Gael Writer

the holy clay

2012-02-26T16:06:00.000-08:00

Some earlier posts discussed the use of themes taken from myths, and the mythical characters, as archetypal elements for the writing of contemporary fiction.

This installment concerns a holy clay, lifted from the grave of a reputed saint buried in an ancient, ruined monastery of St. Colmcille on Tory Island, about a mile off the north coast of Ireland. The story of the saint is part of the folklore of the island, and a few of the anecdotes are collected in "Stories from Tory Island,” by Dorothy H. Therman, 1989:

The cliffs along the north coast are penetrated deeply by inlets, or clefts (scoilteanna). To the east of the lighthouse, not far from the graveyard (of a shipwrecked crew of the HMS Wasp, another story altogether) is Scoilt an Mhuiriseain. Onto its stony beach, in the time of St Colmcille, there drifted a boat carrying seven people. Dr. Edward Maguire quotes Manus O'Donnell, the sixteenth century author of "The Life of St. Columba": 'The fame of his [St. Colmcille's] wisdom, his knowledge, his faith, his piety, had gone forth throughout the entire world, and the holy children of the King of India had conceived love for him on account of the rumours ... there were six sons (of them) and one sister.' The children set sail in search of him and were not heard from for a long time, until they finally reached the northwest coast of Tory. 'And on their coming to land, they died in consequence of the fatigue of the sea and of the ocean.' They were brought across the island and buried together at a place on the edge of what is now West Town, where the foundations of one of St Colmcille's little chapels are still visible. But for three mornings in a row, the body of the woman was found lying on top of the grave, so she was buried separately and from then on rested peacefully.

Alfred McFarland, who visited Tory in 1849 and wrote "Hours in Vacation" (Dublin, 1853) believed that the seven were Scandinavian royalty; Mr. T. J. Westropp stated in the "Antiquarian Handbook Series" in 1905 that they were Hollanders. Dan Rodgers of Tory Island says the islanders thought the woman might have been a saint. And it is from the grave site of the 'saint' that the eldest of the Duggan clan retains the perogative given to him by St. Colmcille to lift 'holy clay', which has the power not only to banish rats, but to protect fishermen from the dangers of the sea. (Rat control was a life and death matter for farmers needing to protect food storage cribs over the long winters).

A bit of the holy clay was lifted for the writer one night by the eldest of the Duggan clan living on the island at the time of my two weeks visit there. I still have the clay among my totems, and am as intrigued by the legend now as I was then. I prefer the legend of siblings from India. It has the elements of a Joseph Campbell myth, from his "The Hero With A Thousand Faces," (3rd ed. 1973). Campbell uses myths taken from cultures around the world, describing a hero's quest for some gift or boon for his people. The quest usually involves a perceived call, often supernatural, a series of trials while on the quest, attainment of the sought-after boon, and a return to the Hero's people.

In a short discourse on the Hero as Saint, Campbell relates how St. Thomas Aquinas reaches a boon of mystical spiritual revelation as he neared the end of writing his major opus of Roman Catholic doctrine, Summa Theologica, put down his pen to leave the last chapters to be completed by another hand, and died soon after, in his forty-ninth year. In his case, St. Thomas, unlike, say, the Bodhisattva, does not return to his people, but has:

"stepped away from the realm of forms, into which the incarnation descends ... the realm of the manifest profile of The Great Face. Once the hidden profile has been discovered, myth is the penultimate, silence the ultimate, word."

Did the princess of India and her brothers receive a mystical spiritual revelation like that of St. Thomas upon reaching landfall after the perilous sea voyage? Or did their journey and its fateful conclusion have other meaning? There seems a lot of creative energy available to a writer in the pondering of old myths like this one.

novellas

2012-01-30T20:10:00.000-08:00

The generic term for the fiction story usually considered by publishers to be too long for a short story and too short for a novel is the novella. A dictionary describes the word as derived from Italian/French forms of 'new,' and means: a story with a compact and pointed plot; or, a short novel or long short story. It is generally thought to be somewhere between 15,000 to 40 or 50,000 words.

Probably most writers think of it as being hard to place for publication: too long for the literary journals and other short story venues, and too short for hardcover book publishers. Unless, that is, you are a big-name author. An article in The Writer's Chronicle, "Revaluing the Novella," by Kyle Semmel, provides some interesting reading on the use of the form. Semmel grounds some of his views and analyses on the legendary author and writing teacher John Gardner, and his book,"The Art of Fiction." It's a book I revisit often, and I'll paraphrase or quote some material Semmel chose from Gardner to describe the novella:

1. The novella moves through a series of small epiphanies or secondary climaxes, usually following a single line of thought, and reaches an end where the world is radically changed.

2. "The novella normally treats one character and one important action in his life, a focus that leads itself to neat cut-offs or framing."

3. Notwithstanding the above norms, three distinctive types of novella include: (1) single stream ("a single stream of action focused on one character and moving through a series of increasingly intense climaxes"); (2) non-continuous stream, or "baby novel," ("shifting from one point of view [or focal character] to another, and using true episodes, with time breaks between"); and (3) pointillist ("moving at random from one point to another").

There are all sorts of experimentation with the structure and overlap of the types given above, and some powerful novellas have resulted. Semmel's descriptions of the basic structures, and his discussions of example novellas, will provide a good footing for the aspiring novella writer.

I liked Semmel's discussion of the non-continuous novella, "Where the Rivers Flow North," by Howard Frank Mosher, in which the narrative moves in and out of the two main characters' points-of-view, that of a Vermont farmer, and his housekeeper, but which is broken up by another third person, authorial point-of-view. Sounds like a hard one to pull off successfully, but there you go!

I also liked an example given in Gardner's book for the continuous stream novella focused on a single character and moving through a series of increasingly intense climaxes. Semmel didn't use this example, but check it out: "The Pedersen Kid," by William Gass.

In retrospect, I think one of my favorite 'short' novels (about 44,000 words), "The Member of the Wedding," by Carson McCullers, might also be thought of as a novella. Challenge yourself this year with a novella.

mythic characters

2011-12-29T10:58:00.000-08:00

An interesting article, "The Absence of Their Presence: Mythic Characters in Fiction," by Steven Schwartz, appears in The Writer's Chronicle, Dec. 2011. Schwartz shows how developing a mythic character in a fiction piece requires some attention to the use of the point of view (POV) chosen to narrate the story. A basic concept is a need to stay out of the head of the mythic character. The reader gets to know him or her only through dialog and action, and through reports of the story narrator. Even in a third-person, omniscient POV, the narrator should not move into the head of the mythic character to show any of his feelings or thought process.

"What might seem less than more at first--an external perspective versus an internal view--turns out to be the necessary narrative device for creating their unique myths.

Using "Moby Dick" Schwartz illustrate's his point:

"With more conventional characters we may feel cheated when their motivations remain opaque, and their psyches, like Ahab's, ultimately unknowable. But we do not make the same demands of mythic characters, often because the prearranged audience in the story reflects our own bafflement. By their surrogate reactions and scrutiny, they preempt our silent protests. That is, we need (the POV narrator) to act as our agent of disbelief..." and, "...we may clearly see what (the mythic character) do(es), but not why, and it's the why that creates a chilling gap of suspense."

Of course the mythic character has to present actions and dialog that elicit a tension and bafflement which grow to suspense. Often appearing as an outsider, with abnormal behavior, the writer should avoid having the observer-narrator explain away the mythic character's motivations, and "never minimize the complexity nor the significance of the strange."

Schwartz explores the mythic dimensions of Jay Gatsby, in Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby," and of Bartleby, in Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener." I've read and enjoyed Gatsby, though he doesn't quite hold a mythic dimension for me. Still, we are never invited into Gatsby's head to discover what he really feels about his experience, and we have only Nick Carraway's first-person POV for a subjective opinion on Gatsby. Gatsby is an outsider in his society, but never really seems to show a strange or abnormal behavior. Bartleby, however, does seem to show such behavior, and in abundance.

Schwartz uses a Steven Millhauser short story, "The Knife Thrower," to illustrate other points about writing the mythical character. Interestingly, Millhauser uses the plural first-person, we, to serve as both narrator and audience watching the controversial knife thrower, Hensch, as he visits their town for a one-time performance. The narrator alludes to rumors that Hensch, in his early carnival days, had badly wounded an assistant. Now, the narrative leaves open a possibility that Hensch in his present performance mortally wounds an audience volunteer, a girl, who had wished to be marked by him. Schwartz discusses the story's use of the first person plural POV:

"All of which makes for a strangely normative viewpoint that in its plurality gives additional weight to its judgment of Hensch. On the other hand, this impersonal "we" relies on rumor and hearsay and is even more incapable of penetrating Hensch''s mystery than an individual observer-narrator such as Nick Carraway ... would be in gaining confidences, creating an extra layer of insulation from the subject. And Millhauser clearly wants it that way to promote the morally ambiguous atmosphere and mythic tone...

"At the conclusion of "The Knife Thrower," illustrating the elusive nature of the mythic, the collective viewpoint voices its frustration. The more we thought about it, the more uneasy we became, and in the nights that followed, when we woke from troubling dreams, we remembered the traveling knife thrower with agitation and dismay. This could well stand as a summary of all mythic characters. Fascinatingly inconclusive, they trick us into remembering them by the absence of their presence."

Creating a mythic character may be quite a challenge.

serial novels

2011-11-25T11:35:00.000-08:00

The NY Times (11/21/2011) reports that the writer, Mark Z. Danielewski ("House of Leaves," "Only Revolutions") is planning a 27 volume novel, titled "The Familiar." The novel is planned to be released with one new volume every three months, beginning in 2014. Knopf Doubleday is reported to have paid one million dollars for the first ten books.

Danielewski has an optimistic view that a huge, long-running, serial release like his will generate perhaps daily, or at least ongoing, buzz about the characters and story-line. He hopes for something similar to what unfolds in newspaper columns, radio talk shows, and public conversations during a season of popular TV episodes, like the recent "Sopranos," or the current "Mad Men."

"Literature is capable of being a subject that people want to catch up on or discuss, whether at a coffee shop or a watercooler," Mr. Danielewski said. "It can become an intrinsic part of their dialogue." His editor says the books will be an attempt to create a "serial relationship" with the readers.

Well, certainly J. K. Rowling had epic success with serial releases (7) of her Harry Potter fantasy novels over about 10 years. According to Wikipedia, her book series has sold about 450 million copies.

Another greatly successful novel series was the eight books, beginning with "Anne of Green Gables," written by Canadian author Lucy Maude Montgomery, and published between 1908 and 1921. The books track the life of Anne, beginning when she arrives as a precocious 11-year old orphan at a farm on Prince Edward Island in Canada, up until she is a teacher there in her early fifties. The books have sold about 50 million copies, according to Wikipedia, and are included in school curriculums all over the world.

An example of success in serial novel publication in a different genre is Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin seafaring adventures, which included 20 novels published between 1969 and 1999. Jack Aubrey is a British Royal Navy officer, and Stephen Maturin is ship's surgeon, who serve together at sea during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. This series sold over 2 million copies, according to Wikipedia.

A more common serial novel enterprise is, perhaps, the more manageable trilogy. A good example of a well-done trilogy is the recent "Hunger Games," by Suzanne Collins. It is a young adult, science fiction series set at some time in what could be a not too distant future, in which the surviving sociopolitical structure of North America has been reduced by internal wars to a despotic capitol and twelve outlying districts--a thirteenth was assumed to have been annihilated--and wherein the districts serve all the economic needs of the capitol. Annual 'Hunger Games,' gladiatorial contests organized by the capitol, in which a male and female from each district are selected by lottery to fight until the death of all but one, serve to keep the masses sufficiently traumatized, and entertained. Each of the books in this series were on best-seller lists, and were critically acclaimed.

It is interesting to note in Wikipedia the structure adopted by Collins for each of her books in the series:

Each book in The Hunger Games trilogy has 27 chapters and is further divided into 3 sections of 9 chapters each. Collins says that this format comes from her playwriting background, which taught her to write in three acts. Her previous series, The Underland Chronicles, was written in the same way, as Collins is "very comfortable" with this structure. She sees each group of nine chapters as a separate part of the story, and comments that she still calls those divisions "act breaks".

It seems interesting to organize the structure of a story, as Collins has done here. It is reminiscent of the very organized and focused method advocated by Jon Franklin in his "Writing for Story." Franklin is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winning author. His craft has been honed on creative non-fiction short stories, but his writing advice seems equally valuable for fiction writers. More next time on Franklin's methods that may be of use for serial novels.

That's it for some reflections for now on writing serialized fiction. Most 'unsung' writers would probably be happy to have the one novel that sells on the order of 30,000 copies. Onward!

the God theme in literature

2011-10-29T14:26:00.000-07:00

Poetry and prose writers through the ages have produced some epic creative works with their visions of the immortal God(s), as conceived at particular times in history. Think of the Greek plays and epic poems, the Hindu epics, and the Middle Eastern and European pagan mythologies. The gods and super-heroes in these may be immortal beings endowed with supernatural powers, but they generally resemble or approximate human form, and have familiar human appetites.

The rise of the later monotheistic religions, beginning with Judaism and proceeding through Christianity and Islam, present a more mysterious God, but either through revelation or inspiration, the later writers retain some anthropomorphic qualities for the one God. For example, He occasionally speaks in a familiar language; He's concerned with interpersonal relationships between Himself and humans, and between humans; and He has given some laws which are to govern these relationships.

The descriptive qualities and characteristics of God given by these three dominant monotheistic religions have not changed much, if at all, in the last 1500 to 2000 years, and seem somewhat frozen in the language and conceptual abilities of the authors who committed them to writing. The stasis became reason enough for some philosophers to declare God was now dead. Further modern scholarship, scriptural criticism, and science, have continued to bump up against the traditional, dogmatic views of God. Indeed, there now seems a plethora of books by modern writers promoting the atheist view: God is not Great, by Christopher Hitchens; The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins; and others. None of the atheists seem, however, to adequately address a resulting, fundamental issue of why then is there something instead of nothing?

Theologians have sometimes been hampered by religious authorities and a fear of heresy from more fully exploring the questions and nature of a revealed God in a religious dogma. Too bad. A lot more might have been discovered in all those years.

Even literary fiction might happen onto some useful insights to God, through imaginative story-telling, guided by human experience and psyche. Think: Moby Dick. Recently I came across a reference to Kafka in an article by Robert Pogue Harrison (NY Review of Books, Oct. 13, 2011), which got me thinking again about this topic:

"In his conversations with Gustav Jaknouch, Kafka reportedly remarked:

God dwells in darkness. And that is a good thing, because without the protecting darkness, we should try to overcome God. That is man's nature.

"These are the words of a modern individual speaking in the wake of what Nietzsche called the death of God. Something similar could be said of Shakespeare. Like Kafka's Deus absconditus, he withdraws into a protective darkness that prevents us from getting a secure handle on him, hence from overthrowing him."

Awesome. Hope the topic was of interest to blog readers.

writing like it's the day job

2011-09-29T16:35:00.000-07:00

Writing, for most writers, is a philosophical pleasure that needs to be supported by a day job. And maybe that's not such a bad thing. Most of us do want our books to be published and read, but except for a chosen few, the rewards are apt to be very modest for the long hours and energies invested in the writing.

The writer, Don Lee, describes a common chain of thought and events accompanying publication, as told in his interview by Jeanie Chung (Oct./Nov. 2011,Writers Chronicle):

"Maybe this will be big. And most of the time, it's not big. Most of the time, it goes all right. You get some nice reviews, maybe some not so nice reviews, and you sell a few copies, or not, and you move on. It's just a little blip. The purpose for your writing cannot be for that moment of publication. It has to be about writing the book itself."

It's a good, sobering reflection. It has to be about wanting to spend time alone with a particular exploration of thoughts and feelings, all channeled through a handful of characters and places dragged up from a subconscious mind. Sometimes it may be to explore past experience from other viewpoints, or to push past outcomes in different directions, or along new paths, and see what happens next. Most of the time, if we see our way through to finishing a manuscript, we can benefit by an enrichment of our conscious and subconscious being. Publication might only be a potential, added bonus.

As Lee's interviewer, Chung, noticed about a Lee character's commitment to making a huge sculpture that can never be exhibited and might not necessarily even be 'art.' For him, Chung surmises, it was all about the process:

"In some ways, (the character, Lyndon) may be advocating more of a workmanlike approach. Like it's your day job; whatever you do for a living, most people aren't working toward one big moment. It's just what you do every day."

Lee agrees, as might many other writers. A project one works on as an engineer is not usually viewed as heading toward any one big moment; it's the day job and we do the best we can at that stage in our career. In a related way, the fiction we write outside the normal day job doesn't have to be aimed at a one big moment, e.g., publication, with blockbuster sales; we do what satisfies the creative impulse best. Like Lyndon, maybe it's just engaging in the process.

sensitive language

2011-08-28T16:36:00.000-07:00

Here's a change-up pitch from the mound: instead of jumping off into a discussion of writing, this is a photograph of my watercolor painting, "Meditative Woman," which got a first prize in the current "Art in the Redwoods" exhibition at Gualala Art Center. The painting had its beginnings at a Life Drawing session held weekly at our local art center. Recognition for writers and artists can be so few and far between, so please allow this short and delicious vanity of including it in my blog.

The writings of V. S. Naipul interest me ("A House for Mr. Biwas","The Mystic Masseuse," et. al.), though Naipaul can be an enigma to me at times, too. I'm reminded of him from an article by Joseph O'Neill in the current issue of Atlantic Magazine. The novels I've read by Naipul are of life and people in his homeland of Trinidad, and the characterizations are vivid. Naipaul has had some bad press here and there from critics, but chiefly, it seems, about his colonial and racial attitudes, and his personal, marital life. His writing, after all, has earned him a Nobel Prize for Literature (and a knighthood). Some well intentioned people can be quick to censor others on a number of sensitive social issues, particularly those that may deal with race, class, or religion. I think that in the long run our First Amendment, dealing with Freedom of Expression, has it about right. We may not like what a person says or writes; still, we might gain something from it. There's at least a possibility that critics could be overly narrow, or too ideological themselves.

So as not to be too academic, I'd like to talk about a party I attended years ago at the home of my brother and his wife. She, and her brother who was also there, are first generation Asian-Indian-descent immigrants to the U.S. from a Caribbean nation, which is populated by mostly Asian-Indian and African-descent people, and all of them dark-skinned. My brother and I are white. In this party atmosphere the word 'nigger' was occasionally used in an affectionate manner. My brother-in-law probably noticed I was uncomfortable with his use of the word with his black friend. He laughed and said the word only meant 'ignorant,' and I shouldn't be worried about using it in a friendly way. Of course, the word has become too loaded with baggage in this country for me to do any such thing. Still, it's odd for a certain word to be accepted in good humor between certain people, and be sanctioned for use by other people. Naipaul would be quick to challenge any sanction.

stealth endings in short stories

2011-07-31T16:32:00.000-07:00

Occasionally as readers we encounter short stories that have 'stealth' endings. The stealth tag relates to the USAF B-2 Stealth Bomber, which is designed to fly under any radar surveillance on the way to its destination. Sometimes the trajectory of a story is almost as elusive, and we don't quite know where or how an impact is going to be felt. We may put ourselves on guard not to be too devastated by the culmination of ominous warnings, but if the author can stay under the radar for the best possible moment to break through and deliver the unexpected, a stealth strike can be memorable.

I am currently reading an excellent short stories collection, "Binocular Vision," by Edith Pearlman (2011). A couple of her initial stories had this sort of stealth effect on me. A good opener for a discussion, though, that has long lingered in my mind, is "Million $$$ Baby," by F.X. Toole, included in his story collection Rope Burns. The Oscar Award winning movie of the same name was based on this short story. It was about a young woman who had grown up in a hard-scrabble town in the Ozarks, and was intent on becoming a boxing champion as her way out of a bleak future. Maggie Fitzgerald wins the grudging help of a trainer/manager, Frankie Dunn. The writer, Toole, had worked as a 'cut-man,' patching up fighters during actual bouts, so he is able to write vivid fight scenes with Maggie in the ring. She fights her way to the top of her division, but is seriously injured and is hospitalized as a paraplegic. She has no hope, and asks Frankie to 'put her down.' Her plight is indeed hopeless, but this is way outside Frankie's religious beliefs. He has the means, though; he has frequently used legal injections to stem the flow of blood from fighters during bouts. He knows what too much can do, too, and it wouldn't be detected. Still, he refuses. Maggie seems to understand, but bites her tongue off in a later suicide attempt, which is thwarted. Another bedside scene, late at night, and Maggie pleads with Frankie by eye motions to do it. It becomes a devastating stealth scene. You didn't think he could, but it seemed somehow right.

In one of Pearlman's stories, "Tess," a child is born to a young woman of apparently limited mental ability. The child, Tess, has major congenital problems. Tess needs continuous life support systems and is connected by two IV tubes from the machines to her heart and intestinal system. Nonetheless she is a beautiful, though mostly listless, child, who is doted on by the nursing attendants. There are lovely, written scenes of the nurses attention and limited responses of the angelic child, but there doesn't seem to be any fulfilling outcome in store for the reader. First-person narratives by the young mother are interspersed throughout. She visits her child weekly in the beginning, while she tries to maintain her marginal, waitress job, but time between visits soon lengthens. She seems to keep a loving attitude, and vaguely understands her child's perpetual need for the tubes sustaining her life. In the stealth ending, she removes the slow pumping blood tube to Tess's heart and hides it beneath the sheets before she ends her final visit.

In Pearlman's story, "Fidelity," an aging travel writer with dimming sight lives with his wife near Boston. He doesn't actually travel, but writes of exotic travel adventures for a small, high-brow publication called World Enough. We get glimpses of his stories, which are very imaginative, and of the close relationship of the writer, Victor, his wife, Nora, and the editor in New York, Greg. The editor is always very solicitous in his calls and letters to Victor and Nora, and they were all close friends when everyone lived in New York. When an unusual antique armoire in Greg's room turns up in one of Victor's stories, Greg is aware Nora must have described it to him. In Victor's next story, which we read with Greg, it describes a traveling couple lying in each others arms, awaiting the eruption of a volcano near their lodgings on an island, whereupon they "will sink into that blue that never changes, unlike the fitful New York sky you and she watched those afternoons Greg you bastard." Greg learns from their daughter that Victor dies soon afterward, then Nora ten days later, from swallowing something. A strong stealth ending, in which the infidelity unfolds at the very end.

unreliable narrators

2011-06-30T13:08:00.000-07:00

(I'll add some artwork tomorrow; need to get this post in on last day of month.)

The writing strategy for a story told by an 'unreliable narrator' presents an interesting challenge to an author, and a recent short story in The New Yorker, "Gravel," by Alice Munro, set a few thoughts in motion.

The narrator in "Gravel" is never transparently unreliable, as is the narrator in "Catcher in the Rye," by J. D. Salinger, as that novel unfolds. However, a question of reliability in "Gravel" surfaces as we realize the events leading up to and surrounding a childhood tragedy are being told by a grown woman drawing on her earlier memories as a kindergartner. The story is constructed so well that it's worth exploring in this posting.

It takes just a column or two for Munro to develop her principal characters and a problem or complication that this story will deal with. The story seems to switch between the Point-of-View (POV) of a child, and the POV of her grownup self, recalling. The back-and-forth is relatively seamless as Monroe moves between the consciousness of each. There's never any question of who.

The younger sister, the kindergartner, is not named; her older sister, Caro, attends grade school. The father, a kind, educated, but gray sort of insurance agent, travels a lot.

The mother "had got busy with various fund-raising schemes for the theater and donated her services as an usher. She was good-looking and young enough to be mistaken for an actress. She'd begun to dress like an actress, too, in shawls and long skirts and dangling necklaces. She'd left her hair wild and stopped wearing makeup. Of course, I had not understood or particularly noticed these things at the time. My mother was my mother."

This passage kind of suggests the seamless way the mother and daughter each inhabit the consciousness of the narration. The kindergartner couldn't possibly have taken in all the earlier comprehensive detail, but her rudimentary observations are being fleshed out by an older self looking back.

A little later: "Well, then came a development that could have been foreseen, and probably was, but not by my father...She told him that the baby was Neal's."

"Was she sure?"

"Absolutely. She had been keeping track."

"What happened then?"

Neal is one of the amateur actors in the theater. This play-by-play commentary seems to be the sort of breathless commentary of the bewildered child, looking at astounding events unfolding. It works so well.

Neal is an idealistic liberal, a drop-out and turn-on sort of guy. The pregnant mother (she's never named), Neal, and the two girls, move into an old trailer beside a gravel pit outside of the town. One snowy morning the mother spies what she believes to be a wolf, and wants Neal to get a gun and shoot it. They argue.

