Lisa K passes this along:
Here are 6 Kindle books on writing that are free right now. Normally most are $15-20.
Act quick! I don't think this is going to last long!
Alicia
Showing posts with label books we read. Show all posts
Showing posts with label books we read. Show all posts
Monday, November 7, 2011
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
New Malady-- writers who don't read
This is a phenomenon I've noticed mostly among poets-- they write but don't read poetry. (I, on the other hand, read poetry but don't write it.) But this is also about fiction writers. You tell me -- do you still read? Does it help or hurt your writing? I know lots of writers who don't like to read when they are writing. What do you all think?
Alicia
Alicia
Saturday, February 12, 2011
Seminal books
A young friend asked me to talk about my experience with three seminal books she was studying in her Children's/Young Adult Lit class. I bet most of you have read these books too! Do you remember reading them when you were young, and the experience you had? What books were formative and influential for you in childhood and adolescence?
Let's see. I'll just type what comes to me. I was born in December 1955, so right in the middle of the baby boom. In high school, I did read and still remember those three books you asked about:
The Diary of Anne Frank
Catcher in the Rye
The Bell Jar
To some degree, they typify the big issues of the 60s, though they were written earlier, at least Anne Frank and Catcher in the Rye were, and represent a world that was sort of irrelevant by the time I read them. But they represented issues of importance--
Catcher, the rise of youth culture
The Bell Jar, the women's movement
Anne Frank, race, though her story was very European-- antisemitism wasn't the real issue for us in the US (not that it didn't exist, but it wasn't enshrined in the constitution!), of course, but racism against African-Americans.
When I was in grade school, we all read a very important children's book -- I've been trying to find the title, but can't-- based on Ruby Bridges's integration of a New Orleans grade school (the famous Norman Rockwell painting of the little black girl in the white dress, surrounded by
federal troops as she walks to school, is also based on this incident). I remember in the novel the girl was named Mary, and I thought that if everyone could read this, no one would ever say little children couldn't go to school together. Funny that I can't remember the title, because I think it
was that book that taught me that novels can change the world for the better, by making people identify with characters who are different-- make people empathize.
Another book like that, not a novel, was Black Like Me, where a white journalist darkened his skin to get the experience of racism. It was an interesting trick, and sold the book, but I do think
he might have just asked some black people. :) He ended up dying of cancer, and it was said it was due to this skin darkening.
Oh, another huge issue at the beginning of my conscious time (that is, after say 1963 and JFK's assassination, which was the first public event I really remember) was The Bomb, always capitalized. We'd just been through high anxiety with the Cuban Missile Crisis, though I was too
young to notice, and everyone pretty much believed that we'd have a nuclear war in the coming decade. Never happened, but that anxiety might have contributed to the extreme, frenetic nature of the late 60s. I remember reading a kit of dystopic novels like Alas, Babylon and On the Beach which were set in a post-nuclear-war world, and that genre definitely reflected (and contributed to) the sense of impending doom. (In fact, you know, the whole forgotten Y2K panic-- remember how there were dire warnings that planes would fall out of the sky and money would disappear from banks as soon as it became Jan 1, 2000?-- was, in some ways, an echo of
that apocalyptic fear, more extreme and immediate-- I mean, really immediate-- everything was going to change at the stroke of midnight!-- and ephemeral, but the same sort of dire "the world will end" dread.) I can recognize in Catcher in the Rye and the Bell Jar that sort of formless crawling dread-- young people believing secretly that there won't be a world there when they grow up. Anne Frank, of course, had very specific dreads before the Cold War, so the dread wasn't formless there. There really was no future for her.
Anyway, I'd say the central issues of the 60s (for the young) were the rise of the youth culture and the extraordinary explosion of art, especially music, that fed the endless desire for stimulation in the young people. :) And the war-- Anne Frank's war was very different than Vietnam, as the racism that affected her was different from what we were going through in the US. Civil rights and racism... this was more like an issue that finally came to fruition-- it had truly been an issue since the Jamestown settlers first brought slaves there in 1609. I was living in Virginia then, and in my childhood, everything was still segregated, so the great years of the struggle for integration were going on right then as I grew up. And finally, the sort of "sleeper issue", the one that ended up having a huge effect but went on sort of in the shadow of the civil
rights struggle, was women's liberation, and the discontent and sense of entrapment that led to that is fully described in The Bell Jar.
So, let's see. I read these probably all in high school or junior high. (In my town then, the high school was 8th-12th grade, so we were children when we entered and adults when we graduated.) I can't tell you how much changed just in that time. As I entered 8th grade, girls were required to wear dresses and stockings, and by the time I graduated, we were all wearing jeans and t-shirts like the boys (I actually was in a big protest and student walkout about the dress code... we won). The war was at its height when I started high school, and the senior boys were all expecting to be drafted, but by the time I graduated, the war was over (for the US) and the draft was a horrible memory. The school was just starting integration my 8th grade year, and a young black man was elected homecoming king my senior year. (Yeah, he was a football star. ;)
I have to distinguish between these three books. The Diary of Anne Frank we read in school, for school, I mean, probably in 8th grade history class. Oddly, given the subject matter, I don't much remember it. I remember of course the iconic photo she took of herself, but I don't remember much about the story. Recently a friend mentioned Anne's difficulty with her mother, and I had to admit that I didn't remember that at all. Maybe this is what happens when we get assigned a book! We didn't choose to read it, so we forgot it. Of course, I do know the story in the main, and I think her courage is an inspiration, but sometimes I think that it's impossible to
read literature of the Holocaust. We know the ending, and it's too much to bear, and it tells too much about the human race. I think very likely I reacted against Anne Frank the way I have always reacted against books about the Holocaust-- I simply shut down and can't deal with it, can't deal with what it means about my fellow humans (and maybe me).
What's kind of ironic is that we were assigned this book about the terrible inhumanity of humans, and Catcher in the Rye was banned. I know now it's "canon" and kids read it in school, but back then, they banned it. It wasn't in our school library, and when I wanted to take it out of the public library, they said my mother had to come with me and sign a permission slip. (My mother was a great reader and thought we should read anything we wanted and we'd sort it out, so she just bought me a copy-- I still remember-- it was a dark red paperback.) What was the banning
offense? Oh, there was the word "fuck" in there. No joke. We were supposed to read about how the Nazis enslaved and then murdered millions, but we couldn't read the word "fuck" because it would corrupt us.
So of course we all loved Catcher in the Rye, because it was forbidden. It was actually kind of earlier than the 60s. (side question-- why no good fiction about the 60s? There were a couple good novels about Vietnam, but I can't think of a great novel set in the 60s-- the real rioting in the streets 60s, not Portnoy's Complaint. And you know, I grew up then, and I'm a writer, and I never thought to write about the time-- I think it was so much about experience, about the moment, that it can only be captured in music, maybe, and the music is great enough, who needs novels? Just crank up the Stones. "Paint It Black!")
Okay. We were the TV generation, as our parents had been the radio generation and their parents the movie generation. Most families had TVs by 1963, and there were only the three networks, so we all watched the same shows. The sitcom was big then, and silly, a talking horse and a talking car and that sort of thing. Lots of variety shows-- watching the Rolling Stones get censored on the Ed Sullivan show ("Let's Spend the Night Together") was like seeing the 50s collide with the 60s. By about 1968, though, the stereo record player was making more of an impact on the TV generation. That was huge-- for the first time, really, the price of a stereo was within reach of teenagers if you pooled your money-- $300, which was about what a TV cost, and think of what that would be in today's dollars, probably about $1800. But while we still watched TV, music became much more important. The stereo was the same level of technological advance as the Sony Walkman (personal stereo) was, but different. The stereo was a communal technology. We'd all sit in a dark room and listen to King Crimson or Jimi Hendrix, you know. Together. Music was a social activity. You'd buy an album ($7... see, I remember prices because I had to babysit 14 hours to buy an album!) and call your friends and they'd
all come over and listen to it over and over and over. My brother Greg used to buy singles (because he was younger and had no money!) and listen to the one song over and over. He'd be really embarrassed if I reminded him that his favorite songs were a Jackson 5 song (Easy as 123) and some treacly ballad named "Traces". Anyway, the rest of us would get REALLY sick of Greg's favorite songs. He'd commandeer the stereo and play his singles over and over.
We all read Catcher in the Rye and thought we were very sinful. It actually made an impression on me not because it was so wicked (it's not), but because the voice is so colloquial and young. It was like the narrator Holden was talking straight to us. That book keeps showing up in weird places. It clearly inspired films like Garden State. And of course, John Lennon's assassin was holding it when he killed John: "very strange," to quote the Beatles.
The story of Holden Caulfield didn't actually make that big an impression. It was the voice of the narrative that was memorable. I think Holden's world of prep schools and Manhattan was about as alien as Anne Frank's attic to me, a girl in a little town in Virginia. I kind of think back fondly on his absolute narcissism, though of course at the time I thought he was very deep, but he's spending 90% of the book thinking about himself, because heck, what else is there that's important! (Ah, to be 17 again... NOT! Never! I'd die first! :) It's a spot-on portrayal of that age, and brilliant, although now the only thing I can remember that remains very wise and worthwhile is something that his (older) teacher says to him, about how he might grow up just knowing enough and thinking enough to despise people who said, "Between you and I," and that would be tragic. And Holden ignore that because the teacher was a "poof" or whatever he called homosexuals, and made an advance on him. Holden missed how great an insight it was, that learning and growing are misused if all they teach you is contempt.
But you know, the whole Manhattan scene was so exotic, but not in an enticing way. In the 50s, all the thoughtful young people wanted to go to NYC and be philosophical. In the 60s, we all wanted to go to California and be beautiful and free. Holden so much describes a world where
grownups rule, where the world was all about work and drinking for stress relief and desperate but secret sex, and he's the one who brings the whole youth thing-- he wants to be candid and open and speak his emotions and be crazy and creative and never get trapped in a job and an apartment and a bank account. Doesn't he at the end ends up in... California? In a loony bin, but, well, that's what California is/was.
Sylvia Plath's book takes place the same basic time, also in elite schools and Manhattan. (You know, I went off to college and met a girl from that exact milieu-- professional class Jewish New York, and she went to a prep school, and she thought I was the exotic one!) By the time we all read -- all being only girls; I don't think I've ever met a man who admits to reading that book-- The Bell Jar, we all knew about her suicide, and that this book was based on her life, and we looked for clues to the death in the book.
Looking back, I think of The Bell Jar as, again, the portrayal of a world that was shortly going to vanish-- very shortly, so that by the time I read it, only a decade after it was written, it seemed like Gone with the Wind. But I did sort of know that world, because my mother, for a while, tried to live in it, buying a sewing machine to make these glamorous dresses like the kind the singers wore on the Ed Sullivan Show and the models wore in The Bell Jar. Of course, she couldn't live in that world-- being a poor ethnic girl who was the first in the family to go to college, etc., but I know she did feel that she SHOULD be like that, glamorous and artificial and brittle. What a weird ideal that was, and yet that was the world Plath was writing about, the world of the glam magazines. No wonder she committed suicide!
Two things come to mind-- one is that girls STILL read Plath's book and feel that what's her name is like them. I never did-- maybe because she was so recent when I read it, and I think also because girls today also have pressure to be "effortlessly hot, beautifully perfect," and for a brief moment in the late 60s, that pressure was off, and that's when I was coming of age. Not that we didn't want to be sexy and all, but you know, YOUTH is sexy, and we knew it-- the youth revolution thing. We knew that we were beautiful because we were young, and we were important because we were young, and that everyone older or younger than us wanted to BE us.
You could wear makeup or not, you could wear hose or never even shave your legs, and you'd still be considered beautiful. Weird time! But of course, Plath didn't live to that time. She lived just before that, in a time like right now, where even the most beautiful girls don't think they're beautiful enough. But at least now beauty is not all the matters, as it was in her time. Now you can succeed in life and love in other ways, although I suspect that those ways are still seen as a bit lesser than the beauty route.
So, as I said, I think girls today probably feel closer to Plath's heroine than I did. The daughter of a friend of mine actually read The Bell Jar and attempted suicide-- btw, she's now getting her PhD in English at Yale. :) That febrile narcissic intensity was something she understood viscerally, and I think the suicide attempt was almost an emulation (though she told four friends and a teacher that she'd taken all these pills, so natch, she was saved).
Other thing-- the part I remember most, and what does this say :)-- is when the heroine sees her first lover's genitals and thinks that they look like "a turkey neck and gizzards." Now that's pretty funny, and it reminds me that the first grenade thrown at the wall of patriarchy was
ridicule. That is, the heroine (or author) being able to laugh at the man was significant. The whole Freudian penis-envy thing was absurdly prominent in the 50s, and the patriarchy was huge in the US, all these boys like my father, coming back from the war and pretending to be men because the male adult was the ideal then, the silent, knowing, secretive, brutal, war-winning man. The 50s were all about shoving women back into the box (it's happening again, I tell you!) because they got too independent for male tastes during the war-- working in factories and going out afterwards with their friends and drinking and sleeping with other men. As soon as the war ended, all the boys came home and had to re-assert the patriarchy, and part of that, I think, was the attempt to pathologize being a woman. See, women were -wrong-, they weren't what they were supposed to be and knew it, and they envied men and that attribute of maleness-- that was the myth. Freud had sort of taken over in the US (I mean, his theories-- he was dead) in the 50s, and so serious women and ambitious women and smart women had to be told that all of that wasn't because they were serious, etc., but because they wanted to be men, and so it was wrong to be a woman and wrong to want to be a man if you couldn't (poor thing) be one. (This is all happening at the very same time as the civil rights movement, of course, so read "white men" there... but it was all very soon going to start sputtering to an end, the veneration of the white male, and about time!)
So anyway, when Plath's heroine got her first glimpse of the vaunted male attribute and made a joke, that showed that the wall was coming down. The ramparts were being stormed. If she could laugh at a man's phallus, well, all those phallic symbols that represented power were revealed in their absurdity too. Plath's heroine was NOT a feminist, but she became a feminist icon because she could laugh, if only secretly, at the symbol of male power.
