Category Archives for novels

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

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

Pollysyllabic Spree End of Year update

New Year’ Eve 2011 update of Books Bought, Books Read (with commentary as warranted):

Books bought since Oct. 1, 2011:

  • The Edge of Reason by Melinda Snodgrass (An excellent, fast-paced urban fantasy novel featuring a battle between magic and reason.)
  • Healthy Aging: A Lifelong Guide to Your Well-Being by Andrew Weil, M.D. (Has a good exercise routine for us old farts.)
  • Wild Cards, Volume One, edited by George R.R. Martin (A collaborative novel-in-stories about alien viruses, a foppish alien, jokers—and maybe some smoker and midnight tokers—and reluctant superheroes know as Aces. Currently reading this novel. Interesting that SF and fantasy novelists, as well as other genre novelists seem to collaborate and create. Something not often seen with “literary” fiction.)
  • Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain (Who wouldn’t want to be as cool, well-fed and well traveled as Bourdain?)
  • Forty Signs of Rain by Kim Stanley Robinson
  • Metaphase by Vonda McIntyre (third in her Starfarers series)
  • The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Twenty-fifth Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois
  • Year’s Best SF 9, edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer
  • The Edge of Ruin by Melinda Snodgrass (second in her Edge series)
  • Marsbound, Starbound and Earthbound by Joe Haldeman (a trilogy)
  • Make a Scene: Crafting a Powerful Story One Scene at a Time by Jordan Rosenfeld
  • World-Building: A Writer’s guide to constructing star systems and life-supporting planets by Stephen L. Gillett
  • A Novel in a Year by Louise Doughty
  • Creative Visualization by Shakti Gawain

In the SF Masterworks series:

  • Babel-17 by Samuel Delany (My first of Delany’s novels. A wild ride with hints of pre-cyberpunk. Also concerned with the nature of language, in this case a language that has to be understood in order to deal with a potential alien threat.)
  • Gateway by Frederik Pohl
  • Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes (looking forward to reading this after reading the original short story)
  • Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick
  • The Shrinking Man by Richard Matheson
  • Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke

Books Read:

  • The Accidental Time Machine by Joe Haldeman (Time keeps on slipping, slipping . . .)
  • Healthy Aging: A Lifelong Guide to Your Well-Being by Andrew Weil, M.D. (Has a good exercise routine for us old farts.)
  • The Edge of Reason by Melinda Snodgrass (An excellent, fast-paced urban fantasy novel featuring a battle between magic and reason.)
  • Babel-17 by Samuel Delany (My first of Delany’s novels. A wild ride with hints of pre-cyberpunk. Also concerned with the nature of language, in this case a language that has to be understood in order to deal with a potential alien threat.)

 

 

Re: Rereading

This week’s Booking Through Thursday:

What’s the first book that you ever read more than once? (I’m assuming there’s at least one.)

What book have you read the most times? And–how many?

Maybe, subconsciously, early in our lives we’re all re-readers. We want the same story read to us over and over because we somehow know we can’t read the same river twice.

And I’m sure the first rereading I did was probably a children’s book or books and certainly comic books which I ravenously reread. As I think about this topic,  images fill my mind of panels vaguely recalled of Disney’s version of Robin Hood (Robin and Maid Marian were foxes and the Prince was a fey lion) and in particular a story of Robin evading King Churl, a warthog. I liked Churl’s warthog minion, specifically because they carried crossbows and I have a fascination with crossbows even though I’ve never used one.

And I recall rereading Alan Dean Foster’s adaptation of Star Wars, because like so many in my generation, Star Wars was/is an obsession. (Foster’s byline was later usurped by George Lucas.)

As far as most reread: that honorific would probably not go to a specific book, but to Hemingway’s short story “Hills Like White Elephants;”  it’s the first “literary” story I loved and led me to my lifelong obsession with Hemingway.

Of his novels I would have to say I’ve read and reread The Sun Also Rises the most. And then I’ve completely abused Kenneth Lynn’s biography of Hemingway, trying, at first embarrassingly enough, to seek out clues about how to be a writer, how to live like a writer.

Another favorite reread — and sometimes it’s just passages I reread — is Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys. I reread a few passages last night when I got stuck in my own writing. Chabon can make a hangover and throwing up from too much drinking seem elegant and morally revealing.

