TOMORROWVILLE

Leiningen Versus the Ants

2010-12-22T00:07:00.000-08:00

Did anyone else ever read that Carl Stephenson short story? I read it quite young (though long after it was published--it dates back to 1938). It made a deep impression on me, although I failed to remember the title, and only found it again years later by asking around.

For those who don't know the story, it's about a determined fellow in the Amazon (the real one, not the dot-com one) who is foolish enough not to flee when the Army Ants come.

We're not dealing with Army Ants here. We're dealing with Argentinian Ants. Smaller. Not as vicious. But relentless.

It's been raining bucketloads here in California. Yeah, yeah, already. England's buried under snowdrifts. Well, bring out the violins. The whole crippled-children-begging-in-the-snow gig is traditional, scenic, and literary. Swell. Here in SoCal, it's swampy, and the ants are coming into our houses by the bazillions.

Argentinian Ants are everywhere these days. Unlike most ants, where one colony fights against another, these tiny little weasels recognize their brothers. Imagine for a moment that the Israelis and Palestinians formed a united front. Oh, sure, it sounds like a good idea at first. But think about it. If they weren't harrying one another, who would they be harassing?

Answer: Somebody else.

Similarly, the Argentinian Ants. They've decided to embrace the brotherhood of Argentinian Antdom, and look where it's left us. They don't have warring "anthills." One colony merges into another, not unlike suburbia in the USA. And it isn't just here. There is supposedly a supercolony of these little bastards that now stretches from somewhere in Spain to somewhere in the Netherlands, which ought to be a bit of a worry to to Dutch, who spent considerable blood and gold throwing off Spanish overlordship a few centuries back.

When I was young, one of the banes of my childhood existence was "Red Ants." These locals were bright orange (red being a misnomer) with ferocious jaws and a mildly venomous bite.

You don't see Red Ants much anymore. Why? As it turns out, they've been overrun by the tiny little Argentinian Ants, who overwhelm them by sheer numbers.

And the common lizard of my childhood, the California Horned Lizard, or "Horny Toad" (not to be confused with the bar of the same name in Bangkok), is now severely endangered in California. At first they blamed urbanization, and that hasn't helped...but what did Horned Lizards eat?

Yep. Red Ants.

Meanwhile, the Argentinians continue their march. They don't fall for the standard poisons or ant traps. Even boric acid doesn't work. New Zealand has been invaded by the little creeps, and has done the best research on the topic, and none of the standard tricks work.

We're about to go on vacation. We're hoping that the house is still here when we return.

There has to be a cure. Bolos? Pampas Grass? Screenings of Evita? Sanctuaries for Nazi leaders?

Maybe if you British types would give back the Falklands, these ants would all move there.

Leiningen had it easy. Those were big fat stupid Army Ants. These are devious, relentless, tiny, innumerable ants.

What kind of a name is "Leiningen" anyway?

Suitable for Kindling

2010-12-09T14:25:00.001-08:00

I suppose I ought to note that Shock and Awe is now available on the Kindle. It can be picked up for $7.78 in the US, but costs a bit more (£5.45) in the UK.

But, then, doesn't everything?

Well, except healthcare.

A Caution to Female Readers

2010-12-06T14:34:00.000-08:00

A quote from O.S. Fowler's Sexual Science (1875):

Novel reading redoubles this nervous drain begun by excessive study. What is or can be as ruinous to the nerves as that silly girl, snivelling and laughing by turns over a 'love story'? Of course it awakens her Amativeness...It is doubtful whether fiction writers are public benefactors, or their publishers philanthropists. The amount of nervous excitement and consequent prostration, exhaustion, and disorder they cause is fearful. Girls already have ten times too much excitability for their strength. Yet every page of every novel redoubles both their nervousness and weakness...Love-stories, therefore, in common with all other forms of amatory exctiement, thrill. In this consists their chief fascination. Yet all amatory action with one's self induces sexual ailments. It should always be with the opposite sex only; yet novel reading girls exhaust their female magnetism without obtaining any compensating male magnetism, which of necessity deranges the entire sexual system. The whole world is challenged to invalidate either this premise or inference. Self-abuse is worse, because more animal; but those who really must have amatory excitement will find it 'better to marry,' and expend on real lovers those sexual feelings now worse than wasted on its 'solitary' form. Those perfectly happy in their affections never read novels.

I was unaware that girls have ten times too much excitability for their strength, but I am glad to have solidly based scientific data on that point. Alas, the author fails to reveal the amount of excitability boys have for their strength, but he seems to be suggesting that we have considerably less excitability relative to our strength. Assuming that girls have, say, four times as much excitabilility relative their strength, I guess that gives us boys an average excitability-to-strength ratio of 2.5 or so.