Now that I'm all adult and (I presume) beyond adolescent narcissism, I do see that Catcher in the Rye and The Bell Jar are beloved precisely because both the protagonists are such narcissists, and maybe that's why I liked those books so much more when I was that way myself. Anne Frank's story is just too.... real. It's too much the misery of reality, while the other two books are about the inner misery of the privileged and educated, and I find that more amusing than apt these days.
I always want to tell people that yes, those are great books, but that's not what life was like for most people back then. But actually, it was, in the sense that every adolescent feels uncertain and lost and like he/she is not sufficiently appreciated. I bet if you gave that book to high school students in Bangladesh, they'd read it at night in their tin shacks by the light of a flickering candle and go to bed hungry because there wasn't enough food for the whole family, and fall asleep thinking that Holden and Sylvia really understand me, and my parents, who will shortly get up at dawn to go labor in the fields for $3 a day, don't even know who I really am.
I think that's why both of those books are always in print-- because there all always 15-year-olds who think there has to be something beyond this life of theirs, whatever it is.
--
So what about you all? What were the important books of your youth? What books do you think really exemplified that period of life, and period of history?
Alicia
Let's see. I'll just type what comes to me. I was born in December 1955, so right in the middle of the baby boom. In high school, I did read and still remember those three books you asked about:
The Diary of Anne Frank
Catcher in the Rye
The Bell Jar
To some degree, they typify the big issues of the 60s, though they were written earlier, at least Anne Frank and Catcher in the Rye were, and represent a world that was sort of irrelevant by the time I read them. But they represented issues of importance--
Catcher, the rise of youth culture
The Bell Jar, the women's movement
Anne Frank, race, though her story was very European-- antisemitism wasn't the real issue for us in the US (not that it didn't exist, but it wasn't enshrined in the constitution!), of course, but racism against African-Americans.
When I was in grade school, we all read a very important children's book -- I've been trying to find the title, but can't-- based on Ruby Bridges's integration of a New Orleans grade school (the famous Norman Rockwell painting of the little black girl in the white dress, surrounded by
federal troops as she walks to school, is also based on this incident). I remember in the novel the girl was named Mary, and I thought that if everyone could read this, no one would ever say little children couldn't go to school together. Funny that I can't remember the title, because I think it
was that book that taught me that novels can change the world for the better, by making people identify with characters who are different-- make people empathize.
Another book like that, not a novel, was Black Like Me, where a white journalist darkened his skin to get the experience of racism. It was an interesting trick, and sold the book, but I do think
he might have just asked some black people. :) He ended up dying of cancer, and it was said it was due to this skin darkening.
Oh, another huge issue at the beginning of my conscious time (that is, after say 1963 and JFK's assassination, which was the first public event I really remember) was The Bomb, always capitalized. We'd just been through high anxiety with the Cuban Missile Crisis, though I was too
young to notice, and everyone pretty much believed that we'd have a nuclear war in the coming decade. Never happened, but that anxiety might have contributed to the extreme, frenetic nature of the late 60s. I remember reading a kit of dystopic novels like Alas, Babylon and On the Beach which were set in a post-nuclear-war world, and that genre definitely reflected (and contributed to) the sense of impending doom. (In fact, you know, the whole forgotten Y2K panic-- remember how there were dire warnings that planes would fall out of the sky and money would disappear from banks as soon as it became Jan 1, 2000?-- was, in some ways, an echo of
that apocalyptic fear, more extreme and immediate-- I mean, really immediate-- everything was going to change at the stroke of midnight!-- and ephemeral, but the same sort of dire "the world will end" dread.) I can recognize in Catcher in the Rye and the Bell Jar that sort of formless crawling dread-- young people believing secretly that there won't be a world there when they grow up. Anne Frank, of course, had very specific dreads before the Cold War, so the dread wasn't formless there. There really was no future for her.
Anyway, I'd say the central issues of the 60s (for the young) were the rise of the youth culture and the extraordinary explosion of art, especially music, that fed the endless desire for stimulation in the young people. :) And the war-- Anne Frank's war was very different than Vietnam, as the racism that affected her was different from what we were going through in the US. Civil rights and racism... this was more like an issue that finally came to fruition-- it had truly been an issue since the Jamestown settlers first brought slaves there in 1609. I was living in Virginia then, and in my childhood, everything was still segregated, so the great years of the struggle for integration were going on right then as I grew up. And finally, the sort of "sleeper issue", the one that ended up having a huge effect but went on sort of in the shadow of the civil
rights struggle, was women's liberation, and the discontent and sense of entrapment that led to that is fully described in The Bell Jar.
So, let's see. I read these probably all in high school or junior high. (In my town then, the high school was 8th-12th grade, so we were children when we entered and adults when we graduated.) I can't tell you how much changed just in that time. As I entered 8th grade, girls were required to wear dresses and stockings, and by the time I graduated, we were all wearing jeans and t-shirts like the boys (I actually was in a big protest and student walkout about the dress code... we won). The war was at its height when I started high school, and the senior boys were all expecting to be drafted, but by the time I graduated, the war was over (for the US) and the draft was a horrible memory. The school was just starting integration my 8th grade year, and a young black man was elected homecoming king my senior year. (Yeah, he was a football star. ;)
I have to distinguish between these three books. The Diary of Anne Frank we read in school, for school, I mean, probably in 8th grade history class. Oddly, given the subject matter, I don't much remember it. I remember of course the iconic photo she took of herself, but I don't remember much about the story. Recently a friend mentioned Anne's difficulty with her mother, and I had to admit that I didn't remember that at all. Maybe this is what happens when we get assigned a book! We didn't choose to read it, so we forgot it. Of course, I do know the story in the main, and I think her courage is an inspiration, but sometimes I think that it's impossible to
read literature of the Holocaust. We know the ending, and it's too much to bear, and it tells too much about the human race. I think very likely I reacted against Anne Frank the way I have always reacted against books about the Holocaust-- I simply shut down and can't deal with it, can't deal with what it means about my fellow humans (and maybe me).
What's kind of ironic is that we were assigned this book about the terrible inhumanity of humans, and Catcher in the Rye was banned. I know now it's "canon" and kids read it in school, but back then, they banned it. It wasn't in our school library, and when I wanted to take it out of the public library, they said my mother had to come with me and sign a permission slip. (My mother was a great reader and thought we should read anything we wanted and we'd sort it out, so she just bought me a copy-- I still remember-- it was a dark red paperback.) What was the banning
offense? Oh, there was the word "fuck" in there. No joke. We were supposed to read about how the Nazis enslaved and then murdered millions, but we couldn't read the word "fuck" because it would corrupt us.
So of course we all loved Catcher in the Rye, because it was forbidden. It was actually kind of earlier than the 60s. (side question-- why no good fiction about the 60s? There were a couple good novels about Vietnam, but I can't think of a great novel set in the 60s-- the real rioting in the streets 60s, not Portnoy's Complaint. And you know, I grew up then, and I'm a writer, and I never thought to write about the time-- I think it was so much about experience, about the moment, that it can only be captured in music, maybe, and the music is great enough, who needs novels? Just crank up the Stones. "Paint It Black!")
Okay. We were the TV generation, as our parents had been the radio generation and their parents the movie generation. Most families had TVs by 1963, and there were only the three networks, so we all watched the same shows. The sitcom was big then, and silly, a talking horse and a talking car and that sort of thing. Lots of variety shows-- watching the Rolling Stones get censored on the Ed Sullivan show ("Let's Spend the Night Together") was like seeing the 50s collide with the 60s. By about 1968, though, the stereo record player was making more of an impact on the TV generation. That was huge-- for the first time, really, the price of a stereo was within reach of teenagers if you pooled your money-- $300, which was about what a TV cost, and think of what that would be in today's dollars, probably about $1800. But while we still watched TV, music became much more important. The stereo was the same level of technological advance as the Sony Walkman (personal stereo) was, but different. The stereo was a communal technology. We'd all sit in a dark room and listen to King Crimson or Jimi Hendrix, you know. Together. Music was a social activity. You'd buy an album ($7... see, I remember prices because I had to babysit 14 hours to buy an album!) and call your friends and they'd
all come over and listen to it over and over and over. My brother Greg used to buy singles (because he was younger and had no money!) and listen to the one song over and over. He'd be really embarrassed if I reminded him that his favorite songs were a Jackson 5 song (Easy as 123) and some treacly ballad named "Traces". Anyway, the rest of us would get REALLY sick of Greg's favorite songs. He'd commandeer the stereo and play his singles over and over.
We all read Catcher in the Rye and thought we were very sinful. It actually made an impression on me not because it was so wicked (it's not), but because the voice is so colloquial and young. It was like the narrator Holden was talking straight to us. That book keeps showing up in weird places. It clearly inspired films like Garden State. And of course, John Lennon's assassin was holding it when he killed John: "very strange," to quote the Beatles.
The story of Holden Caulfield didn't actually make that big an impression. It was the voice of the narrative that was memorable. I think Holden's world of prep schools and Manhattan was about as alien as Anne Frank's attic to me, a girl in a little town in Virginia. I kind of think back fondly on his absolute narcissism, though of course at the time I thought he was very deep, but he's spending 90% of the book thinking about himself, because heck, what else is there that's important! (Ah, to be 17 again... NOT! Never! I'd die first! :) It's a spot-on portrayal of that age, and brilliant, although now the only thing I can remember that remains very wise and worthwhile is something that his (older) teacher says to him, about how he might grow up just knowing enough and thinking enough to despise people who said, "Between you and I," and that would be tragic. And Holden ignore that because the teacher was a "poof" or whatever he called homosexuals, and made an advance on him. Holden missed how great an insight it was, that learning and growing are misused if all they teach you is contempt.
But you know, the whole Manhattan scene was so exotic, but not in an enticing way. In the 50s, all the thoughtful young people wanted to go to NYC and be philosophical. In the 60s, we all wanted to go to California and be beautiful and free. Holden so much describes a world where
grownups rule, where the world was all about work and drinking for stress relief and desperate but secret sex, and he's the one who brings the whole youth thing-- he wants to be candid and open and speak his emotions and be crazy and creative and never get trapped in a job and an apartment and a bank account. Doesn't he at the end ends up in... California? In a loony bin, but, well, that's what California is/was.
Sylvia Plath's book takes place the same basic time, also in elite schools and Manhattan. (You know, I went off to college and met a girl from that exact milieu-- professional class Jewish New York, and she went to a prep school, and she thought I was the exotic one!) By the time we all read -- all being only girls; I don't think I've ever met a man who admits to reading that book-- The Bell Jar, we all knew about her suicide, and that this book was based on her life, and we looked for clues to the death in the book.
Looking back, I think of The Bell Jar as, again, the portrayal of a world that was shortly going to vanish-- very shortly, so that by the time I read it, only a decade after it was written, it seemed like Gone with the Wind. But I did sort of know that world, because my mother, for a while, tried to live in it, buying a sewing machine to make these glamorous dresses like the kind the singers wore on the Ed Sullivan Show and the models wore in The Bell Jar. Of course, she couldn't live in that world-- being a poor ethnic girl who was the first in the family to go to college, etc., but I know she did feel that she SHOULD be like that, glamorous and artificial and brittle. What a weird ideal that was, and yet that was the world Plath was writing about, the world of the glam magazines. No wonder she committed suicide!
Two things come to mind-- one is that girls STILL read Plath's book and feel that what's her name is like them. I never did-- maybe because she was so recent when I read it, and I think also because girls today also have pressure to be "effortlessly hot, beautifully perfect," and for a brief moment in the late 60s, that pressure was off, and that's when I was coming of age. Not that we didn't want to be sexy and all, but you know, YOUTH is sexy, and we knew it-- the youth revolution thing. We knew that we were beautiful because we were young, and we were important because we were young, and that everyone older or younger than us wanted to BE us.
You could wear makeup or not, you could wear hose or never even shave your legs, and you'd still be considered beautiful. Weird time! But of course, Plath didn't live to that time. She lived just before that, in a time like right now, where even the most beautiful girls don't think they're beautiful enough. But at least now beauty is not all the matters, as it was in her time. Now you can succeed in life and love in other ways, although I suspect that those ways are still seen as a bit lesser than the beauty route.
So, as I said, I think girls today probably feel closer to Plath's heroine than I did. The daughter of a friend of mine actually read The Bell Jar and attempted suicide-- btw, she's now getting her PhD in English at Yale. :) That febrile narcissic intensity was something she understood viscerally, and I think the suicide attempt was almost an emulation (though she told four friends and a teacher that she'd taken all these pills, so natch, she was saved).
Other thing-- the part I remember most, and what does this say :)-- is when the heroine sees her first lover's genitals and thinks that they look like "a turkey neck and gizzards." Now that's pretty funny, and it reminds me that the first grenade thrown at the wall of patriarchy was
ridicule. That is, the heroine (or author) being able to laugh at the man was significant. The whole Freudian penis-envy thing was absurdly prominent in the 50s, and the patriarchy was huge in the US, all these boys like my father, coming back from the war and pretending to be men because the male adult was the ideal then, the silent, knowing, secretive, brutal, war-winning man. The 50s were all about shoving women back into the box (it's happening again, I tell you!) because they got too independent for male tastes during the war-- working in factories and going out afterwards with their friends and drinking and sleeping with other men. As soon as the war ended, all the boys came home and had to re-assert the patriarchy, and part of that, I think, was the attempt to pathologize being a woman. See, women were -wrong-, they weren't what they were supposed to be and knew it, and they envied men and that attribute of maleness-- that was the myth. Freud had sort of taken over in the US (I mean, his theories-- he was dead) in the 50s, and so serious women and ambitious women and smart women had to be told that all of that wasn't because they were serious, etc., but because they wanted to be men, and so it was wrong to be a woman and wrong to want to be a man if you couldn't (poor thing) be one. (This is all happening at the very same time as the civil rights movement, of course, so read "white men" there... but it was all very soon going to start sputtering to an end, the veneration of the white male, and about time!)