"Easy. Easy. Let's just think a bit. Guns are a terrible thing. If I went and got a gun, then what would I be saying? That Vietnam was O.K.? That I might as well have gone to Vietnam?"

"You're not an American."

"You're not going to rile me."

It's the kind of laid-back guy he is. He usually smokes pot on weekends, and one time he lets Caro try one, but tells her not to tell her mother.

"I was there, though, and I told. There was alarm, but not quite a row."

"'You know he'd have those kids out of here like a shot,' our mother said."

The father begins to pick the girls up for visits with him on Saturdays, but becomes ill with recurring flu and stops coming for a while. It seems to have an effect on Caro, and she repeatedly sneaks their dog onto the school bus to leave it off at her father's house near her school. Meanwhile the mother begins acting more like a mother than a free spirit as the birth of her new child approaches, and warns the girls about playing at the rain-filled gravel pit near the trailer. Nevertheless the girls wander over to the pit with the dog one day. At one point the younger girl realizes her sister has given her some instructions:

"I was to go back to the trailer and tell Neal and our mother something.

That the dog had fallen into the water and Caro was afraid she'd be drowned.

Blitzee. Drownded.

Drowned.

But Blitzee wasn't in the water.

She could be. And Caro could jump in to save her."

She watches Caro leap into the water with the dog and runs to tell. But there's an odd interval of delay when she gets to the trailer.

The events at the trailer, and the recollections over the years haunt the woman. She's now a professor teaching at a college when Neal notices an article about her in an Alumni annual from his town, where she'd done her undergraduate work, and he writes her. She's reluctant, but agrees to meet him.

Neil tries to reassure her about the events of the past with his be-happy philosophy.

"I see what he meant. It really is the right thing to do. But, in my mind, Caro keeps running at the water and throwing herself, as if in triumph, and I'm still caught, waiting for her to explain to me, waiting for the splash."

Is it a case of the unreliable narrator? Did it really happen as the memories suggest? We can't really know. Great writing, though.

mythic energies enhance fiction

2011-05-29T14:34:00.001-07:00

My sketch is just a lead-in to our theme of immortality--and seeking a presence of eternal, youthful beauty.

Mythic energy in fiction may be hard to define in words, but we usually recognize its presence when we engage it in a work of fiction, whether as a reader, or a writer. When a fiction writer recognizes his story has mythic undercurrents, he would probably do well to sharpen the plot to exploit such material. Fiction that gets published and lasts generally touches on universal themes, stuff that excites emotional resonance in our DNA, and the stuff of myths typically does this for everyone.

Take a classic in YA literature, Tuck Everlasting, by Natalie Babbitt. The story tells of the Tuck family, in rural, early America, where family members share the secret of a spring that contributes to their immortality. Another myth of the fountain of youth, tells of a search for it in Florida by an earlier, Spanish explorer, Ponce de Leon. Tuck Everlasting is beautifully written, with wonderful pastoral scenes, but it was the mythical undercurrents of immortality, aging, and related secrets, that gave the story its power.

I recently finished a contemporary best-seller that exploits the same theme: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, by David Mitchell. In this story of Dutch traders in 1700s Japan, a Japanese woman, a midwife, whom Jacob has fallen in love with, is abducted by a powerful noble, and is forcibly confined in a secluded temple under his control. Ostensibly, the temple mission is to rescue destitute, often disfigured, women, and provide a place of refuge for them. (Spoiler Alert on reading following!) However, under the trappings of goddess worship, the women are made to bear children for the monks. The children are soon removed from the women, presumably to be given to good families on the outside, but actually the children suffer a terrible fate in the quest for the immortality of the noble and his monks. Again, an interesting background story of the Dutch East India Trading Co. activities and its people in early post-Edo era Japan, but with a bizarrely fascinating overlay of a search for immortality.

The yearning for immortality also comes to mind as a theme in Wagner's cycle of The Ring, a series of four operas based on Norse mythology. Our small town enjoyed live, closed-circuit video transmittal from the Metropolitan Opera in New York to our local movie-house for the first two operas of the cycle: Das Rhinegold, and Die Walkure. In the cycle, Wotan seeks to avert the twilight of the gods and preserve their immortality within a newer, and more resplendent Valhalla. In doing so he inadvertently entwines the fate of the gods with the heroic deeds of mortals. The music, staging, and drama has been superlative.

In conclusion, a universal, mythological underpinning has potential for breathing life into a work of fiction.

sketching character and plot

2011-04-29T17:12:00.000-07:00

I'll use this post to explore approaches to inserting character and plot in fiction, employing art as a backdrop to the discussion.

Two thumbnail figures can help set the stage for discussing how to introduce one of the main characters into our work of fiction. The first charcoal illustration, barely formed, potentially attractive, is a very tentative figure. Compelling, perhaps, as an art piece, but probably not as a suitably developed story character--yet. The intent might be to have this character reveal more of herself as the fiction unfolds, and she is tested by the relationships and challenges she encounters in the 'fictional dream,' (as in John Gardner, "The Art of Fiction"). Each new encounter fleshes her out a little more, so that the reader sees her ever more clearly, though he might bring his own subjective judgment to what he is seeing. That should be fine with the author who values his readers.

The other illustration considers opening the fictional dream with a clearly shown figure, in a characteristic setting, and a composition and style that is somehow representative of the character. The challenge for the fictional dream employing this opening may lie less in the suspense of how this type of character will respond to people and situations, but more with the depth and poignancy of the response.

I'm currently reading a novel, "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet," by David Mitchell. Mitchell seems to have done a good job of starting out with emergent charcoal portraits of two main characters, Jacob, a clerk in the service of the Dutch East Indies Co. in Japan at the end of the eighteenth century, and Orito, a Japanese noblewoman. Mitchell rather slowly reveals their psychological makeup, filling in the blanks as the characters are stressed, and all to good effect. It's a wonderful read.

Till next month.

revising brigadier's daughter

2011-03-31T16:06:00.000-07:00

Hated to allow a one month gap in posts but the vagaries of the communications god, Mercury, struck at my blog in the interval since the last post. The previous wireless Internet Service Provider (ISP) went out of business, and connection to the net was down for about six weeks. After making suitable burnt offerings to Mercury, and signing a 2-year contract with AT&T for their wireless data service, my net connection is again up and running. The transmission speed is just as good for this rural area, about 3 Mbps down and 1 Mbps up, but there are frequent hiccups during transmission, which have the effect of slowing any computer commands a lot. Maddening stuff.

A lot of writing time was taken up recently in researching literary agents to query for possible representation of "The Brigadier's Daughter," a completed YA novel discussed briefly in my last post. However, a new book I just read invited another peek at comments my protagonist, Caitlin, makes about the classic, "Moby Dick," during her English class. "All Things Shining--Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age," by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly, devotes a chapter and more to discussion of possible meanings and allusions embedded in "Moby Dick."

Caitlin is asked to discuss Melville's scene where Queequeg casts dice on the deck of the whaling ship to learn his fate, as an example of Pagan versus Christian attitudes toward death. The book had been one of Caitlin's favorites, and being the whimsical person she is, she'd constructed an alternate reality for Queequeg. In her imagination, he was probably from the Afghan village of her immigrant mother (still Pagan, even today). When challenged by other students, Caitlin makes her case in her best, authoritative manner. Since the "All Things Shining" book had new information about Queequeg I wanted to go back over Caitlin's discussion to see whether any revision might be useful.

A brief paragraph from the "All Things Shining" book illustrates the magic of Melville's novel:

...the whale is a mystery, so full of meaning that it verges on meaninglessness, so replete with interpretations that in the end they all seem to cancel out. It is this tantalizing but ungraspable quality of the great Sperm Whale, we are later told--his facelessness, his imposing "pyramidical silence," but also the immensely amplified sense of the "Deity and the dread powers" that lurk within his brow---it is this unrelenting but also unyielding mystery that stands at the center of the universe. "I but put that brow before you," a central character says. "Read it if you can."

Heady stuff, but you don't need to be a philosopher to enjoy the drama of "Moby Dick."

query letter

2011-01-30T15:48:00.000-08:00

A Query is the Rock Breaking the Surface

It's been an interesting month of working on a YA novel, "The General's Daughter," which has evolved into "The Brigadier's Daughter." Someone in an online writer's group pointed out that there was a 1996 movie with the first title, based on a novel of the same name. Presumably, titles are not copyrighted, but it's no big problem to change it. The mom is still a one-star general, which works out to be a Brigadier General. Writer's groups, or writer's workshops, can be tough with critiques of a Work-in-Progress (WIP), but generally no one is shooting to kill, and if the author can just adjust to the flak he might better advance across the beachhead and come out with a better book at the end.

The last blog talked a little about how the first 5 pages need to 'hook' the reader; they need to compel him to want to read further. There's an even tighter window of opportunity to grab the attention of an agent or editor to want to read an offered manuscript. It's one thing to write, say, a 50,000 words YA manuscript, and quite another to write that dreaded one-page query, which somehow has to distill all that material into, at most, about 300 words. Helpfully, there is an online forum of writers accessible at www.AgentQueryConnect.com, where a writer may post a draft query and invite critiques. Of course there is an art to critiquing material, and not everyone is so artful, but generally a lot can be learned by careful attention to the sum total of all the critiques.

The opening lines of a fiction query letter always contain introductory details of how the writer chose to contact this particular agent/editor, the title of the completed work, and the genre. Some include the number of words here, and some insist it belongs at the very end of the query. Probably the agent/editor would prefer it up here, so that they can decide whether to read further about any work that has an unsuitable number of words for the genre. Gordon Lish may have been willing to edit down Raymond Carver, but it may be presumptuous of lesser writers to expect such willingness by the editor.

The next part of the query is the 'hook,' two or three lines giving the color of the story and a compelling element of tension about where the story is going. Here was the first attempt for 'General..'

A prepping journey undertaken by teenagers to signal an independence from parents is difficult. If the parents divorce first, prepping is maybe half over. But when the remaining parent is a dominating, all consuming disciplinarian, an Afghan immigrant mother, who also happens to be a one-star general in the US Army, prepping takes on epic proportions.

Most of the critiques commented that the voice wasn't appropriate for YA; too 'preachy;' or too academic. Generally, sitting back and looking at it again, they're right. That's how it's going to come across to the query reader. The actual story doesn't have such academic overtones. It's just the result of laboring to get a whole lot of ideas on the table in a couple of sentences, and using big words to do the job. Here's a later version after the critiques and a couple of revisions:

When her Army Brigadier General mom is deployed to the war in Afghanistan, 17-yr. old Caitlin is anxious to toss all that horrible top-down discipline she'd grown up with, and make her own decisions. It's her chance to become her own person, but will it take an epic karate battle to discover just who that person is?

It's probably not there yet, but seems a lot better.

first pages

2010-12-28T16:58:00.000-08:00

This post is being written in an interval between Christmas and New Year's Day. It has been raining off and on for weeks and so has been fine weather for writing, art, and reading. Most of the writing has been on revisions to a work-in-progress, a YA novel tentatively entitled "The General's Daughter." Perhaps some excerpts from the novel could be useful to discuss in a writer's group, but possibly not in a blog. It may be just as much a useful exercise to experiment with an opening page or two on the short story concept introduced in last month's blog. Or something evolved from it.

Fiction writers quickly learn how critical the first pages of any submittal are for moving a manuscript from an editor's slush pile toward serious consideration for publication. If the first several pages, usually mentioned as less than five, do not grab the editor's interest, most likely the submittal will be lost. That doesn't leave much slack for building the fictional dream, so eloquently described by John Gardner. At the minimum, the writer must quickly produce a character(s) of interest; a tension or suspense that moves the action along; and a competent, narrative voice; all of which combine to capture a reader's commitment to finishing the story.

The driftwood shelter sketch above can set the scene. Here's a first draft of a possible, related short story:

      The brown, sandy beach extended a mile south of their driftwood shelter, sweeping a gentle arc, cut off by a rocky peninsula stretched out into the ocean at the far end of the beach. A tall, white lighthouse tower rose from the knobby end of the peninsula, where breaking waves threw up white plumes of spray.

     "You never even mentioned having an ocean-going kayak," Teresa said. "How could you have just left it stashed out here in the dune grass. Weren't you worried someone could steal it?"

     Tom leaned back against the latticework of ocean-polished driftwood. They'd built the shelter two months ago and the storms still hadn't swept it away. He took another toke from his joint. Medical marijuana, to use the new compassionate, or evasive, term for illegal, old-fashioned pot. In his case compassionate was accurate enough. He'd be dead in six months. He passed the joint to Teresa.

     "I didn't have the energy to drag it back and forth to the trailer park," Tom said. "Anyhow, it's ready now for a maiden voyage."

     "Why don't you just take it out a little ways for your first day and come back in, so I can watch you. If all goes well you can paddle down to see your son in Point Tucker tomorrow."

     "I'll be fine. It'll just be getting through the surf might be tricky."

     "Did you tell Brad I'd be driving you to the city for your appointment Monday?" Teresa said.

     Tom nodded, took the joint from her and pulled a deep toke. He hadn't told her that he'd quit the experimental program. He'd thought a lot about the remaining options: this, or enter a hospice program. If he took this route, it wasn't really suicidal. There was a theoretical chance he'd make it to Hawaii. No sin involved.

"I need to get started if I'm going," Tom said. "Help me drag the kayak down to the beach."

     They climbed the bank and trudged through thick dune grass to where he had concealed the kayak. The cockpit was covered with a tarp. When they lifted from both ends, Teresa gasped. "What have you got in here? It weighs a ton," she said.

     "Well, you know, foul weather gear, radio set, GPS, all the stuff you need even for a forty mile jaunt. Better to be safe."

Okay, that seems to sort of set the scene and the situation. A couple more pages might do the job needed to invite a full reading by some hard working editor, but time to return to the novel already in-progress. Happy New Year.

story inspiration and narration

2010-11-06T17:20:00.000-07:00

I'm using my sketch of an oceanside driftwood teepee as a metaphor for a writer's process of constructing a fiction story.

First, there needs to be an interesting idea or concept for a story. An image, and it usually is in the form of imagery, of some idea or concept springs from the subconscious mind, and depending on the energy the image brings with it, reveals itself to a writer as a possible story line.

Out of the solitary quietness of a walk along a deserted beach, the sight of a delicately assembled structure like the teepee fort can't fail to arrest one's attention. What sort of person(s) constructed this? Extrovert rather than introvert, likely; young, probably; feelings of insecurity, maybe; building sense, surely. Of course it would make for a neat twist in a story if the builder was someone completely unexpected, like an older woman, who lives nearby in her own home, on a small but adequate pension from her share of community property she got when she divorced her boring husband of thirty years. So why did she erect this teepee? It's intriguing me already. Don't steal this story!

Let's use the teepee metaphor a little further to explore the selection of elements needed to write the story. I'm currently reading "Letters to a Young Novelist," by the 2010 Nobel Prize winner for Literature, Mario Vargas Llhosa. I'm not so young, but never mind; it's interesting. Llhosa describes the elements one needs to decide on when setting out to write a story as:

narrator
space
time
level of reality

His first three criteria are not so different than those discussed by other authors, but Llhosa's eloquence and fresh ways of describing them are worth reading. Narrator and space as discussed by Llhosa are intertwined, and are usually discussed by other writers as the Point of View (POV) to be used in narrating the story. In choosing a narrator the writer can employ a character from within his story, i.e., someone who occupies the 'space' of the story, and who tells the story in his own words, such that the operative pronoun used throughout the narration is "I." Of course the narrator can also be a plural narrator, such as an entire classroom of students observing the new kid arriving in class (Llhosa's "Madam Bovary" example), in which the operative pronoun in the narration will be "We." His examples of the use of the collective (plural) pronoun in literature is worth the reading. The story narrator can also, of course, be someone outside the story space, i.e., an omniscient narrator. Nothing new about that, but again, the examples he uses from literature are marvelous and prompts one to think of this potential choice in new ways. A third category of narrator he discusses is the 'ambiguous narrator,' one concealed behind the second person, and who talks directly to the reader. Good examples given here, too, such as Victor Hugo and "Les Miserables".

More on Llhosa later.

states of becoming

2010-09-30T14:57:00.000-07:00

What kind of insights did I get from the literary fiction I recall, or the movies or plays I saw, in those early formative years, the years I spent urgently trying to become who I am now--for better or worse? Some stories that jump to mind might simply have been good, escapist fare transporting me to another place or time, or featuring especially interesting characters. I might have thought those characters' exploits seemed exciting, or fun-laden, or sad; however, perhaps in only a few cases, did a character really touch something deeply profound in the ongoing search for who I was, or was trying to be.

Some of the books I remember from those formative years included most of the works of Charles Dickens, Robt. Louis Stevenson, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Booth Tarkington, and an assortment of other individual classics. But this is not meant to be an exhaustive reading list, just a takeoff point for reflections on a few, perhaps lesser known, but personal choices.

I read "Tom Brown's School Days," by Thomas Hughes at a time when I was thinking about what high school I might go to. Certainly the choices available bore no resemblance to the nineteenth century English public school that Tom was sent off to board at. I admired his sense of honor and bravery while there, and the hardships he came through in that difficult, sometimes brutal environment, to become a leader among his school peers. When I peruse those pages today, it's a wonder to me how I got through Hughes' Victorian style of 'Rule, Brittania!' literary expression, but the story was somehow deeply satisfying to the boy I was at the time.

An odd one next, "The Amboy Dukes," by Irving Shulman, which I read when I was at a NYC public high school in the late Forties. The old neighborhoods in south Queens where I lived were changing, with more of the inner city gang culture beginning to appear in our far out reaches of the city. Initially I thought it was a bit exciting, and of course girls were becoming a major related attraction. "The Amboy Dukes" story dramatized such developments; I knew the neighborhoods, and in a way, the characters of that story. But ultimately, I judged the story so disheartening. Luckily for me, I guess.

I'll close the chat with "How Green Was My Valley," by Richard Llewellyn. By this time I had started college, commuting daily from my home in Queens to CCNY, up in the Bronx. Being one of a large family of boys and one sister, I was taken with the closeness of the large family of young men and their sister, and loving parents, living in a coal mining community in Wales around the turn of the century. The narrator was the youngest son of the family, and described his coming of age trials in the harsh school system of that time and place, and the rough-and-tumble world of the youths his age. His father and all his brothers were miners, and if they did have a cheerful, song-filled approach to life, living was nonetheless hard with the wages and labor unrest of the time. The father had hoped his youngest son, a bright lad, would go on to a higher education than any of the rest had had. It was not to be, because as his brothers left one-by-one for a better life in America, the young boy passes up his chance for higher schooling and goes down into the mines to work alongside his beloved father. I think I was so overcome by the sentiment of it that, along with other factors, I decided to leave college and go to work as an apprentice in an uncle's construction union. That ill-advised foray didn't last too long--the work was too irregular, and I went back to school the next semester.

The formative power of books might often be a great thing.

southern voices

2010-08-31T11:08:00.000-07:00

Having just re-read the classic short story "A Member of the Wedding," by Carson McCullers, I'm reminded of how wonderfully the author developed her structure of character voices, the sense of place, and a theme of personal change. Frankie Addams is a twelve year-old girl in a small, southern town in the Forties, during WWII. She is still a bit tom-boyish, but this spring finds her in a state of heightened awareness and tension, wanting something to happen, to be able to break out of her familiar but suffocating routine. She has been alienated from the society of her former girlfriends and has only the company of her younger first cousin, John Henry, and the doting, but 'tell-it-like-it-is' black maid, Berenice.

In early sections of the story the drama plays out in the kitchen of the Addams house, during evenings of card playing, eating supper, and with Frankie giving voice to her anxieties and frustrations, her vague plans for breaking out of the maddening stasis of her life, only to be brought down to earth time and again by the more sage and practical Berenice, who's had four husbands and has been around the bend. Frankie's diction is forever entertaining, as she reaches for words and expressions of her feelings that belie her age. The sense of the slow moving rhythm of life in the small town is portrayed in their conversations, and in Frankie's restless pacing around the kitchen, and her volatile outbreaks. Although there is an underlying bond between Frankie and Berenice, Frankie sometime uses Berenice as a foil for her anger using aggressive language, but Berenice lets her have it back in style. Sometimes, to work out her pent-up anguish, Frankie practices knife-throwing against the kitchen wall. She alarms us.

The indignities and injustices of race relations more common in that era come out in some of Berenice's stories, and is evident from mannerisms of Berenice's friends, but Frankie doesn't seem much, if at all, tainted by that evil. In fact she is a sometimes visitor to Berenice's ancient mother, who tells her fortune, and is friends with Berenice's foster brother. It's amusing to hear Frankie attempt to give him her eloquently phrased version of grownup advice.

In Frankie's attempt to assume a maturity she doesn't have, she roams an unfamiliar side of town and befriends a alcohol-fogged soldier from the nearby army base, and agrees to meet him that night at his hotel to go dancing. Again, it's very amusing to hear her try to converse with this sodden soldier like a grownup, but soon the scene escalates into a trip to his room and Frankie has to almost bite off his tongue and smash him in the head with a pitcher to escape.

Frankie plans to escape her stifling environment by getting her brother and his fiance to take her with them after their upcoming wedding, and they can then have adventures together while roaming the world. It seems her last chance--and she's devastated when they go off on their honeymoon without her. Her world has collapsed.

In a sort of anti-climax, or epilogue, a couple of months later Frankie has found a very compatible new girlfriend in town, and it looks like life will go on after all. Sadly, Berenice is getting married once more, and has served a notice of quitting to Mr. Addams. We'll miss her.

voice uncovered

2010-07-25T15:58:00.000-07:00

The NY Review of Books had an intriguing review by Wyatt Mason on a book written by David Lipsky,"Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace," published by Broadway, 320 pp. $16.99. The book encompasses a collection of conversations between Lipsky and Wallace.

Although Wallace's fiction has at times been cited as "excessive—not edited—arbitrary—self indulgent—mad—gibberish—nonsense", such criticism may have owed to his being "an avant-garde writer. He believed that one of fiction's main jobs was to challenge readers, and to find new ways of doing so." All well and good, and I may read some of his work to form my own assessments, but I was especially attracted in this review to a short section that analyzed a "spoken casualness that would become a characteristic quality of Wallace's prose. An excerpt from a Wallace story includes a suicidal-depressive narrator's description of his state of mind when he witnessed the driver of his bus get seriously injured:

I felt unbelievably sorry for him and of course the Bad Thing (an euphemism for his depression) very kindly filtered this sadness for me and made it a lot worse. It was weird and irrational but all of a sudden I felt really strongly as though the bus driver were really me. I really felt that way. So I felt just like he must have felt, and it was awful. I wasn't just sorry for him, I was sorry as him, or something like that.

The reviewer suggests: "The mix of registers here is typical of Wallace: intensifiers and qualifiers that ordinarily suggest sloppy writing and thinking ("unbelievably"; "really" used three times in the space of a dozen words; "something like that") coexisting with the correct use of the subjunctive mood ("as though the driver were"). The precision of the subjunctive—which literate people bother with less and less, the simple past tense increasingly and diminishingly being used in its place—is never arbitrary, and its presence suggests that if attention is being paid to a matter of higher-order usage, similar intention lurks behind the clutter of qualifiers. For although one could edit them out of the passage above to the end of producing leaner prose—

I felt sorry for him. It was irrational, but I felt as though the driver were me. I wasn't just sorry for him, I was sorry as him.

—the edit removes more than "flab": it discards the furniture of real speech, which includes the routine repetitions and qualifications that cushion conversation."

The paragraph by Wallace stands out as a unique "voice," that thing we're always being challenged to develop in our fiction writing, while at the same time being advised to tighten-up our prose, weed out all but the necessary adverbs and adjectives, "kill the little darlings," meaning our effusive metaphors, similes, and erudite words, and more often than not the use of any constructs like subjunctive moods (I wonder if Hemingway ever used them). Such tightening-up might not always be the best approach.

I think Mason has offered some nice insights for writers in his review. (As a postscript, I was also sad to read in the article that Wallace committed suicide in 2008.)

the narrator's voice

2010-06-30T20:47:00.000-07:00

The role played by a character's 'voice' is often stressed in fiction writing. It may be the trait most explored by writers in getting their creations down on paper, but it is tantalizingly hard to capture in a manner that will set a story above the rest. Perhaps just as worthy of a writer's consideration, though, is the adoption of a compelling narrator's voice. Sometimes they may be one and the same, as when the story is told in first person.

A few that spring to mind are "Catcher in the Rye," "How Green Was My Valley," "Lolita," and "The Great Gatsby." They all seem to have had that seamless, enfolding, fictional dream quality in both the character's voice and his narration of his own story.

