Category Archives for Reading

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.

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

Outlaw Writer

John Gardner: Literary OutlawJohn Gardner: Literary Outlaw by Barry Silesky

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A real teacher, I suppose, can teach through any medium, even if he’s dead.

John Gardner died at age 49 after a motorcycle accident about a year before his classic The Art of Fiction was published in 1983. It’s basically Gardner’s collected notes on the craft, along with exercises. (As an aside: Gardner, as a writing teacher, experimented with broadcasting his writing classes on TV, which seems to prefigure online instruction.)

About ten years after the book’s publication, a friend loaned me a copy at a key time in my long apprenticeship as a writer (like most writers, even famous ones, there are moments I fear I’m a fraud, given my success as a fiction writer amounts to two short stories published online over eight years ago). I read it, absorbed it, worked through its exercises, some of the toughest exercises any writer could and should try.

Its still one of the best books on writing any writer could read, and I recommend it, as I recommend John Gardner: Literary Outlaw, the first fairly extensive general biography of Gardner ever published. The biography is absorbing, for the most part, a solid portrait of a writer as full of foibles and contradictions as he was genius for writing and teaching writing.

In many ways Gardner, or the image of himself that he portrayed publicly, and to most of those who knew him privately, was a model writer, wholly devoted to writing, to the craft; writing absorbed him. It was as much a state of being, almost inseparable from the man, which is a recurrent  theme of the biography. I suppose today much of Gardner’s life as a writer falls into cliche: heavy drinking, womanizing, depressive (probably bipolar, given the envious bouts of energy Gardner seemed to possess, even after drinking astounding amounts of gin, etc.). And yet, it’s sort of a cliche you, as a writer, want to aspire to. A life almost wholly devoted to writing and literature.

As far as Gardner being a literary outlaw: I suppose he was at the time his fame and stature grew in the late ’70s and early ’80s, or infamy as some might and did say with the publication of his book On Moral Fiction, a polemic that pretty much slapped most of his contemporaries (Mailer, Updike, John Barth) in their, according to him, amoral faces.

In time, he would recant some of what he wrote in On Moral Fiction,and his novels (Grendel, Mickelsson’s Ghosts, for instance)would seem to contradict his dismissing the fiction of fabulists and metafictionists, such as Barth, as basically crap that largely broke its promises to the reader of providing a profulent uninterrupted dream, and rather descended into cheap wordplay. (Although to this day, Barth’s short story “Lost in the Funhouse” mostly makes me scratch my head and say WTF?)

At the time that I read On Moral Fiction, in the early ’90s, I loved it; back then, my life had turned seemingly into an absurd existentialist vacuum. I viewed the book then as sort of a secular bible. And, I suppose, its urge toward attempting to write not didactic fiction, but fiction that challenges and moves toward transcendence rather than the Abyss, is still a driving force in my writing.

And it’s not hard to believe Gardner reached such a transcendence in his own life, as Silesky suggests poignantly at the end of the biography, quoting one of Gardner’s students who wrote after visiting the site in 1998 in Susquehanna, New York where Gardner crashed his motorcycle and died: “‘In the mythology of death . . . one must cross the river; and there it was [the Susquehanna River]. All he had to do was get up, brush the grit off his trousers and step across.’”

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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.

Happy Birthday Mr. Burroughs

Today is Edgar Rice Burroughs‘ birthday (born 1875).

As Hollywood via Disney reminded us this spring, Tarzan’s creator also created a certain Martian warlord, John Carter, and reacquainted some of us with the warrior’s exploits, and maybe a new generation to Burroughs’ characters and fiction with the release of  John Carter, an entertaining, action-packed and visually stimulating—especially if you saw it in 3D—movie that  was, however, panned by some critics as  ”. . .  bloated, dreary and humorless” (USA Today).

Those critics are themselves probably bloated, dreary and humorless. And likely never cared for Burroughs and his fertile imagination in the first place. Or if they did at one time care, have obviously lost that sense of wonder and adventure.

As far as the movie goes, Roger Ebert—as usual—best understands it, its genre and the expectations it should have fulfilled as a movie based on classic pulp SF, as he writes in his review of the film:

Does John Carter get the job done for the weekend action audience? Yes, I suppose it does. The massive city on legs that stomps across the landscape is well-done. The Tharks are ingenious, although I’m not sure why they need tusks. Lynn Collins makes a terrific heroine. And I enjoyed the story outside the story, about how Burroughs wrote a journal about what he saw and appears briefly as character. He may even turn up in sequels. After all, he wrote some.