So anyway, when Plath's heroine got her first glimpse of the vaunted male attribute and made a joke, that showed that the wall was coming down. The ramparts were being stormed. If she could laugh at a man's phallus, well, all those phallic symbols that represented power were revealed in their absurdity too. Plath's heroine was NOT a feminist, but she became a feminist icon because she could laugh, if only secretly, at the symbol of male power.
Now that I'm all adult and (I presume) beyond adolescent narcissism, I do see that Catcher in the Rye and The Bell Jar are beloved precisely because both the protagonists are such narcissists, and maybe that's why I liked those books so much more when I was that way myself. Anne Frank's story is just too.... real. It's too much the misery of reality, while the other two books are about the inner misery of the privileged and educated, and I find that more amusing than apt these days.
I always want to tell people that yes, those are great books, but that's not what life was like for most people back then. But actually, it was, in the sense that every adolescent feels uncertain and lost and like he/she is not sufficiently appreciated. I bet if you gave that book to high school students in Bangladesh, they'd read it at night in their tin shacks by the light of a flickering candle and go to bed hungry because there wasn't enough food for the whole family, and fall asleep thinking that Holden and Sylvia really understand me, and my parents, who will shortly get up at dawn to go labor in the fields for $3 a day, don't even know who I really am.
I think that's why both of those books are always in print-- because there all always 15-year-olds who think there has to be something beyond this life of theirs, whatever it is.
--
So what about you all? What were the important books of your youth? What books do you think really exemplified that period of life, and period of history?
Alicia
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Fun things
I was reading Fearless Fourteen by Janet Evanovich, and I realized that one reason she's so popular with her readers is that she knows what's fun and spins it out to an enjoyable length. She doesn't just allude to it-- she exploits it.
She has a recurrent "stoner" character who is kind of fun himself, and so when the protagonist hires him to do security on the boyfriend's house, she doesn't expect much real security. She just really wants to keep him occupied so that he doesn't get into trouble. But he takes this security job seriously, which is funny in itself (camo uniforms, etc). And he invents a special cannon to protect the house, a potato gun. PVC pipes that shoot potatoes.
Okay, so that's fun, this stoner and his young sidekick inventing this gun. But Evanovich doesn't stop there. She spins it out-- the protagonist comes home to be almost bombarded with vegetables. And the vegetables are funny too-- not just potatoes. They also hurl a cantalope (she goes for the funny names). And there are little dropped-in lines, like the stoner shooting a "twice-baked".
There's a full scene built around this. BUT that's not all. In the end of the book, when the protagonist is under siege by the bad guys, the stoner arrives like the cavalry and shoots potatoes at them and wins and is interviewed by the local media.
Two thoughts here--
1) Figure out what will be fun for the reader and go with it-- really play it out, exploit it. If you go too far, you can always cut it back later. But have fun with the fun.
2) The climax should be unique to your story. How your protagonist conquers the bad guy or accomplishes the goal should bring in elements you've set up in your story. In this book, Stephanie has been kind of a house mother, gathering these little orphans (the stoner, the boy whose mother was kidnapped, the homeless stalker) around her and feeding and housing them. So her reward for this is that they are there to help her in the climax. What has your story set up for in the end? What is the unique way your protagonist can use what he/she has learned or gained during all that rising conflict? What allies has he gathered? What skills has she acquired? IN THE STORY... use what he/she has gained in the story, not just what he/she came into the story already having.
Oh, another--
3) The climax should echo the type and tone of the book. That is, a comedy should have a comic climax (like the potato gun rescue). A romance should have a climax that has a romantic element (like one of the couple rescuing the other, or their new trust letting them overcome some obstacle). Don't settle just for a generic thrilling climax-- bring in the extra element that is unique to this book.
So let's talk about what is "fun" in stories. It's easy to see in a comedy, but what's fun in other types of books? Look at your own story, and tell us what type it is, and what you think the reader will find to be a lot of fun and you should expand?
Like the book I was talking about in the last post, with the hero who sings her swoony songs. Well, at least I and Murph think that's fun. So I might have him sing a song later too. I have no idea how to pull that into the plot, but what the heck. Also it's a big pain that most songs from the 20th and 21st Century can't be quoted (copyright). Fortunately he's Irish, so I can use Irish folk songs, but not the Pogues, alas. I mean, "Love You to the End" would SO fit their romance.
But anyway, I suspect the "fun" part for the readers might be his songs. As long as I don't have to write them myself, I think I can spin that out. Not sure how his singing can help save the day in the climax. Hmm. Maybe the villain is going to be on American Idol.
Alicia
She has a recurrent "stoner" character who is kind of fun himself, and so when the protagonist hires him to do security on the boyfriend's house, she doesn't expect much real security. She just really wants to keep him occupied so that he doesn't get into trouble. But he takes this security job seriously, which is funny in itself (camo uniforms, etc). And he invents a special cannon to protect the house, a potato gun. PVC pipes that shoot potatoes.
Okay, so that's fun, this stoner and his young sidekick inventing this gun. But Evanovich doesn't stop there. She spins it out-- the protagonist comes home to be almost bombarded with vegetables. And the vegetables are funny too-- not just potatoes. They also hurl a cantalope (she goes for the funny names). And there are little dropped-in lines, like the stoner shooting a "twice-baked".
There's a full scene built around this. BUT that's not all. In the end of the book, when the protagonist is under siege by the bad guys, the stoner arrives like the cavalry and shoots potatoes at them and wins and is interviewed by the local media.
Two thoughts here--
1) Figure out what will be fun for the reader and go with it-- really play it out, exploit it. If you go too far, you can always cut it back later. But have fun with the fun.
2) The climax should be unique to your story. How your protagonist conquers the bad guy or accomplishes the goal should bring in elements you've set up in your story. In this book, Stephanie has been kind of a house mother, gathering these little orphans (the stoner, the boy whose mother was kidnapped, the homeless stalker) around her and feeding and housing them. So her reward for this is that they are there to help her in the climax. What has your story set up for in the end? What is the unique way your protagonist can use what he/she has learned or gained during all that rising conflict? What allies has he gathered? What skills has she acquired? IN THE STORY... use what he/she has gained in the story, not just what he/she came into the story already having.
Oh, another--
3) The climax should echo the type and tone of the book. That is, a comedy should have a comic climax (like the potato gun rescue). A romance should have a climax that has a romantic element (like one of the couple rescuing the other, or their new trust letting them overcome some obstacle). Don't settle just for a generic thrilling climax-- bring in the extra element that is unique to this book.
So let's talk about what is "fun" in stories. It's easy to see in a comedy, but what's fun in other types of books? Look at your own story, and tell us what type it is, and what you think the reader will find to be a lot of fun and you should expand?
Like the book I was talking about in the last post, with the hero who sings her swoony songs. Well, at least I and Murph think that's fun. So I might have him sing a song later too. I have no idea how to pull that into the plot, but what the heck. Also it's a big pain that most songs from the 20th and 21st Century can't be quoted (copyright). Fortunately he's Irish, so I can use Irish folk songs, but not the Pogues, alas. I mean, "Love You to the End" would SO fit their romance.
But anyway, I suspect the "fun" part for the readers might be his songs. As long as I don't have to write them myself, I think I can spin that out. Not sure how his singing can help save the day in the climax. Hmm. Maybe the villain is going to be on American Idol.
Alicia
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Writing book reviews
Theresa found this site of book reviews of writing craft books from Vision magazine. Yes, there's a review of my POV book there, but that's not why I'm sharing it with you. Well, not entirely. :) I think the reviews are really helpful in choosing among different grammar books and character books and such. Check it out!
Alicia
Alicia
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Help finding a short story
I'm front-paging this for the selfish reason that I want to see if anyone knows the title or author of this story--
I remember an amazing short story (well, of course, not the title or author) where a little boy recently lost his mother. He has misplaced a beloved toy, and his father, not wanting him to feel more pain, hears him praying to God that the toy would be recovered. Well, Dad goes out and gets him a replacement toy and tells him, "I found it!" and the boy thinks his prayer was answered. Then Dad hears him praying to God that his mom will come back.
Great use of irony and pathos-- and "wrong thing for the right reason" action. (Anyone know this story? I'd love to use it in a class.)
Alicia
I remember an amazing short story (well, of course, not the title or author) where a little boy recently lost his mother. He has misplaced a beloved toy, and his father, not wanting him to feel more pain, hears him praying to God that the toy would be recovered. Well, Dad goes out and gets him a replacement toy and tells him, "I found it!" and the boy thinks his prayer was answered. Then Dad hears him praying to God that his mom will come back.
Great use of irony and pathos-- and "wrong thing for the right reason" action. (Anyone know this story? I'd love to use it in a class.)
Alicia
Thursday, September 10, 2009
The Words Not Spoken, The Steps Not Taken
I'm reading Stone's Fall by Iain Pears, an exquisitely talented mystery writer whose first book, An Instance of the Fingerpost, is a near-perfect clinic on first person narratives. This new book is gorgeously written in reverse chronological order similar to the movie Memento, but covering a much broader time span.
But I'm struck over and over again not by the structural pyrotechnics but by the simple way he incorporates missing details that lesser writers might just leave out. Instead, by referencing the words not spoken and the actions left undone, we get a richer, more complex narrative. This is not an author who merely watches scenes unfold in his head and then records where the characters are standing and what they are saying. This is an author who embraces the totality of events from every angle.
Here's the first place I noticed this technique, on the bottom of the opening page. We're at the funeral of a woman so old that the narrator, a friend from decades ago, didn't realize she was still alive until he read her obituary in the morning paper.
It was a fine enough service, I thought, although I was not an expert. The priests took their time, the choir sang prettily, the prayers were said, and it was all over. A short eulogy paid tribute to her tireless, selfless work for the unfortunate but said nothing about her character. The congregation was mainly freshly scrubbed and intense-looking children, who were clipped around the ear by teachers if they made any untoward noise. I looked around to see who would take charge of the next round, but no one seemed to know what to do. Eventually the undertaker took over.
The paragraph goes on to describe the plans to inter the body and the procession of pallbearers. But by that point, the main work of the paragraph has already been accomplished. Pears hasn't once referred to the deceased woman's family or close friends, but we all understand they are not present. It's probably the main point of the paragraph, and it's made so obliquely that an inattentive reader might fail to draw the conclusion.
So how does he do it?
That phrase, but said nothing about her character, jarred me right out of the otherwise mild and pleasantly correct catalog of details of a very old woman's funeral. Instantly I wondered why the eulogy of an old, rich woman known for her charitable works would not reference her character. Normally, we might expect such a eulogy to talk about her kindness, her warm heart, her empathy or her sympathy. That's the key signal: Hey! Wake up! Important things are missing here! Pay attention to what's being left out!
Then we get fidgety children and casually brutal schoolteachers. There's a sense of duty attached to their presence, but no real feelings of mourning. Then the service ends, and right at the point where a family member or other designated spokesperson would talk about the next steps in the process, no one steps forward. But Pears handles it so deftly that but for that earlier key signal, we might not reach the proper conclusion.
A lesser writer might have written something like,
While the choir sang, I looked for familiar faces but found none. Of course, she'd never had children of her own, but what about the rest of her family? I also couldn't find a single representative of her husband's family. Or her second husband's family. No friends. No one even close to her age. No one but the dutiful and the curious and a cluster of children from the charity school she founded.
To be candid, that's not an entirely ineffective technique, even if it lacks Pears's masterful sleight of hand. A narrator who notices what's missing is an engaged and thoughtful narrator, and he's more likely to be interesting than the narrator who merely watches the scene unfold and records,
It was a pretty church with a small altar and vaulted ceilings. The pews were filled with school children from the charity school she'd founded. They fidgeted while the choir sang prettily, and their teachers clipped their ears to make them stand still. The priest gave the eulogy and talked about her many charitable works. It was a fine service, I thought, and at the end of it, the undertaker invited us all to the interment that afternoon.
Do you see how that works? It's a technically smooth paragraph with many of the same physical details as the Pears paragraph. But without the active mind of the narrator noting what's missing, the writing feels flat.
This is a technique Pears uses over an over to great effect. Look at how he focuses on what's missing here:
Not all journalists are editors, not all artists are members of the Academy. John Praxiteles Brock, my fellow lodger, was not then a success; his torment at having to look out every morning at the proof of unattainable glory in the next street was balanced by his desire to rub shoulders with the famous, who might assist him in his career. He would come home occasionally bubbling with excitement and pride: "I said good morning to Sargent this morning!" or "Henry MacAlpine was buying a pint of milk in front of me today!" Alas, it was rare that either said good morning in return. Perhaps his desperation frightened them; perhaps the fact that his father was a sculptor (hence his unfortunate middle name) of retrograde opinions and unpleasant temper put them off; perhaps they felt that youth has to fight on its own. Now he is more successful, Brock gives little encouragement to others, either.
Gorgeous, isn't it? Look at all the ways he uses negative statements and awareness of what's missing to paint a clear picture of this character. Can you spot them all?
A writer's work is as good as her powers of observation, and this includes a sensitivity not just to what is recordable, but to what is missing. Pay attention both when you're reading and observing, and ask yourself, What is being left out? How is it relevant? Because there's more to good storytelling than recording where the characters are standing and the words they speak. Sometimes the most significant details are those the characters leave out.
Theresa
But I'm struck over and over again not by the structural pyrotechnics but by the simple way he incorporates missing details that lesser writers might just leave out. Instead, by referencing the words not spoken and the actions left undone, we get a richer, more complex narrative. This is not an author who merely watches scenes unfold in his head and then records where the characters are standing and what they are saying. This is an author who embraces the totality of events from every angle.
Here's the first place I noticed this technique, on the bottom of the opening page. We're at the funeral of a woman so old that the narrator, a friend from decades ago, didn't realize she was still alive until he read her obituary in the morning paper.
It was a fine enough service, I thought, although I was not an expert. The priests took their time, the choir sang prettily, the prayers were said, and it was all over. A short eulogy paid tribute to her tireless, selfless work for the unfortunate but said nothing about her character. The congregation was mainly freshly scrubbed and intense-looking children, who were clipped around the ear by teachers if they made any untoward noise. I looked around to see who would take charge of the next round, but no one seemed to know what to do. Eventually the undertaker took over.