In the case of a third-person story, a great deal more latitude exists for distancing the voice of a character and the voice of an independent narrator who tells the story. Perhaps any of the Charles Dickens stories would do to illustrate this, where the narrator has an educated, intellectual voice, clearly different than the character's own, lower class voice, or that of the criminal and violent class characters' voices.

In other third-person stories the narrator's voice may closely fit the intellect, mannerisms,and diction of the main characters in the story, and the reader remains generally unaware of the presence or agency of the narrator. This seems to have generally been the case in stories by Alice Munro, or William Trevor, for examples.

In the matter of narrator strategy, an author once wrote that he likes to be informed from the beginning how a particular story came into existence--how is it that it came to be written down for himself and others to read. Not many stories try to answer that question; most just take off into the fictional dream, but some, like David Copperfield, or Moby Dick, take a shot at letting us know how the story we are reading came about. The strategy can make for a compelling narrator presence.

A recent T. C. Boyle story published in The New Yorker, "A Death in Kitchawank," makes the case for still another strategy, the introduction of a second narrator, who inserts his own observation of the story events, and at a later point in time than the original narrator. The second narrator's asides, included as brief, italicized paragraphs, describe the emotions and responses of one of the secondary characters to the story's events. It didn't seem to make any dramatic changes to the original telling of events, but provided additional, bittersweet shadings toward a better understanding of that one character. Like other innovations in fiction writing, this could be a useful tool for a writer to think about.

thoughts moldering in a forest

2010-05-28T15:03:00.000-07:00

Hiking in the woods is a tonic for the imagination, especially when coming across signs of some long-ago enterprise moldering back into the forest floor. Something that didn't work out after all? Or had served its purpose, and time moved on? It's said that the natural condition of the earth, at least in temperate climates, is to be covered with forest. Perhaps if we don't irreversibly decimate the natural process--through global warming, air pollution, and such--and leave gracefully when our time is done, the forest will once again take over, swallow up our temporary artifacts, and restore the land.

The sketch is of a derelict truck, a Willys Overland, circa 1929 -1932 (I owned a Willys 1932 sedan once, long ago). I'd noticed the truck many times, half-hidden in the trees and shrubs, as I drove past on one of our county roads. There are no buildings visible in the area. Judging by the utility boxes on the back of the truck, it might have been some sort of repair/service vehicle, perhaps serving the logging companies that once operated here before the industry went into decline.

I searched my disorganized files for a few photos of old, abandoned timber sawmills, and nearby workers' houses, which I'd come across while working on two earth dams in northern California forests, but the photos remain hidden away somewhere. The memories of seeing those relics, closed chapters of other forgotten stories, came to mind as I sat sketching this truck.

Gathering such woolly material for stories is always part of the process, but it needs writing, too.

portrait of a novel

2010-04-30T17:55:00.000-07:00

We don't often engage two models for our life drawing sessions, but this time we invited the mother of a young woman to accompany the daughter. Being a confident, attractive woman herself, the mother accepted our invitation. Her presence, and poise, coupled with her daughter's elan, seemed to add elements of mood, atmosphere, and creative tension to the setting.

While viewing this unfinished portrait--watercolor on Tyvek (a semi-glossy film)--my internal fiction writer glossed over thematic material that might inspire a related short story: 1) Each were aware they may have the same lover, and seized on the modeling session to gain intuition over what to do next; or 2) The daughter had been given up for adoption as an infant and believed she had traced her mother--or had she? or 3) The girl had learned her mother was thinking of leaving her husband, the girl's father, and their mood is communicated by body and words.

The art seemed to lend itself as a springboard into some intriguing fiction themes. To be revisited.

Chekhov's subversive endings for stories

2010-03-31T11:50:00.000-07:00

Chekhov is often cited as one of the greatest of short story writers. Still, he seems to be an acquired taste, and perhaps not one to whom a reader might go for shoring up a battered psyche, or to seek some uplifting or inspirational energy. First readings of Chekhov can be heavy affairs. Characters sometimes seem hugely stoic, and their complications never seem to resolve; indeed, they seem to arrive at the end of the story no closer to a resolution of their conflicts than at the beginning. The story seems to have no discernible end. The vast Russian settings, enormous divergence of living conditions between nobility and peasantry, and the absolute power of one over the other, these elements can inject some tensions into the stories, but basically the stories are more about recurrent ordinary human weaknesses and failings than ennobling examples of struggle and triumph.

Whence, then, the acquired taste for Chekhov's stories? David Jauss, writing in The Writer's Chronicle, Mar./Apr. 2010, offers some insight. His article, "Returning Characters to Life: Chekhov's Subversive Endings," examines how Chekhov tends to end his stories by returning his characters to life and the problems created either by their change or their failure to change." In his stories, even when the character changes, "their changes either fail to last, merely complicate the existing conflict, or create a new and often greater conflict."

Today's writers who have had some exposure to degree programs, seminars, or workshops, usually work within the classic model of beginning with a character who faces some sort of major conflict, the conflict intensifies, often interrupted by other sub-conflicts, until there is some climax at which the problem(s) is resolved, or not, leaving the character changed in some conclusive manner thereafter. Not so with Chekhov: "But for all of their apparent inconclusiveness, his stories do have endings; they're just not the kinds of endings favored by...the average viewer of The Sopranos." Nice touch, that, hey? "They are subversive endings, endings designed to undercut our expectations and, thereby, force us to examine our conceptions about life and human nature."

Jauss cites and examines a wide array of Chekhov stories to demonstrate the various categories of subversive endings used by Chekhov to such powerful effect. Jauss says "Many of today's writers write as if unaware of some of the possibilities Chekhov opened up, and thus they end their stories in highly predictable and conventional ways." Jauss's article is suggested as a worthwhile reference for writers to broaden horizons for structuring their stories. A list of Chekhov's subversive endings as categorized by Jauss will give some idea of the range and depth of analysis provided:

1) Anti-Epilogues
2) Reverse Epilogues
3) Echo Endings
4) Chiastic Endings
5) False Climaxes
6) Omitted Climaxes
7) External Climaxes
8) Temporary Climaxes
9) Complication-creating Climaxes
10) Conflict-creating Climaxes
11) Extended Anti-Climaxes
12) Shifts in Address, Tense, and/or POV

The chance to revisit and appreciate Chekhov's stories will be an added benefit.

outlining with a story board - 2

2010-02-28T13:37:00.000-08:00

This is the final strip of storyboard graphics for "The Summit." After taking the time to mull over the previous blog, with its story board and highlighting of interim complications/problems, the current revision of the short story seemed to invite a tightening up. The beginning of story implied a backstory of having just survived an avalanche, which was dropped. The characters have enough problems on their hands as is, and it seemed enough to show they're hard-pressed to achieve their goal of reaching the summit. Similarly, the complications of insufficient supplies of supplementary oxygen tanks, and strains of a failing relationship, furnished enough tension without adding the woman's secret knowledge of a pregnancy discovered just before their expedition. The story board seemed a good focusing tool for identifying perhaps too many complications, just as it might have been useful to alert the writer of no obvious, central or main complication that could provide ample tension for a reader.

The scene of arriving at the cobblestone altar to Kali on the summit showed a major turning point, with a debilitating decline in the physical condition of the scientist. The woman, almost physically spent herself, faces the daunting task of getting her incapacitated partner down the stormy mountain--the descent panel. She takes shelter for the night beneath a canopy of fallen rocks in the "notch,"--see the night shelter panel. Her partner is now unresponsive and she can only guess at the severity of his condition. After a fitful night the woman awakens to the early gray light of dawn. She checks for vital signs of her partner, but other than a still warm body temperature, she doesn't detect any. Depressed and exhausted she goes in and out of sleep and wakefulness. In one of her awakenings, she sees a figure at the entrance to her shelter. At first she perceives it to be their guide, Ranpur, but she gradually becomes aware of all the physical characteristics of the goddess, Kali, blue-skinned, holding a sword and human head. The Kali figure tells her to leave her partner and descend the mountain. The woman is frightened and confused--she can't just leave him without knowing if he's dead. Kali can't be consulted about anything further--she's gone.

The idea for the story arose in part from reading of the disastrous events in 1996 when 15 people died trying to reach the summit of Mt. Everest. Eight of these people, men and women, died in a confused scenario when three or four parties climbing simultaneously made a series of errors. In desperate attempts by the survivors to get off the storm swept mountain, partners unable to continue were left behind, whether dead or alive.

And so, the dilemma of our woman character: was it Ranpur, or the product of a stressed out imagination? Does it matter--should she leave while she still has the strength? Would the reader?

Well, the story, and the storyboard, were enjoyable to create, and will probably be repeated for some future stories.

outlining with a story board

2010-01-30T14:26:00.000-08:00

Some writers have only the barest of concepts in mind as they commence a first draft of a story; others prefer to work with a written outline, listing perhaps main characters, the principal and secondary problems, interim resolutions of secondary problems along the way, and a final resolution. Another idea is to engage the left brain in the conceptual process, and develop a story board before proceeding into the first written draft. The graphics needn't be elaborate, perhaps using only stick figures for characters and very rough sketches for the rest, but it may stir the imagination and help visualize the sequence of key scenes that are most dramatic in telling the story. The story board might also alert the writer to how well the arc of tension rises through the story toward some inexorable release in a final resolution of the main problem.

Story boards are most often considered for developing the very short stories of children's picture books, but they can, and have been, used for considering the skeletal structure of longer fiction, including novels. Whereas the story board might contain a graphic treatment for every page in a child's picture book, it might only show a panel for each major change of setting, or each complication, in the longer forms of fiction.

The partial story board shown above relates to my short story tentatively called, The Summit, which is currently being revised. The story opens (1) with the three characters, an older scientist, his much younger lover, an engineer, and a local guide. They are climbing a mid-difficulty peak in northern India. Their position is precarious, having just survived an avalanche, the westerners are resorting to supplemental oxygen, and the story needs to get moving. In (2) they face the next challenge on this lesser known route--a steep escarpment requiring some technical climbing. It seems important not to get bogged down in details here, but to just show the harrowing conditions. In (3) the climbers take refuge in a small cave on the face to escape worsening weather conditions. To pass time, the scientist draws his companions into a topic much on his mind, the existence of god. He's prone to dismiss it as myth, but seems apprehensive of newer complexities uncovered by science that may touch on it. The engineer offers one of the elementary theological arguments for god, but has little interest in the subject. She has more immediate concerns--what to do about a recently discovered pregnancy, and an intuition that the relationship is almost over. The guide simply makes them aware he is a devotee of Kali. Of course, there's not time to delve very deeply into the god or personal issues, but the idea is to show a state of mind that sets a course for what follows. As soon as the weather breaks a bit, the climb resumes. In (4) the route taken encounters a deep slipped-out region of rock, called 'the notch,' which they must cross on their path to the summit. The guide disappears during the crossing, and is assumed to have fallen into a crevice somewhere in the notch.

The complete story board for this short story is 8 panels total, and was done to aid the revision process. The blog for next month will show the final panels, together with a discussion of the remaining story. Comments are invited, and hope to see you back here then.

love in all its dimensions

2009-12-31T15:57:00.000-08:00

Writers generally stay vigilant for spotting story lines that might have a unique spin in depicting vulnerabilities of the universal condition. That's pretty highbrow for moving into a discussion of an absurd but tenderly poignant 2007 movie, watched only recently, titled "Lars and the Real Girl." The storyline depicts an emotionally damaged young man who resorts to buying a life-size inflatable doll to be his companion and ease his loneliness. When the movie was first released, the concept seemed off-the-wall, bizarre, and a bit kinky, with an unsavory connection to sex toys. Still, it seemed to garner some modestly good reviews, and there was always an interest in how the writer and director handled this material. In the age of Netflix, it was easy to find out, and rather enjoyable. One hastens to add that the acting was especially good. Well, the humans. The doll was especially weird.

Lars, a thirty-something, is living in a garage apartment next to his married brother Gus's home. Karen, Gus's attractive wife, hurries across the snow covered yard in her robe to knock at Lars' door; she wants to invite him to eat breakfast with her and Gus. Lars is too shy or something to even open the door: they carry on a one-sided conversation through the glass pane, until Karen thinks she has an agreement. But instead, Lars drives off to work. He dresses neatly, and works at a computer station in some sort of large technology firm. His cubicle mate calls him over to see the assortment of sexy, inflatable dolls he has on his monitor. Lars is disapproving of his associate's waste of company time. Another associate, Margo, a charming young woman, tom-boyish good looks, comes over to flirt with Lars. She's obviously very interested in him, but he keeps a cool distance. So far, nothing too amiss.

Days later, a crate is delivered to Lars apartment. Gus and Karen are inquisitive, and Lars is evasive. Karen again tries to get him to come to dinner at the house, and, surprising her, Lars accepts—if he can bring his girlfriend. Karen is ecstatic; of course he can. Lars tells her the girlfriend, Bianca, is from Brazil, the daughter of a missionary, and has had an injury that requires her to use a wheel chair. No problem; Karen is so happy for him. The next scene alone is worth the price of admission. Karen and Gus are seated at one side of the table staring across at something that grips them in a sort of catatonic trance. The camera pans around to show a smiling Lars at dinner, with Bianca, the life-sized, inflated doll, seated at the table in a wheel chair beside him. From time to time, Lars speaks to the doll, shares food from her plate, and carries on a conversation with Karen and Gus as if there was nothing unusual happening at all.

Getting kinky yet? Not at all. Lars explains later to Karen that since he and Bianca are not married yet, it wouldn't be right if she stayed with him in his apartment, and so could she stay in the extra bedroom in the house? Of course, yes, of course, Lars; no problem, says a shell-shocked Karen. In what seems a good writing strategy, the back-story is unfolded after an intrigue has been built-up wondering what is Lars problem. Gus gradually pieces it together for Karen. Their mother died when they were just youngsters, and it devastated their father who remained drowned in grief and remorse afterward. As soon as he was old enough, Gus, unable to bear it, got out of the house. Lars, the younger brother, was left to live with the depressed father until years later, and it apparently had taken its toll on him.

Karen decides they have to get Lars to see a local doctor-psychologist in this small, mid-western town. The ruse is that they're going to have this woman doctor check out Bianca to be sure that everything necessary is being done for recovery from her 'injury.' Lars is persuaded, and the office visits are humorous, but more than that, it's moving to see how the doctor is actually probing into Lars' own state of mind. Exceptional acting in what could have been just comedy.

Just as compelling, it seemed believable that the whole town was pulling for Lars, accepting Bianca as an everyday reality, especially by Lars' church-going community, and his office mates. Yes, Margo stays threaded into the storyline; see the movie to appreciate just how well it was done.

The bizarre nature of the story recalls an article, "Love in 2-D," by a Japanese writer, Lisa Katayama, which was published in the NY Times last July. The phenomenon involves "a thriving subculture of men and women in Japan who indulge in real relationships with imaginary characters. These 2-D lovers, as they are called, are a subset of otaku culture— the obsessive fandom that has surrounded anime, manga and video games in Japan in the last decade." Studies have suggested the 2-D love phenomenon "may be attributed in part to the difficulty many young Japanese have in navigating modern romantic life." The author points out that a government survey shows "more than a quarter of men and women between the ages of 30 and 34 are virgins; 50 percent of men and women in Japan do not have friends of the opposite sex."

The 2-D aspect refers to a practice of forming real, romantic relationships with a graphic image of an anime character imprinted on the slipcase of a pillow, which they carry with them on 'dates,' perhaps to a karaoke bar, a public dinner, or similar public places. These items are sold on the Internet, or can be bought or traded at public conventions. Katayama interviews several men who are a part of the subculture, and represent a broad spectrum of 2-D lovers. At one extreme there are men who have given up all expectations of ever marrying, who have a wistful, self-conscious awareness of their fetish, but are nevertheless happy and fulfilled in their 2-D love. In the middle range, some may have tried 'real' romances, but were dumped and have returned to 2-D love. At the other end, some may be happily married now, but have fond recollections of their former obsession. Katayama suggests that the majority of the 2-D lovers go to work, pay rent, have a wide circle of friends, and otherwise live normal lives. Although the paraphernalia may alarm some—the anime characters are often scantily clad prepubescent girls (cartoons; like Elsie, but unwrapped)—the interviewees mostly seemed to have pretty gentle natures. In any case, there doesn't appear to be the cases of sexual violence reported in Japan as are reported in western newspapers.

The human condition seems to endlessly amaze, and should prove an endless source of new material for writers to ponder.

Cherry Blossoms and the Butoh Dance

2009-11-30T16:47:00.000-08:00

The emotional impact of any story can largely depend on our own life experiences, and where we now stand along that unfolding journey. A recent German film, "Cherry Blossoms," besides its good acting and visual gems, has some powerful themes that will be useful to discuss from a story writing viewpoint.

*** *** ***

Here is a summary of our film story to facilitate the discussion. A married couple lives in a small German town, and the man is nearing retirement from his civil service office job. Trudi's doctors reveal the results of her recent medical exam; she has a fatal illness. They suggest she break the news gently to her husband, perhaps while they go on an adventure together, a change of scenery. Trudi is very dejected; she tells them Rudi doesn't like changes, or travel. Nonetheless, she coaxes Rudi to take a vacation with her to visit their three adult children. Trudi had studied Japanese Butoh dancing before marrying, and would love now to visit their youngest son, Karl, who lives and works in Tokyo. However, not knowing of her illness, Rudi protests that it would be cheaper for Karl to come here, and so they go instead to visit their other son and daughter in Berlin. The visit is unexpected and their son and his family have little time to entertain the parents, nor does the daughter. The daughter's lesbian partner is persuaded to drive the parents around town for their sightseeing, and to a Butoh dance performance. The expressionistic dance intertwines graceful movements with the grotesgue, the light and shadows of coming into being, and the ceasing to exist. Rudi, who has no taste for Butoh, sits on a bench outside the performance area.

The parents soon decide their busy children have no time for them, and leave Berlin to visit a lake resort. While there, Trudi dies, and Rudi is plunged into despair. He has depended on his wife all his married life for his happiness. The children return to their parents' home for the funeral. They have a dubious, even distasteful, expectation for Rudi's ability to fend for himself without their mother, and are fearful that he will become dependent on them. After some reflection on the Butoh keepsakes and Japanese travel literature his wife had left behind, Rudi travels to Japan to visit Karl, and to come to terms with his loss of Trudi. Like his siblings, Karl is busy with his work and wary of his father's despondent and dependent-like intrusion into his life. Rudi wanders the seamy side of Tokyo, in and out of strip joints, massage parlors, but all in grief. Often he wears his wife's clothing beneath his topcoat. Rudi overhears Karl on the telephone with his sister describing his wanderings and cross-dressing, and complaining that it is her turn to be a host to their father. The next day Rudi wanders into a park, where he watches a young Butoh dancer perform in a remote, sylvan setting. He starts a conversation with her, and she tells him how Butoh helps her keep contact with her deceased mother. Rudi returns to the park each day to watch her dance, and she befriends him and helps him find his way around Tokyo. One day he follows her home, to discover she lives in a tent in a wooded outskirt of the city.

Rudi asks the girl to accompany him to visit Mt. Fuji, the long cherished ambition of Trudi. The girl cautions him that Mt. Fuji is very shy, and is often lost to misty cover for days at a time. They go and stay together at a resort near Mt. Fuji, and indeed, one day leads to another as the mountain stays hidden in mists. During this time in the resort their friendship deepens; he shows her his wife's clothing which he carries in his luggage, along with the momentoes of her Butoh period. After some days at the resort, however, Rudi becomes weaker, and grows ill. One night he steals outside and discovers that the mists have risen to reveal Mt. Fuji in the moonlight. He quickly dresses in his wife's kimono and Butoh makeup, and he hurries to the side of a lake beneath the mountain. There, he dances his own interpretation of the Butoh, and is joined in the dance by an apparition of his wife. The next morning the girl awakens to find Rudi gone and hurries to find him dead by the lakeside. Returning to their room, she finds he has left her a large amount of money in an envelope. Together, she and Karl participate in the cremation ceremony for Rudi, and afterward each walks off on their own into the city.

*** *** ***

The story has some very good, universal problems that help generate story tensions: growing old; a dependency by one spouse on the other for psychic happiness; a reversal of dependency issues or perceptions of such, between parents and children; and the need for symbols and ritual that satisfy our deep yearning for a spiritual dimension of life. The use of dance as a ritual form portraying a spiritual dimension of life, particularly the Buhto dance, has a profoundly satisfying appeal. The symbol of the whitened face mask of Buhto, creating an impassive persona for the dancer, from a coming into being, to a ceasing to exist, is so mesmerizing and beautiful.

The Buhto dance seems to signify the persona and mythology of the Hindu god, Kali, to my mind. I'd been thinking of additional revisions for one of my short stories, concerning a mountain climbing expedition by an American couple in the Karakorum Mountains, on the borders between India, Pakistan, and China. In my story it's a minor peak, of religous significance to devotees of Kali, and had included a real or imagined Kali dance sequence at a story resolution point. At the least, Cherry Blossoms will be a source of further inspiration. I'll probably revisit the short story in a later blog.

writing in first person POV and other perils

2009-10-31T17:12:00.000-07:00

Has there been an overwhelming tendency in contemporary times for authors to favor writing in first person point-of-view? Cris Mazza, an author and professor of writing, thinks so, and discusses results of her informal surveys in "Too Much of Moi?" published in The Writers Chronicle, Oct/Nov 2009. Mazza surveyed literary magazines and story anthologies, including about 150 stories within each category, and 123 novels. She generally found first person narratives to be on the order of 60% to 70%, but with up to 80% in some individual magazines. For the novels, about 66% of the total, and 87% of thirty-one first novels, were in first person.

Mazza makes a point that "While 65% may not seem overwhelming, it would be considered a landslide in a primary election that offered more than two choices on a ballot." Our authors' ballot, would of course, include first, second, and third person candidates, with at least several variations of the latter: typically called omniscient, objective, and limited third person. Not many enduring stories have been written in second person (here's a plug for one contemporary work, Chris Lynch's "Freewill.") Generally, fiction written more than a few decades ago favored limited third person, and older classic fiction favored omniscient third person.

Various motives are given for writing in first person. Some authors believe it to provide a more intimate story, one that feels more 'real' to a reader, and, in view of the current market popularity of memoirs and 'chick-lit' stories, may provide a narrative style of obvious appeal to a wider share of the reading public. Good first person stories have been, and will continue to be, written; but an author should have a good understanding of the potential weaknesses. Mazza says "Really effective first person should be like viewing the story's events through a clouded, scratched, nicked, warped, or otherwise marred piece of glass, or plastic." Otherwise, one of the pitfalls may be that it becomes all too easy to slip into a mode of narrowly relating a character's emotional and physical responses to a series of obstacles placed in the way of the character getting what she wants. A straightforward, major problem, multiple sub-problem obstacles, and final resolution, constitute the road map of the story. It becomes difficult to include perceptions of irony, nuance, and character complexity that can raise the story to the level of a literary work. Another potentially draining situation is when the first person author and the story protagonist become the same character, probably a common problem.

Some good, in-depth material on the advantages and disadvantages of the several point of view narrative styles are given in "The Art of Fiction," by John Gardner, and "Creating Fiction," edited by Julie Checkoway.

encountering "Distant Relations"

2009-09-23T11:52:00.000-07:00

What is left unsaid by the author can sometimes provide an ultimate, satisfying epiphany in a work of fiction. This reflection developed slowly with me after reading "Distant Relations," by Orhan Pamuk, a short story appearing in the Sep. 7, 2009 edition of The New Yorker. Pamuk was the 2006 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. His story seems a gem, suited to gaining a better understanding of the art of storytelling. (Spoiler alert: find and read the original first, if you can).

The story concerns a young, cosmopolitan, Turkish man who has finished his degree in America and is being groomed as a manager in his father's prosperous business in Istanbul. Kemal is due to be engaged to a girl from one of the wealthy, Westernized families of the city, girls who were beginning to break the old taboos, and, occasionally, were brave enough to sleep with their boyfriends before marriage. Here is Kemal, summing up his relationship with the girl, Sybil:

"Believing myself a decent and responsible person, I had every intention of marrying her; but, even if I hadn't wished to, there was no question of my having a choice now that she had 'given me her virginity.' Before long, this burden cast a shadow over the common ground between us, which we were so proud of--the illusion of being 'free and modern' (though, of course, we would never have used such words for ourselves), on account of having made love before marriage--and in a way this, too, brought us closer."

However, early in the story, he goes to a shop where Sybil had pointed out a handbag to him that she admired. He is startled to find he knows this store clerk from his childhood; she is a younger, distant relation, and very beautiful. Fusun stretches into the window display to fetch the bag from a mannequin, and Kemal is mesmerized by the too-short, lacy yellow skirt, and the yellow pump she kicks off while reaching. They make small talk, and Fusan, a blonde, tells him the cost of the handbag, but she is sure the shop owner, a close relative of Kemal, will offer him a discount when she returns from lunch. "It's not important," he says, and takes out his wallet, "a clumsy gesture that, later, Fusun often mimicked..." he tells us.

