers plugs. He’s also funny.

And an example of how the SF & F community seems much more willing to pay it forward with other writers than writers in other genres.

Scalzi also recently posted an interview in which he talks about his background as a journalist and film critic, and about the most important event of his life–getting laid off at AOL and deciding to become a freelance writer. At that point he took control of his career. Something writers need to do more of, even this on.

So, enjoy this video.

—Todd

Copy editing conundrum 6: Shady Cliche and Stunted Emotions

Episode 6:

It’s been some time since I last posted a Copy Editing Conundrum. So, welcome new readers. Hope you enjoy, and are informed, as well as entertained. Although, technically today’s episode has less to do with copy editing, and much more to do with substantive editing, or perhaps injecting bad substances into published work like Hunter Thompson injected, well, everything, rather than pumping those substances out.

I found this cliche-ridden gem quoted in a Writer’s Digest article on what makes novels sell, and the excerpt is from a novel, or series of novels, that’s making the writer a J.K. Rowling-rich hack. (I write for money; I think writers should make money and a lot of it, but it still irks me that bad writing can make so much money and sell people on cheap emotions.) Anyhow, here’s the passage in question:

Okay, I like him. There, I’ve admitted it to myself. I cannot hide from my feelings anymore. I’ve never felt like this before. I find him attractive, very  attractive. But it’s a lost cause, I know, and I sigh with bittersweet regret. It was just a coincidence, his coming here. But still, I can admire him from afar, surely. No harm can come of that.

Every line is a cliche. It reminds me  of a teenage girl’s diary, or even a prepubescent girl writing about her first crush. And yet, the character is supposed to be an adult woman, confessing her darkest erotic desires. An apparently emotionally-stunted woman. (Have you guessed the bestseller?)

This is bad writing at its finest, reveling in its shiny badness. And I’m disappointed in Writer’s Digest for providing it as an example of tension-filled writing that will make your novel sell. It may help sell, but it’s not tension-filled. It’s not remotely satisfying, at least for this reader. Is this the kind of writing modern readers want, even if it is meant as escapism? I hope not. I hope it’s a passing fancy.

My advice would be to send this passage back and tell the writer to rewrite it until a real character, a real woman with genuine desires emerges from the prose.

Of course, if the whole novel reads like this one passage, the writer could churn out a novel a month, which will make the writer’s publisher happy, as long as readers are buying. And the hack will laugh all the way to the bank.

—Todd

The Romance of Carl and Bobbi Jo, or a Little Silliness Brought on by Wine

While playing around on Facebook and drinking wine  last night,  I composed this piece of flash fiction:

The Romance of Carl and Bobbi Jo

Another work day over, Bobbi Jo was too tired for having fun. She had been working in the coal mine.

Then Carl showed up. “Hey, Bobbi Jo, you want to slip on down to the Oasis?”

“Carl, you know I got friends in low, low places.”

Later that night, much much later. Both were drunk, Carl and Bobbi Jo. They stood on Bobbi Jo’s front porch, under amber light.

“Lord, I am so tired,” Bobbi Jo said.

“Too tired for having fun?” Carl said.

“No, hardly Carl.” She embraced Carl and kissed him deeply. “No, my dear, I want you to pretend you’ve been working in a coal mine.”

Carl was a bit slow, given the 42 shots of gin he had drunk. He stared at Bobbi Jo, puzzled.

“And you’re goin’ down, down.” She grinned.

Carl grinned, too. It was a pretty good night.

Even later:

“Oh, Carl, you spin me round, right round,” Bobbi Jo said.

“Right round?” Carl said.

“Like a record, baby. When you go down.”

Carl looked at the clock. “Baby, it’s five o’clock in the morning.”

 

How Many Words Must a Writer Write Down To Know He or She Has Written a Novel?

Word Count

Word Count

I once read somewhere Mark Twain kept a running word count in the margins of his manuscripts. Word counts are probably a weird obsession held largely by writers. We survive by them. Sometimes we’re paid by the number of words we write. Sometimes we use the count to measure a good day’s work, whether those words add up to a few sentences or several pages.

Word counts also tell us—somewhat arbitrarily—what sort of work we have written. Is it a Tweet (which actually is even more micro, down to the character)? Is it an essay? A short story? A novella? A novel?

A few months ago, a writer friend of mine Gerald Warfield and I shoptalked about just such things. We couldn’t come up with a solid answer. But a blog post from Writer’s Digest gives some novel advice at least, breaking down some average word counts for novels of different lengths.

The link is here. Of course, it’s not the end-all declaration of authority, but it must count for something.

—Todd

The End of the World as We Know It

After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall: A NovelAfter the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall: A Novel by Nancy Kress

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

One of the best short novels I’ve read.

I love Kress’ prose style, and the multi-voiced narrative really works well.

From Locus magazine (June 2012):

“In addition to being a graduate level class on how and why non-linear story structures work, After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall is a swift and engaging story about the end of the world as we know it.”

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Happy Birthday Mr. Faulkner

” ‘. . .Now I want you to tell me just one thing more. Why do you hate the South?’

” ‘I don’t hate it,’ Quentin said, quickly, at once, immediately; ‘I don’t hate it,’ he said. I dont hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark; I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont!”

It’s the last lines of William Faulkner’s (1897 to 1962) Absalom, Absalom! that provoked my master’s thesis. At the time, I wanted to know why Quentin Compson committed suicide in The Sound and The Fury, and I thought I had found my answer in a novel published about 10 years later.

Admittedly, now, as I look back at that quote, what really stirred me was my own conflicted view of my state—Texas—I didn’t hate it. I didn’t. And I don’t. I do hate what people outside of the state often think of it: that all of Texas is wrapped up in the TV series Dallas.

I don’t wear a Stetson cowboy hat, and I’ve owned only two pair of cowboy boots in my lifetime. I’ve never connived against my family for an oil fortune, because I’ve never had an oil fortune, or any fortune for that matter. I’m not a fan of big oil as it is, but, at the same time, I do—mostly—love the Dallas Cowboys and the Houston Texans; I love football, which is as much a religion here as evangelical Christianity, which I despise.

I love the state that was once a nation, and the ruggedness of the women and men who came here to forge it. I love its myths. I love that I can walk the bed of the Paluxy River in Glen Rose and see dinosaur tracks embedded there for eons. I can also shake my head at the absurdity of the creationist museum just a few miles down the road. That’s Texas.

It must’ve been a similar ambivalence that Faulkner felt about the South, about his native Mississippi, when he wrote Quentin’s protest. For Quentin protests too much. I can’t say for sure what Faulkner felt. I only know what I read.

And what I read as a writer sparked my imagination, enlivened my passion for words when I read those flowing sentences so wrapped up in the cadences of the King James Bible and Shakespeare and the lilt of the Southern voice so distinct in the audio recording of Faulkner’s Nobel speech—an inspiring speech about humanity and its ability to endure.

At the heart of Faulkner is not darkness; it’s humanity enduring in spite of itself.

“They endured,” Faulkner writes of the black servant Dilsey and her family in a later edition of The Sound and The Fury.

I would like to hope it is our fate as human beings. To endure.

Maybe one day, when the proverbial aliens make us pets in a dome (as they do in Nancy Kress’ wonderful SF novel After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall) that those aliens, when writing our history can say of us: We endured.