The paragraph goes on to describe the plans to inter the body and the procession of pallbearers. But by that point, the main work of the paragraph has already been accomplished. Pears hasn't once referred to the deceased woman's family or close friends, but we all understand they are not present. It's probably the main point of the paragraph, and it's made so obliquely that an inattentive reader might fail to draw the conclusion.
So how does he do it?
That phrase, but said nothing about her character, jarred me right out of the otherwise mild and pleasantly correct catalog of details of a very old woman's funeral. Instantly I wondered why the eulogy of an old, rich woman known for her charitable works would not reference her character. Normally, we might expect such a eulogy to talk about her kindness, her warm heart, her empathy or her sympathy. That's the key signal: Hey! Wake up! Important things are missing here! Pay attention to what's being left out!
Then we get fidgety children and casually brutal schoolteachers. There's a sense of duty attached to their presence, but no real feelings of mourning. Then the service ends, and right at the point where a family member or other designated spokesperson would talk about the next steps in the process, no one steps forward. But Pears handles it so deftly that but for that earlier key signal, we might not reach the proper conclusion.
A lesser writer might have written something like,
While the choir sang, I looked for familiar faces but found none. Of course, she'd never had children of her own, but what about the rest of her family? I also couldn't find a single representative of her husband's family. Or her second husband's family. No friends. No one even close to her age. No one but the dutiful and the curious and a cluster of children from the charity school she founded.
To be candid, that's not an entirely ineffective technique, even if it lacks Pears's masterful sleight of hand. A narrator who notices what's missing is an engaged and thoughtful narrator, and he's more likely to be interesting than the narrator who merely watches the scene unfold and records,
It was a pretty church with a small altar and vaulted ceilings. The pews were filled with school children from the charity school she'd founded. They fidgeted while the choir sang prettily, and their teachers clipped their ears to make them stand still. The priest gave the eulogy and talked about her many charitable works. It was a fine service, I thought, and at the end of it, the undertaker invited us all to the interment that afternoon.
Do you see how that works? It's a technically smooth paragraph with many of the same physical details as the Pears paragraph. But without the active mind of the narrator noting what's missing, the writing feels flat.
This is a technique Pears uses over an over to great effect. Look at how he focuses on what's missing here:
Not all journalists are editors, not all artists are members of the Academy. John Praxiteles Brock, my fellow lodger, was not then a success; his torment at having to look out every morning at the proof of unattainable glory in the next street was balanced by his desire to rub shoulders with the famous, who might assist him in his career. He would come home occasionally bubbling with excitement and pride: "I said good morning to Sargent this morning!" or "Henry MacAlpine was buying a pint of milk in front of me today!" Alas, it was rare that either said good morning in return. Perhaps his desperation frightened them; perhaps the fact that his father was a sculptor (hence his unfortunate middle name) of retrograde opinions and unpleasant temper put them off; perhaps they felt that youth has to fight on its own. Now he is more successful, Brock gives little encouragement to others, either.
Gorgeous, isn't it? Look at all the ways he uses negative statements and awareness of what's missing to paint a clear picture of this character. Can you spot them all?
A writer's work is as good as her powers of observation, and this includes a sensitivity not just to what is recordable, but to what is missing. Pay attention both when you're reading and observing, and ask yourself, What is being left out? How is it relevant? Because there's more to good storytelling than recording where the characters are standing and the words they speak. Sometimes the most significant details are those the characters leave out.
Theresa
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Which is more striking?
I'm reading Relentless by Dean Koontz, and it's a sub-genre I love, where evil book reviewers get what's coming to them.
No, really, I love books about writers. That's sort of sad, isn't it?
Anyway, I don't know why, and I don't even know if it's real or the writer/hero is imagining it. But the reviewer who panned his book is in the hero's bedroom. Hero wakes up and senses him, but it's dark and he can't see. He reaches into a drawer where he keeps a flashlight.
Here's the next line:
The flashlight wasn't there.
Now my head sort of edited that to:
The flashlight was gone.
Now just with that little bit of info, which-- if you were writing the same passage-- would you do? And why?
I've been trying to put things positively in my own writing, because that feels more active somehow. But Koontz knows how to create suspense and shock a lot more than I do, so I bet he's right. What do you think?
No, really, I love books about writers. That's sort of sad, isn't it?
Anyway, I don't know why, and I don't even know if it's real or the writer/hero is imagining it. But the reviewer who panned his book is in the hero's bedroom. Hero wakes up and senses him, but it's dark and he can't see. He reaches into a drawer where he keeps a flashlight.
Here's the next line:
The flashlight wasn't there.
Now my head sort of edited that to:
The flashlight was gone.
Now just with that little bit of info, which-- if you were writing the same passage-- would you do? And why?
I've been trying to put things positively in my own writing, because that feels more active somehow. But Koontz knows how to create suspense and shock a lot more than I do, so I bet he's right. What do you think?
Monday, May 4, 2009
Starting right in
I am reading a memoir (My Lobotomy, by Howard Dully and Charles Fleming), and it starts like this:
My name is Howard Dully. I am a bus driver. I am a husband, a father, and a grandfather. I'm into doo-wop music, travel, and photography.
I am also a survivor. In 1960, when I was 12 years old, I was given a transorbital, or ‘ice pick’ lobotomy. My stepmother arranged it. My father agreed to it. Dr. Walter Freeman, the father of the American lobotomy, told me he was going to do some ‘tests.’ It took ten minutes and cost two hundred dollars.
The surgery damaged me in many ways. But it didn't "fix" me or turn me into a robot. So my family put me in an institution.
I spent the next forty years in and out of insane asylums, jails, and halfway houses. I was homeless, alcoholic, and drug-addicted. I was lost.
So... this is a memoir, not fiction, but it's still story. (Can't you imagine this as a first-person novel opening?) So... what do you think about starting right in on it, stating the conflict right up front, and here even the whole story is previewed ("the next forty years").
Now do you like this? Does it make you want to read more? Or do you feel more like you don't need to read more, because the whole story is right there-- there's no suspense?
In what case would you start a story so suddenly? What sort of story or character would elicit that sort of opening?
I think one thing we should all realize is-- there isn't a one-size-fits-all opening. It's often a good idea to "start right before something happens" or "start in the action" (and it's seldom a good idea to start with an unattributed line of dialogue :). But the opening has to fit the story. And so the question is, does the opening fit your story?
And with an opening like this, what sort of story would it be good for? Why would you make the decision to open with a comprehensive summary?
One danger I see is that the reader won't hang on for the first few pre-lobotomy chapters, which are essential (because we need to know why his parents even considered the surgery, what was "wrong" with him). But I notice that he says, "When I was 12," and that actually creates some anticipation/dread as he narrates in the first chapters his childhood. And knowing what is to come, we can hear about his misbehavior and his trauma (his mother dies when he's five, and he's never told anything but that she's gone away and won't return) and feel even greater dread-- that this isn't one of those stories where some wonderful teacher realizes that this is a troubled boy who needs some extra help, that it won't end up happily. We know-- he's going to get a lobotomy, and he's going to spend most of his life in institutions. (But we know there's eventually a happy ending too-- is that what keeps us slogging through the misery?)
That is, the author's decision to tell all in summary makes the details of his childhood more meaningful-- it's not just a bad kid, it's a kid who is going to be grossly mistreated. It's not just another wicked stepmother, it's a stepmother who has him lobotomized. It's not just a misspent youth, it's going to be a wasted life.
An interesting choice, anyway, and so far, it works to draw me in. (And next time I grump about how we treat kids with kid gloves these days, protect them too much, I need to remember this story! This is actually the era I remember-- he's 8 years older than I am-- as free and liberated, with parents benignly letting kids be kids without overprotecting or diagnosing them... yeah, and kids we now would recognize as having ADD or learning disabilities were just considered "bad" then, and expelled or sentenced or... well, I guess lobotomized.)
Alicia
My name is Howard Dully. I am a bus driver. I am a husband, a father, and a grandfather. I'm into doo-wop music, travel, and photography.
I am also a survivor. In 1960, when I was 12 years old, I was given a transorbital, or ‘ice pick’ lobotomy. My stepmother arranged it. My father agreed to it. Dr. Walter Freeman, the father of the American lobotomy, told me he was going to do some ‘tests.’ It took ten minutes and cost two hundred dollars.
The surgery damaged me in many ways. But it didn't "fix" me or turn me into a robot. So my family put me in an institution.
I spent the next forty years in and out of insane asylums, jails, and halfway houses. I was homeless, alcoholic, and drug-addicted. I was lost.
So... this is a memoir, not fiction, but it's still story. (Can't you imagine this as a first-person novel opening?) So... what do you think about starting right in on it, stating the conflict right up front, and here even the whole story is previewed ("the next forty years").
Now do you like this? Does it make you want to read more? Or do you feel more like you don't need to read more, because the whole story is right there-- there's no suspense?
In what case would you start a story so suddenly? What sort of story or character would elicit that sort of opening?
I think one thing we should all realize is-- there isn't a one-size-fits-all opening. It's often a good idea to "start right before something happens" or "start in the action" (and it's seldom a good idea to start with an unattributed line of dialogue :). But the opening has to fit the story. And so the question is, does the opening fit your story?
And with an opening like this, what sort of story would it be good for? Why would you make the decision to open with a comprehensive summary?
One danger I see is that the reader won't hang on for the first few pre-lobotomy chapters, which are essential (because we need to know why his parents even considered the surgery, what was "wrong" with him). But I notice that he says, "When I was 12," and that actually creates some anticipation/dread as he narrates in the first chapters his childhood. And knowing what is to come, we can hear about his misbehavior and his trauma (his mother dies when he's five, and he's never told anything but that she's gone away and won't return) and feel even greater dread-- that this isn't one of those stories where some wonderful teacher realizes that this is a troubled boy who needs some extra help, that it won't end up happily. We know-- he's going to get a lobotomy, and he's going to spend most of his life in institutions. (But we know there's eventually a happy ending too-- is that what keeps us slogging through the misery?)
That is, the author's decision to tell all in summary makes the details of his childhood more meaningful-- it's not just a bad kid, it's a kid who is going to be grossly mistreated. It's not just another wicked stepmother, it's a stepmother who has him lobotomized. It's not just a misspent youth, it's going to be a wasted life.
An interesting choice, anyway, and so far, it works to draw me in. (And next time I grump about how we treat kids with kid gloves these days, protect them too much, I need to remember this story! This is actually the era I remember-- he's 8 years older than I am-- as free and liberated, with parents benignly letting kids be kids without overprotecting or diagnosing them... yeah, and kids we now would recognize as having ADD or learning disabilities were just considered "bad" then, and expelled or sentenced or... well, I guess lobotomized.)
Alicia
Saturday, March 14, 2009
Shifting Interior Monologue
Puffing a bit as she reached the top of the stairs, Anita stopped to catch her breath. Maybe Nathan was right--she was getting a bit old. Since when had a flight of stairs been so daunting? For once, she wished she'd picked up one of those crazy neon sports drinks from Marty's instead of her usual coffee. Thinking of him, she tried to stifle a silly grin rolling across her face; trying to get her breath under control and stop smiling at the same time only led her to lapse into a terrible coughing fit.
She was so loud that she drew Peri to the doorway. "Anita, are you okay?" said the tall young woman, reaching out to pull her inside. "Gosh, you sound awful. Here, I'll take the drink; you go sit down in the office." Georgia looked over from where she was stocking yarns, worry all over her face. She knew Anita well enough not to make a huge fuss; still, she was watching the older woman's every move.
"I'm"--breath--"fine," Anita insisted, a wave of her hand as if to swat them all away. "Quit fussing." She let Peri take her to the back office, if only to avoid the prying eyes of all the customers. That was something that had been lost with her generation, it was true--the fine art of minding one's own business. Okay, okay, a sip of water. Why did everyone seem to think water cured everything? All it did was wet the throat. Still, she took the glass, nodded a thank-you to Peri, leaned back into her seat with relief when Peri left the office.
~~ from The Friday Night Knitting Club by Kate Jacobs
The parts highlighted in green are clean interior monologue, unmixed with other narrative elements like action or description. Take a look at how she brackets that interior monologue. That's fairly important when you're trying to keep some kind of narrative distance, but still want to dip into the thoughts of a particular character. You do things like bury the IM in the middle of paragraphs and surround it with other narrative elements, especially exposition that disguises itself as interior monologue.
Why especially that? "Telling" the character's internal state (rather than showing it directly with interior monologue) can serve as a sort of depth midpoint between the more distant feel of the omniscient and the more intimate feel of the interior monologue.
Let's pick apart that first paragraph as an example.
Sentence One:
Puffing a bit as she reached the top of the stairs, Anita stopped to catch her breath.
That's action. Action is dynamic motion of a character or object in the narrative world. So the dynamic movement is a body climbing stairs and a chest huffing for air. It doesn't matter that Anita "stopped" because stopping describes her activity (we all stop climbing when we reach the top of the stairs, right?) and allows her to engage in another activity (puffing).
Sentence Two:
Maybe Nathan was right--she was getting a bit old. Since when had a flight of stairs been so daunting?
That's interior monologue, a character's direct thoughts presented without any narrative filters. Anita is remembering something her son said, something she's been resisting. And she asks herself a rhetorical question.
Now, the next bit might initially seem as though it's also interior monologue:
For once, she wished she'd picked up one of those crazy neon sports drinks from Marty's instead of her usual coffee. Thinking of him, she tried to stifle a silly grin rolling across her face;
But it's not. We have a narrative filter in place here. This is "telling" the reader Anita's thoughts. The "telling" comes mainly from the use of the phrases "For once, she wished" and "Thinking of him." (By the way, we've already been given to understand that Marty's coffee is always piping hot, maybe too hot to drink.) If we were to recast this as a cleaner form of interior monologue without the filter, it might read something like,
She should have picked up one of those crazy neon sports drinks from Marty's instead of coffee. Marty. The silly grin rolled across her face. No way to stifle that.