Well, we have a little foreshadowing here, and expect perhaps later we will observe a more intimate relationship, where Fusun grows to mimic him.

Meanwhile, Kemal seems to wrestle with his vision of himself as "a decent and responsible person," and his yearning toward perhaps a more modern, uninhibited sexual freedom. He suggests to Sybil that instead of meeting in his office for their trysts, they meet in an unused flat his mother owns in the Merhamet Apartments. However, Sybil doesn't want to sneak around in secret apartments as if she were his mistress. "Where did you get this idea from, to meet in that apartment?" "Never mind," Kemal says. We feel the tension developing in Kemal's two states of mind.

Sybil points out to Kemal that the 'Jenny Colon' handbag is a fake, and suggests he "return the bag, get his money back, and run,' because the shop has cheated him. Kemal reluctantly goes back to the shop for a refund, but faced with the wounded pride of Fusun, and his continued enchantment with her, he is soon consoling the weeping girl with tender hugs. She can't return the money to him because the shop owner has gone home and the register is locked--another humiliation for her. Kemal struggles to get out his reply: she can drop it off at the Merhamet Apartments, where he tells her he goes afternoons, to catch up on office paperwork.

We seem now to be heading toward the denouement of our story; will Kemal shed Sybil and take up with Fusun, or perhaps he will break loose of his old-fashioned inhibitions and carry on with both simultaneously? He leaves the shop in a state of shame and guilt, mixed with images of bliss, on his way home to his parents' house. Enroute, he notices a yellow jug in a shop, and impulsively goes in and buys it. The symbolism of the yellow equates, of course, as it does throughout, with Fusun. (My sketch of the yellow, evening primrose serves as a lead-in to our story).

Our story, (related by Kemal in a distant past tense), hurtles toward a conclusion. When Kemal reaches home he asks his mother for the key to her Merhamet Apartments, and it now becomes obvious it has been unused for years. Kemal tells us the "yellow jug drew no comment from anyone during the twenty years that it sat on the table where my mother and father and, later my mother and I ate our meals. Every time I touched the handle of that jug, I would remember those days when I first felt the misery that was to turn me in on myself, leaving my mother to watch me in silence at dinner, her eyes filled half with sadness, half with reproach."

It was a masterful construction. The story forces the reader to return to key encounters and dialog to satisfy himself that he, at last, understands Kemal, and the resolution of his story. I felt that the author laid out all the foreshadowing and clues that successfully engage the reader, and lead to the conclusion that Kemal attempted to continue a double life with the two women, and ended up with neither, a saddened and lonely man in his later life. Not many other short stories with such veiled endings are as well done.

Hills Like White Elephants, and other paintings.

2009-08-23T16:30:00.000-07:00

Lately, I've been re-reading Alex Powers' "Painting People in Watercolor--a design approach," a favorite of mine, and thought about how similar in approach the design of a good story can be to the design of a good painting. Both furnish aesthetic experiences for a reader or viewer, and it might not be too surprising if they both shared a few conceptual elements.

After covering a lot of design ground, Powers sums up four essential elements in his most successful paintings: 1) less subject; 2) bigger shapes; 3) darker values; and 4) faster painting (for livelier paint quality). If I can translate this to writing, some fiction presents numerous characters, place settings, and motifs or plots, an overall busyness, which can make reading more of a mental challenge than an aesthetic experience. The 'bigger shapes' criteria is related to fiction, because our right-brain, aesthetic appreciation may be challenged to discover interesting shapes meant to illuminate a story, when all those shapes seem to demand equal attention.Powers' darker values advice is related to many artists' tendencies to paint their shapes in a narrow, unexciting range of light to middle value hues (colors), whereas the more adventureous, and aesthetically pleasing paintings will include a vivid use of glowing darks. Similarly, in writing, a bolder palette of values for emotions and actions could be used to accent the fiction's principal 'shapes.' Finally, the faster painting admonition can remind writers that perhaps the originality and energy of a story may be drained by a constant 'noodling,' and 'toning-down,' of any risky material.

I decided to select some classic short fiction piece and work backwards to visualize how a writer's vision might show some affinity with Powers' design principles. Ernest Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants," a strong, aesthetic reading experience, seemed to surface as a candidate immediately. So here goes. The opening paragraph of the story seemed to contain all the design shapes needed for the story:

The hills across the valley of the Ebro were long and white. On this side there was no shade and no trees and the station
was between two lines of rails in the sun. Close against the side of the station there was the warm shadow of the building
and a curtain, made of strings of bamboo beads, hung across the open door into the bar, to keep out flies. The American
and the girl with him sat at a table in the shade, outside the building. It was very hot and the express from Barcelona would
come in forty minutes. It stopped at this junction for two minutes and went to Madrid.

Hemingway offers all of the important shapes for a painting in his opening paragraph. The initial sketch includes the two main characters, the long, white hills with no shade or trees, and an abstraction of the railroad track leading away, toward Madrid. The river is suggested by another shape. The sketch might also have shown the couple sitting in shade outside the bar, waiting for their train, but it might introduce too much subject matter--too busy. Small shapes, like table and chairs, might weaken the composition, as in 2).

Some of the initial value range is established here, using warm hues to suggest the heat. The reflected white glare of the hilltops in sunlight suggest the white elephants fancied by the girl, Jig.

Aesthetically, the painting seems to be holding together well thus far. This is a digital painting, using Corel Painter X watercolor tools, and is a lot more forgiving of mistakes than traditional watercolor painting. The eye moves through the painting from the lower right, over the 'paper-doll' silhouettes of the figures--our focal point--and leaves over the hills at the top.

Some of the values are further darkened, and the small format for the blogging images suggested that might be enough. A little decoration in the form of painting splatter is added, think-metaphors for the scatter of dialog between Jig and her partner as they contemplate whether Jig will go through with an abortion.

The man is confident an abortion will be safe, reasonable, and allow them to continue a happy relationship. Jig wants to believe him, but seems ruefully uncertain, right up until the train arrives.

I think most of the major aesthetic shapes of the story are captured in the painting, but the complete aesthetic experience afforded by the intellectual impacts of the couple's dialog can only be experienced by reading and pondering Hemingway's story.

Nonetheless, I think a writer could benefit by visualizing his story, during the conception, during writing, and during revisions, as a composition of major shapes, shaded in a range of values that dramatize their presence, and by critical use of language that supports the vision's selected focal point.

journeys

2009-07-25T13:23:00.000-07:00

Recently a 17-yr. old boy, Zac Sunderland, completed a 13-month, 28,000 mile, round-the-world voyage in a 36 ft. sailboat. Zac bought his well-used boat for $6000, and set sail in June 2008 when he was only 16, arriving back home earlier this month, 13 months later, at Marina Del Rey in southern California. Previously home-schooled, he studied to complete a high school education while at sea. His parents--dad is a professional sailor--stayed in touch with him during the voyage, using special software and satellite updates to help track storms in Zac's path.

I was reminded of this daring kid's voyage while at the nearby Point Arena wharf, inspecting a small monument (see my sketch) on the rock-armored beach, commemorating a landing of 15 men from the town of Yawatahama, Japan, on Aug. 13, 1913. A free-hand etching done on a metal plate set in the top of the monument depicts their 15-meter, 3-masted junk, and though the boat was a bit larger than Zac's, it may not have been any more seaworthy, and certainly did not have the satellite updates of weather to help plan the safest route along the 11,000 km voyage. It did have 15 crewmen , though, which I'm not certain was an asset or a problem. Disappointingly, the hopeful immigrants were returned to Japan; nevertheless, a sister city relationship sprang up between Yawatahama and Point Arena in later years.

All of which leads into my latest evening reading, "On to Oregon," by Honore Morrow. First published in 1926, it had been mentioned by a number of YA literature folks as one of their favorite books while growing up, and was compared to a couple of American classics. I'd never heard of Morrow's novel, but as noted, I'm intrigued by stories of epic journeys. John Sager, a 14-yr. old boy, with four younger siblings, and his parents, are on a wagon train leaving Missouri in 1844, and headed for the Oregon Territory. He is a difficult, rebellious boy, and the journey up through Wyoming has already faced desolate wasteland, hunger, sickness, and marauding Indians. When both of John's parents die of disease, it falls to this undisciplined, but tenacious boy to keep his remaining family together, and try to bring their wagon through to Oregon. John has elements of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer in his makeup, but he faces much more dangerous trials in his story. I'm only one-third through, so I've yet to decide how well the book succeeds.

A collection of my YA book reviews is at Jacketflap.

pinocchio, in depth

2009-06-06T15:50:00.000-07:00

Pinocchio, like many of the classic fables, seems to have numerous layers of symbolic meaning, much like the more studied, often darker, fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. Perhaps the staying power of such stories owes something to our subconscious resonance to the embedded symbolism.

Tim Parks, writing for NYRB (30Apr2009), penned an interesting review for the new translation of the classic, "The Adventures of Pinocchio," by Carlo Collodi, translated by G. Brock. Collodi had a formative background that may well have colored his story of Pinocchio. Born in 1826, the first of ten children in a poor Florentine family, where six of his siblings died in childhood, Collodi knew the hardscrabble life he sets for Pinocchio and the puppet's creator/father, Geppetto. Collodi was educated in a seminary, but in 1848 and 1859 volunteered in two unsuccessful revolutionary wars fought to unify Italy and free it of foreign powers. By the late 1860s the country had been unified, and Collodi began his writing career working for the new Ministry of Education, where he was invited to write for children. As Parks tells it:

"The success of his children's books was welcome but Collodi's ambition had been to write adult literature. Here, however, his work was criticized for failing to deliver realistic character and incident, and for its underlying pessimism about both the new Italy and human nature in general."

Though given an exuberant, feel-good treatment by the Disney movie version of 1940, the original story told the adventures of a brash, gullible, and easily manipulated Pinocchio. Collodi's cynicism about human nature inhabits the puppet's disregard for his poor father's efforts to shelter and educate him, and is palpable in concocting the guileful, unsavory schemes of Cat and Fox for hoodwinking the puppet. (We seem to have reprised Cat and Fox lately in Wall Street's Bernie Madoff gulling his trusting puppets). Parks opines that Collodi's "…irritation at writing in a genre he thought secondary may have contributed to the story's extraordinary mood swings and unusually cavalier approach to such matters as narrative consistency," but which nevertheless contributed to the story's vitality.

Parks relates how Collodi tired of his story and wanted to end it at the point where Cat and Fox, unable to prise Pinocchio's mouth open to get at his hidden gold coins, hang him in a tree, and plan to return for the coins the following morning. However, the publishers prevailed on Collodi to continue, and he presses on with the following remarkable scene:

"Oh, if only you were here, Daddy!" calls Pinocchio. "His eyes closed, his mouth opened, his legs straightened, and then, after a tremendous shudder, he went completely limp."

Parks notes the scene appears suspiciously like an allusion to the Crucifixion. Yes, astonishing, but credible, considering the profane cynicism of the ex-seminarian, turned anti-cleric, and revolutionary soldier, who fought against Papal armies and their foreign allies opposed to unification of Italy.

Other religious symbolism may be ascribed to the character of the blue fairy, a girl with "sky-blue hair," and "her face white as a waxen image," iconography suggestive of Mary, the Blessed Mother figure in the Church. The blue fairy in the story is a recurring figure of solace and comfort to the beleaguered Pinocchio. Here, Collodi seems not so cynical, and perhaps somewhat wistful for the Italian archetypal figure of the ever-caring mother, exemplified by Mary.

In the end, Collodi tells us Pinocchio becomes a boy like other boys. Are we then elated, or are we rather nostalgic for the loss of Pinocchio's former individuality and freedom? But he never showed anything like individuality or enjoyed much freedom as a puppet, and had only ever been a victim of internal whim and external manipulation. Collodi loved such enigmas, and broke lots of conventional fiction writing rules to spin his magical, compelling tale.

The story has always intrigued me, and it may have much more depth and writing craft than I'd previously imagined. A writer could learn a few things from Collodi.

subconcious underpinnings for fiction writing

2009-05-10T14:15:00.000-07:00

I think many writers experience a rich relevance of certain place settings encountered on local excursions, or in distant travels. Such encounters may set in motion a sort of subconscious connection to the scene, even though one had little or no direct memory of a physical connection with the place. We're not speaking of the common 'déjà vu ', or, 'I've been here before' feeling; rather, one more specifically targeted to the writer: 'this place expresses something that I may need to deal with in my fiction.'

These ideas were in mind recently when I sorted through some of my photographs taken at an old, largely empty, dairy ranch property, circa 1880-1940, located here on the west coast. The first shots were of a Victorian-style tree house, ensconced in the twisted heart of a gigantic, ancient cypress tree. The mysterious doorway conveys something of a magical portal into fictional space. Inside are carved figures representing the Garden of Eden: Adam, Eve, the animals. Intriguing, especially after reading the recent novel, "Infinity in the Palm of Her Hand," by Gioconda Belli, a story about the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. The other photos were taken going away from the tree house, on a walk through lush, overgrown vegetation to the now abandoned, original ranch house, slowly subsiding over the years into the black earth beneath. Such a sense of loneliness and mortality, perhaps somehow linked to the tree house diorama.

I assembled a few minutes of a movie clip using the photos, with a piano sonata playing in the background. The music haunts me whenever I revisit the old house.

to write, or sketchcrawl?

2009-04-12T14:04:00.000-07:00

After a few short story rejections over the past months I feel a need to recharge my inner battery, so I have spent more time on art, including drawing, outdoor sketching and life drawing sessions at the art center, and watercolor painting. Sometimes art seems a little safer--if someone doesn't care for the picture I'm working on, well, that's okay; I rarely ask an opinion. The drawing or painting either works aesthetically for me, or it doesn't. Writing involves a little more of the personal joys, sadness, triumphs, and failures that a writer brings out of his experience to the fiction work undertaken. You don't necessarily know as much about me from my art as you might from my stories. Just so, an editor's rejection can be hard to handle; is it a judgement on my inner workings, or just a matter of writing craft? Okay, we all know that any writer that dares to submit their work will have these introspective periods, and just need to get over them.

A friend suggested I join her in an international fraternity of sketchers who every 3 months go on a one-day sketching odyssey in their area, and then post the results on the group's web page, at www.sketchcrawl.com. The Sketchcrawl page downloads drawings from our blogs, so here's a few I completed for the 22nd Sketchcrawl, all from locales near my home on the northern California coast.

First sketch: Point Arena Lighthouse; Second Sketch: Point Arena downtown.

Third photo: wharf at Point Arena; Fourth photo: pioneer's graveyard in Manchester.

inauthentic authors

2009-03-15T15:26:00.000-07:00

The sketch depicts a storyteller, a seanchai, in the Irish tradition, who unwinds his tale from the darkened corner of a smoky cottage (inspired by photo in "Rachel Giese: The Donegal Pictures). Though he remains partly obscured in the shadows as he tells his tale of 'long ago and far away,' the audience judges his appearance and words to decide for themselves whether he's an 'insider' or an 'outsider' to the people of the story. If he speaks intimately of the ways of the 'Tuatha de Danaan,' the faerie people, he may take care to validate how he comes by such knowledge. He might claim for himself a special relationship to the faeries, but in that case his audience might wonder why he has come to be wandering their countryside, hungry, and in want of shelter for the night. Whatever his claim, the storyteller needs to stand ready to defend it. If his story suggests an intimate, personal tale of the Tinkers, also known as the Travelers, a gypsy-like subset of the Irish population, the storyteller's own appearance, dress, and dialect may be key in winning over his audience.

In modern times, our written novel, with its acceptibility of author pseudonyms, a wider world of social and cultural complexities, and various degrees of removal between author and audience, may place the audience in a more vulnerable position to 'inauthentic' authors. Some cases discussed here will clearly involve 'inauthentic' authors, as in the case of an author of a memoir which did not in any way represent his own, personal experience. A lesser degree of inauthenticity might be ascribed to the author James Frey, who was shown to have allowed substantive amounts of fictional episodes to creep into his memoir. In such cases the storytelling might be more rigorously honest, and still compelling, as first-person fiction. Indeed, most 'memoirs' probably have at least some, if minor, amounts of fiction, which would not necessarily move the memoir into being thought inauthentic. The issue of inauthenticity is a lot less clear in other cases.

The subject has provided the media with a lively topic in recent years, wherein misrepresentations of a book have raised interesting issues for the reading public. In most if not all the cases the misrepresentation originated with the author, though occasionally the publisher seemed remiss in fact-checking. In a few books the representations were a hoax, with the writers presenting themselves as Holocaust survivors, or as survivors of drug addiction, or of urban violence, and their work is offered as a memoir, or a personal experience. However, in other cases the misrepresentation might consist only of a false suggestion by the author of his ethnic identity, intended to establish credentials for writing the story, and to gain access to market quotas he presumed to exist for that cultural or ethnic identity.

An interesting survey and a writer's discussion of this topic are given in "Real Fakes & Inauthentic Others," by Alyce Miller, in The Writer's Chronicle, V5 No. 41, March/April 2009. Curiously, some of the same fakes and inauthentic others were discussed in "Guilty," a 2008 bestseller by Anne Coulter, a political conservative, who focuses on a notion that such authors feel the 'modern' need to identify with 'victims' in their stories.

Hoaxes dealing with the Holocaust include an award-winning "Fragments," by Binjamin Wilkomirski, published in 1995, and comprising memories of his imprisonment as a Jewish boy in a Nazi concentration camp in Poland. He was uncovered as a hoax in 1999. He'd actually spent the war years with adoptive parents in Switzerland, and wasn't even Jewish. Another two hoaxes of the genre exposed in 2008 included "Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years," by Misha Defonseca, and "Angel at the Fence," by Herman Rosenblat. They had all seemed to reviewers to write with authority, but their stories had come unraveled, either when backgrounds were checked, or some pertinent detail didn't stand up. Rosenblat couldn't repeatedly have met his blond angel at the camp fence as he described, because someone who knew better, an actual camp inmate, pointed out the physical inaccessibility of that fence to any prisoner. Nonetheless, these were stories that were apparently well crafted, and were praised by critics and readers—until the matter of authenticity had come up. If the story had been labeled as fiction, would it have succeeded as well? It might have lessened the presumed authority of the writer, but if the protagonist had been developed as a sympathetic character, and the story had gripping obstacles and resolutions, well then, perhaps.

An example of the false memoir, and false ethnicity issue, which was treated in both of the references given above, and which I also recall from reading a NY Times book review, unfolded after the publication of "Love and Consequences: A Memoir of Hope and Survival," by Margaret B. Jones. The memoir's protagonist is a half-white, half-Native-American girl, who grows up in an African-American foster parent's household in South Central Los Angeles. She runs drugs for the 'Bloods' street gang, raises pit bulls to sell to gang members, and loses her foster-brother to gang warfare. In the Times interview, Margaret has escaped her past life, now has a small daughter and a new home in Washington, bought using proceeds from a Starbucks investment, and attends college. It seems incredulous, but why not? The interview includes a photo of a young black man who is a guest in her home and is said to be recovering from a gun wound. In another photo Margaret is sitting on the stoop with her child, Rya, and one of those mean-looking pit bulls she used to raise in the 'hood. Unfortunately for her, it was later discovered that Margaret B. Jones is really Peggy Seltzer, who grew up in an affluent section of southern California and attended a private school there. Nevertheless, she opined that she'd done some good with her fictional account of life in the 'hood, by giving voice to an oppressed minority who are usually ignored. Too bad she hadn't called it fiction.

Another interesting literary ruse occurred with the publication of "My Own Sweet Time," by Wanda Koolmatri, supposedly an Australian Aborigine woman, but which was really written by Leon Carmine, an Anglo-Australian male cab driver in Sydney. He was disarmingly honest about it when the ruse was discovered: "I couldn't get published, but Wanda could." Before being discovered an ethnic outsider, his book "took the publishing world by storm."

There were many other interesting cases discussed by Miller in her article; "The Education of Little Tree," by Forrest Carver, a hugely successful 'autobiography of a Cherokee Indian,' though Mr. Carver was later discovered to be white; and "I, Rigoberta," an autobiography by Rigoberta Menchu, a renowned Guatemalan human rights activist and Nobel laureate, but relating experiences Rigoberta never had. Though not the poor, uneducated person she had claimed to be, she said she wanted to speak out for those voiceless, oppressed people of her country who had suffered such genocide.

Ms. Miller makes some interesting points when she surmises that "the…hoax may, in part, function as a reminder of the consequences of condescending to work from "previously silenced or suppressed voices" by presuming it looks like a particular thing," and, "The notion that an 'outsider' appropriates, while the insider never does, is false and simplistic."

To conclude, the inauthentic author might run the gamut of a repugnant hoax, to someone who made a venial marketing decision.

starting a story

2009-02-21T13:46:00.000-08:00

Perhaps one of the most pivotal points in laying out a short story is where to begin? According to Michael Kardos in his excellent article, "In Defense of Starting Early," (Writer's Chronicle, Feb. 2009), much of the contemporary advice is to start at, or immediately following, a conflict, and proceed efficiently to the resolution. He quotes Vonnegut: "Start as close to the end as possible."

My own stories sometimes include initial settings of time and place, and character development, that may not be needed to engage the all important question of, "what is this story really about?" In most cases it might easily start a little closer to the end, but then it could become a different story. It might be done just as well or perhaps better that way, of course, but Kardos, who's job was to read several thousand manuscripts for three literary magazines over the past seven years, has come to see how frequently the story that starts late fails to develop an engaging plot.

He says that, typically, the late-starting manuscript begins in the aftermath of some accident or tragedy (twenty percent of the stories received at his literary magazine assignments) and moves forward from there, depicting how a character deals, or doesn't deal, with the accident or tragedy. Often the story doesn't work because the accident or tragedy seems to exist mainly to add gravity to the work. If the backstory were cut, the events of the dramatic present that follow wouldn't change at all. Other times, even if the accident or tragedy is directly relevant to a story told in the dramatic present, we are shown characters moving from place to place, making observations, having conversations, etc., but very little in the way of plot. This is because the important story—the gripping story—is already over. The most dramatic event in these characters' lives has already happened.

Kardos mentions the Ur-text of narrative theory, Aristotle's "Poetics," in which "the beginning of a plot is said not to follow anything by causal necessity. Rather, the beginning is, by definition, that from which events of causal necessity follow." Kardos concludes that "after-the-accident" stories are noteworthy in being "unconventional, especially when the accident is not actually an accident at all, but rather, as is often the case, the tragic result of causal factors. Often these causal factors, if rendered in the dramatic present, might make for a more compelling and satisfying story than the one actually written."

Why is this unconventional structure so common now in contemporary fiction? Kardos hypothesizes it has to do with the dominant aesthetic virtues of subtlety and restraint, as seen in the continuing relevance of Hemingway's "iceberg principle," such that "if fiction were an iceberg, then seven-eighths of the iceberg ought to remain hidden underwater." Another example given is Raymond Carver: "Most of my stories start pretty near the end of the arc of the dramatic conflict." Kardos says that "Given Carver's tendency to avoid flashback and backstory, we are typically denied knowledge of the events that have gotten his characters to where they are now, at the start of their narratives….One of the effects that Carver achieves by starting late, and skipping these earlier, character-shaping events, is the downplaying of causality—action and reaction, or problem and decision—in favor of a brief, shimmering moment in a character's life, the exact significance of which is difficult for either the character or the reader to articulate."

I think Kardos makes a good case for being wary of starting too late in your story.

cell-phone novelists

2009-01-08T10:13:00.000-08:00

A startling writing phenomenon seems to be rolling over Japan—cell-phone novelists, mostly girls and young women, who are posting serial installments of their work on special (free) web-hosting sites. Imagine trying to tap out a 100,000-word novel on a cell-phone, using just your two thumbs, while commuting to your job on the crowded bullet train. Some of these writers have no idea of the structure of novels when they begin, but, increasingly, their on-line works are making it into manga (graphic novels), books, and movies. A recently published novel written by a previously unknown cell-phone author sold 2 million copies. A movie version of another cell-phone novel earned 35 million dollars last year. At the end of 2007, cell-phone novels held four of the top five positions on the literary best seller list!

Some of the examples discussed in The New Yorker (12/22-29/08) generally portray passive, emotionally painful, often masochistic, romances, written with very simple word and sentence structure. The editor of a literary journal is quoted as saying, "The author's (real) name is rarely revealed, the titles are very generic, the depiction of individuals, the locations—it's very comfortable, exceedingly easy to empathize with. Any high school girl can imagine that this experience is just two steps from her own. But this kind of empathy is largely different from the emotive response—the life-changing event—that reading a great novel can bring about. One tells you what you already know. Literature has the power to change the way you think."