So, Girls, read if you like; but keep in mind the risks of exhausting your female magnetism without obtaining any compensating male magnetism...though I suspect the latter can be obtained by settling onto the couch with a case of beer and watching sports for a weekend or so. So if you must read a novel, set aside some beer-and-sports time to suck up some male magnetism.

The dangers of novel reading are made starkly clear by his statement that "every page of every novel redoubles both their nervousness and weakness." Redouble? Every page? Even in a Large-Print Edition?

My copy of Anna Karenina runs 961 pages. If in fact nervousness and weakness is increased by a factor of two (the meaning of redoubled) by every page, then by the end of that book, a Girl's nervousness and weakness would have been been increased by 2 to the 961st power, which is (rounding after five digits) an increase of 19,491,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000 times, which is a whole lot more nervous and weak.

If you are more sensible and avoid the Russians, selecting instead, say, Jane Eyre at 284 pages, a Girl will still end up 2 to the 284th power worse off--that is, 31,083,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times more nervous and weak. Still quite a bit, though.

It is good that the Creator in His wisdom made Girls weaker as they become more nervous. If a Girl could read a novel and become a million times more nervous but also a million times stronger, we would have a problem of horror-movie proportions on our hands.

As to his last assertion, I can easily believe that those perfectly happy in their affections never read novels, as I have never met anyone perfectly happy in anything. Perhaps I just run with the wrong crowd.

But I am sad he doubts I am a public benefactor.

Why Real Life Isn't a Good Guide to Good Fiction

2010-11-30T15:59:00.000-08:00

Actually, I don't have anything to say at the moment. But Rufi Cole's blog has a nice post on the whole problem of why we aren't allowed to make fiction as strange as life.

I am friends with both Rufi and her mother, writer Kimberly Cole. They live in a duplex in Corona del Mar, with Kimberly in the upstairs unit, and Rufi in the downstairs unit.

Uh-huh. Mother and daughter, living adjacent to one another. And both novelists. Yeah, sure, that's a believable setup.

A Link to Myself

2010-11-26T09:27:00.000-08:00

Those of you who don't normally visit the Macmillan New Writing blog may want to wander over there to read my entry in the Round Robin interview series, where I respond to questions posed by Doug Worgul.

Welcome the Lady's Slipper to America

2010-11-23T14:53:00.000-08:00

Deborah Swift's The Lady's Slipper has arrived on our shores in a big way. Here's the Huntington Beach Barnes and Noble superstore (shelving about 120,000 titles).

And here, up in Fiction and Literature, sitting next to Jonathan Swift (any relation?) is The Lady's Slipper--face out, what's more, and a half-dozen copies to boot.

All of the other B&N's seem to have it as well, so when you add in the Borders and a couple of indies, there are probably about 150 copies within 25 miles of my house. Keeping in mind that this is Southern California, more noted for surfing than reading, that's a strong showing indeed. (The real reading towns, like Portland, Seattle, and NYC, must be swimming in copies.)

Congrats, Ms. Swift. May you sell a million copies!

Historical Accuracy...and the Joys of Inaccuracy

2010-11-22T14:16:00.000-08:00

I'm not a writer of historical fiction. Indeed, I find the idea of writing historical fiction quite intimidating. To be honest, I find the idea of even writing about historical fiction intimidating.

So my hat is off to all of you who actually have the nerve to gird your loins, bite the bullet, bell the cat, or whatever cliche you prefer, and actually venture forward and write the stuff. The thought of writing it might intimidate me, but I love reading it.

And one of the joys of reading good historical fiction is when the writer manages to evoke the time-machine sense of reality, from the chronological details on down to locutions, smells, meals, and attitudes. One of the standard criticisms of a work of historical fiction are either that the timeline has collapsed or that an anachronism of some sort has crept in and both are hard to avoid.

In general, I apply the same standards to historical fiction as to fiction in general: I know it's a lie, but I demand that the lie seems to tell the truth. And often this truthfulness seems to involve stretching the facts a bit...even in historical fiction.

In an author's note preceding one of Patrick O'Brien's Aubrey-Maturin novels, he points out that each novel covers a fairly large span of time, and that since he had written more of the novels than he'd ever imagined at the outset, soon he would be forced to resort to hypothetical years, such as 1812a and 1812b; there simply wasn't enough Napoleonic War to encompass the story he had started to tell.