Yes, this does change the voice slightly. This isn't an exercise in preserving voice, but in interior monologue and exposition and ways to use them to achieve certain effects. Can you all see the difference now?
If you're writing in deep third -- the limited or subjective form of third person -- you won't need these midpoint bits to transition the reader from the omniscient narrative to the interior monologue. In fact, you won't always need it even if you're writing in omniscient. In the third paragraph of this excerpt, the final sentence is a list of actions. It's not separated from the preceding interior monologue by anything at all. We move straight from IM into action, and it works just fine.
Anyone care to propose a theory on why that works in that particular spot? I think there's a reason, and the reason can be found in the final sentence.
One more thing about this excerpt. But I think I'm also going to pose this as a question for all of you. What do you notice about the middle paragraph?
For those of you who read this blog on a feed reader, here's a gentle reminder that we have really smart people making comments on the last Friday Night Knitting Club post. They all had worthwhile insights, and if you have a moment, it might be interesting to take a look.
One final note--
I've been invited to participate in a Pitch Party at Book Roast on March 17. See the Book Roast blog for details. It looks like a fun event.
Theresa
She was so loud that she drew Peri to the doorway. "Anita, are you okay?" said the tall young woman, reaching out to pull her inside. "Gosh, you sound awful. Here, I'll take the drink; you go sit down in the office." Georgia looked over from where she was stocking yarns, worry all over her face. She knew Anita well enough not to make a huge fuss; still, she was watching the older woman's every move.
"I'm"--breath--"fine," Anita insisted, a wave of her hand as if to swat them all away. "Quit fussing." She let Peri take her to the back office, if only to avoid the prying eyes of all the customers. That was something that had been lost with her generation, it was true--the fine art of minding one's own business. Okay, okay, a sip of water. Why did everyone seem to think water cured everything? All it did was wet the throat. Still, she took the glass, nodded a thank-you to Peri, leaned back into her seat with relief when Peri left the office.
~~ from The Friday Night Knitting Club by Kate Jacobs
The parts highlighted in green are clean interior monologue, unmixed with other narrative elements like action or description. Take a look at how she brackets that interior monologue. That's fairly important when you're trying to keep some kind of narrative distance, but still want to dip into the thoughts of a particular character. You do things like bury the IM in the middle of paragraphs and surround it with other narrative elements, especially exposition that disguises itself as interior monologue.
Why especially that? "Telling" the character's internal state (rather than showing it directly with interior monologue) can serve as a sort of depth midpoint between the more distant feel of the omniscient and the more intimate feel of the interior monologue.
Let's pick apart that first paragraph as an example.
Sentence One:
Puffing a bit as she reached the top of the stairs, Anita stopped to catch her breath.
That's action. Action is dynamic motion of a character or object in the narrative world. So the dynamic movement is a body climbing stairs and a chest huffing for air. It doesn't matter that Anita "stopped" because stopping describes her activity (we all stop climbing when we reach the top of the stairs, right?) and allows her to engage in another activity (puffing).
Sentence Two:
Maybe Nathan was right--she was getting a bit old. Since when had a flight of stairs been so daunting?
That's interior monologue, a character's direct thoughts presented without any narrative filters. Anita is remembering something her son said, something she's been resisting. And she asks herself a rhetorical question.
Now, the next bit might initially seem as though it's also interior monologue:
For once, she wished she'd picked up one of those crazy neon sports drinks from Marty's instead of her usual coffee. Thinking of him, she tried to stifle a silly grin rolling across her face;
But it's not. We have a narrative filter in place here. This is "telling" the reader Anita's thoughts. The "telling" comes mainly from the use of the phrases "For once, she wished" and "Thinking of him." (By the way, we've already been given to understand that Marty's coffee is always piping hot, maybe too hot to drink.) If we were to recast this as a cleaner form of interior monologue without the filter, it might read something like,
She should have picked up one of those crazy neon sports drinks from Marty's instead of coffee. Marty. The silly grin rolled across her face. No way to stifle that.
Yes, this does change the voice slightly. This isn't an exercise in preserving voice, but in interior monologue and exposition and ways to use them to achieve certain effects. Can you all see the difference now?
If you're writing in deep third -- the limited or subjective form of third person -- you won't need these midpoint bits to transition the reader from the omniscient narrative to the interior monologue. In fact, you won't always need it even if you're writing in omniscient. In the third paragraph of this excerpt, the final sentence is a list of actions. It's not separated from the preceding interior monologue by anything at all. We move straight from IM into action, and it works just fine.
Anyone care to propose a theory on why that works in that particular spot? I think there's a reason, and the reason can be found in the final sentence.
One more thing about this excerpt. But I think I'm also going to pose this as a question for all of you. What do you notice about the middle paragraph?
For those of you who read this blog on a feed reader, here's a gentle reminder that we have really smart people making comments on the last Friday Night Knitting Club post. They all had worthwhile insights, and if you have a moment, it might be interesting to take a look.
One final note--
I've been invited to participate in a Pitch Party at Book Roast on March 17. See the Book Roast blog for details. It looks like a fun event.
Theresa
Sunday, March 8, 2009
Subjective Omniscient
Being invited into a person's living quarters in New York City is a huge gesture of trust. Certainly their choice of art work, furniture, paint color, reveals much about their taste and style. But that's the case anywhere, isn't it? New York is different; it remains a city of neighborhoods built up along the lines of class and race: the Upper East Side for Old Money, the West Side for New. Downtown for the Trendies. And all sorts of strivers and dreamers and regular middle- and working-class folks sprinkled everywhere in between, snapping up any apartment that is bug-free (please!) and not too overpriced (pretty please!). But it's not necessarily the location are addressed that defines a person. You can lease a tiny, rent-controlled studio just off the East side's Madison Avenue -- or, one building over, own a massive multi-bedroom flat inherited from a wily old grandfather. In midtown offices, coworkers wonder if their peers are pulling themselves up by their bootstraps or are really just trust-fund babies. When impressions are everything, would you want any one to know the truth either way?
That's why regular, workaday New Yorkers "entertain" in restaurants. Cocktail bars. Meeting up at the museum. Oh, sure, you'll hear people say it's because of the size of their apartment. That the kitchen is too small to make a reasonable meal. But that's just part of the equation. Because unless you go out of your way to live hugely above or below your means, letting a friend, a colleague, a significant other into your home reveals everything: your attitudes, your sense of style... and the state of your pocketbook. It's one thing if your home is so grand as to intimidate, though in New York there is always someone who has more, bigger, seemingly better. Opening your apartment door invite envy or condescension. It changes the playing field.
The truth comes down to this: in a city obsessed with wealth and status, there are few gestures more intimate than being invited into someone's home.
So when Marty suggested to Anita that it would be fun to just stay in for a night, cook a meal together, and enjoy some wine, she panicked.
~~ from The Friday Night Knitting Club by Kate Jacobs
I've been thinking about doing little mini-units on some of the techniques employed in this book. She breaks a lot of rules, and she does it to good effect. Or, rather, perhaps rather than saying she breaks the rules, we should say that she's stretching the narrative with techniques we don't see much in genre fiction.
Here, for example, she uses a technique that Alicia discusses in her book on point of view. Those of you who have read Alicia's book might remember this. It's okay sometimes to start a scene in a more objective or omniscient point of view, and then gradually sink the reader lower down into the subjective third person.
So really, that's what the author is doing in this passage. Except her omniscient isn't exactly objective, is it? We get the sense of an actual narrator, a perspective being provided by someone outside the events of the book. This is sometimes called the intrusive author, but I've never liked that term because it implies that the author is doing something bad. Instead, let's call it subjective omniscient. The external narrator has a point of view.
One of the interesting things about the omniscient point of view is that it lends itself a little more readily to touches of formality. All the colons and semicolons don't jar in this passage, and I'm usually very sensitive to their presence. But because this passage reads in an almost academic manner, the more formal punctuation is less disruptive.
And yet the tone of the piece is anything but formal. Notice the way she incorporates an almost dialogue-like feeling in some of the prose. There are fragments, casual interjections like "oh, sure," rhetorical questions (who is asking what of whom, exactly?), and bits of slang to modernize this mini-treatise on New York apartments.
What else do you notice about this passage? Take a closer look at the way she chooses and organizes her words, and tell me in the comments what you see. And what effect it creates on the overall passage. This is highly controlled writing, and it's well worth a bit of your time to analyze it, even if this particular type of book isn't your first choice for reading pleasure.
Theresa
That's why regular, workaday New Yorkers "entertain" in restaurants. Cocktail bars. Meeting up at the museum. Oh, sure, you'll hear people say it's because of the size of their apartment. That the kitchen is too small to make a reasonable meal. But that's just part of the equation. Because unless you go out of your way to live hugely above or below your means, letting a friend, a colleague, a significant other into your home reveals everything: your attitudes, your sense of style... and the state of your pocketbook. It's one thing if your home is so grand as to intimidate, though in New York there is always someone who has more, bigger, seemingly better. Opening your apartment door invite envy or condescension. It changes the playing field.
The truth comes down to this: in a city obsessed with wealth and status, there are few gestures more intimate than being invited into someone's home.
So when Marty suggested to Anita that it would be fun to just stay in for a night, cook a meal together, and enjoy some wine, she panicked.
~~ from The Friday Night Knitting Club by Kate Jacobs
I've been thinking about doing little mini-units on some of the techniques employed in this book. She breaks a lot of rules, and she does it to good effect. Or, rather, perhaps rather than saying she breaks the rules, we should say that she's stretching the narrative with techniques we don't see much in genre fiction.
Here, for example, she uses a technique that Alicia discusses in her book on point of view. Those of you who have read Alicia's book might remember this. It's okay sometimes to start a scene in a more objective or omniscient point of view, and then gradually sink the reader lower down into the subjective third person.
So really, that's what the author is doing in this passage. Except her omniscient isn't exactly objective, is it? We get the sense of an actual narrator, a perspective being provided by someone outside the events of the book. This is sometimes called the intrusive author, but I've never liked that term because it implies that the author is doing something bad. Instead, let's call it subjective omniscient. The external narrator has a point of view.
One of the interesting things about the omniscient point of view is that it lends itself a little more readily to touches of formality. All the colons and semicolons don't jar in this passage, and I'm usually very sensitive to their presence. But because this passage reads in an almost academic manner, the more formal punctuation is less disruptive.
And yet the tone of the piece is anything but formal. Notice the way she incorporates an almost dialogue-like feeling in some of the prose. There are fragments, casual interjections like "oh, sure," rhetorical questions (who is asking what of whom, exactly?), and bits of slang to modernize this mini-treatise on New York apartments.
What else do you notice about this passage? Take a closer look at the way she chooses and organizes her words, and tell me in the comments what you see. And what effect it creates on the overall passage. This is highly controlled writing, and it's well worth a bit of your time to analyze it, even if this particular type of book isn't your first choice for reading pleasure.
Theresa
Monday, February 16, 2009
Narrative Summary
And so, the door at Walker and Daughter was open a little bit late and eventually a little bit later than that. Soon enough, at the end of the long workweek, a few regular customers took to popping in with their knitting -- sweaters and scarves and cell-phone socks -- and asking questions about all the mistakes they'd made while commuting on the subway.
"I just can't get the buttonhole right!"
"Why do I keep dropping stitches?"
"Do you think I can finish it by Christmas?"
Without ever putting up one sign or announcing the creation of a knitting club, these women began regularly appearing in the evenings and, well, loitering. Chatting with one another, talking to Anita, gathering around the large round table in the center of the room, picking up where they had left things the week before. And then, one Friday last fall, it became official. Well, sort of.
~~ The Friday Night Knitting Club by Kate Jacobs
If you've ever wondered what good narrative summary looks like, that's it right there, baby. Narrative summary (sometimes also called narrative compression, condensed narrative, summation, transition, etc., etc.) is a variety of exposition that takes events occurring within the story's real time and condenses them into a tight, focused summary.
The events are not narrated in real time. There is no scene in the sense of a singular event presented moment by moment in the order of occurrence. There are characters, but who are they? There is dialogue, but who speaks it? There is a point of view, but no viewpoint character allowing us to experience the events through her perspective.
Instead, a mash of Fridays after work are presented as a circumstance -- not an event -- giving rise to a conclusion. After many (indistinguishable, lumped-together) Fridays at the knitting shop, a club of knitters was created. Not scene and sequel, but situation and result.
A friend gave me this book to read because she was taken by the unusual narrative style and wanted me to see it. (Hi, A! *waves*) I can see why she had the reaction she did. Almost the entire book is presented in some form of exposition, and we just don't see that much these days. Beautifully written, engaging, entertaining exposition. Just when you thought it was buried forever next to the dinosaurs, here it comes back, full of life and breathing fire.
Even though we've been clinging to deep, intimate points of view for a while -- and by "we," I mean readers and authors and industry folk alike -- there have been signs that objectivity was making a comeback. If you've been listening, you've heard those signs right along with me. A reviewer complaining about being bored with first person stories. Two friends at the bookstore, picking up and dropping title after title before agreeing that they all "sound" the same. A book lover raving about a romance, and then adding almost wistfully, "But I kind of wish we'd known more about the parson's wife," or some other character who played a pivotal non-pov role.
Prose has been cozy and intimate for so long that objectivity feels like something totally new. Remember Sherry Thomas's first book, Private Arrangements? Remember how it started with that almost Victorian passage about the definition of a good marriage? Talk about deft writing. That book came out just shortly after Friday Night Knitting Club. And I'm sure if you think about it, you'll quickly identify other stories, or other places in stories, where the viewpoint character isn't immediately identifiable. Or maybe there was a viewpoint from outside the story, as in Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, or The Crimson Petal and the White, two stories on the more literary end of the spectrum that created narrative distance not through pure objectivity, but through the eyes of a disinterested external narrator.
I'm only on page 80 or so of Friday Night Knitting Club, so it's far too soon to draw any conclusions about the text as a whole. But the text up until this point has been heavy on narrative summary, light on intimacy. There are bits which are firmly rooted in the pov of this or that character, and given the popularity of this book, it seems as though readers are having no trouble connecting to the characters. I am certainly engaged by the text.