In a panel discussion hosted by the same journal, the question discussed was "Will the cell-phone novel 'kill the author'?" A panel conclusion was that the novels weren't literature at all, "but the offspring of an oral tradition originating with the mawkish Edo-period marionette shows and extending to vapid J-pop love ballads." The journal editor concluded, "It's not a question of literature being above it. It's just—it's Pynchon vs. Tarantino. Most people have a fair understanding of the difference."

Yes, but I like the connection of Japan's current cell-phone bare-bones novel to the earlier marionette shows. Perhaps some American bare bones, genre novels are offspring of the ubiquitous Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century "Punch & Judy" puppet shows, staged on sidewalks in many of our urban-immigrant centers. No literary pretensions there, just economical, brief respites from grim realities pressing in on all sides.

evoking sympathetic characters--or maybe not

2009-01-02T10:44:00.000-08:00

Every so often one picks up a novel in which the protagonist has been given some demoralizing physical affliction that is not his main obstacle in getting what he wants in the story, but seems to have been factored in by the author, either to create added sympathy for the character, or perhaps to provide an interesting, additional tension. But does it work?

On one end of the scale, arguably, we might have the overweight character, whose romantic horizon is consequently more constricted, or who suffers numerous barbs and indignities as a result of his weight. Does the overweight condition add much to the story? I can think of several YA novels in this category, most not too memorable, but a recent graphic novel might be useful to discuss along this line.

"Skim," by cousins, Mariko (author) and Jillian (illustrator) Tamaki, is the story of Kimberly Keiko Cameron, attending a private, girls' school in Toronto. Kim and her small group of friends practice an eclectic mix of Goth and Wiccan lifestyles, which sets them off from the majority, more affluent and conventional girls. Kim, who lives with her divorced mother, is a very lonely girl to begin with, and her overweight condition intensifies this. She develops a crush on her English teacher, a young, hippie-like, New Age woman. The graphics are quite effective in showing how Kim's fantasies sometimes mix with the realities of her infatuation. The teacher abruptly transfers away from the school, and Kim is despondent. She compensates a little by eating more frequently, and resists attempts by her girlfriend to hook them up with college boy dates. The story has its tender moments and story interest, but the overweight factor, and eating compulsion, are ultimately a little off-putting. Kim's lonely nature, her search for identity and meaning through Wiccan ritual, and through a fantasy love, seemed enough for the story without the added hurdle of her body weight.

Overweight may or may not have a genetic basis, but cerebral palsy definitely does, and we'd really be loading our character down with this while he's on his search for what he wants in the story. "Stoner and Spaz," a YA novel by Ron Koertge, does just that. Ben is a conservative, strait-laced, generally ignored student with a CP disability, a spaz, who escapes his loneliness with a heavy dosage of movies at the local arts theater—until he meets Colleen there, another lonely student, but a rebel who'll do any drug, and take any dare. She doesn't ignore his disability; she teases him about it, and thrillingly they're on some sort of high wire together. He doesn't even smoke cigarettes, but she has him try a joint, and takes him to all the swinging clubs with her. She challenges him to direct his own movie, and he challenges her to give up the drugs. We get the feeling Ben will have the strength he needs for his challenge, but our heart goes out to Colleen who just doesn't seem like she'll make it. So, does the affliction make for a better story? It probably would have worked fine if he were just the lonely, movie-addicted, introverted young man he was, without the CP complication. However, the CP seemed to have a reasonably good fit, wasn't overly clinical, and the story didn't strain to send any message about disabilities. Koertge continues to be a favorite YA author.

"The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time," by Mark Haddon, demonstrates a deeper end of the scale for imposing an affliction on a character. Christopher, an autistic 15-yr. old, narrates his story. Here, the affliction is the dominant theme of the story, though Haddon weaves his revelation of the autistic child's view of the world into a warp of light mystery about who killed a neighbor's dog. Christopher utilizes his love of reading Sherlock Holmes mysteries and an acute, deductive logic, to pursue the mystery. He is handicapped by an inability to 'read' the moods and behaviors signaled by other people, and though he cannot tell or understand jokes, he is often ironically funny. Other times, he is maddeningly irritating with his idiosyncrasies, and petulance toward his beleaguered father. I recall that Haddon had training in social work, and he probably understands his character well. In the case of this novel, the affliction, and the writing, are compelling reasons for reading the novel through, but the reading experience finally seems less rich when the mental process of the character is so far removed from us.

voice of a myth-The Underneath

2008-11-24T20:02:00.000-08:00

It was such a pleasure to read "The Underneath," by Kathi Appelt. It would be hard to suggest which age group it might best appeal to, perhaps middle grade, but high school, or younger child, or adult, would find lots of appeal, too. For background structure, it recalls ancient tales of mermaids, and selkies (Celtic), ondines (German), and lamia, which some myths refer to as half-woman, half-serpent. In Underneath, it is a version of the lamia, as a 1000-yr. old cottonmouth snake, a giant water moccasin, which had once assumed the form of a woman, but after being betrayed by a human male, had reverted to her snake form. In Appelt's telling, once the myth creature reverts to its animal form, it can never change back to human. Grandmother moccasin has a sinister presence throughout the story, as she lies imprisoned in a clay jar buried beneath the roots of a lolbolly pine in the swamps of East Texas. A thousand years before, a man had taken her lamia daughter, Night Song, from her, and there was a price to be paid. Sssssss. Once she was free.

Another character in the story had been an evil young boy, perhaps bent that way by a vicious, abusive father, and who is now a lonely, fearfully evil man, called Gar Face, named after a vicious, ugly fish who lives in the swamp waters. Gar Face figures prominently in the story, but more so does his chained-up, abused bloodhound, called Ranger, and the two kittens, Sabine and Puck. Their mother, a calico cat, had sought refuge beneath Gar Face's cabin, trusting Ranger, and gave birth there to her two kittens. The story of the kittens growing up, their games, learning to hunt, but never daring to venture out in sight of Gar Face, is artfully told. Relating their playing and hunting strategies to their big cat ancestors is part of the marvel. Eventually, Gar Face discovers and captures Puck, and also his mother, when she goes to Puck's defense. Gar Face ties them in a sack and throws them into a river. Puck escapes, and the story becomes his struggle to survive in the swamp, and whether he will find his way home to Ranger and Sabine. In the parallel story, we discover in intermittent small chapters how Grandmother moccasin lost her daughter, Night Song, to another magical creature, Hawk Man, after they both had crossed into their human natures, and how they came to have a daughter. Who, of course, is the granddaughter of Grandmother moccasin--and grandmother knows of her and seeks her.

How the path of the characters intertwine and ultimately cross makes for an epic story.

The language of the story provides a good part of the enjoyment; I can imagine myself reading the suspenseful cadences to my own granddaughter, now grown, when we shared evening story times in my small, coastal cabin:

"Here then is a hard-edged bitter boy become a man known as Gar Face...Do not cross his angry path. Do not."

"Do not go into that land between the Bayou Tartine and the little sister, Petite Tartine. Do not step into that shivery place. Do not let it gobble you up. Stay away from the Tartine Sisters."

"Grandmother is waking up. 'Ssssoooooonnnnn,' she says, 'my time is coming. Sssssoooonnnn...' Do not look into that mouth of cotton. Do not."

disreputable history and art

2008-11-02T20:43:00.000-08:00

This time of year seems to invite more reading than writing, and some watercolor painting, as appears here. Most of my reading has been in short stories, but also a few YA, and some Indian-American, and Asian novels. I've spent only small amounts of time revising my earlier short stories, and hope to get a couple of them in shape for submitting in the coming months.

I recently finished "The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks," by E. Lockhart, a YA novel. I've always been attracted to stories with a prep-school setting, ever since the powerful experience of reading, as a young boy, "Tom Brown's School Days," by Thomas Hughes. The Disreputable History has nowhere near the tension and drama of Tom Brown, but it has some nice writing, character development, and harmless, if not sophomoric, pranks carried out by a males-only, secret society. Frankie, a spunky young woman, newly endowed with a terrific body over the previous summer, falls in love with one of the boys in the society. She manages to penetrate the secrets and inner workings of the society, and uses phony email messages to commandeer their programs.

The story is told generally in third-person omniscient, though at times Lockhart projects the reader into the mind of Frankie in some long passages, so that it seems like a first-person narrative. Frankie, and a less affluent, scholarship student at the school, a friend of Frankie's boyfriend, Matthew (can't remember his name), comprise the better developed characters in the story. Frankie can be maddening to a male reader, this one, anyhow, with her urgent need to know everything Matthew thinks, or the relationship is going nowhere. Still, she's engaging, and inventive. She goes a little overboard on her use of 'neglected positives,' like describing someone as ept, her presumptive opposite of inept. Frankie tells us in several places she's Jewish, which I thought might enrich her character further, but Lockhart leaves it to us to imagine how. I like ethnicity in characters, and sometimes use Irish connections in my writing.

negative space in writing scenes

2008-09-04T10:41:00.000-07:00

The concept of negative space might be as useful to writing as it is to art. I was thinking about this while trying to make a watercolor painting come alive. It involves some of the same challenges as making a scene in fiction writing come alive.

In a certain style of painting a nude figure in watercolor, we might start with a pencil drawing on a white sheet of paper, paint a light value color wash over the entire paper, following with a flesh color wash that covers and extends out from the nude drawing. Before these washes are fully dry, another light value wash might be brushed over the figure and surrounding areas. All of the hues and values are now established, but it’s a hodgepodge of color without any real focus. Perhaps like a scene in the beginning of a story, where several characters, objects, or activities may be vying equally on the page for the reader's attention.

Let's return to the painting. To "pop" the figure forward, I can apply a medium value (darker) color to the "negative space" outside the nude figure. The lighter, flesh-colored figure begins to emerge and draws the viewer's attention. But perhaps the effect is too strong, and the figure now seems too remote from the background. So, I wash over part of the figure with the same, medium value color. The lighter, flesh tone of the figure can still be seen through the darker wash, but that covered part of the figure is now partly subsumed into the background. My painting has become more integrated, but I'm concerned that I've lost some needed focus where I've washed over the figure. I go back in and apply a still darker value to the negative space outside selected parts of the subsumed figure. That's better; more of the figure emerges. The figure has become the main focus of the painting, and the related flow of washes surrounding the figure adds to the viewing experience.

To explore this idea, here's the opening to a story:

Geronimo and Corky, shirtless and wearing sweatbands, edge toward the red brick wall, pounding a handball against it as they advance.

Pocketa-pocketa-pocketa

Greg, a slender, dark-haired boy sits on the sidewalk with his back against the wall and watches the game. He's wearing a frame without any lenses, and a burnt cork mustache. He turns and looks as a city bus hisses to a stop at the corner curb. Luke gets off the bus, gripping a backpack over one shoulder, and walks over to stand and watch the game.

Okay, we've got some initial light color washes over the complete scene; a couple of areas of interest, perhaps, but nothing too compelling. Let's pop a main character forward by brushing some dark washes in the negative space around him. Luke is our man.

Corky hits the ball to the sweet spot in the corner, and it rolls back across the sidewalk, unplayable. Point and game—Corky throws up his arms and lets out a whoop. Geronimo pulls off his sweatband, curses, then squats beside Greg and flings an arm around his shoulder. He holds the struggling Greg in an arm lock, kisses him on the forehead, and looks up at Luke.

"He's mine; go get one of your own," Geronimo says, smiling. "I hear they got loads of these little darlings up at that school of yours?"

"Yeah, ease up on him; Greg's a little strange, but not that strange," Luke says. "He grew up with Corky and me and you don't think about that, but you should."

Well, that darkens the surrounding negative space, but I don't want Luke to pop too glaringly out of his background. I'll brush some of the darker wash from the negative space over part of Luke, and make him relate more to the background.

"Maybe you're not one of us anymore," Geronimo says. "Maybe you've gotten too good for us?"

"Nah," Corky says, sweeping up a gray tee-shirt from the sidewalk to mop sweat from his face and torso. "As long as the cops are still looking for who did the kid in the Grover Heights rumble, we've all got to stick together. Luke is in it as much as any of us. We're each other's alibi."

Well, that's enough of an exercise for now. Luke is shown as part of the darker background, but pops forward to a point of greater interest as character qualities of education and sensitivity are suggested.

Two art forms, writing and painting, and each may have similar scene management techniques.

chabon's yiddish mystery

2008-07-28T19:57:00.000-07:00

The last three months have been a little rough, what with being in and out of the hospital a couple of times. A gall bladder wasn't doing its job anymore—it suddenly died—and had to be jettisoned. However, it didn't go quietly; complications arose afterward. When something like that is finally over with, and a sense of good health returns, it's something like an epiphany.

Before all that started, I'd been reading "Spud," by John Van De Ruit. I'd seen mention of it in several blogs that review YA literature, and the storyline sounded promising. A boy attends a boarding school in South Africa, and has to engage a rigorous educational regimen while fitting in amongst a disparate, and unruly group of boys in his dorm house. I was hoping for something like the classic "Tom Brown's School Days," which had made such a deep impression on me as a young reader. Tom Brown it was not, but was more of a slapstick, goofy series of escapades by the boys. Some of the plot elements might have led somewhere, like Spud being picked to play the lead role in "Oliver," but I'm afraid I lost interest midway.

As I've been convalescing, I've finished reading Michael Chabon's "The Yiddish Policemen's Union." A very imaginative story—the U.S. government has temporarily settled Jews, driven from Palestine in the 1948 war (a 'what-if' fabrication), into their own, self-governing enclave in Alaska. However, the land is soon to revert back to the State of Alaska, and the Jews will have to leave. There is a plan to this madness, and Chabon weaves it well. Meanwhile, Detective Meyer Landsman of the Yiddish Police Department has a murder to solve, involving a Messiah, a fundamentalist, "black hat" Jewish sect, and loads of intriguing Yiddish lore, all of which are intricately threaded into the plot.

Chabon's writing style is often remarkable, with his choice of similes, and metaphors, and descriptive details. Sometimes the similes are stretched a bit, but they're so darn good you forgive him. A really good writer.

cutting ties in YA

2008-05-28T15:39:00.000-07:00

Reading, writing, and everything else was interrupted by removal of a gangrenous gall bladder early in May. There must be a short story hidden in the fog of that experience. I particularly recall being awakened every two hours in the darkness when the electronic LCD module, with its blinking red display, was wheeled up to my bedside. "Vital signs check," calls a voice from somewhere behind the Star Wars resemblance of R2D2. Fingertip clipped into a sensor, thermometer beneath my tongue, and a blood pressure wrapping on my arm: I wait for R2D2 to announce whether I am still with the Force, or fading.

Before going into the hospital, I finished reading "A Story of a Girl," by Sara Zarr, a 2007 YA novel, and "The Member of the Wedding," by Carson McCullers, an old classic that could be characterized as YA, also. The two novels are very different in tone, mood, and style of writing, but at least one similar, elemental plot line threads through both stories: the urgency as a chosen time for the protagonist to leave home approaches.

In 'Story,' Deanna's father had discovered her having sex with an older boy in his car when she was barely a teen. Not only does it undermine her relationship with her dad, the boy spreads the story around the high school, and Deanna's reputation suffers over the next several years. To complicate the family dynamics, Deanna's older brother has had to marry early, after getting his girlfriend pregnant, and he and his wife and child live in his parents' basement. Another defeat for dad's shaky morale. Deanna dreams of finishing high school and then escaping her situation by teaming up with her brother and his family to get a house together. However, the brother realizes he's got his own growing up to do, and plans for he and his wife to move out on their own, sans Deanna.

The story has strong emotional content, but the father, and mother, come close to being 'flat,' barely sympathetic figures. That's a hard writing obstacle to overcome, because with Deanna as first person narrator, we can't really get inside dad's head to experience his call on our sympathies.

"Member…" is a wonderful read, almost Faulkner in mood and tone. It describes the awful loneliness and anxieties of Frankie, a twelve-year old girl, and her obsessive decision that she's going to leave the house of her widower father following the wedding of her brother, newly home from the Army. She conjures up immature images of the adventures they'll have as they travel the world together. As the wedding date approaches, Frankie raises the tension of the story by naively accompanying a boozy, on-leave soldier to his hotel room. The conversations Frankie has with her father's black servant woman and her friends transport us back to the painful disparities between the races in the old South. A deep and satisfying classic story.

writing antarctica

2008-04-11T09:02:00.000-07:00

"The White Darkness," by Geraldine McCaughrean, is the story of Sym Wates, a 14-yr. old British girl, and her Uncle Victor, actually an honorary title, and their perilous journey across the Antarctica to find the legendary Symms's Hole, a portal to a hollow Earth.

When Sym was a child, her father was a business partner of Victor, and Victor's obsession with finding Symms's Hole became the father's own dream, to the point of giving over his life savings and property to help finance their future discovery expedition. Victor even persuaded her father to place Sym on a regular regimen of antibiotics, to ensure her health, and protect any inhabitants of Earth's interior against contamination when he would take her to explore the interior. This drug regimen has probably caused Sym's near-deafness, requiring her to wear hearing aids. Victor also sees to Sym's education in all things pertaining to Antarctica. It is during this lonely, introspective period that her reading leads her to converse with a Captain Lawrence Titus Oates, who perished ninety years before, on Scott's expedition to the South Pole. When Sym's father dies, Victor dupes Sym away from her mother to begin the portal search in Antarctica. He has enlisted the services of a Norwegian writer, who has located the probable location of Symms's Hole using satellite imagery, and who is accompanied by his son. Thus far Victor seems a somewhat sinister figure who seems to have an alarming interest in Sym. Is he for real about this expedition?

In Antarctica, the situation becomes even more bizarre. Victor manages to drug the other members of his sightseeing tour, and commandeers the tour's tracked vehicle to transport himself, Sym, the Norwegian and the son, in a mad dash across Antarctica to the reputed portal location. Without giving up too much of the story, it can be said that the writer and his son aren't who we thought them to be, and Victor becomes ever more possessed. It may only be because of her voluminous reading of the historical Antarctica expeditions and scientific lore that Sym is able to navigate and endure countless hardships. It is also a testament to McCaughrean's writing that she is able to spin a plot and give us characters that can absorb us in such a wasteland of nothingness. Worth a read.

bolting from the Rez

2008-04-01T08:42:00.000-07:00

Only Sherman Alexie could have written "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian" and have carried along the reader so effortlessly, and intriguingly. It's not that a good writer couldn't imagine the hard situation and trapped circumstances described for life on the 'Rez,' but a non-Indian would probably encounter significant critical resistance to publishing such a story. So it's been a treat to have Alexi give us the 'Diary' with all its courage, and warts, and sorrows, and resilient hopes, of a boy who's been there, done that, and can talk of it in gallows humor, as well as with a great affection for the parents who tried their best to do the right thing by him.

The story gets underway with 'Junior,' or Arnold Spirit, nearing the end of his time in middle school on the Rez, and feeling like he's going to die soon if he doesn't get off the Rez. Alcoholism and unemployment are rampant, and life expectancy is mean and short. Junior conceives of attending high school off campus, at a nearby town called Reardon. Of course, this is going to be interpreted by his best friend, Rowdy, and most of the other boys on the Rez, as becoming a traitor. Regardless, he's too sensitive, and hungry for life, to let such worries dissuade him, and he makes the leap.

The boys at Reardon are at first skeptical about this kid from the Rez, but Junior has one good thing going for him. He's pretty good at basketball. And he manages to swallow his fears enough to give a good account of himself in a scuffle with one of the strapping big players on Reardon's team. Junior also acquires a serious crush on one of the Reardon girls, and it's good for a little humorous tension. Through it all he's still, of course, commuting back and forth to the Rez, where his audacity is gradually accepted by the other Indian youths. We continue to get a glimpse of existential life on the Rez, or the untimely demise of it, and we're glad that a promising boy has started his trip outward to more hopeful things.

boy's bonding

2008-03-10T13:54:00.000-07:00

Author Meg Rosoff has come up with another thoughtful YA novel, "What I Was." Generally, boys are not known for intensity of emotional relationships with other boys, without becoming the story of an overtly gay, perhaps one-sided or not, relationship. "What I Was" never commits to identifying the protagonist Hilary's attraction to the mysterious boy, Finn, as gay, neither in Hilary's mind, nor in their experiences. But it is an underlying tension in the plot and keeps the reader wondering throughout, even into the epilogue, where Hilary reminisces as an old, never-married bachelor on his experiences as a boy at St. Oswald's.

Rosoff chooses an intriguing setting for her story, St. Oswald's School on the southeast coast of England, one of the austere, ancient boarding schools that seem to dot the country, and it contributes to the mood and dynamics that propel the story along. Finn, about fourteen, lives alone in a fishing shack along the periodically almost submerged headlands, and it is his grace, simple lifestyle and taciturn manner that intrigues Hilary, about sixteen, son of a wealthy family, who has been expelled from several boarding schools before St. Oswald's. Hilary is one of those boys who are recognized as 'different' by other boys, and his roommates delight in tormenting him. Meeting Finn, who does not go to school but has somehow escaped the notice of any authorities, makes life more tolerable, even interesting, for Hilary, who cuts school as often as he can to spend time with Finn. Finn becomes alarmingly ill at one point, and the story makes a revelation that adds a layer of complexity to what the reader may think about the nature of the special relationship that has been so cherished by Hilary. It is perhaps fundamentally unknowable, but invites some thought.

economy of style

2008-02-23T15:25:00.000-08:00

Ernest Hemingway is an exemplar of using simple, active sentences, stripped of adverbs and adjectives. He employs an economy of actions and dialog to reveal what's needed of back-story, emotion, inner thoughts, and the future arc of the story. I'm reminded of this search for economy when I'm designing a single-panel cartoon, like the accompanying one done for a California Native Plants Society newsletter. The lettering on the boat hull gives us the back-story—it's about global warming. The boat tour guide's dialog announcing that a local park beach is ten feet below the water surface conveys an element of the back-story in which glacial melt has raised coastal waterlines. He doesn't have to spell this out for us—we participate in the story being told. The guide also points out "mutant" Pitcher Plants off to the side of the boat. These are carnivorous native plants, ordinarily growing between ½ to 1 foot in height, but we "get it" that they've become monsters due to the greenhouse gases accompanying global warming. At least the newsletter readers will easily understand this part of the back-story, since they're already familiar with the natural plant. For a general readership, I might have needed the guide to refer to their natural height, and carnivorous nature, to convey the alarm that is intended.

I got started on this discussion after reading "Taking Tips from Hemingway—How the Master Revised His Way to a Masterpiece," by David Kalish, in The Writer's Chronicle, v40, #4. It was interesting to read some of the critiques that F. Scott Fitzgerald made on Hemingway's Ms. for "The Sun Also Rises." I think I would have been quite discouraged to receive some of those critical remarks, advising a lot of slashing and cutting of the Ms. Of course that was early in Hemingway's career, and he took them to heart and honed his story accordingly. Later, when Fitzgerald criticized the Ms. for "A Farewell to Arms" even more, Hemingway had gained sufficient confidence in his own judgments that he could ignore much of the criticism.

omniscient narrator

2008-01-30T14:32:00.000-08:00

I want to organize a few thoughts for a new short story, and reflect on points made by Jenny Dunning in her article "Reconsidering Omniscience in Contemporary Fiction Writing," published in The Writer's Chronicle, Feb. 2008. Most of my writing has been in first person or third person limited point of view, which is perhaps typical in contemporary fiction. Now, I'm interested in experimenting a bit more with a stronger, omniscient narrator.

As Dunning states in her article, all third person stories implicitly have narrators, but many contemporary stories veil this fact by employing third person narration in which diction and syntax belong to the character. The veiling of a narrator voice is most pronounced in "free indirect discourse," which takes place as the narrative's psychic distance to the character's consciousness falls away. It's an effective storytelling technique, but narration that moves between an overt narrator and character consciousness, or one that employs a degree of such omniscience, can also be a powerful strategy, Dunning says. The trick with omniscience is to use it with subtlety, to know when and how to tell. She uses a good example by Flaubert. Dunning also feels there's a difference when we locate a story as the character's story when it is actually the narrator's story; it affects the reader's understanding of the story.