Of course, again, I think the pleasure of rereading is rediscovering a book or story, and realizing it’s never the same old story.

An an alien invasion with a twist

Childhood's EndChildhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

One of the most common — if not the most common — tropes of science fiction is the alien invasion story. Its so common, now, its cliche. Still, it shows up, especially in movies and on TV.

Though the stories are commonplace, a staple of the genre, when those stories are well told, and not just shoot-’em-ups (that style has its place too, though, along with a tub of popcorn) they often give you a perspective of humanity’s direction, its potential, and even its faith in itself as a species to survive.

Arthur C. Clarke’s classic Childhood’s End does just that. It’s an alien invasion story with a twist. When the aliens — the Overlords — come, when their massive ships park over our skies, those ships don’t erupt with explosive death rays to blow up buildings, nor do they blow up the planet itself to, say, make way for a hyperspace bypass. Instead, the Overlords, essentially do nothing for years, except observe.

Well, observe, and then direct. Though the Overlords don’t initially show themselves, they do, however, make contact with humanity, and, in turn, indirectly begin to shape humanity’s course, bringing about world peace, and establishing a near-utopian society. As the Overlords establish this utopia, their true purpose unveils itself: Earth is something of an experiment, one conducted not by the Overlords, but by a God-like being, the Overmind. The Overlords, it turns out, are no more than servants and errand boys sent by the Overmind to carry out its purpose, to draw humanity into its being.

Clarke plays with multiple themes common to SF: utopia and dystopia, the limits of science and technology, for example. He asserts, through these genre commonplaces, that humanity is responsible for itself; its future can be either bleak and apocalyptic or it can be, if not utopian, at least worthwhile. We cannot, Clarke seems to suggest, lose faith in ourselves.

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Books Bought, Books Read: June 2011 Edition (So Far)

OK, decided to re-up a meme. The idea is pilfered from Nick Hornby’s wonderful book about the joys of reading and acquiring books The Pollysyllabic Spree.

Books Bought thru June 1–June 20, 2011

  • Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury
  • Minority Report by Philip K. Dick
  • Embassytown by China Mieville
  • The City & The City by China Mieville
  • The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
  • Halting State by Charles Stross

Books Read, June 1–June 20, 2011

  • The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin
  • Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick

Philip K. Dick’s kind of become an obsession. Also trying to read and collect the SF Masterworks  (the photo link is not my collection, but I wish it was ) put out by Gollancz (Oh, by the way, I have a birthday coming up in July. Hint, hint).

Also, I’m not being a good Buddhist at all (not that I’ve ever declared myself a Buddhist officially), given I’ve skipped meditation a few times lately, have imbibed some intoxicating drinks in recent days, and find myself too deeply attached to reading and acquiring books to ever renounce this particular form of sweet suffering.

The Hemingway Hoax

The Hemingway HoaxThe Hemingway Hoax by Joe Haldeman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What intrigues readers and Hemingway fans so much about the manuscripts lost in Paris in 1922? Hemingway was so obsessed with that episode—his wife at the time, Hadley claims they were stolen—he wrote about it some 40 years later in his posthumously published memoir A Moveable Feast, and the story was recently retold in Paula McLain’s The Paris Wife.

Scholars, biographers and novelists have speculated about the what-could-have-beens if those manuscripts were somehow to surface. It’s a question that intrigues fictional Hemingway scholar John Baird so much that, at least in some universes of Joe Haldeman’s The Hemingway Hoax, he’s cajoled by con man Sylvester Castlemaine to forge those manuscripts, and get the forgeries published as the real thing, a scheme that may alter Earth’s history in several universes.

Once Baird takes on the task, he alerts the attention of the Spacio-Temporal Adjustment Board, a time-space policing agency with a license to kill. An agent of STAB jumps back through time-space to stop Baird by any means necessary.

One trip, one threat of death should be enough to stop Baird, but something happens to throw off the space-time continuum and Baird gets flung from one end of space- time to another, each time persisting in writing the forgery until the interdimensional hitman can convince him otherwise or kill every manifestation of Baird known to exist.