Does that seem like an oxymoron? Have we spent so many years flogging the deep pov/show don't tell horse that we've forgotten about other methods to become transported into the narrative?
Don't get me wrong. A solidly crafted limited-subjective third person pov is always going to be an important tool in the writer's kit. It might even be in the top five. But narrative trends come and go, and if the trend is moving toward broader perspectives, then expository writing might just find itself becoming a more important tool.
Theresa
"I just can't get the buttonhole right!"
"Why do I keep dropping stitches?"
"Do you think I can finish it by Christmas?"
Without ever putting up one sign or announcing the creation of a knitting club, these women began regularly appearing in the evenings and, well, loitering. Chatting with one another, talking to Anita, gathering around the large round table in the center of the room, picking up where they had left things the week before. And then, one Friday last fall, it became official. Well, sort of.
~~ The Friday Night Knitting Club by Kate Jacobs
If you've ever wondered what good narrative summary looks like, that's it right there, baby. Narrative summary (sometimes also called narrative compression, condensed narrative, summation, transition, etc., etc.) is a variety of exposition that takes events occurring within the story's real time and condenses them into a tight, focused summary.
The events are not narrated in real time. There is no scene in the sense of a singular event presented moment by moment in the order of occurrence. There are characters, but who are they? There is dialogue, but who speaks it? There is a point of view, but no viewpoint character allowing us to experience the events through her perspective.
Instead, a mash of Fridays after work are presented as a circumstance -- not an event -- giving rise to a conclusion. After many (indistinguishable, lumped-together) Fridays at the knitting shop, a club of knitters was created. Not scene and sequel, but situation and result.
A friend gave me this book to read because she was taken by the unusual narrative style and wanted me to see it. (Hi, A! *waves*) I can see why she had the reaction she did. Almost the entire book is presented in some form of exposition, and we just don't see that much these days. Beautifully written, engaging, entertaining exposition. Just when you thought it was buried forever next to the dinosaurs, here it comes back, full of life and breathing fire.
Even though we've been clinging to deep, intimate points of view for a while -- and by "we," I mean readers and authors and industry folk alike -- there have been signs that objectivity was making a comeback. If you've been listening, you've heard those signs right along with me. A reviewer complaining about being bored with first person stories. Two friends at the bookstore, picking up and dropping title after title before agreeing that they all "sound" the same. A book lover raving about a romance, and then adding almost wistfully, "But I kind of wish we'd known more about the parson's wife," or some other character who played a pivotal non-pov role.
Prose has been cozy and intimate for so long that objectivity feels like something totally new. Remember Sherry Thomas's first book, Private Arrangements? Remember how it started with that almost Victorian passage about the definition of a good marriage? Talk about deft writing. That book came out just shortly after Friday Night Knitting Club. And I'm sure if you think about it, you'll quickly identify other stories, or other places in stories, where the viewpoint character isn't immediately identifiable. Or maybe there was a viewpoint from outside the story, as in Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, or The Crimson Petal and the White, two stories on the more literary end of the spectrum that created narrative distance not through pure objectivity, but through the eyes of a disinterested external narrator.
I'm only on page 80 or so of Friday Night Knitting Club, so it's far too soon to draw any conclusions about the text as a whole. But the text up until this point has been heavy on narrative summary, light on intimacy. There are bits which are firmly rooted in the pov of this or that character, and given the popularity of this book, it seems as though readers are having no trouble connecting to the characters. I am certainly engaged by the text.
Does that seem like an oxymoron? Have we spent so many years flogging the deep pov/show don't tell horse that we've forgotten about other methods to become transported into the narrative?
Don't get me wrong. A solidly crafted limited-subjective third person pov is always going to be an important tool in the writer's kit. It might even be in the top five. But narrative trends come and go, and if the trend is moving toward broader perspectives, then expository writing might just find itself becoming a more important tool.
Theresa
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Waves Crashing on the Beach
I've received quite a lot of emails, etc., asking me to identify the awful book. Not gonna do it.
I've also received a lot of guesses about its title. None of them have been right.
In case you have a book in mind and are wondering if it was the one I ranted over, here's a handy little test.
Question 1:
Did it have waves crashing on the beach during a moment of sexual liberation? Actual waves. Actual beach.
That's it. That's your test.
And now the oldtimey romance writers will join me in being appalled. We're the ones who remember when "waves crashing on a beach" was a shorthand insult of the romance genre. Back in those days, romance writers were chided for writing about sexual relationships in a coyly disguised manner. We were teased for using euphemisms -- waves crashing on a beach -- to describe sexual feelings. When book reviewers wanted to get their snark on, they would talk about the waves and the beach as a way of implying that the writing quality was poor and the writing was unobservant and cliched.
My, how things have changed. Now it's the ones who talk about sex with any frankness who are chided and even scorned.
So we have this book that's flatly literary, dressed up like commercial fiction, and borrowing a metaphor used to scorn genre.
And that wasn't even the worst of it. That was just the part that made me feel safe in ranting about it.
I've also received a lot of guesses about its title. None of them have been right.
In case you have a book in mind and are wondering if it was the one I ranted over, here's a handy little test.
Question 1:
Did it have waves crashing on the beach during a moment of sexual liberation? Actual waves. Actual beach.
That's it. That's your test.
And now the oldtimey romance writers will join me in being appalled. We're the ones who remember when "waves crashing on a beach" was a shorthand insult of the romance genre. Back in those days, romance writers were chided for writing about sexual relationships in a coyly disguised manner. We were teased for using euphemisms -- waves crashing on a beach -- to describe sexual feelings. When book reviewers wanted to get their snark on, they would talk about the waves and the beach as a way of implying that the writing quality was poor and the writing was unobservant and cliched.
My, how things have changed. Now it's the ones who talk about sex with any frankness who are chided and even scorned.
So we have this book that's flatly literary, dressed up like commercial fiction, and borrowing a metaphor used to scorn genre.
And that wasn't even the worst of it. That was just the part that made me feel safe in ranting about it.
Monday, February 9, 2009
What Not To Do
I just finished reading a book that will probably go straight from my nightstand to the trash can.
This was the second book from an author whose first book achieved some critical praise and better-than-expected sales. I didn't read it, but I heard good things about it. The second book was given a beautiful cover. The jacket copy made it sound like just the sort of thing I enjoy. I read the first page and liked what I saw, so bought the book.
Usually that's the trifecta of indicators that I'll like a book: good cover, good copy, good first page.
Unaware of what lay before me, I started reading. The first 100 pages were so confusing that I almost put the book down then. Characters were introduced all in one clump -- and by "characters," I mean, "enough bodies to fill a cathedral." These scenes of introduction consisted almost entirely of dialogue tagged with a character name. And by "dialogue," I mean, "cocktail party chitchat about their children, celebrity gossip, and other trivia that damned well better not be the basis for a plot."
Alas.
One hundred pages in, I had more or less figured out who were the main characters -- more or less. I was wrong about one of the characters who started strong but dropped out of the book without so much as a whisper. And I thought I had figured out what the plot would be. All of the scenes to this point revolved around an impending event. People discussed it (at least sometimes), and prepared for it in various ways, or at least thought about it in passing while they were doing other things. The event was in the near future and there was a feeling, albeit subdued, that something important might take place at that event. It was the only unifying factor that tied all these chitchatting bodies together. My thought was that the first 100 pages was an elaborate set-up, and that the plot would take hold at the event.
It didn't.
In fact, that's where it all fell apart.
The event came and went with remarkably little worth mentioning, but that didn't prevent the author from spending 30 pages on it. The next 400 pages of the book took place over an eleven-year span. That amounts to roughly 36 pages per year. I know. I did the math. It was one of the little tricks I used to try to keep out of a coma during the long middle of the book.
For about 300 pages, we moved from one character to the next, skipping entire years in this or that character's life, dropping in on another character for a cup of coffee and a light gossip. This one's mother is ill. Oh, dear. (Does the illness have any effect on anything? No. The next we hear of it is years later, when someone reminisces about mom's fever.) Another one visits her uncle and he's in a bad mood. Poor old man. (Does his bad mood have any repercussions? No. His relationships are unchanged.) One of the male characters takes an interest in sports, and so we sit in the bleachers with him for a scene. Go, team.
And so on.
Don't get me wrong. There are actual scenes here. People do things. They go places. They talk to one another, and sometimes they want things.
But it's all disconnected. We spend one afternoon with one character in July, then skip forward to another character in October, then to a third character in December, and nothing leads us from one scene to the next. They're just sort of there. I'd describe it as a bunch of short stories under one book cover, but that might give you a sense of coherence that simply doesn't exist.
So after perhaps 450 pages and nearly 11 full years in book time following no fewer than 6 major characters, a rumor is started about one of the characters. She denies it. People don't believe her. About 50 pages from the end, she admits that it's true. People shrug and go back to pruning the roses. The End. (Whaddya mean, what about the other major characters and their verging-on-subplot story lines? Who cares! We're out of pages! The book is over!)
This book inspires me to make a top ten list of what not to do in novels:
1. Don't give us the entire cast in a single page, especially when the cast numbers in the dozens.
2. When you introduce a character, give us something to remember him by. Hint: The character's opinion of white bread probably won't do it unless you plan to have him eat a lot of sandwiches.
3. Oh, yeah. This is important. Don't forget to have a plot.
4. Don't create major point-of-view characters in the first 50 pages, and then forget they exist.
5. Don't expect subplots to substitute for plot.
6. Don't let time gaps drain any sense of urgency from the events.
7. Don't let major characters feel complacent. If they don't care, why should we?
8. Don't tack on a false crisis as a way to end the book. Hint: If you don't know how to stop writing, but could easily go on for a few more pointless decades, you might not have a handle on your story.
9. Unless you want your readers to be very bored, don't pick a theme like, "Nothing changes, and so what if it did."
10. Don't create a whole whack of story threads that lead nowhere and accomplish nothing and are never resolved.
Theresa,
who believes she may have accidentally read a hifalutin post-post-modern nihilistic literary novel dressed up like genre fiction.
This was the second book from an author whose first book achieved some critical praise and better-than-expected sales. I didn't read it, but I heard good things about it. The second book was given a beautiful cover. The jacket copy made it sound like just the sort of thing I enjoy. I read the first page and liked what I saw, so bought the book.
Usually that's the trifecta of indicators that I'll like a book: good cover, good copy, good first page.
Unaware of what lay before me, I started reading. The first 100 pages were so confusing that I almost put the book down then. Characters were introduced all in one clump -- and by "characters," I mean, "enough bodies to fill a cathedral." These scenes of introduction consisted almost entirely of dialogue tagged with a character name. And by "dialogue," I mean, "cocktail party chitchat about their children, celebrity gossip, and other trivia that damned well better not be the basis for a plot."
Alas.
One hundred pages in, I had more or less figured out who were the main characters -- more or less. I was wrong about one of the characters who started strong but dropped out of the book without so much as a whisper. And I thought I had figured out what the plot would be. All of the scenes to this point revolved around an impending event. People discussed it (at least sometimes), and prepared for it in various ways, or at least thought about it in passing while they were doing other things. The event was in the near future and there was a feeling, albeit subdued, that something important might take place at that event. It was the only unifying factor that tied all these chitchatting bodies together. My thought was that the first 100 pages was an elaborate set-up, and that the plot would take hold at the event.
It didn't.
In fact, that's where it all fell apart.
The event came and went with remarkably little worth mentioning, but that didn't prevent the author from spending 30 pages on it. The next 400 pages of the book took place over an eleven-year span. That amounts to roughly 36 pages per year. I know. I did the math. It was one of the little tricks I used to try to keep out of a coma during the long middle of the book.
For about 300 pages, we moved from one character to the next, skipping entire years in this or that character's life, dropping in on another character for a cup of coffee and a light gossip. This one's mother is ill. Oh, dear. (Does the illness have any effect on anything? No. The next we hear of it is years later, when someone reminisces about mom's fever.) Another one visits her uncle and he's in a bad mood. Poor old man. (Does his bad mood have any repercussions? No. His relationships are unchanged.) One of the male characters takes an interest in sports, and so we sit in the bleachers with him for a scene. Go, team.
And so on.
Don't get me wrong. There are actual scenes here. People do things. They go places. They talk to one another, and sometimes they want things.
But it's all disconnected. We spend one afternoon with one character in July, then skip forward to another character in October, then to a third character in December, and nothing leads us from one scene to the next. They're just sort of there. I'd describe it as a bunch of short stories under one book cover, but that might give you a sense of coherence that simply doesn't exist.
So after perhaps 450 pages and nearly 11 full years in book time following no fewer than 6 major characters, a rumor is started about one of the characters. She denies it. People don't believe her. About 50 pages from the end, she admits that it's true. People shrug and go back to pruning the roses. The End. (Whaddya mean, what about the other major characters and their verging-on-subplot story lines? Who cares! We're out of pages! The book is over!)
This book inspires me to make a top ten list of what not to do in novels:
1. Don't give us the entire cast in a single page, especially when the cast numbers in the dozens.
2. When you introduce a character, give us something to remember him by. Hint: The character's opinion of white bread probably won't do it unless you plan to have him eat a lot of sandwiches.
3. Oh, yeah. This is important. Don't forget to have a plot.
4. Don't create major point-of-view characters in the first 50 pages, and then forget they exist.
5. Don't expect subplots to substitute for plot.
6. Don't let time gaps drain any sense of urgency from the events.
7. Don't let major characters feel complacent. If they don't care, why should we?
8. Don't tack on a false crisis as a way to end the book. Hint: If you don't know how to stop writing, but could easily go on for a few more pointless decades, you might not have a handle on your story.
9. Unless you want your readers to be very bored, don't pick a theme like, "Nothing changes, and so what if it did."
10. Don't create a whole whack of story threads that lead nowhere and accomplish nothing and are never resolved.
Theresa,
who believes she may have accidentally read a hifalutin post-post-modern nihilistic literary novel dressed up like genre fiction.
Monday, January 19, 2009
Deep POV sample books for Wes-- Help?
Wes asked for some examples of books narrated in deep POV.