I'll need to keep in mind the following points for the omniscient story. When the narrator speaks, s/he "tells"—but not in such a way as to close down the reader's involvement in the story. Also, I want to consider how the story might originate in the narrator, a storyteller who knows more than the characters, and who attempts to discover something about human existence in the telling of the story.

an artful novel

2008-01-15T08:44:00.000-08:00

The Caldecott Medal was announced yesterday for "The Invention of Hugo Cabret," by Brian Selznick. I'd just finished reading (assimilating?) the book, which is an artful arrangement of text and graphics. Interestingly, the book was a candidate both for the Newbery Medal, for a written novel, and the Caldecott, for a graphic illustration book, showing a new interest in a greater blending of the two mediums for telling a story. Unlike a graphic novel, with its steady progression of graphic panels, or a typical illustrated novel with perhaps only a graphic plate introducing each chapter, 'Hugo' is interspersed with multiple pages of text followed by one and two page spreads of artistic, shaded black and white drawings. Sometimes the drawings taken together illustrate only fleeting seconds in the action of the storyline, like successive still frames of a motion picture. Indeed, part of the storyline deals with the lost career of a French cinematographer dating from the early years of motion pictures.

Hugo, a young boy, lives in the apartment of his uncle, which is buried in the labyrinthine inner passages of the massive central train station in Paris. Hugo's father has died in a fire at a museum where he worked, and Hugo has been taken in and trained by his uncle, to assist him in maintaining all the clocks in the train station in good, accurate condition. However, the uncle has mysteriously disappeared, and Hugo struggles to keep the clocks running. He does not want to report his uncle's disappearance for fear he'll be turned out of the station, but he has to pilfer his food from shop owners in the station just to survive. In addition to his timekeeper duties, the mechanically talented Hugo is trying to restore a mechanical man, an automaton, that his father found in museum discards and gave to him. The automaton, a gear-driven marvel that can write and draw pictures, becomes the key to the mystery surrounding Georges Melies, the famous cinematographer, now a poor, novelty shop owner in the train station, and his adopted daughter, Isabelle, Hugo's newfound friend.

Five hundred pages of story and art that go together seamlessly and in just a couple of evenings of intriguing reading.

three levels of story--J. M. Coetzee

2008-01-08T15:56:00.000-08:00

J. M. Coetzee's latest novel, "Diary of a Bad Year, is an example of some interesting, major tinkering with the typical form of the novel. His credentials for experiment include winning the Nobel and two Bookers. The reviews I've read are somewhat mixed as to whether the experiment is a complete success. The idea, nevertheless, remains interesting. A principal protagonist, Señor C, like Coetzee himself, is a South African writer transplanted to Australia, and he is compiling a collection of his "Strong Opinions" for a German publisher, representing philosophical, political, and literary positions.

Señor C enlists the help of a young Filipina woman from his apartment building, named Anya, to type a manuscript from his voice recordings. The printed novel's format consists of three, subdivided sections on each page. The topmost section is given over to the transcribed essays on the "Strong Opinions" Señor C holds (similar to actual essays Coetzee has himself previously published). The middle section of the page contains Señor C's thoughts on how and why he has come to hold such opinions, speculates on how Anya might interpret them, and how that might reflect on him. The bottom section is in Anya's point-of-view, her observations, personal reflections, and a narrative of the unfolding relationship between her and Señor C.

The page's arrangement seems representative of three stages of consciousness in the writer. Whether we refer to him as Coetzee or Señor C, the analogy is the same. The topmost section is in Señor C's fully conscious mode, with all the writer's normal strategies of academic rigor, sophistication, propriety, and political correctness at work. Too often this might lead to uninspired, stilted writing. In the middle section Señor C steps back from some of his "Strong Opinions" and thinks critically of how and why he might hold such views. I'm reminded of a current affairs radio program, called "T-U-C; Time of Useful Consciousness," described as a brief flash of time before losing consciousness, when a pilot has to react to save his aircraft after his mind is subjected to acrobatic, super-G forces. Similarly, for Señor C, the wrappings of erudition and neat philosophical packaging fall away from his "Strong Opinions" and the raw instinctual elements of his subconscious shout to him. In the bottom section of the page we have the complete submergence of the writer's thoughts into a pure story level, in the POV of a fictional person, Anya, giving her own thoughts on the "Strong Opinions" she is transcribing, and her thoughts on the developing situation between her and Señor C.

It's interesting to think of new forms for the novel, and Coetzee has given us a unique and interesting model. My own, simpler musings barely rise above forms of combined graphics and prose.

coming-of-age inside a mystery

2007-12-22T09:42:00.000-08:00

Just finished "Edenville Owls," by Robert Parker, a recent MG/YA novel about an indie club of Middle School basketball players who take on local JV school teams, the team leader's journey toward discovering his first girlfriend, and a diabolical figure threatening their eighth grade teacher. The author has published over fifty bestselling adult detective stories before this, his first book for young readers. The story is set right after WWII, so I can relate to the boy's descriptions of his favorite radio stories and other background. The mystery part of "Owls" is a little bizarre, but the story has its charms.

I enjoyed the nostalgic asides of the narrator, our protagonist, talking about the radio shows he liked—those old adventure and detective stories, even the commercial jingles mentioned struck a memory chord, as well as the double-feature "B" movies appearing at the local theater on the weekend. Parker fed some of these nostalgia trips into the story as two-page chapters, in italics, to set them off from the ongoing plot line. While it was interesting to me revisiting that old stuff, I wonder how well it worked for a young reader today? Well enough, I suppose, since the story included lots of poignant moments, and the ongoing excitement of the basketball competition, and the mystery. On the "short" side, not much literary irony to mull over, but hey, it was a pretty good read.

thoughts on a genre label

2007-12-10T08:40:00.000-08:00

The New York Times Book Review recently listed "Out Stealing Horses" by Tor Petterson, a book I read this past year, as one of the 10 Best Books of 2007. The book encompasses a coming-of-age story of a Norwegian boy, Trond, beginning with a summer in 1948 when he lived with his father in a rustic cabin near the border between Norway and Sweden. The title derives from the boy and a local friend stealing rides on a farmer's horses at night. Other accounts of Trond's subsequent summer experiences at the cabin are given as reflections when Trond returns to the cabin to live out his final days as an old man. We learn that Trond's father was part of the Norwegian Resistance against the occupying Nazi forces, and of an occasion when Trond accompanies him on one of his trips into Sweden. As Trond becomes an older teen, he helps his father float logs, cut from their cabin property, down the river to a sawmill in Sweden. The quiet, ending days of Trond in the wintery cabin have an almost poetic simplicity.

I suppose I would have wondered whether to pitch this novel, if it were mine, wishful thinking, as a YA or general literary fiction novel. Would it have been any easier to market as one or the other? Would it have been as successful if marketed as a YA novel? Would the declining arc of Trond's life, no matter how beautifully written, engage a young reader?

repaving route 66

2007-11-24T14:26:00.000-08:00

Some YA authors are able to construct stories that will keep a reader turning pages even though the conflict situation and structure may be somewhat familiar. Laurie Halse Anderson's "Twisted" is like that, and though the protagonist, a high school senior named Tyler, has had to work off a minor vandalism rap at his high school, he's not really serious 'Gangsta' material. He and his younger sister, Hannah, do have some problems with a psychologically abusive, work-driven father, who's been shaped by his own father-abused childhood. Predictably, the mother at times retreats into the solace of a drink or two rather than confront her over-controlling husband. Tyler falls for an air-head rich girl at his school, and endures the hostility, and ultimately a violent encounter, with her brother, another classmate.

It could be an all too familiar scenario and characters, but Anderson's writing is good and she injects the right amount of tension to keep moving the story along. A good secondary character, Hannah, Tyler's younger sister, just starting her freshman year at Tyler's school, enhances the story. She metamorphoses from a dutiful, homebound girl into an exuberant, confident, breakout personality, eager to set Tyler and herself onto the popular track in school life—though there's still the grinding problem of dad.

Previously toured themes can still reverberate in the hands of good writers.

more on graphic novels

2007-11-15T08:39:00.000-08:00

Re-Gifters is one of the new graphic novels, though one can as easily refer to it as a mass market—which includes literary work—comic book, geared to Middle-Grade or High School readers, but appealing to some of us adults, too. Re-Gifters, like some of the early comic books, has an authors' team, Mike Carey, writer, and Mark Hempel and Sonny Liew, illustrators. Read more about comic book author teams in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, by Michael Chabon.

The Re-Gifters story is about a Korean girl, Dixie, who would like to gain the romantic interest of her top competitor, an Anglo boy, who is in her training club, or dojo. Dixie lives in a rough section of Los Angeles, and in an early scene she's confronted by a group of toughs. She's on her way to being nailed, but is rescued by a cool-talking Hispanic boy with attitude, who's also a loan shark. The gang looks up to him and Dixie now has a useful friend. Later, she uses money her father had given her to enter a big martial arts competition, and instead, buys a statue of an ancient Korean warrior to give as a present to the Anglo boy. It's a futile gesture, and now she's lost her chance to compete in the tournament. In a series of misadventures, the statue comes back to her as a gift from the Hispanic boy (hence, Re-Gifters), and she is given a free 'wild card' chance to enter the tournament. The Hispanic boy provides her with a dilapidated 'gym' at his home for training. As Dixie advances in the tournament, the Anglo boy, also moving up, gets concerned about her potential, and tries to sweet-talk Dixie into throwing her semi-finals match. She disdains his attempt, and goes on to defeat him in the finals. In the closing, the Hispanic boy is a dinner guest in Dixie's traditional Korean household, and the future, at least for a while, seems rosy.

The graphics are dynamic and nicely drawn, and the story has some appealing multi-cultural aspects, though it's a little worrisome to contemplate that Dixie's new boyfriend is, after all, a loan shark, though with a seemingly good heart. Graphic novels will never replace the deep immersion and imaginative world of prose novels, but they have an appeal all their own.

story endings

2007-11-05T14:47:00.000-08:00

In finishing three short stories, novellas really, in the "Elephanta Suite," by Paul Theroux, the crafting of convincing, satisfying endings for a story came to mind. Theroux's stories, all set in India, are engrossing and beautifully written, with the endings for the first two stories powerful and seamless, and convincing, but the ending of the final story, "The Elephant God," seemed not to fit the portagonist's character. The story is gripping until that point, but though the protagonist, an American woman, looking for a spiritual life while living in an ashram and simultaneously working as an instructor of American speech patterns for employees of a technological call-center, is a resourceful, strong-willed woman, her dramatic retaliation against one of the employees who assaulted her is not quite believable. Though she's been stalked and abused by this man, her last, cold, calculating action seemed over the top, though satisfying to some degree.

Endings were on my mind when I read an interesting essay in Writer's Chronicle, Nov. 2007, "A Tale of Two Endings: Dicken's Great Expectations," by Douglas Bauer. Dickens' original manuscript ended on what seemed a contrived, chance meeting between Estelle and Pip in the city, and a parting between them that seemed final. Bauer says, "…if you read Great Expectations as a novel that steadily acquires real emotional and psychological traction, then Dickens's original ending—with its almost contemporary, quietly stated irony, bracingly free of his famous sentimentality; and one that's contemporary too in its powerful truncation (all those what-ifs" that get said in all that isn't said)—is the preferable conclusion."

However, an author friend of Dickens who was asked to review the original manuscript convinced him to write a more hopeful ending. Dickens's rewrite hedged a bit, making it seem like a continued relationship between Estelle and Pip was foreseen, though the final line was left somewhat ambiguous—"I saw the shadow of no parting from her." That version got published, and the following year (1862) in a second printing, apparently now more satisfied with the idea, Dickens made the line less ambiguous: "I saw no shadow of another parting from her."

Perhaps Theroux might also have received suggestions to have his ending less extreme, a more subtle irony, but he went with a powerful truncation concept. It's still got me thinking, so perhaps it did its job.

Some of Bauer's other thoughts on endings were also interesting: "... any ending that succeeds both culminates and at the same time continues the story…the mix of these two factors naturally varies according to whether the writer's principal desire is, on one hand, to bring everything together, or, on the other, to leave matters more elliptically open. But both qualities, culmination and continuation, are fundamentally always present." And, "The question, then, facing the writer is how to write an ending that benefits from all the complicated momentum that has been funneled into it; one that sounds its confidence and retains a narrower but still resounding power, even as it sings its final notes alone." Not bad.

keeping a bit of the loony in the story

2007-10-24T08:32:00.000-07:00

Do those old classics need to be as long as they were when first published? Maybe not, if we agree with British publisher Orion and a new series of "compact editions" of some nineteenth century classics, including "Moby Dick," "Anna Karenina," "Vanity Fair," and "The Mill on the Floss." Adam Gopnik of the New Yorker (22Oct07) reports they were neatly cut in half, so that they can be taken in quickly and all the more admired. He notes wryly, however, that the names of the abridgers were curiously withheld; perhaps they were alarmed at the magnitude of what they had done. Gopnik says that "Melville's story is intact and immediate; it's just that the long bits about the technical details of whaling are gone, as are most of the mock-Shakespearean interludes, the philosophical meanderings, and the metaphysical huffing and puffing." Wasn't all that half the magic of "Moby Dick"?

Gopnik imagines the soothing letter that Melville might have received from his editor accompanying the suggested cuts, had he been alive to receive it. "Herman: Just a few small trims along the way; myself I find the whaling stuff fascinating, but I fear your reader wants to move along with the story—and frankly the tensile strength of the narrative is being undercut right now by a lot of stray material that takes us way off line."

The Orion publisher's editing job is perhaps what a modern critic or professional editor might say about the original book if it arrived over the transom today—"too much digression and sticky stuff and extraneous learning. If he'd cut that out, it would be a better story." A small shudder is in order. Gopnik reflects on how "masterpieces are inherently a little loony…" but how that often contributes to their originality. He reflects, "What makes writing matter is not a story, cleanly told, but a voice, however odd or ordinary, and a point of view, however strange or sentimental." Although we're often told in the revising process for our fiction, tighten, cut, cut, out with the darlings, kill the adverbs and adjectives, it might be well to remain aware not to lose all loony ambiance and originality.

notes on tc boyle's process

2007-10-16T15:41:00.000-07:00

T. C. Boyle has another of his vintage short stories in a recent New Yorker, entitled "Sin Dolor." It's a story of a young boy who was born with some sort of genetic mutation that causes him to feel no pain. The doctor who examines him for numerous burns and lacerations when he is a child at first suspects child abuse by the parents, though he's at a loss as to why the boy feels no pain. The doctor becomes interested in doing long-term medical observations and since the boy is from a poor family he is able to have the boy spend a great deal of time at his own house, eating, teaching the boy, and generally taking a paternal interest in him. However, after a long period of this, the father appears at the house one day, removes the boy, and leaves the village with him. After a long period the boy and his father return to the village and the doctor comes upon the spectacle of the boy performing on stage, putting red hot blades to his flesh, and piercing his cheeks, while the father is taking up donations. The father has made a sideshow of him to earn money. The doctor manages to speak with him, but the boy is resigned to his fate of earning money to support his family. He dies shortly after.

This is the sort of wrenching story I'd come across in the past from Boyle. Language, style, drama is always superb, but there seems always a hard psychological and visceral toll on me. I remember another of Boyle's stories that stayed with me a long time. A young couple in a new home in southern California, where the high crime rate is of concern, engages a home security firm. They provide the couple with a sign for their lawn warning that intruders will face armed response. This enrages one of the crazies who lives in the area (Boyle has already convincingly portrayed this crazy being interviewed by a woman real estate agent), and he invades the home of the young couple firing a gun and demanding an armed response. He locates the cowering couple and kills them.

I marvel at the power and craft of such writing but I get a sense of hopelessness from the theme and denouement. So, Boyle intrigues me and I couldn't help but go straight to an interview by Diana Bishop with Boyle in my latest Writer's Chronicle. In some selective excerpts, Boyle says he's "fascinated with these other guys to see how they've ruined their lives. Maybe writing about them provides a cautionary tale for me." He says "the theme of man as animal often plays a part" in his stories. "I don't want my readers to do anything. I'm not imposing anything on them. They come to me because they like to communicate…I am simply an artist. I'm disturbed by things, amused by things, love things, am horrified by things. I want to constantly address this mystery of the world and so that's why I'm creating art. If it communicates to people then I'm very gratified." All this fits my take on his stories.

Boyle is currently interested in identity theft—his recent novel, "Talk Talk," takes up this theme. "What is identity, who are you, how do you find out?" I'm not sure I'm ready to tackle a Boyle novel—the short stories affect my mood for long enough periods—but perhaps.

What about his drive, and process? "(F)or me the thrill of producing fiction, of pursuing and discovering something ineffable, is enough…because it's such a rush for me to explore something and see where it will go." As you might also infer from this, Boyle is someone who doesn't write to an outline. Bishop asks, "When you start to write a short story or novel do you know the ending or do you like the exploration?" Boyle says, "I know nothing at all. Nothing. The first line comes and I start…I begin by seeing something and then its translated into a voice talking to me and then I follow it and see where it will go." Bishop asks him how he revises? "Constantly, as I go along." Revisions after the first draft is completed? "It is, with minor exceptions, exactly as it evolved on the keyboard," and apparently doesn't need much more before going to the agent.

I like this one too. Bishop asks, "While you may begin writing short stories or novels with a question, you many not end up with the answer? "No." Also, when Bishop asks can art save the world, so to speak? "Well, the world is unsavable to begin with. Art illuminates you. It makes you feel that somebody else is feeling the same thing that you are so you're not alone. But it doesn't have a political agenda; it can't. Because an agenda destroys the aesthetic impulse of the discovery and the exploration of what you're doing. You're doing it because you have no answer. That's why you do it."

I admire a lot about Boyle.

wilderness survival

2007-09-17T11:19:00.000-07:00

A youth struggling to survive in the wilderness makes for compelling reading, and "Touching Spirit Bear," by Ben Mikaelsen, 2001, is another addition to the genre, with an interesting twist. The wilderness struggle is set up as a juvenile justice experiment. This sort of rehabilitation has been applied in Native American justice, and in this MG/YA novel it is portrayed as being tried for a non-Native American youth offender in Minnesota.

Cole, a violent tempered high school student has badly mauled a classmate in a fight. A chance to avert a jail sentence is offered to him by an experimental Circle Justice council brought in by the court. The Council offers Cole a chance to spend a year in isolation on a deserted island, somewhere in Minnesota, as a means of promoting justice and healing for the criminal offender, the victim, and the community. Cole is interested only in escaping a prison sentence and accepts, though inwardly mocking those trying to help him. While on the island, he destroys the shelter and food he was provided with, and tries to escape, but fails. His rage is directed at a white bear that ventures near his camp, a bear known to Indians in the region as the spirit bear, and he is badly mauled by the bear. After he is found by his Tlingit Indian supervisor who visits the island periodically, he is nursed back to health and elects to return to the island to try and complete his trial. The story is interesting, with compelling wilderness aspects, but the character of Cole, the violent young boy who was beaten by his alcoholic father while growing up, and the father, was a bit flat and stereotypical, though believable.

place in fiction

2007-09-10T10:36:00.000-07:00

In my MFA program, I wrote a thesis on the use of place as a literary device in stories. Place can play an important role in stories, sometimes almost as great a role as the characters that populate a story. It can be a character. I was reminded of this in reading an article titled "The Mushroom Hunters," by Burkhard Bilger, in the New Yorker (8/20/07). The rain soaked forest habitat of the secretive mushrooms makes for just such a character.

Picking for the market began in about the Seventies, in the National Forests of Washington and Oregon, and was mostly done by locals who kept their patches secret. However, mushroom hunting exploded beginning in the Nineties. The pickers in the referenced article lived in a roughshod, primitive campground, and were roughly divided into ethnic groups—Hmong, Mien, Cambodian, Laotian, Mexican, and Caucasian. Most of the pickers were Asian. Matsutake mushrooms may sell for up to one hundred and sixty dollars a pound, and though a highly experienced picker might find up to seventy-five pounds in a day, an experienced Cambodian couple together averaged less than twenty-five pounds a day. In six weeks they earned ten thousand dollars. The work can be arduous and pickers search for the mushrooms from sunup till sundown. One needs a sort of sixth sense, because the mushrooms usually lie hidden beneath a carpet of pine duff on the forest floor. Pickers are very clannish and each group is suspicious of any other group. The atmosphere in the camps can be a bit like the old Forty-Niner gold miners, with guns fired in the air during evening celebrations in camp. Pickers also fire guns in the deep forest to keep up a contact with each other and avoid getting lost. There's a story hidden in the sort of place described, and waiting to be populated with other characters.

David Guterson populated such a mushroom world with his own unique characters, in his novel, "Our Lady of the Forest," published in 2003. A frail young woman ekes out a marginal living hunting mushrooms in a National Forest in Washington. She has visions of the Virgin Mary appear to her in the deep forest, and when word gets out, people drive from all over seeking to witness the apparitions. Crowds follow her through the forest on her daily workday. A priest is dispatched by the Catholic Church to investigate the authenticity of the apparitions. It was an engrossing story and showed the power of place in the fictional world that Guterson constructed.

POV, age level, and other gems

2007-08-08T15:07:00.000-07:00

Reading a writers' craft book authored by a literary author, as compared to a 'nuts-and-bolts' author, can be a gratifying experience. Particularly where the author guides the reader through examples taken from classical literature—whether short stories or novels—or from contemporary literature that may yet await a judgment of time. Francine Prose's book "Reading Like a Writer" is interesting enough to read straight through in daily sessions, though it might be better to take it slow and intersperse such craft reading with a good fiction book. Give the subconscious a little more time to dwell on the writing strategies visited. A good interview of Prose by Andrea Dupree appears in the Writer's Chronicle, Sept. 2007, and touches on many of the topics included in her crafts book.

One of the topics Prose discusses that was of interest to me in my YA fiction writing deals with the voice and Point-of-View of a young person. At times, some authors use a wiser, more mature narrative voice than a first-person YA protagonist might be thought to use. Prose says "I've been writing a novel from the point of view of a fourteen-year-old girl, and I was tormented by the question of adult consciousness versus child consciousness, adult language versus child language—you know, that stupid statement: I don't think a fourteen year old would say that." Nonetheless, Prose goes on to discuss a story by Leonard Michaels where a seemingly adult consciousness works for a kid at times. "And when I read the Lenny Michaels story, I found things in the story that clearly come from the pre-adolescent kid, and things that clearly come from the adult looking back... It's first person, but sometimes it's a first-person twelve-year-old, and sometimes it's the first person forty-year-old, and it really works…" It's somehow freeing to read that, but of course if one is an unknown writer it could be a risky business.

Along that line, Dupree says to Prose, "In 'Reading Like a Writer,' you encourage people to disregard the typical rules that are trotted out in writing classes. At the same time, do you feel that writers who are transgressive in their writing have as good a shot of breaking in as others who are more conventionally polished?" Prose allows that it may set a higher hurdle to overcome in selling the book, but, "I don't think there's any choice. If somebody is talented, they're not going to be able to write for what they think the market wants." Sounds right, or ought to be right.

Another kernel that Prose tosses out, "…the better the writer is, the greater the degree of self-doubt. I've had students who really think they're Tolstoy, and they're not the best students I've ever had. Whereas my friends, whose work I respect enormously, whose work I feel lucky to read, are tormented by self-doubt."

There's a certain thrill in reading a good crafts book. One usually concludes that, armed with such insights, the next book is going to be written better than the last. Give Prose's book a try.

innovative story concepts

2007-07-19T15:39:00.000-07:00

Summertime has translated into more reading than writing for this blogger. A few posts ago the topic was high-concept YA novels, and this will be a brief discussion on one of them. "I'd tell you I loved you, but then I'd have to kill you," by Ally Carter, has an intriguing concept—the students at the 'Gallagher Academy for exceptional young women' are actually pursuing rigorous academic and field training to become spies. The secretive academy is off-limits to outsiders, and even the town in which it is situated has no idea of its nature. In addition to normal studies, the high school level girls learn to be fluent in up to fourteen languages, and are trained in covert operations, including the use of lethal force on adversaries. This would be an ambitious set of plot elements for any writer to keep in play while selecting and pursuing a story conflict and resolution. It could be addressed seriously, or perhaps as a spoof. Carter seems to have alighted somewhere in between. The story is nicely written, often humorous (Gallagher graduates were responsible for inventing such useful spy materials as 'Velcro' and duck-tape, and some national heroes—e.g. Amelia Earhart—are revealed as graduates). But the basic storyline is about Cammie, the girl protagonist, falling in love with a lower middle class boy from the nearby town. Now, all the esoteric spy elements can be dealt with as points of intrigue, and not treated too strenuously, while a straightforward, universal appeal, romance story is told. A fun, chick-lit story.