And for those of you unfamiliar with the John Carter storyline, here’s Ebert again to summarize it:

Burroughs’ hero is a Civil War veteran who finds himself in the Monument Valley, where he has an encounter that transports him to the red planet Mars. This is not the Mars that NASA’s Rovers are poking into, but the Mars envisioned at the time Burroughs was writing, which the astronomer Percival Lowell claimed was criss-crossed by a system of canals. Luckily for Carter, it has an atmosphere that he can breathe and surface temperatures allowing him do without a shirt.

Maybe one day I’ll tackle the merits of John Carter (the movie), but today’s post is simply to share some tidbits about Burroughs, the writer: He and his family, for instance, in 1914 moved to Oak Park, Ill., where Ernest Hemingway, a teenager at the time the  Burroughs’ family arrived, was born and raised. Hemingway may have out of curiosity, Hemingway biographer Kenneth S. Lynn writes, “familiarized himself with Edgar Rice Burroughs’ novels . . . .” though the Hemingway family, mother Grace in particular, were Anglophiles who packed the bookshelves with Dickens, Shakespeare and the rest of the literary crew from across the Pond.

(I like to think Hemingway read Burroughs; he was a voracious reader, and how could Tarzan or any other of Burroughs’ heroes not appeal to Hemingway’s sense of budding masculinity? Then again, Hemingway dismissed fantasy and science fiction as genres; of course he dismissed most writers as terrible at one point or another in his lifetime no matter how good or bad.)

Another aside: Frank Lloyd Wright also moved to, lived and worked in Oak Park ( a suburb of Chicago) around the time Hemingway was born (July 21, 1899). What an intellectually stimulating neighborhood that must have been!

Now back to Burroughs.  Martian princess Dejah Thoris was his first successful character—he had written earlier stories—created in 1911. The princess,  Burroughs’ official website says, attracted the attention of All-Story magazine editor Thomas Metcalf, who “liked the tale and offered Burroughs $400, an extravagant sum. The story, renamed ‘Under the Moons of Mars,’ was serialized from February to July of 1912.”

Burroughs’ most famous creation, Tarzan of the Apes, swung into action in 1912.  According to the website:

Burroughs received $700 for the tale — and his career was off and running. Burroughs quickly discovered (probably to his secret delight, and certainly to the delight of countless readers) that he had many more tales to tell. There would be the inevitable Tarzan and Mars sequels but Burroughs’ imagination needed even more worlds in which to roam, and so in the next few years he would try his hand at almost every type of story imaginable.

Burroughs died March 19, 1950 in Encino, Calif.

___

*Editor’s note: If you’re out and about this weekend, and because you hopefully have a long three-day weekend (you slackers), maybe you can also celebrate the beginning of National Literacy Month by reading Burroughs.

“How did you get into this stuff?”

Perdido Street Station (New Crobuzon, #1)Perdido Street Station by China Miéville

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

How did I get into this stuff? I ask, paraphrasing China Mieville’s question to himself in the New Yorker’s Science Fiction issue.

Robert E. Howard. Conan the Barbarian. Monsters and swashbuckling battles. Comics. Star Wars. D&D. That’s just the short list of how I got into fantasy and science fiction.

Let’s backtrack to D&D. At the root of Perdido Street Station‘s story is a Dungeons & Dragons adventure, full of magic, monsters, swashbuckling battles, and adventurers willing to do “anything for gold and experience” (p. 383).

Of course, it’s much more complex than a Saturday night gaming session (paper, pencils, dice and miniatures subbing for digital images)—not that a session of D&D can’t be as complex as a novel. But, unless you play the game long enough with the same group, and survive the DM’s whims, it’s hard to fulfill the promises of a lengthy novel, the depth of character, an evolving plot and subplot that can be fully explored. A fully-realized world.

And a fully-realized world, a city—New Crobuzon—as alive and bustling as any real city, and peopled with just as fantastic creatures as a real city: the tortured Remade, the mysterious Jack Half-a-Prayer, the birdlike garuda, the monstrous psyche-sucking slake-moths that the main characters must finally destroy.

Which is the basic plot, one that could rival and perhaps surpass any the most sadistic Dungeon Master could create: one the human scientist Isaac undertakes after the garuda Yagharek, exiled from his people for taking away another’s choice, hires Isaac to rebuild his wings so he can fly once again. Isaac takes up the task, and in his experiments to learn how to engineer the wings, accidentally unleashes a terror that stalks the city. Reluctant at first to fight the slake-moths, Isaac is driven into the battle not only to help the garuda, but also to save his girlfriend, and test out the crisis engine that could lead him to scientific notoriety.