I used to know a bunch, when I was writing the POV book. First thing I'd say is-- there are not nearly as many books "in" deep POV as authors who say they write in deep POV. :) And there are many more books that actually use deep POV along with a more distant POV too. Let me see if I can think of some.
Well, Ulysses (by James Joyce) is VERY deep POV, stream of consciousness, at least the Leopold Bloom and Molly Bloom passages. (The Stephen Dedalus passages are more distant.)
Sole Survivor, by Dean R. Koontz. This is almost unbearable, at least the first couple chapters, because it's a third-person narration of a man in terrible grief. If you can bear the vicarious pain, it's a great example of deep POV.
Mr. Murder, also by Dean R. Koontz. You know, really, when Koontz is on, he's the best at this. His deep POV narrators range from a child to a serial (insane) murderer, and then narrative styles reveal a lot about the characters.
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. This is almost stream-of-consciousness.
Horse Heaven by Jane Smiley. This has some really interesting deep POV passages from --get this-- the horse's POV.
Flowers from the Storm, by Laura Kinsale. Again, the deep POV is in certain passages, not the whole book, but she really explores the inner reality of the hero, who is aphasic after a stroke.
Just a start-- can you all give Wes some more suggestions for novels that make good use of deep POV?
Alicia
I used to know a bunch, when I was writing the POV book. First thing I'd say is-- there are not nearly as many books "in" deep POV as authors who say they write in deep POV. :) And there are many more books that actually use deep POV along with a more distant POV too. Let me see if I can think of some.
Well, Ulysses (by James Joyce) is VERY deep POV, stream of consciousness, at least the Leopold Bloom and Molly Bloom passages. (The Stephen Dedalus passages are more distant.)
Sole Survivor, by Dean R. Koontz. This is almost unbearable, at least the first couple chapters, because it's a third-person narration of a man in terrible grief. If you can bear the vicarious pain, it's a great example of deep POV.
Mr. Murder, also by Dean R. Koontz. You know, really, when Koontz is on, he's the best at this. His deep POV narrators range from a child to a serial (insane) murderer, and then narrative styles reveal a lot about the characters.
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. This is almost stream-of-consciousness.
Horse Heaven by Jane Smiley. This has some really interesting deep POV passages from --get this-- the horse's POV.
Flowers from the Storm, by Laura Kinsale. Again, the deep POV is in certain passages, not the whole book, but she really explores the inner reality of the hero, who is aphasic after a stroke.
Just a start-- can you all give Wes some more suggestions for novels that make good use of deep POV?
Alicia
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Breaking Rules
At some point earlier this year, Alicia and I talked a little bit about lists and series. We talked about different methods for organizing information in lists. We talked about how people remember list items. We talked about rhythm and parallel structure and ending on strong notes. (Did we talk about shortest-to-longest? I can't remember.) Useful editing tricks.
But, as with all rules, there is a point where art transcends form and the rule no longer matters. This point has been brought home to me recently in a book I'm reading which both follows and ignores ignores all of the organizational principles for items in lists.
-----
The things they carried were largely determined by a necessity. Among the necessities or near-necessities were P-38 can openers, pocket knives, heat tabs, wristwatches, dog tags, mosquito repellent, chewing gum, candy, cigarettes, salt tablets, packets of Kool-Aid, lighters, matches, sewing kits, Military Payment Certificates, C rations, and the two or three canteens of water. Together, these items weighed between 15 and 20 pounds, depending upon a man's habits or rate of metabolism. Henry Dobbins, who was a big man, carried extra rations; he was especially fond of canned peaches in heavy syrup over pound cake. Dave Jensen, who practiced field hygiene, carried a toothbrush, dental floss, and several hotel-sized bars of soap he'd stolen on R&R in Sydney, Australia. Ted Lavender, who was scared, carried tranquilizers until he was shot in the head outside the village of Than Khe in mid-April. By necessity, and because it was SOP, they all carried steel helmets that weighed 5 pounds including the liner and camouflage cover. They carried the standard fatigue jackets and trousers. Very few carried underwear. On their feet they carried jungle boots -- 2.1 pounds -- and Dave Jensen carried three pairs of socks and a can of Dr. Scholl's foot powder as a precaution against trench foot. Until he was shot, Ted Lavender carried six or seven ounces of premium dope, which for him was a necessity. Mitchell Sanders, the RTO, carried condoms. Norman Bowker carried a diary. Rat Kiley carried comic books. Kiowa, a devout Baptist, carried an illustrated New Testament that had been presented to him by his father, who taught Sunday school in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. As a hedge against bad times, however, Kiowa also carried his grandmother's distrust of the white man, his grandfather's old hunting hatchet. Necessity dictated. Because the land was mined and booby-trapped, it was SOP for each man to carry a steel-centered, nylon-covered flak jacket, which weighed 6.7 pounds, but which on hot days seemed much heavier. Because you could die so quickly, each man carried at least one large compress bandage, usually in the helmet band for easy access. Because the nights were cold, and because the monsoons were wet, each carried a green plastic poncho that could be used as a raincoat or ground sheet or makeshift tent. With its quilted liner, the poncho weighed almost two pounds, but it was worth every ounce. In April, for instance, when Ted Lavender was shot, they used his poncho to wrap him up, then to carry him across the paddy, then to lift him into the chopper that took him away.
From The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien.
-----
Is there an organizing principle to this list? Not really. There are lots and lots of beautiful things he does in the prose, but we can't say that this list is organized according to any sterile central rule. It has tremendous emotional impact, though, and that's really what I'm talking about when I say that sometimes art transcends form. Art speaks to our emotions. Form is the container that holds the art. Sometimes the emotions are too big for the container or don't fit comfortably in a standard container. In those cases, function should trump form, as it does here.
But, of course, there's always a danger in breaking away from established forms. It's a risk. The best way to minimize that risk is to really understand the rules and the underlying principles that create them. And then, with that understanding to guide you, look at successful instances where others have broken the rules and examine how they've made it work.
So let's talk about the paragraph from the Tim O'Brien piece. (This is an exceptionally good book, by the way. Well worth reading even if it's not one of your usual genres. I'm not a big fan of 20th-century war books, but my sister-in-law recommended this one, and I'm so glad she did.)
Tell me what you see him doing, and why you think it works. Yes, I'm going to make you think about this. Pay attention, and think it through. Notice things like word choice, repetition, and the points where emotion is introduced or eliminated. Tell me in the comments what kind of impact those things have on you as a reader.
By the way, in case you were wondering about my recent absence, I wasn't wandering England with Alicia. I wish I had been. My family owns a small construction company and we're in the process of moving to a new location. I'm not deeply involved in this business, but I am deeply involved in the move. And it's no fun at all. But we'll get through it. We're in the home stretch now.
Theresa
ps. Today is the birthday of P.G. Wodehouse, which makes me want to lay in bed, drink tea, and be silly all day.
But, as with all rules, there is a point where art transcends form and the rule no longer matters. This point has been brought home to me recently in a book I'm reading which both follows and ignores ignores all of the organizational principles for items in lists.
-----
The things they carried were largely determined by a necessity. Among the necessities or near-necessities were P-38 can openers, pocket knives, heat tabs, wristwatches, dog tags, mosquito repellent, chewing gum, candy, cigarettes, salt tablets, packets of Kool-Aid, lighters, matches, sewing kits, Military Payment Certificates, C rations, and the two or three canteens of water. Together, these items weighed between 15 and 20 pounds, depending upon a man's habits or rate of metabolism. Henry Dobbins, who was a big man, carried extra rations; he was especially fond of canned peaches in heavy syrup over pound cake. Dave Jensen, who practiced field hygiene, carried a toothbrush, dental floss, and several hotel-sized bars of soap he'd stolen on R&R in Sydney, Australia. Ted Lavender, who was scared, carried tranquilizers until he was shot in the head outside the village of Than Khe in mid-April. By necessity, and because it was SOP, they all carried steel helmets that weighed 5 pounds including the liner and camouflage cover. They carried the standard fatigue jackets and trousers. Very few carried underwear. On their feet they carried jungle boots -- 2.1 pounds -- and Dave Jensen carried three pairs of socks and a can of Dr. Scholl's foot powder as a precaution against trench foot. Until he was shot, Ted Lavender carried six or seven ounces of premium dope, which for him was a necessity. Mitchell Sanders, the RTO, carried condoms. Norman Bowker carried a diary. Rat Kiley carried comic books. Kiowa, a devout Baptist, carried an illustrated New Testament that had been presented to him by his father, who taught Sunday school in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. As a hedge against bad times, however, Kiowa also carried his grandmother's distrust of the white man, his grandfather's old hunting hatchet. Necessity dictated. Because the land was mined and booby-trapped, it was SOP for each man to carry a steel-centered, nylon-covered flak jacket, which weighed 6.7 pounds, but which on hot days seemed much heavier. Because you could die so quickly, each man carried at least one large compress bandage, usually in the helmet band for easy access. Because the nights were cold, and because the monsoons were wet, each carried a green plastic poncho that could be used as a raincoat or ground sheet or makeshift tent. With its quilted liner, the poncho weighed almost two pounds, but it was worth every ounce. In April, for instance, when Ted Lavender was shot, they used his poncho to wrap him up, then to carry him across the paddy, then to lift him into the chopper that took him away.
From The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien.
-----
Is there an organizing principle to this list? Not really. There are lots and lots of beautiful things he does in the prose, but we can't say that this list is organized according to any sterile central rule. It has tremendous emotional impact, though, and that's really what I'm talking about when I say that sometimes art transcends form. Art speaks to our emotions. Form is the container that holds the art. Sometimes the emotions are too big for the container or don't fit comfortably in a standard container. In those cases, function should trump form, as it does here.
But, of course, there's always a danger in breaking away from established forms. It's a risk. The best way to minimize that risk is to really understand the rules and the underlying principles that create them. And then, with that understanding to guide you, look at successful instances where others have broken the rules and examine how they've made it work.
So let's talk about the paragraph from the Tim O'Brien piece. (This is an exceptionally good book, by the way. Well worth reading even if it's not one of your usual genres. I'm not a big fan of 20th-century war books, but my sister-in-law recommended this one, and I'm so glad she did.)
Tell me what you see him doing, and why you think it works. Yes, I'm going to make you think about this. Pay attention, and think it through. Notice things like word choice, repetition, and the points where emotion is introduced or eliminated. Tell me in the comments what kind of impact those things have on you as a reader.
By the way, in case you were wondering about my recent absence, I wasn't wandering England with Alicia. I wish I had been. My family owns a small construction company and we're in the process of moving to a new location. I'm not deeply involved in this business, but I am deeply involved in the move. And it's no fun at all. But we'll get through it. We're in the home stretch now.
Theresa
ps. Today is the birthday of P.G. Wodehouse, which makes me want to lay in bed, drink tea, and be silly all day.
Thursday, September 18, 2008
The pause that refreshes...
To quote the Boss, I ain't nothing but tired... travelling constantly this month. And next, come to think of it. Anyway, I'm going to try to post more, but short. :)
I've been thinking a lot about "deep POV," and first let me say that this is not the only or even the best approach to viewpoint. It's more useful in character-focused stories, and, as I say in my POV book, when you want to present the character's inner perception of reality as primary (rather than, say, real reality :).
But let's say that's what you want to do-- acknowledge the primacy in your narrative of the character's perception of reality. Good! I love that. However, I think then writers should focus on what that means, and not assume that it's a matter of names and pronouns ("Never use the character's own name in deep POV" is a "rule" I just heard) or whether words like "thought" and "felt" are verboten, or whether internalization should be in Roman or italic font (why, btw, isn't "italic" capped, if "Roman" is?), or whether thought should be in past or present tense....
I'm not saying all those questions won't come into play, but rather that if you -before- you start to write a scene, park yourself squarely in this person and dedicate yourself to portraying the actual inner experience of being that person, most of those issues will be answered as you write. That is, those are just the manifestations of being in deep POV--- not actually deep POV.
The point is to give the reader that inner experience, and what gives the reader that experience is what you should do. And that might actually meaning doing a bit more narrating to create that for the reader. That is, authenticity-- truly replicating the inner experience-- is not as good as verisimilitude-- creating an experienceable version of the inner experience.
What's the difference? Well, let me turn to my latest, sigh, intellectual project. Many years ago, at the University of Chicago, I took The Modern Novel from the great Joyce scholar Richard Ellman. Of course, Ulysses was the center of the course, and to my unending shame, uh, I read all the dirty parts, and maybe some of the rest, and.... Well, really, one of the most important lessons to learn in college is what to focus on, and there were FIFTEEN modernist (aka, very long) novels to read in a 10-week quarter (please compare to a typical class today, where the poor overworked students had to read FIVE books in 15 weeks). And I knew I was going to write the paper on a Faulkner trope (love Faulkner), and so why....
Well, so here it is, decades later, and I've read only about 70% of the most important novel of yada yada. So anyway, the dh and I decided to embark on a joint re-read of Ulysses recently. He got farther than I did. But I did pay close attention to the "stream of consciousness" sections (mostly in the Leo Bloom passages). Now these were a brave, innovative experiment, trying to truly replicate the workings of a mind:
Singing with his eyes shut. Corney. Met her once in the park. In the dark. What a lark. Police tout. Her name and address she then told with my tooraloom tooraloom tay. O, surely he bagged it. Bury him cheap in a whatyoumaycall. With my tooraloom, tooraloom, tooraloom, tooraloom.
Just like a real mind-- skipping from subject to subject, preoccupied with one (Corney is his wife's lover, or so he thinks), searching for and failing to find words, following a diverting melody....
That extremely deep viewpoint manifestation is infinitely study-able, and has provided fodder for hundreds of doctoral dissertations. However, I found the Bloom passages much less readable (and experience-able) than the more controlled, more "shaped" Stephen Dedalus passages, as here, where he thinks of his mother's death (set up as the topic a paragraph before-- that is, the reader doesn't have to guess):
Stephen, an elbow rested on the jagged granite, leaned his palm against his brow and gazed at the fraying edge of his shiny black coat-sleeve. Pain, that was not yet the pain of love, fretted his heart. Silently, in a dream she had come to him after her death, her wasted body within its loose brown grave-clothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath, that had bent upon him, mute, reproachful, a faint odour of wetted ashes. Across the threadbare cuffedge he saw the sea hailed as a great sweet mother by the well-fed voice beside him. The ring of bay and skyline held a dull green mass of liquid. A bowl of white china had stood beside her deathbed holding the green sluggish bile which she had torn up from her rotting liver by fits of loud groaning vomiting.