Boy's tribalism, and rites of passage

2007-07-06T14:50:00.000-07:00

In all strata of life, in every neighborhood, and every ethnicity, there seem to be common rites of passage that all boys must wend their way through in one style or another. Girls will have their own rites of passage, in some ways similar, other ways not. The rites endure, though the threats change with times. The pensive mood of this piece arises after having read Chris Lynch's "Sins of the Fathers." Lynch can be such a powerful writer (disclosure—he was a faculty member at my Vermont College MFA). The three boys of the novel form a tightly knit tribe to themselves: Drew, the narrator and most expressive, Skitz, the fatherless clown, and Hector, seemingly the strong, silent force. Drew's terrific dialog, flowing smoothly from inner to outer expression, draws the reader into almost inhabiting his physical character. The setting is a Catholic parochial school in Boston, and rough as they are, or would like to see themselves, they respect the sisters who teach there and the three parish priests who oversee the school. One of the priests is a newly assigned, young, hippie-like Jesuit, who tries to befriend the boys, and continually uses bad judgment, drinking on outings with the boys to a Bruin's hockey game, rolling a joint in Drew's presence—immature conduct, and ultimately damaging to him. The boys have some destructive habits themselves: popping St. Joseph aspirin with RC cola to get a buzz, and one of them experiments with sniffing glue. A deeper, darker theme emerges toward the end of the novel. The abuse of minors by some clergy is all too common in the news these days, but it is unfailingly wrenching with each new disclosure. One of the boys has probably endured such a betrayal, and we hope his tribe will be able to keep him from falling into an abyss of remorse and substance abuse, and that the three friends will help carry each other forward.

email query tangles

2007-06-22T20:39:00.000-07:00

Many of the literary agents today invite email queries from authors. Some accept only email queries, while others accept only snail mail. Email seems to offer a convenient, economical means of reaching an agent and getting a faster reply, but it has some pitfalls which writers should be aware of. If a writer drafts his query letter in a word processor program, like MS-WORD, and then copies and pastes it into an email, problems can and do occur. This may happen because email does not recognize your word processor's formatting codes. In reviewing many agent blogs and writers' comments, the most common problem is the use of 'smart quotes' by WORD. These are the curly-shape quote marks that also have different shapes at the beginning and end of a quote (most writers recommend turning this feature off in WORD). The email recipient will see smart quotes reproduced as a clump of strange symbols on his end of the transmission. Other WORD formatting that will be lost and replaced by other strange symbols are italics, bolds, and em symbols (conversion of double dashes into a single long dash). To avoid these problems, the writer should save his WORD document as a Text file, then copy and paste from the text file into the email. This should resolve those particular problems. Some writers advised an intermediate step of copying the WORD file into a Notepad, or other Text-editing file, and then copying from there into the email. However, that shouldn't be necessary; copying from a WORD text file should be sufficient.

The next problem occurs if the agent requests sample pages be included after the query, and within the body of the email. Indents and double spacing within the paragraph will be lost when copying and pasting from the WORD manuscript into the email. It appears that the best the writer can do to improve the appearance for the benefit of the agent-reader is to manually insert a blank space between paragraphs. The email format does not allow providing double spacing within paragraphs, as is customary when submitting hardcopy manuscripts.

The situation is a little daunting yet, and has led some agents not to accept email queries, but hopefully things will improve in the future. Hang in there, writers—and agents.

high-concept plots

2007-06-13T08:03:00.000-07:00

The past week has been light on writing and adrift on planning, and not so much planning as contemplation. Time to get going on a new novel. The finished one is out in the ether looking for an agent, and I need the bones of a new dreamtime. I tend to recall stories as either character-driven, or plot-driven, though the best ones generally had both elements. A good author/teacher like John Dufresne, in “The Lie That Tells a Truth,” suggests setting your character in motion and just watch what happens. Get it down. That would certainly get a story started, but not having anything for a plot is daunting. Then there are the writers for whom the plot is all consuming. “What I’m Reading Now,” a blog by Allisa Lauzon is a wonderful collection of her YA book reviews that I’ve been following lately, and the biggest thing that seems to hook this reader is most often the plot. Some are so pumped-up and bizarre that I’m just going to have to read them to see if the author really pulled it off. Here’s a terrific example of a high-concept plot from “I’d Tell You I Loved You, But Then I’d Have to Kill You,” by Ally Carter:

"From the outside the Gallagher Academy for Exceptional Young Women appears to be a boarding school for rich and snotty young women. The school, however, is actually a training school for future spies. Cammie is a Gallagher legacy and the daughter of the school's headmistress. By her sophomore year, she is already fluent in fourteen languages and knows how to kill a man seven different ways and is starting her first covert operations course...”

The concept is almost outlandish—and yet, it’s totally intriguing. Is it going to be tongue-in-cheek, or serious stuff? Ally has another spy-themed book in her credits, so she probably knows the genre; I’ll just have to read this one to see. Another high-concept plot I found intriguing was “Blue Bloods,” by Melissa De La Cruz:

“The most powerful and elite families in New York City are hiding a secret- a secret that their children are about to discover as they are inducted into The Committee. They are Blue Bloods- an ancient race of Vampires. Schuyler's life changes dramatically when her invitation arrives to join The Committee. She soon discovers that they are hiding things- especially after a young Blue Blood turns up dead- her life force completely drained. An interesting new take on a vampire novel. Blue Bloods moves quickly, capturing readers’ interests from the beginning.”

A belief in vampires today is a rational stretch, but the concept has a long history in storytelling, books, movies, and TV, so that the readiness to suspend disbelief is already at work for the author. Here, Melissa has a great plot, but she’ll have to work a lot harder to keep the reader wrapped up in the “fictional dream,” as per writing guru John Gardner. I love the ambition of her setup and I’ll read this book, too.

contemplating don quixote

2007-06-03T16:22:00.000-07:00

I've inserted a watercolor done at my life drawing session last week. The pensive mood is nice, and it's time to start another novel, which will involve some casting about for concept and theme. My present evening reading is Cervantes’s “Don Quixote,” translated by Edith Grossman. I’ve read other, earlier translations, but this is both scholarly and a handsome edition, replete with footnotes about Cervantes’s story references, and the manuscript history. A jacket blurb by Lionel Trilling says, “It can be said that all prose fiction is a variation on the theme of “Don Quixote.” Perhaps. The theme of an addled but learned man coming centuries late to the call of knightly chivalry, and setting out in comical, makeshift knight’s regalia to seek adventure, has the ingredients of a comical farce, and yet, it never admits to anything like tongue-in-cheek comedy. We groan and shake our heads at Quixote’s foibles, even smile, ruefully, but the language, and often the wisdom sweep us along. Another jacket blurb by Milan Kundera says it well, “Don Quixote is practically unthinkable as a living being, and yet, in our memory, what character is more alive?” There are many story variations on this hero’s journey, or quest, from the crossing of the threshold from our world into the story world, the trials the hero must face along the journey, the winning (or losing) of some treasure, and the return—richer or poorer, in wealth or spirit. Perhaps none have, or will, make the journey quite like Don Quixote.

psychological aspects of POV

2007-05-25T13:52:00.000-07:00

A fiction writer is faced at the outset with the decision of choosing a theme and the POV that will be used to tell the story. Various considerations enter into the choices, including whether a first-person or third-person narrative might achieve the desired closeness with the reader, and whether the POV can adequately dramatize the envisioned scope of story. Often the story theme may be based on a personal life experience. That experience may offer some sort of hidden meaning the writer wants to explore, and then it seems there should be some best POV for the cast of characters and the type of story being considered. However, it may be that the POV choice actually takes over and steers the story into directions and choices that are driven by it, and which more closely relate to the writer’s own psychological makeup than the fictional story he starts out to tell.

In a NY Times article, “This is Your Life, and How You Tell It: In Storytelling, Deep Clues to the Self” (by Benedict Carey, 22May07), some recent research looked at ways people narrated their life stories. Those with mood problems had many good memories, but the scenes were often tainted with some dark detail. By contrast, those individuals who scored more positive, “generative” personalities on psychological tests might recall the same sorts of life problems in a reverse way, as linked by themes of redemption. “They flunked sixth grade but met a wonderful counselor and made honor roll in the seventh.” In other words, their understanding of their life’s story drove their narrative themes. That might be a useful observation to keep in mind when choosing the experience and setting out to write.

The research then seemed to offer other useful insights to the fiction writing process, and the retelling and reinterpreting of experiences from our own life stories. How do we recall the most vivid scenes from our experiences? An important factor was the perspective people in the study were told to take when revisiting a life experience—whether in first-person, or third person. The investigators found that revisiting a bad experience—an argument, say, or a failed exam—was significantly less upsetting when viewed in the third person, as compared to first person; and, a shift in perspective to third-person allowed the storyteller to deepen and even reshape the event instead of being immersed in it.

Which POV is going to create the stronger fiction story? If the event is compelling enough, and focused, total immersion in a first-person narrator might work okay. If the event is still not clearly understood in the author’s own mind, using third-person narration to explore a deepening and reshaping of the personal event might lead to a better fictional story.

vying for a query

2007-05-14T11:24:00.000-07:00

Still in revision on the Sci-Fi, but occasionally returning for scans of a YA novel, "Black Crane," that was finished, revised a few times, and laid aside last summer. It seems ready for trying to interest an agent or publisher, but perhaps it will have to wait until after the Sci-Fi effort plays out. Taking into account some of what has been discussed in blogs by literary agents, a query for "Black Crane" might contain the following:

What do you do with all that built up discipline when your army general mom goes off to Iraq, and you’re sent with your siblings to live with your absentee dad?

Sixteen-yr. old Caitlin is ready to break out into her own life, but that’s kind of hard to do when General Rose Su Wei expects her to be the Rock of Gibraltar to her younger sister and older brother. Her dad, Cyrus McCormick, expects life will go on as usual while they’re living with him, but he’s clueless about things like peer pressures, soft drug use, and drinking, that go on at the high school parties. As a new high school newspaper reporter, Caitlin is keen on learning all about these things. Her articles alienate her cryptic editor, and a libertarian, athletic boy named Cody, a karate champ. Caitlin, trained by her mother, is no slouch at karate, either. An intense love-hate relationship between her and Cody leads to the epic battle of The Black Crane vs. The Golden Dragon.

Energies feel divided now, and perhaps the Black Crane effort should have been carried through to the query stage. It was probably a question of confidence.

plot twists

2007-05-03T20:24:00.000-07:00

Just finished reading “Kite Runner,” by Khaled Hosseini. The story opens in Afghanistan just before the Russian invasion in ’78. Amir is a middle-class Afghani boy, about thirteen, and his closest friend is a servant boy, Hassan, a Hazara—a minority ethnic group descended from Asian Mongols--who works in Amir’s household. Amir and his dad are Pashtuns, a majority ethnic group in Afghanistan, and are Sunni, a dominant Islamic sect. Hassan and his dad are Shia, a despised minority sect of Islam, and so Hassan suffers a double burden in the boys’ daily contacts with other Afghani boys. Though Hassan is devoted to Amir, and risks dangers when defending Amir against other boys, Amir remains almost indifferent to him.

In one episode, an Afghani boy rapes Hassan for defending Amir, who cowardly watches from hiding. Our sympathies for Amir take a further plunge when Amir later frames Hassan for stealing his watch. He’s jealous of his own father’s affections for Hassan, and hoped to drive him away from the household. When the Russians invade Afghanistan, Amir and his dad flee to America. There Amir matures as a better person, aspiring to be a writer, and meets a young Afghani woman and marries her. He regrets many of the weaknesses he’d shown in his boyhood, and when news comes after the Russians are driven out of Afghanistan, that the victorious Taliban have slain Hassan along with many other Shia, Amir returns to try and rescue Hassan’s surviving eleven-yr. old son.

In Afghanistan, he learns that Hasan was actually his illegitimate half-brother. In the dangerous search for Hassan’s son, he encounters the same man who once abused Hassan has now bought Hassan's son from an orphanage, and is abusing the boy. A horrible plot twist. In some desperate actions, and after suffering brutal injuries, Amir rescues Sohrab and flees with him back to America. There, Sohrab is a lonely, almost mute boy from his experiences, but Amir and his wife adopt him, and wait patiently for him to heal.

The plot skirts close to having too many coincidences, and takes some brutal turns, but it held a lot of suspense and gave the sense of a very different world. I spent four years in the Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan, Pashtun country, and traveled to Kabul and other places in Afghanistan. That was '68-'72. The story was an unsettling but riveting revisit to that country.

cut the hook

2007-04-22T16:16:00.000-07:00

I entered a "Hook" for my current Sci-Fi story in a contest sponsored by an online site of published authors, called "fangs, fur, and fey." It's basically an exercise in writing a short (300 word max.), book-jacket type blurb that will catch an agent or publisher's attention when reading a query letter. The site promised online critiques by their authors for each accepted entry. Apparently lots of us writers were interested in such an exercise, and feedback, because the site's 250 submittals limit was reached in the first twenty-four hours. It was fun, and I learned from it. Here's my entry and the critique received:

Josiah, an American mining engineer, discovers beryl ore—the source of a rare, space age metal, beryllium—within a powerhouse excavation in the Andes. He conspires along with his boss to sell the ‘waste’ excavation for personal gain. He’s getting on in years and needs a pension plan. Distressingly, he begins having hallucinatory, epileptic seizures, in which an ancient, woman warrior, Akla, tells him he’s a reincarnated space druid and orders him to destroy ‘the beryllium eaters.’ But who are they? He hopes he can finish his beryllium heist before he becomes further unhinged.

Soon after, he encounters two Skatha, creatures from another planet, who are formed like humans but are organically encased within a sheathing of beryllium. They arrived on Earth long ago to search for beryllium, and became hidden allies of the Inca in their conquest of South America. The Skatha stayed on, to allow Drost, the male commander of the mission, to continue pillaging the skin sheath of humans. He ‘fire-tongues’ his victims, bio-electrically depositing their skin onto his beryllium sheath, enabling him to experience the tactile pleasures of life for a limited time.

Eila, a female Skatha, is a reluctant subordinate of Drost, and still wants to remain true to their original mission—a complication after she falls in love with Josiah. Akla becomes increasingly impatient with Josiah’s incompetent efforts to carry out his assignment. Drost’s egomania grows, and he forms an international society with Inca trappings, where he slags people into computerized adherents of his will, by putting a programmed, bio-metallic compound of beryllium into their initiation drink. One of his slags, an Israeli Deputy Defense Minister named Vasthi, overcomes her slagging program and challenges Drost for the leadership of the slags. She and Eila contend for Josiah’s love during the fight to defeat Drost.

Reviewer's Notes:

Good: Fantastic eye for detail. The writer has a great imagination

Bad: Unfortunately, this is another short synopsis. The writer packed the entire story into 300 words (it's 300 exactly, I checked because I thought it might have been over.) This type of detail leads to information overload. The writer might have written a great epic story, but the hook is too complex and doesn't quite work.

Suggestion: the hook should read more like a back cover blurb. When a reader flips a book over in a bookstore and glances at the back, that blurb has maybe ten seconds to capture that person's attention. It's hard to captivate when there is so much information crammed into so little space. Less would have been more in this case.

I appreciate the intricate set-up, but unfortunately this is a pass.

So it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut might have said. Less would have been more. Too long for a hook. But the reviewer didn't fault the overall plot or characters populating the story. I liked that.

constructing characters

2007-04-18T20:05:00.000-07:00

An interesting writer’s article appeared in the Jan/Feb issue of the SCBWI Bulletin, entitled “Character Building,” by Louise B. Wyly. Wyly discussed using the Myers-Briggs personality test groupings, to construct interesting characters that logically support or conflict with each other. For example, you want a boy or girl who places high value on cooperation from others—a born leader—one who takes for granted that he or she would be followed. For this, Wylie selects an ENFJ type individual. The test assigns four dominant personality traits for any individual:

E or I; Extrovert or Introvert
N or S; Innovative or Sensation/Practical
T or F; Thinking or Feeling
P or J; Perceptive or Judgmental

Once you’ve selected perhaps two dominant traits you’re looking for, you might complete the characters personality with two other tentative traits, and try to stay aware throughout your story how that character would logically react in each conflict or problem situation. Any grouping of four traits has a certain frequency of occurrence in the population as a whole, and this has been borne out in many years of M-B testing. That’s not to say that a fiction writer couldn’t have a character switch traits in a stressful situation, but it doesn’t run true to form, and the reader might need extra convincing.

My own grouping when I took the test years ago was INTP, which is something like five percent of the population, and representative of an engineer, my “other” profession. People can gradually change their grouping over time, though, as a result of changing life experiences. The book Wyly gives as a reference for her article is “Please Understand Me,” by David Keirsey and Marilyn Bates, available in bookstores. Might be useful stuff to think about for a writer.

hooks in queries

2007-04-09T11:04:00.000-07:00

At the point where we finish our novels, we’re faced with the need for the dreaded query letter, with its required ‘hook’ content. The hook must lure the publisher or agent to think for a moment about whether to consider this wonderful opportunity a little further. How are we going to do that? How can one possibly condense the excitement and thrills of this literary gem that we’ve labored over for the past year, or years, into a make it or break it, attention grabbing, terse invitation to read the whole. Or at least to ask for a synopsis and partial. Criminal, we think, shouldn’t have to be done. But it does, and even if the novel is a fairly good read in its entirety, we may as well accept that the preliminary hurdle must be overcome, with class, with élan, before anyone might invite us to the next hurdle, the equally dreaded synopsis.

One informant tells us to consider the hook as a movie trailer for our story. That seems an apt approach. Get a clear sense of the problem, and of the people we’ll want to care about up and running, and show some emotional conflicts they’ll face in gaining a resolution. But don’t shoot ourselves in the foot by using unfortunate language while doing it. Easy, right? Well, no, but it's a necessary skill set to acquire. A few days of browsing the tons of aspiring writers' mail discussed on a blog like Miss Snark-Literary Agent is worth the cost of several craft books--and loads of fun.

There's a contest beginning April 13, where Fangs, Fur, and Fey, an authors' blogging site, will accept up to 180 hooks, in specified genres, 300 word maximum length, and will post on-line comments made by published authors who reviewed the hook submittals. Could be another learning experience, for those of us with thick skins (submitters will not be identified--thankfully).

More later on synopses.

techniques of distancing and close-up

2007-04-02T11:03:00.001-07:00

“wait for me,” by An Na, her latest novel after her Printz Award winner, "A Step From Heaven," is able to summon a good deal of emotional response from the reader. It draws on the powerful, basic need of every youth to adhere to a parent’s expectations, but often trying at the same time to find a different life path than the one held out by the parent.

Mina’s mother, Uhmma, is intent on her oldest daughter going to a prestigious university, preferably Harvard, and the mother consumes herself, while ignoring her disdained husband, and her youngest child, Suna, in pursuit of her goal for Mina. But Mina has been deceiving her mother for years about her less than adequate grades at school, and has been pocketing money from the receipts at their dry cleaning shop, meant to help support herself when she will look for a job after graduating high school and leaving her difficult home life.

An Na manages to create reader sympathy for hardworking Uhmma, and a mystery is raised early on as to whether Mina may have a different father than Suna. The close relationship between the sisters is lovingly portrayed. A Mexican boy, Ysrael, is hired to work at the cleaners, and a tender relationship grows between him and Mina, though kept hidden from Uhmma. The story is brought to a strong resolution point when Mina must choose whether to follow Ysrael when he leaves for San Francisco to study music, or stay at home to nurture Suna until she is strong enough to overcome her dismal lack of acceptance by Uhmma.

The story has a number of points interesting to a writer. Alternating chapters give Mina’s first-person POV in immediate past tense, and Suna’s third-person POV in present tense. Suna’s story can move rapidly from distancing scenes to close, inner consciousness scenes. Sometimes the portrayal is ethereal, in keeping with her dreamy, sleepwalking nature. Mina’s dialogue with Uhmma is sometimes given inside quotations, and sometimes not. Possibly this, too, is done for distancing/close-up effects, but it wasn't always consistent. The writing of scenes between Mina and Ysrael can be deeply emotional, sometimes skirting a romance genre, but An Na remains overall a fine literary writer.

reading ease of YA novels

2007-03-26T11:07:00.000-07:00

The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing—Traitor to the Nation, by M. T. Anderson is a challenging read on many accounts. To start reading without benefit of literary reviews, it takes many pages to get grounded in the story. Is it a futuristic, or fantasy novel? People who are members of a curious enterprise called The Novanglian College of Lucidity, ‘devoted to divining the secrets of the universe,’ and called only by digital representations, 03-01, 07-04—that give some measure of a person’s social standing and his profession—what’s going on here? What period of time are we in?

A first clue, or not, is that the language seems a sort of archaic English. Gradually the reader learns the setting is Colonial times, near Boston. At the beginning of the story, the main character is an African boy, named Octavian Nothing. The college purchased him and his mother, an African Princess, in the slave market, to be studied for the characteristics of their race. Can they learn Western music? How much of what they eat is converted to energy, to waste? These and other seemingly banal quests for knowledge leave the reader questioning the mental capacity of the college’s intellects.

Gradually, possible story themes emerge, of how unenlightened the social, philosophical, and scientific thought might have been in some circles of Revolutionary-era America, and particularly how unenlightened it was toward African slaves. It might not have been as harsh as in the more agrarian South, but seemed just as degrading.

The complete story of Octavian Nothing will be published in at least two volumes, reportedly, and this volume carries us up to Octavian’s participation in some early Revolutionary War clashes, where slaves were “loaned” by their owners to the Patriots for some of the heavy work of war, and to ‘excuse’ their own lack of participation.

Anderson has set in motion an ambitious story, which is not an easy read, but seems to have all the hallmarks of intensive research—from the language of the times, to the previously little known attitude of Colonial New England toward slavery. Apparently it has received favorable attention from young readers, and that renews confidence in youth’s abilities to wrestle with a difficult literary work, if it encompasses a good story.

To point out what is meant by difficult reading, a sample was taken at random, p.54, and analyzed with WORD’s grammar check, to find the following interesting statistics:

Words per sentence—40
Flesch Reading Ease—55 %
Flesch Kincaid Reading Level—11th Grade

As noted in earlier blogs, the scores for some bestselling authors and a Pulitzer Prize winner in a study have typically shown vocabularies suitable up to Grade 6, and Reading Ease up to 80 Percent. Perhaps Octavian’s reception is welcome news for writers of young people’s literature who might like to use more difficult but expressive language, and intricate plot development, but were held back by assumptions about youths.

more on graphic novels

2007-03-18T16:27:00.000-07:00

Graphic novels have been increasing in popularity and rather than being any threat to prose novels they may reinforce reading habits for some. I think graphic novels invite far more introspection than a completely passive diversion, like TV, and they invite art appreciation right along with story participation. Good graphic novels have a clean-cut similarity to attractive block prints of modern art . The coupling of art forms and expressions to the story in progress can be intriguing.

One of the best I’ve read is “Blankets,” by Craig Thompson. It’s an engrossing memoir of a young man who has been raised in a severely strict, fundamentalist Christian family, and who meets an attractive young woman, Raina, in a Christian summer camp. Raina is a warm, beautiful, liberal-minded individual who is very popular among her similar-minded friends. She intrigues Thompson, and invites him to spend a couple weeks of his winter break visiting at her home in another town. Her family has some internal disconnects, but Thompson falls in love there with Raina, and although it becomes clear it can’t last beyond this visit, he grows and matures in ways he couldn’t have imagined before. The artwork is great, and the graphic unfolding of the story is wonderfully done.

More recently I enjoyed American Born Chinese, by Gene Luan Yang. This is a handsomely done graphic novel about a young boy of Chinese immigrant parents growing up in America, mostly centered around his life and friendships in school. Episodes from the Chinese Monkey King fables are interspersed in the story, and they seem very much to belong. Jin Wang is so intent on being "American" that for a part of the book he's drawn as Western-looking boy named Danny, though we don't quite know what's going on yet. Danny's visiting cousin from China, a crude stereotype, mystifies us, and is an embarrassment to Danny in front of the all-American girl he idolizes. The threads come together when the Monkey King comes to visit Jin and convinces Jin he'll be a happier person if he'd just be himself. Besides the great graphics, it's a well structured story.

I’ll have to mention just one more, Amelia Rules-The whole world’s crazy,” by Jimmy Gownley. It’s a MG graphic novel, kids playing at being superheroes, and coping with life at school and at home. Story is, of course, a lot less sophisticated than the older books discussed, but the graphics are neat and appealing.

voices and alternatives

2007-03-11T16:57:00.000-07:00

Voice is such a difficult quality to establish for any main character, and is usually the first task a writer considers in making his story come alive on the page—and be marketable. Some writers might seize on direct qualities, like regional dialect, or notable class distinction in the character’s diction, to create a unique and interesting voice. Others might use introverted or extroverted modes of expressing their character’s speech—hesitant, thoughtful, fearful; or blustering, assertive, combative.

Still others may bag the whole exercise of creating a compelling voice, and instead give their character some challenging condition that will create interest in them as a character. This may be more hazardous to the writer’s success than finding a distinctive voice, since the writing must now also avoid any unearned praise, or blame, for the character solely because of their given condition. The writer must be very good to succeed at this type of story, and some have been. Two YA books that come to mind include:

Stoner & Spaz, by Ron Koertge
A H.S. boy with Multiple Sclerosis falls in love with a girl who uses and deals drugs. It’s an epiphany for the boy, and he also becomes interested in filmmaking. The romance ends, the girl goes back to drugs, but the boy is a better person for the experience.