One one the things that drew me to reading more of Mieville’s novels, after being completely rocked by his Hugo-winning The City & The City, was learning Mieville grew up playing D&D. It’s clear the game is a serious influence, on his imagination, but Perdido Street Station takes you beyond the limiting world of elves and dwarves and dragons into a blend of magic and science and mixed technologies–the characters arm themselves with flintlocks, but are aided by steam- and magic-driven construct/robots. Mieville is well known for his efforts to genre-bust, and Perdido Street does that very well.

It’s mostly a riveting book, although it slows about midway (it’s 623 pages in the paperback edition I read) and Mieville does seem to to linger on repetitious descriptions of the psyche stealing slake-moths (although his descriptions of them exploding in the end were exquisite), but overall the novel pulls you in and holds you and reminds you of why you got into this stuff (fantasy & science fiction) in the first place: it’s a riveting tale with fascinating characters and it draws you into its world.

And I’ll let Mieville ask you the final question: “How did they [readers] get out of it?”

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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.)

 

 

Books bought, books checked-out, books read: End of Summer, beginning of Fall 2011

An update to my pollysyllabic spree:

Books bought

  • The Accidental Time Machine by Joe Haldeman
  • Year’s Best SF 14

Books checked out

  • In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto by Michael Pollan
  • Healthy Aging by Andrew Weil

Books read

  • The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
  • Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury
  • Embassytown by China Mieville
  • Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke

Coming down from the trees: or please don’t edit library books

I decided to shift genres and read some nonfiction after checking out Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food at my neighorhood library. I’m slowly jumping on the food/nutrition/health bandwagon, as I’ve hit my forties and have been trying to eat more vegetables, and be a little bit healthier in my habits, both physical and mental.

When I started reading the book yesterday, I had only read a few pages of the book and  found a curious editing choice in the copy I checked out. Library books, of course, are often abused: they’ve been marked in, had coffee spilled on them (I’m guilty of this abuse), have torn or even sometimes missing pages. I once even found a leaf in a copy Arthur Plotnik’s The Urban Tree Book . 

On page 6 of the library copy of the book, the previous borrower decided to take action (see PDF) and quibble with the author over word choice, scratching through the line “coming down from the trees,” not because the line is cliche, but because Pollan has chosen to refer to humans as an evolved species and not a divine creation. The “editor” in pen has inserted in the margin “being created by the All mighty God.”

I alternate between finding this funny in a Ned-Flanders sort of way (recalling Flanders marking out “darns” and “hecks” from either Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew) and finding it annoying. I can imagine this reader with pencil in hand, grumbling to himself and thinking, Gosh darnit I’m so sick-and-tired of these liberals and their making monkeys of us, I’ma gonna make the next person reads this here book think about the Truth and facts. Yep, they gonna know the Lord created the universe in six days and our world is six-thousand years old.

The  comment is not relevant to Pollan’s argument. The previous reader has co-opted the book as his own, as if it were his desire to have written a book about food and nutrition, but from the perspective of creationism.

After I posted this entry yesterday, I flipped through the book and discovered the previous reader had kept editing  as he read when Pollan made reference to humans being an evolved species, an animal, a mammal, a primate.

The first thing these edits caused me to think of is my own obsession with debates over evolutionary theory (a theory based on hard science; of course, the scientific method could arguably be an ideology; certainly evolutionary theory, or rather correctly, the theory of natural selection proposed by Darwin, et al, was much abused in Darwin’s own time through Social Darwinian theories) and creationism (an ideology that is a subset of the ideology of religious fundamentalism that makes serious leaps of logic, faith and misreading).  Pollan, interestingly enough, talks about currents in food science as nutrionism, “an ideology . . .[a way] of organizing large swaths of life and experience under a set of shared but unexamined assumptions.”

Anyhow, I believe in evolution, in natural selection; I believe we are animals, mammals, and primates and there is good, solid, examined evidence to demonstrate that life primeval wasn’t Flinstonian in nature, as some creationists try to demonstrate.

That said, the next thing the creationist editor caused me to think about was a recent Facebook discussion about artistic intention and the intentional fallacy. Clearly, the creationist editor misread Pollan’s book, and read into it an argument against creation, and seems to ignore Pollan’s—from what we can gather through textual evidence only—intention: “My aim in this book is to help us  reclaim our health and happiness as eaters.”

Or is this Pollan’s intention? Perhaps he really is trying by writing about an interesting topic such as food and health to sideswipe us into believing we evolved tens of thousands of years ago and monkeys are our uncles ?

I tend to think opening the evolution-creation debate wasn’t Pollan’s intention, but I’m just another reader of a so far well-written book-length argumentative essay that tries its best to examine unexamined assumptions about food.