(Notice that Stephen's thoughts come expressed in perfectly grammatical sentences... he's my kinda guy. :)
The Bloom passage is stream-of-consciousness; the Dedalus passage is deep POV. I have my own preference, obviously. But I would like just to point out that there is a distinction between "replicating" the experience of being inside a mind, and "creating" that experience. Verisimilitude, paradoxically, can be more approachable, more acceptable, than an authenticity-- often we must turn away from what can feel too claustrophobic, disturbing, or confusing. So a slightly less "in your face" approach might actually let the reader overcome that instinctive resistance and then participate in the experience more fully.
We are, after all, already participating in artifice, because language is a construct produced by the collective mind-- but not the same as thought. So even stream-of-consciousness, as it uses words, is less than truly authentic. Similarly, the use of narrative conventions, along with language, can enhance the experience. Notice how Joyce actually sets up the action of a paragraph and then descends into stream-of-consciousness-- that is, the narrative convention of set up isn't just dismissed, but used to ease the reader in, to let the reader feel the setting and context:
Mr Bloom gazed across the road at the outsider drawn up before the door of the Grosvenor. The porter hoisted the valise up on the well. She stood still, waiting, while the man, husband, brother, like her, searched his pockets for change. Stylish kind of coat with that roll collar, warm for a day like this, looks like blanketcloth. Careless stand of her with her hands in those patch pockets. Like that haughty creature at the polo match. Women all for caste till you touch the spot. Handsome is and handsome does. Reserved about to yield. The honourable Mrs and Brutus is an honourable man. Possess her once take the starch out of her.
So don't start with the "rules"-- start inside, and all the "rules" fall away. Don't confuse the phenomena with the neumena-- the external with the essence. Create this experience, and then see if you need to fix anything, and the "rules" might be helpful there. (For example, frequent use of the character name can distract from the reader "inner experience," but use of he/she probably doesn't.)
Just an example based on something I read the other day:
As she listened to his protests, her stomach lurched. She buttered her roll and then smiled at him.
Something happens there between the inside (stomach) and the external action (buttering). What is it? Why put those two together in the same sequence? Maybe what's needed is the teensiest bit of transition between internal feeling and external action... and that's called "intention". That is, she is forming the will to do the action, right? You probably don't have to explain why, but a transition that shows her deciding to act will give the reader more context for experiencing what she experiences. After all, she doesn't just perceive, and she doesn't just act. She also decides. So consider something like:
As she listened to his protests, her stomach lurched. She concentrated on buttering her roll, and when she was calmer, she smiled at him.
Okay, so that wasn't short at all. :)
Alicia
I've been thinking a lot about "deep POV," and first let me say that this is not the only or even the best approach to viewpoint. It's more useful in character-focused stories, and, as I say in my POV book, when you want to present the character's inner perception of reality as primary (rather than, say, real reality :).
But let's say that's what you want to do-- acknowledge the primacy in your narrative of the character's perception of reality. Good! I love that. However, I think then writers should focus on what that means, and not assume that it's a matter of names and pronouns ("Never use the character's own name in deep POV" is a "rule" I just heard) or whether words like "thought" and "felt" are verboten, or whether internalization should be in Roman or italic font (why, btw, isn't "italic" capped, if "Roman" is?), or whether thought should be in past or present tense....
I'm not saying all those questions won't come into play, but rather that if you -before- you start to write a scene, park yourself squarely in this person and dedicate yourself to portraying the actual inner experience of being that person, most of those issues will be answered as you write. That is, those are just the manifestations of being in deep POV--- not actually deep POV.
The point is to give the reader that inner experience, and what gives the reader that experience is what you should do. And that might actually meaning doing a bit more narrating to create that for the reader. That is, authenticity-- truly replicating the inner experience-- is not as good as verisimilitude-- creating an experienceable version of the inner experience.
What's the difference? Well, let me turn to my latest, sigh, intellectual project. Many years ago, at the University of Chicago, I took The Modern Novel from the great Joyce scholar Richard Ellman. Of course, Ulysses was the center of the course, and to my unending shame, uh, I read all the dirty parts, and maybe some of the rest, and.... Well, really, one of the most important lessons to learn in college is what to focus on, and there were FIFTEEN modernist (aka, very long) novels to read in a 10-week quarter (please compare to a typical class today, where the poor overworked students had to read FIVE books in 15 weeks). And I knew I was going to write the paper on a Faulkner trope (love Faulkner), and so why....
Well, so here it is, decades later, and I've read only about 70% of the most important novel of yada yada. So anyway, the dh and I decided to embark on a joint re-read of Ulysses recently. He got farther than I did. But I did pay close attention to the "stream of consciousness" sections (mostly in the Leo Bloom passages). Now these were a brave, innovative experiment, trying to truly replicate the workings of a mind:
Singing with his eyes shut. Corney. Met her once in the park. In the dark. What a lark. Police tout. Her name and address she then told with my tooraloom tooraloom tay. O, surely he bagged it. Bury him cheap in a whatyoumaycall. With my tooraloom, tooraloom, tooraloom, tooraloom.
Just like a real mind-- skipping from subject to subject, preoccupied with one (Corney is his wife's lover, or so he thinks), searching for and failing to find words, following a diverting melody....
That extremely deep viewpoint manifestation is infinitely study-able, and has provided fodder for hundreds of doctoral dissertations. However, I found the Bloom passages much less readable (and experience-able) than the more controlled, more "shaped" Stephen Dedalus passages, as here, where he thinks of his mother's death (set up as the topic a paragraph before-- that is, the reader doesn't have to guess):
Stephen, an elbow rested on the jagged granite, leaned his palm against his brow and gazed at the fraying edge of his shiny black coat-sleeve. Pain, that was not yet the pain of love, fretted his heart. Silently, in a dream she had come to him after her death, her wasted body within its loose brown grave-clothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath, that had bent upon him, mute, reproachful, a faint odour of wetted ashes. Across the threadbare cuffedge he saw the sea hailed as a great sweet mother by the well-fed voice beside him. The ring of bay and skyline held a dull green mass of liquid. A bowl of white china had stood beside her deathbed holding the green sluggish bile which she had torn up from her rotting liver by fits of loud groaning vomiting.
(Notice that Stephen's thoughts come expressed in perfectly grammatical sentences... he's my kinda guy. :)
The Bloom passage is stream-of-consciousness; the Dedalus passage is deep POV. I have my own preference, obviously. But I would like just to point out that there is a distinction between "replicating" the experience of being inside a mind, and "creating" that experience. Verisimilitude, paradoxically, can be more approachable, more acceptable, than an authenticity-- often we must turn away from what can feel too claustrophobic, disturbing, or confusing. So a slightly less "in your face" approach might actually let the reader overcome that instinctive resistance and then participate in the experience more fully.
We are, after all, already participating in artifice, because language is a construct produced by the collective mind-- but not the same as thought. So even stream-of-consciousness, as it uses words, is less than truly authentic. Similarly, the use of narrative conventions, along with language, can enhance the experience. Notice how Joyce actually sets up the action of a paragraph and then descends into stream-of-consciousness-- that is, the narrative convention of set up isn't just dismissed, but used to ease the reader in, to let the reader feel the setting and context:
Mr Bloom gazed across the road at the outsider drawn up before the door of the Grosvenor. The porter hoisted the valise up on the well. She stood still, waiting, while the man, husband, brother, like her, searched his pockets for change. Stylish kind of coat with that roll collar, warm for a day like this, looks like blanketcloth. Careless stand of her with her hands in those patch pockets. Like that haughty creature at the polo match. Women all for caste till you touch the spot. Handsome is and handsome does. Reserved about to yield. The honourable Mrs and Brutus is an honourable man. Possess her once take the starch out of her.
So don't start with the "rules"-- start inside, and all the "rules" fall away. Don't confuse the phenomena with the neumena-- the external with the essence. Create this experience, and then see if you need to fix anything, and the "rules" might be helpful there. (For example, frequent use of the character name can distract from the reader "inner experience," but use of he/she probably doesn't.)
Just an example based on something I read the other day:
As she listened to his protests, her stomach lurched. She buttered her roll and then smiled at him.
Something happens there between the inside (stomach) and the external action (buttering). What is it? Why put those two together in the same sequence? Maybe what's needed is the teensiest bit of transition between internal feeling and external action... and that's called "intention". That is, she is forming the will to do the action, right? You probably don't have to explain why, but a transition that shows her deciding to act will give the reader more context for experiencing what she experiences. After all, she doesn't just perceive, and she doesn't just act. She also decides. So consider something like:
As she listened to his protests, her stomach lurched. She concentrated on buttering her roll, and when she was calmer, she smiled at him.
Okay, so that wasn't short at all. :)
Alicia
Friday, August 29, 2008
More about books
From Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller: a list that all readers will understand—of books that call to you in a bookstore:
Eluding these assaults, you come up beneath the towers of the fortress, where other troops are holding out:
the Books You've Been Planning To Read For Ages,
the Books You've Been Hunting For Years Without Success,
the Books Dealing With Something You're Working On At The Moment,
the Books You Want To Own So They'll Be Handy Just In Case,
the Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer,
the Books You Need To Go With Other Books On Your Shelves,
the Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified,
Now you have been able to reduce the countless embattled troops to an array that is, to be sure, very large but still calculable in a finite number; but this relative relief is then undermined by the ambush of the Books Read Long Ago Which It's Now Time To Reread and the Books You've Always Pretended To Have Read And Now It's Time To Sit Down And Really Read Them.
Alicia
Eluding these assaults, you come up beneath the towers of the fortress, where other troops are holding out:
the Books You've Been Planning To Read For Ages,
the Books You've Been Hunting For Years Without Success,
the Books Dealing With Something You're Working On At The Moment,
the Books You Want To Own So They'll Be Handy Just In Case,
the Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer,
the Books You Need To Go With Other Books On Your Shelves,
the Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified,
Now you have been able to reduce the countless embattled troops to an array that is, to be sure, very large but still calculable in a finite number; but this relative relief is then undermined by the ambush of the Books Read Long Ago Which It's Now Time To Reread and the Books You've Always Pretended To Have Read And Now It's Time To Sit Down And Really Read Them.
Alicia
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Book meme
I think we need a way to distinguish "books I know I've read but have no memory of".
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel 2x
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World* for school
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune (started about 8 times)
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers
Well, as you can see, I'm much more likely to start a book and then drop it if I'm not into it (or if I find another book). There are other books I read for school (English major) but I enjoyed so I don't remember that I read those for school.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel 2x
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World* for school
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune (started about 8 times)
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers
Well, as you can see, I'm much more likely to start a book and then drop it if I'm not into it (or if I find another book). There are other books I read for school (English major) but I enjoyed so I don't remember that I read those for school.
Monday, August 18, 2008
An Interesting Meme, Just for Kicks
I don't usually go in for memes, but this one caught my eye.
Here are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school*, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel 2x
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers
I flatter myself that I'm well-read, but I just cleared half this list. Some of them, I will never read and I know I will never read -- In Cold Blood, for example, holds zero appeal for me, as does Freakonomics, though I'm sure they're both wonderful books. And, having suffered through The Brothers Karamazov, it's unlikely that I'll ever subject myself to another of Dostoevsky's novels.
Joyce's Ulysses holds the distinction of being one of the very few books I started without finishing -- Bridges of Madison County being one of the few others. Usually, if I stop reading a book, I come back and finish it later, as I'm doing now with Ha Jin's The Crazed. I know Bridges and Ulysses will never again be opened before my eyes, though. Not unless I'm forced to it at the point of a knife.
Some of my forever-favorite books are on this list. Anything Dumas, Mrs. Dalloway, Persuasion, Oryx & Crake, Vanity Fair, and -- OMG, should be required reading for everyone -- Eats, Shoots & Leaves.
Some of these books I admired but didn't enjoy, such as Confederacy of Dunces, which was a brilliantly written slog, and On the Road, which seems geared toward adolescent males. But I read them in their entirety and could appreciate them, even if not love them.
So what about all of you? Spot any favorites on this list? Books that are particularly meaningful to you? Books that you think deserve to go unread?
Theresa
*I didn't distinguish between books I read on my own and books I read for school. Alas, I was one of those dreadful students who ignored my reading list unless the books appealed to me.
Here are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school*, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel 2x
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers
I flatter myself that I'm well-read, but I just cleared half this list. Some of them, I will never read and I know I will never read -- In Cold Blood, for example, holds zero appeal for me, as does Freakonomics, though I'm sure they're both wonderful books. And, having suffered through The Brothers Karamazov, it's unlikely that I'll ever subject myself to another of Dostoevsky's novels.
Joyce's Ulysses holds the distinction of being one of the very few books I started without finishing -- Bridges of Madison County being one of the few others. Usually, if I stop reading a book, I come back and finish it later, as I'm doing now with Ha Jin's The Crazed. I know Bridges and Ulysses will never again be opened before my eyes, though. Not unless I'm forced to it at the point of a knife.
Some of my forever-favorite books are on this list. Anything Dumas, Mrs. Dalloway, Persuasion, Oryx & Crake, Vanity Fair, and -- OMG, should be required reading for everyone -- Eats, Shoots & Leaves.
Some of these books I admired but didn't enjoy, such as Confederacy of Dunces, which was a brilliantly written slog, and On the Road, which seems geared toward adolescent males. But I read them in their entirety and could appreciate them, even if not love them.
So what about all of you? Spot any favorites on this list? Books that are particularly meaningful to you? Books that you think deserve to go unread?
Theresa
*I didn't distinguish between books I read on my own and books I read for school. Alas, I was one of those dreadful students who ignored my reading list unless the books appealed to me.
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