The curious incident of the dog in the night-time, by Mark Haddon
An autistic teenager decides to find the murderer of a neighbor’s dog and discovers his father killed it and it leads to the uncovering of the mystery of why his mother left home. The author inserts lots of graphics and scientific puzzles to dramatize the teenager’s inner world and interests.

But the challenging condition might be made a lot less severe than in those cases, as in the following YA book I’ve just read:

An Abundance of Katherines, by John Green
The main character is a HS senior who’d grown up as a child prodigy. He doesn’t have much of a voice, and his introverted, nerdy condition is definitely an added challenge. Some nineteen girls have dumped him through the years, and all were named Katherine. He goes on a summer road trip with his best friend (he’s half-Jewish, the friend is Arab), and through much of the story he works on developing a theorem, shown in mathematical curves, that will predict whether the partner in any relationship will be the dumper, or dumpee. During his road trip he meets an opposite temperament—extroverted—Tennessee girl in a backwater setting, and redemption is at hand.

Voices and Alternatives—both equally challenging.

fictional truth

2007-03-04T16:24:00.000-08:00

An essay by Frederick Reiken in The Writer’s Chronicle, Mar./Apr. 2007, titled “What is True?—Thoughts on Fictional 'Truth,' Unconscious Metaphor, and Celery” had so many good parts to it, and I want to try and capture a couple of them here.

One of the ideas is that a ‘fictional truth’ needs to rise above the ordinary, factual, black-and-white happenings of real life if we want it to support a literary work. We’ve often heard, in workshops and such, ‘just because it happened doesn’t make it interesting.’ Reiken’s essay used an excerpt from a short piece titled “How to Tell a True War Story,” included in Tim O’Brien’s Vietnam fiction work, The Things They Carried, as follows.

You can tell a true war story by the questions you ask. Somebody tells a story, let’s say, and afterward you ask “Is it true?” and if the answer matters, you’ve got your answer.

For example, we’ve all heard this one. Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on the grenade and takes the blast and saves his three buddies.

Is it true?

You’d feel cheated if it never happened.

Without the grounding reality, it’s just a trite bit of puffery, pure Hollywood, untrue in the way all such stories are untrue. Yet even if it did happen—and maybe it did, anything’s possible—even then you know it can’t be true, because a true war story does not depend on that kind of truth. Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth. For example: Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast, but it’s a killer grenade and everybody dies anyway. Before they die though, one of the dead guys says, “The fuck you do that for?” and the jumper says “Story of my life, man,” and the other guy starts to smile but he’s dead.

That’s a true war story that never happened.

That provides such a great illustration of literary, fictional truth. Another idea I valued in the essay touched on a fiction writer’s use of story ambiguity. Quoting work by author John Berger, Reiken says “Authentic writing depends primarily on a writer’s willingness to stay faithful to the fundamental ambiguity of experience.” Also, “a writer who attempts to close too many ambiguities at once without opening others will run into a problem…” The idea of keeping ambiguities afloat during a fictional work seems so important to me, to extend the suspense of events, and to keep the reader turning the pages. One of my favorite creative writing teachers, John Gardner, also gets some play in Reiken’s essay, on topics from Gardner’s book entitled, “On Moral Fiction,” and dealing a lot with the ‘metaphors’ of the essay title. In sum, this is an essay I’m going to have to read over a couple of times—good stuff.

point of view thoughts

2007-02-25T20:36:00.000-08:00

Point of View is a writing concept in which it can be easy to err. For most of my YA fiction I’ve either used first-person, or third-person limited, and lately, more of the latter. I had come to believe it gave more freedom than first-person, but some critiques of my recent work had me wondering whether I’ve completely understood the third-person POV, or perhaps the boundaries are shifting today.

I think one of the great instructors of creative writing, as well as being a first-rate author, was John Gardner. His book, “The Art of Fiction,” (1984), is an outstanding craft book. In reviewing some of Gardner’s comments on POV, I noticed that long ago I highlighted this passage:

“We may go along for years without ever noticing that the third-person-limited point of view is essentially sappy…the third person limited point of view forces the writer into phony suspense.”

Gardner sets up a story situation in which a man named Alex Strugatsky is taking his Saturday morning ballet class when his mistress, the wife of the local Chief of Police, comes in to stand watching. Alex is distressed—he does not want their affair known, lest the police chief shoot him; but he does not want to be impolite, because his mistress, Genevieve Rochelle, is a beauty. Gardner shows that if we start off this story in the omniscient point of view, as Checkhov would, we can get the important facts in right away and get on to what’s really interesting, such as: What will Alex do? But if the writer starts off in third-person-limited, where, Gardner says, the writer limits himself to the thoughts of the central character, mentioning nothing not directly present in the character’s mind, Alex’s story quickly becomes sappy. The sappiness occurs because the writer has no other way of showing what happens except by somehow putting it into Alex’s head.

However, Gardner’s non-omniscient, third-person POV seems to be broken down into two separate categories by Lynna Williams in her chapter, “And Eyes to See: The Art of Third Person,” in "Creating Fiction," edited by Julie Chekoway. The ‘sappy’ construct of third-person-limited given by Gardner is Williams ‘third-person-unified,’ in which “everything, even the “telling” that goes on in exposition, is filtered through the point-of-view character’s consciousness (see bold passage in Gardner). However, in Williams third-person-limited, the POV character:

“will continue to be our angle of vision on events, and we’ll still have access to her thoughts. But in this use of third person, we’ll also be able to take advantage of objective narration; that is, neutral exposition that is not tied to the character’s consciousness.”

It’s the latter type of third-person limited that I’ve followed, rather than the bold-marked version quoted in Gardner’s discussion. So perhaps I've been correct in my POV treatments. Still, I’m about ready to believe that third-person omniscient may be the more powerful, best, all-around way to go in fiction writing.

synopses crapometer

2007-02-20T15:59:00.000-08:00

Some days there seem to be few words of literary craft or reflection that might merit a blog entry. That may be good—as when all free time is suctioned into the present enterprise of creating a science fiction novel, an unusual genré for this writer, but enjoyable, nonetheless. A second draft is coming along reasonably well, but a few thoughts on one of the hard tasks ahead might be worth musing about now. Synopses of stories are difficult to write, even for mainline fiction stories, but a synopsis for a science fiction story could be especially challenging. Lots of ground has been broken for some plot premises, which sci-fi readers might be expected to be familiar with, but any totally new concepts could be hard to get across in a synopsis. After reading online some synopses examples gathered by a literary agent, Ms. Snark, where writers have submitted them expressly for her Crapometer assessment exercise, a certain amount of trepidation now hangs over the anticipated synopsis writing task. Some of the synopses Ms. Snark received were rated good, but one of the sci-fi ones was so easy to lampoon. Lots have been written in craft books about writing synopses, but this was quite a lesson. Check it out.

inventiveness in writing

2007-02-16T10:37:00.000-08:00

I'm currently reading "Just in Case," by Meg Rosoff. She's also the author of "How I Live Now," last years Michael L. Printz" award (for a book that exemplifies literary excellence in young adult literature). "How..." was interesting, with a 15-yr. old American girl visiting her cousins in England at a time when some shadowy guerrilla force has risen all over the countryside. She and her cousins are left to fend for themselves while the adults of the household are gone. The character and voice of the girl was compelling, and the book was a little daring in that she becomes involved with her same-aged first cousin. A good read. The title of the new book, "Just in Case," is a play on words, as the protagonist, a 15-yr. old who has a doomed outlook on life, changes his name from David Case to Justin Case, not recognizing the irony. As he's in a clothing store looking for a set of threads to go with his new persona, he meets a girl who's decided to help him dress tastefully. Here's the author's description:

"Justin turned slowly. The voice belonged to a girl of perhaps nineteen who peered at him through a heavy, clipped pink fringe. Her eyes were thickly rimmed with kohl, her mouth neatly outlined in a vivid shade of orange that clashed perfectly with her hair. She wore four-inch platform boots in pale green snakeskin, wildly patterned tights, a very short skirt, and a tight see-through shirt printed with Japanese cartoons over which was squeezed a 1950s-style long-line beige elastic bra. A camera bag hung from her shoulder.
Even Justin recognized that her dress sense was unusual."

I love that inventiveness, which is typical of Rosoff; how can the reader not keep turning the page to see what kind of person we have here? The age difference intrigues, too; what's the author going to do with this? Agnes is obviously a lot more extroverted than the doom-struck Justin. Rosoff goes on with her inventiveness, and it all flows nicely without seeming contrived at all. It's entirely engaging. That's a great way to write.

probabilities and agents

2007-02-13T19:25:00.000-08:00

Like lots of writers these days I've thought about using some of my energies to search out and enlist the aid of an agent to try and improve the chances of marketing a Ms., or at least, one for my latest YA novel. Agents, of course, would prefer a novelist with credits, so in the past I've tried the unsolicited Ms. route to the better known publishing houses. If you're not going to do simultaneous submissions, which many houses say they do not accept, it's a pretty time consuming route. Out of several YA novels I've submitted over the past eight years, the maximum number of submittals I've managed for any one novel was about six--twice I waited up to a year for a reply. I don't know what the probabilities are at book publishers, but I read an interesting article by an associate editor at a literary journal, on the success rates for short story Ms. at such journals. He figured there was an average one-percent chance of being accepted, and since that encompasses a lot of marginal work, he gave himself at least a five-percent chance of having his own stories accepted at any given journal. He had a math instructor do his statistics and he figured he needed on average to submit his Ms. up to 56 times to be confident of having a story accepted. I would have thought with a probability of five-percent it would have been twenty submittals, but you get the idea. If the percentages are the same for books, and it took on average about six months to hear back from a book publisher, you might not learn whether you had a viable novel for up to ten years. A competent agent would have a better idea of the market than me, and assuming the agent liked the novel, it would seem like a win-win situation to sign on with one. So much for the marketing quandry; I'm looking forward to some fiction writing tomorrow morning. To have a few smiles about what comes across the transom of a sharp, no nonsense agent, see Miss Snark's blog.

young people's literature

2007-02-11T13:57:00.000-08:00

I noticed today that the story "Bridge to Terabithia," by Katherine Paterson, (1977), has come out as a movie again (also in 1985). BTT is a moving, sensitive story about an anxious, artistic boy named Jesse, and an athletic tomboy named Leslie. Leslie is the 'new kid on the block' having moved into the locale with her New Age intellectual parents--lots of books, no TV, no formal religion--and she easily wins a school race that Jesse has long trained for. Nevertheless they become fast friends and create their own mythical world, Terabithia, in the woods near their home. (Warning--plot tip follows). The book created a shock in its day because of the tragic death of a young character. Such an attitude would seem very condescending today. It even surprises me for then, since an old, classical favorite, "Grimm's Fairy Tales," had plenty of young deaths. Other young people's literature taboos were also apparently crossed by BTT --Leslie's parents New Age spirituality, and a supposed sexual content. If sex was there it completely escapes my memory. And yet BTT was on ALA's “Ten Most Challenged Books of 2002”...for "offensive language, sexual content, and references to the occult and Satanism." Wow, I read it and never even picked up on any of those. I thought it was only a moving, sensitive story. Nowadays many of those taboos have fallen--though not always to the benefit of a good story. Still, I think the more liberal attitudes have been rewarding for young readers on the whole.

scoring manuscripts

2007-02-08T16:33:00.000-08:00

Many writers will be familiar with MS-WORD’s spelling and grammar check capability in its Tools menu. I’ve often used this check to evaluate a completed Ms., particularly to find my total word count, Flesch Reading Ease score, and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level score. It’s been interesting to check the Reading Ease and Grade Level of my work compared to more than a dozen best-seller authors analyzed by author James V. Smith, Jr., in his “Fiction Writer’s Brainstormer.” Smith's analyzes show that all of his best-seller authors typically log Reading Ease Scores between about 70 and 90; whereas, a U.S. Government manual describing combat actions that “any credible fiction writer could have turned into high-energy writing,” scored about 37. His best-seller authors also scored Grade Levels between about 4 and 6—which was surprising, since one of them, Wallace Stegner, was a Pulitzer Prize winner. So, even in good adult literary fiction, the grade level required to understand the language chosen was not necessarily high. The Gov. manual scored almost Grade 13. My most recent YA novel manuscript, about a girl who competes in karate, had a Reading Ease of 77, and a Grade Level of 6, so I figured that part was pretty good. Now, if only the story is interesting and marketable. You'll notice, if you try it, that brief, intense discussions like this, and story synopses, tend to score poorly because one tries to get too much info into a short piece. This post scored 52.5 in Reading Ease, and 11.2 in Grade Level.

the king dork code

2007-02-06T14:31:00.000-08:00

I’ve been reading the YA novel, King Dork, by Frank Portman, a lead singer/guitarist in a San Francisco Bay area punk band. His main character, Tom Henderson, a high school ‘dork’ who fantasizes on starting his own rock band, has pretty much read all the YA ‘classics,’ and prides himself on being nothing like the characters in them. He heaps sarcasm on Catcher in the Rye, and Separate Peace, and this works to give him his unique, conflicted voice. He dismisses teachers and parents who found those books and similar heroic in their own youth. Especially Catcher, which I sort of liked back then, but I can understand that. Attempts by Tom to decode messages tucked into the books left to him by his dead father are a little involved, but work to advance plot and subplots. High school bullying and sex seem a little far out at times, but maybe not. Tom’s spacey mom and flower-era stepdad provide good backdrops for Tom’s angst. This is a first novel by Portman, and a pretty good startup.

stephan king syndrome

2007-02-04T16:40:00.000-08:00

Sort of a stunning walking experience two days ago. Reminded me of author Stephan King's awful experience walking along a highway in Maine, though it was much worse for him. I was on the last lap of my three-mile walk--a repeated one-mile loop of empty, paved roads in a little-used state park. I was on my last lap, heading home, when I heard a squeal of tires behind me and I moved to the side of the road. When I looked over my shoulder a red car was skidding right at me. I ran off the road and fell while trying to get up a low slope. I could see in slow motion the grill work and bumper headed for me as I lay on the grassy slope. The car jammed to a stop a couple feet away. I was looking eye-level through the windshield and a young woman seemed to be laughing, perhaps nervously, or perhaps she was stoned, sitting behind the wheel. Her passenger boyfriend just kept looking at her and wouldn't even look at me. I was pretty shaken; I got up, dusted off, and stalked away, down the road. They got the car started again and gave me a wide berth as they drove by. It was very eerie. Something like getting visited by a banshee, a female harbinger of the end. Or as my son put it, a bean sídhe (Irish, pronounced the same) must have been driving the car. Well, perhaps it will make good material to give verisimilitude to a strange sort of fictional story.

publishing

2007-02-02T15:43:00.000-08:00

It’s a worsening problem to keep up with the publishing houses and know who is accepting unsolicited Ms., and whether they will return a Ms. in a SASE, or even whether they’ll send a form rejection in an SASE included with a Ms. that doesn’t have to be returned. Some now just tell the writer to submit a complete Ms., and if they’re interested they’ll let the writer know. It’s a pretty cold way of doing business, and these conditions keep changing. Just submitting a novel on spec may cost thirty to forty dollars, and the editor will likely make a decision on the first four or five pages. It shouldn’t be any more work and expense for them to invite a query letter, an outline, and up to ten pages of the Ms (with SASE for reply). They may have taken this step to hold down their slush pile, but if the probability of uncovering a good Ms. remains about the same, and probably it does, they may be passing up profitable opportunities. A friend told me about a new writer’s site that will track and update changing publisher’s needs and provide a forum for writers: www.jacketflap.com. I registered as I'd like to keep up with this situation.

language and translations

2007-01-30T19:36:00.000-08:00

Another production of Brian Friel's Translations has opened on Broadway. Set in rural Ireland in 1833, it tells of the British Army ordinance survey after the country's conquest, to remap the land, changing all the Gaelic place names into Anglicized names that will better speed troop movements, and facilitate administrative functions. Overnight, a thousand years and more of local legend and myths associated with the original place names are repressed. The characters include a "hedgemaster," who teaches the locals in the forbidden Gaelic tongue, and also teaches some of the ancient Greek and Latin classics in the original tongues. He's aging, and one of his sons tries to carry on in his nationalist tradition, and the other cooperates with the British in their mapping efforts, thinking it will bring economic progress. A young British Lieutenant falls in love with one of the women students and adopts the Irish ways, causing problems. The play is so elemental in its problems and conflicts, particularly in the deep roots of language, informing who we are, and who we will become. Good stuff for a writer to ponder.

gene robbers

2007-01-28T15:04:00.000-08:00

Recently our Grange held a benefit for Percy Schmeiser, a Canadian, who owns an organic farm raising canola (rapeseed) plants situated near other farmers using Monsanto's genetic canola seed. Percy's crop became contaminated with the genetic strain (wind, birds, who knows?) and when it was discovered, Monsanto ordered him to pay for a license or to have his crop destroyed; otherwise he would face legal action. Our benefit was held to help him with his legal costs. It seems a case of intellectual property and patent rights gone amok. An article in the newspaper today discusses how patents are given to researchers on human genes they discover as markers of certain genetic traits, especially genetic disorders. So perhaps someone may actually own the rights to some genes we have in our body. I hope they don't find out about any of us pirates, and require us to license 'their' genes. Or destroy them. Might be a story hidden in there.

The other sci-fi story is doing okay, sixty-five pages, and moving.

workshopping

2007-01-25T20:50:00.000-08:00

My recent issue of the 'Writer's Chronicle' had an ad for a new book titled "Against Workshopping Manuscripts," (It's a damnable thing, etc.) . I disliked workshopping when I first started a graduate program in creative writing, and it was a ragged process for the first one or two residencies on campus. However, I think people quickly came to see that the point was not only to highlight what was not working--and let's get past minor stylistic mistakes--but let the writer know in a constructive way why they thought it wasn't working, and just as important, what was working for the reader. In later residencies, it became a much valued process for author and critique responders both. Since then I've attended a couple of workshops in writers' conferences and it continues to be an interesting process. There may be nothing quite like having experienced workshoppers in one's personal writing group to enhance a writing life.

graphic novels

2007-01-23T19:50:00.000-08:00

The 2007 Printz Award for a YA novel was announced, and was "American Born Chinese," a graphic novel by Gene Luen Yang. I'm glad to see the recent successes of graphic novels; I also liked "Blankets," by Craig Thompson, a YA graphic novel I read last year. For some young readers the written novel will have a greater power for capturing imagination, but for others the graphic novel will retain a greater appeal. The graphic novels mentioned here had the story line and graphics developed by the same author. Being a (student) artist and writer myself, I'm intrigued by the combination. Last year I read "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: a novel," by Michael Chabon, which described a team of an artist and a writer who developed comic book stories of the Fifties. I think the graphic novel has been an interesting development, and I wish all the authors a continued success.

islands in the sea

2007-01-21T19:52:00.000-08:00

I heard an interview of Michael Parker on NPR, about his new book of short stories, "Don't make me stop now." One of the stories was about an elderly black man and two elderly white sisters hanging on and living out their days on one of the Outer Bank Islands off the east coast--NC, I think. They're the last ones on the island. The man's son is trying to get him to leave, telling him those sisters don't mean anything to him, but there's some sort of relationship and he's staying. I love the idea of people trying to hang onto a disappearing way of life. Especially near the sea. I've read two memorable books about the near-last inhabitants of the Great Blasket Islands, off the west coast of Ireland, "Peig," by Peig Sayers, and "The Islandman," by Tomás O'Crohan. (Of course I've still got them on my shelf.) The island people finally grew weary of their hard existence and petitioned the government to resettle them on the mainland, in the late Thirties, I think. The books were written in Gaelic and translated into English. Great reading.

laying the groundwork

2007-01-19T20:08:00.000-08:00

Blogspot has been acting overloaded lately, so I’ve missed an entry. The sci-fi revision seems to be going okay. The tendency is to get the technical scope and boundaries defined early in the story, and let the conflicts build from there, but there can be a risk of overloading the human-interest elements of the story line. I think the characters, other-worldly and human, are intriguing enough in their early interactions and dialogue to carry some of this technical load, but I’ll have to be careful. I'll be interested to see how my writing-exchange partner responds to this part. It’s a great thing to be able to share a Ms. with a writer-friend.

a balance--humor and straight talk

2007-01-17T20:33:00.000-08:00

The revision of my sci-fi story seems to be progressing okay. One of the large considerations has been how much of the tongue-in-cheek humor to retain from the original draft. I originally wanted something of a comic, bizarre effect, but the story also turned out to have a somewhat intriguing plot. How to keep the best of both? I think my strategy has evolved to developing the most believable dialog in the revision, and to retain any underlying humor in a straight-faced manner.

free will--story theme

2007-01-16T15:49:00.000-08:00

The 02Jan07 Times says "a bevy of experiments in recent years suggest that the conscious mind is like a monkey riding a tiger of subconscious decisions and actions in progress, frantically making up stories about being in control." Free willers generally hold that whatever choice you make is unforced and could have been otherwise, but it is not random. "That strikes many people as incoherent," a Dr. Silberstein said. Every physical system that has been investigated has turned out to be either deterministic, or random. "Both are bad news for free will," he said. I like that monkey riding a tiger image. There's a story waiting to be developed.

thematic material--tribal

2007-01-15T15:38:00.000-08:00

I've often wondered why the U.S., almost alone among the leading, developed nations, has such a draconian social network of health care, unemployment benefits, welfare arrangements, and such. A recent article in the NY Times, about or by a researcher, suggested that it may be because of our diverse ethnic and racial population. People may feel that others outside the tribe ought to look out for themselves. I'd always thought extreme ambition was more the driving force. Other countries with a more homogeneous population might think more benevolently about their neighbor. I wondered if a tightly focused example of this tribal concept might be the theme of a short story, avoiding, of course, being anything like didactic.

motivation

2007-01-14T19:51:00.000-08:00

Motivation of the main character--this has slowed me to a degree in a current revision of my sci-fi novel. Of course, a motivation was already written into the plot, but it's so important to carry the reader along with a seamless, consistent understanding of the motivation of the character, or the writer may introduce a fatal interruption of the "fictional dream" (John Gardner, The Art of Fiction) for the reader. And everything may be lost. It's an especially nuanced task for sci-fi, where the extraordinary needs to be made believeable.

recycling the mood of places

2007-01-13T16:31:00.000-08:00

I'm reminded in the revision of my sci-fi novel that the site in the Andes where I worked many years ago was first used as a place setting in that story, and again last year was used as a place setting in a mainline short story that was published in the Oracle Literary Journal. I'd associated a lot of energy, mood, and drama with the place, and I feel I still have some meanings to work out about it in future stories.

sci-fi underpinnings

2007-01-12T19:58:00.000-08:00

It's enjoyable to explore the use of real, philosophical underpinnings in writing sci-fi, but it's also important I think to make it seamless and unobtrusive when used in the story plot. I've had characters, even young ones in mainline stories, toss off allusions to some concepts of Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit geologist who did exploration in China in early Twentieth Century (he discovered remains of Peking Man). In a sense, Teilhard felt that all matter in the universe had a level of consciousness--even rocks. Young readers have liked that idea. In another sense, all components of creation become more complex as time advances. Think of man as a complex molecule, becoming ever more complex. Great underpinning for sci-fi, but keep it subsumed in an interesting, dramatic storyline.

revision of old work

2007-01-11T18:53:00.000-08:00

Finished re-reading and started revision of an old sci-fi novel I wrote perhaps fifteen years ago. It's the only sci-fi genre I've ever done. I wasn't too effective in getting it out to publishers--maybe two or three, and unsuccessfully--but that was the day of typewriters, and it was so hard to make revisions and still keep a clean copy. It's actually pleasurable now to revise and hone a Ms. on a computer. Anyhow, the plot and characters are pretty imaginative, and the Ms. is entitled "The Beryllium Eaters." It's set in Ecuador, where I worked once as a geotechnical engineer, and involves outer-space, bio-metallic creatures, who arrived at the time of the Inca conquests, and present-day people. I like the feeling of having another major writing project ahead of me for the winter months. Stay tuned.

musings

2007-01-10T10:53:00.000-08:00

There seems to be a lot of marvelous and creative venues available on the internet now--and for free. Amazing. I've posted four pieces of my art (watercolor paintings and art print) on a student art site hosted by a large British advertising agency, which I read about in the NY Times. I'll provide a link on my blog page when I get settled in. And then there's Google's blogging service--this page. I'm looking forward to posting things, perhaps daily, about my own writing and writers/writing that I'm interested in at the moment. I'll leave it at that for today.