This was a fun read for me, as both a Hemingway and Haldeman fan. It’s always intriguing to think about what direction a writer might have taken if he published once-lost manuscripts or kept working on some manuscript that taxes him so much he gives up wriiting. Haldeman’s story puts forward the question of what effect, if any, does literature or art have on history. It’s a fast-paced witty novel with a twisted plot.

And watch out literary forgers—STAB may just be watching.

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Review of What Dreams May Come

What Dreams May ComeWhat Dreams May Come by Richard Matheson

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Richard Matheson’s What Dreams May Come sets itself up as a memoir of sorts (SNARK ALERT: unfortunately some memoirs deserve that tag, too), a piece of nonfiction dictated from the afterlife. Obviously, it’s a novel, the story of Chris Nielsen, who dies in a car accident, and whose spirit is transported to the afterlife, or a realm of the afterlife known as Summerland.

Before Chris’ spirit goes to Summerland, he finds himself stuck in a sort of purgatory in which he has to accept he’s dead. What keeps him in this state is his wife, Ann, whose grief he witnesses, and his desire to assure her that she’s going to be fine.

Once he finally enters Summerland, he’s guided and acquainted to this level of the afterlife by his cousin, Albert.

Like Dante’s visions of the afterlife, Matheson’s afterlife consists of many levels and Summerland isn’t quite heaven, though it’s not unpleasant–it’s a place of perpetual sunlight and summer where spirits come to work to get to higher levels, a heavenly corporate ladder of sorts.

Though Chris finds Summerland pleasant enough, he never finds it satisfying because he longs for his wife. His love for her seems boundless, and when she commits suicide on Earth, his love takes him on a journey to hell to rescue her, to get her spirit to see life/the afterlife is worthwhile.

The novel is uneven, an OK read.

Matheson’s afterlife is New Age-y and universalist in outlook: Buddhists get Nirvana, Christians get Heaven (eventually, although it’s not an immediate reunification with God), and Vahalla is probably in there, too. He explores several theological/philosophical concepts, in particular the soul’s attempt to move level by level in the afterlife, until reunion with God is acquired. Most often this climb up requires rebirth on Earth, until the soul is perfected.

Matheson also plays with the fiction/nonfiction them by adding a bibliography of book about death and the afterlife at the end of the novel.

Its weakness: the idealistic, overly sentimental relationship between Chris and Ann. It’s almost too perfect. Granted the novel is fantasy, but their relationship lacks in realism, though Chris protests it wasn’t perfect—like most couples they fought over money, they almost got divorced—his protests are unconvincing. They always make up and smoothe things over perfectly, even in their most difficult journey—guiding Ann into the afterlife to be reborn.

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A Punctuation Question

As I’ve been reading Richard Matheson’s What Dreams May Come, I’ve come across some punctuation habits that have been throwing me. I’m sure I’ve seen the following use of the semicolon in other books and stories, but it’s standing out in this novel.

Here are a couple of examples:

“I wondered what my own appearance was; knowing that Albert wouldn’t tell me if it was unpleasant in any way.”

and

“The chilling sensation again; the hint of ‘another place.’”

Wouldn’t commas suffice here, or are these semicolons used for rhetorical effect, making for a stronger pause? Or something completely different?

Brief Review of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend

I Am Legend (S.F. Masterworks)I Am Legend by Richard Matheson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Don’t expect Will Smith’s movie I Am Legend  (2007) if you read Richard Matheson’s original 1954 novel. As with any novel-to-film adaptation, directors take poetic license: the film’s vampires, for instance, are soul-less brutes.

Though the film holds up on its own, it’s no match for the novel.

Robert Neville is the only human left in a post-apocalytic world inhabited by vampires. To survive, he locks himself in a boarded, locked and garlic-filled home at night, and stalks around a devastated Los Angeles killing the vampires by day.

While the novel has vampires—a horror staple—it works just as well as science fiction (it’s in fact part of Gollancz’s SF Masterworks series, the books of which I’ve been trying to find and read, in part as another reading project, as well as to learn from SF masters). The vampirism, Neville discovers, is a disease, and an apparently uncurable one.

And though Neville struggles to understand the disease, it turns out (spoiler alert) he’s the legend of which the novel’s title speaks.

The novel is a dark but philosophically powerful book, ultimately humanistic in outlook, despite its ending.

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