Well, I was willing to forgive that fiddling with chronology in favor of the story. I'm also willing to forgive Massie's Augustus for having the Romans speak in something like modern phraseology, even though I sometimes found it a bit jarring, and I'm far more than happy to have Alis Hawkins have her Medieval folks speak in something that I can comprehend rather than forcing me to work through it as though it were Chaucer. (Deciding how to represent the speech of another time and culture is a tricky issue. I've always been amused at the tendency of American WWII movies to have the Germans speak English with a rather tight-assed British accent--foreign enough to seem foreign, but still immediately comprehensible.)

At the other end of the language and diction spectrum from Alis and Massie is the problem John Fowles faced in The French Lieutenant's Woman. I read an interview with Fowles where he said he deliberately made the characters speak a somewhat older English than the Victorians actually spoke, because almost no one realized how much spoken Victorian English sounded like the English of the twentieth century. He was asserting that accuracy would have undermined the feeling of authenticity. And, of course, what writers of fiction all know is that the sense of authenticity is more important than authenticity itself; with the exception of the late lamented David Foster Wallace, most of us fictioneers don't use footnotes.

Though, if you're skilled enough, you can make a fine career out of violating people's historical expectations with real authenticity. (Okay, okay. "Real authenticity" is a hideous, seemingly redundant term. Yet I'm contrasting it with a "seeming authenticity," which sort of means "fake authenticity." The language isn't adequate for this sort of thing.)

As I was about to say before I got trapped in that parenthetical comment, one of the admirable things about Faye Booth's historical fiction is how she violates our preconceptions about the period in which her stories are set. How she gets away with this and makes it believable is a mystery to me, as she can't exactly whip out charts and graphs and keep the story moving. It's conviction and skill, I guess, and is sort of the opposite of Fowles' approach. Fowles said to himself, the readers won't believe it if I stick to the facts; Faye said, to hell with it, life then didn't work the way you believe: here's how it was, and you'd better take it and like it.

And, you know what? Both approaches work just fine.

Ahem. That's nine paragraphs before getting to the point of this post, which might be a Personal Best for me.

All this rumination on historical detail was set in motion by watching the DVDs of A&E's Nero Wolfe series. Rex Stout's Wolfe novels were written over nearly forty years, and although the early novels are solidly planted in the 1930s, as the series progresses it loses lock on time. There are stories that are definitely set during World War II, and others that are set in the McCarthy period; and certain technological innovations creep into the pages. But Goodwin and Wolfe apparently remain the same age throughout, and how they dress and the cars they drive also seem frozen in time.

So how was this handled on film? Very much as in the books, but with variations. The cars and sets suggest the 1950s, but Goodwin's and Wolfe's dress and dialogue are more 1940s, and characters and situations suggest everything from the late 1930s to the mid-60s--and not in any particular order. In one episode, Archie is in the military and trying to be sent to fight in Europe rather than serving stateside; in another, one of the characters talks much like a beatnik, but dresses as if she skipped over from Twiggy-era Carnaby Street.

Rather than worrying about matching the time period of the stories, the teleplays include whatever elements make the adaptation most diverting. And, oddly, I found that it works. Like the books, the teleplays take place in a sort of Neverland, where the main characters continue on virtually unchanged. (The fact that most of the stories take place inside Wolfe's house make this easier to pull off.) I find myself noticing that Archie is wearing a Sam Spade hat while talking to a woman in go-go boots and Dippity-Do hair, but I don't find myself objecting. This unchanging cast of characters and attitudes is somehow satisfying--a kind of comfort food for the brain.

On thinking it over, I realized I had other favorite diversions that also fit this mold, notably Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster tales. The television adaptation of those stories stuck to a single time period, but the stories themselves, like the Wolfe stories, started out rooted in time but gradually drifted off into their own universe, a universe that has a chronology in the sense of A happening before B, but not in the sense that any quantifiable period of time passed between them.

These two examples break two oft-quoted rules about writing fiction. First is the simple rule against anachronism--a good rule for historically grounded fiction, but inapplicable in the familiar yet separate universes of Wodehouse or Stout.

Second is the rule about the importance of character arc. Neither Jeeves nor Wooster nor Goodwin nor Wolfe has one. All four of the characters are rounded out over the course of their stories, but no one would claim that they had really changed.

Which proves what, exactly? I'm not sure. I think it proves that an overriding rule is: Entertain your readers enough and none of the other rules apply.

=====================

PS Rex Stout's Wolfe novels provide one of the most amusing (and ridiculous) examples of readers engaging in the biographical fallacy. Because the character Nero Wolfe is obese and obsessed with food, many readers assumed that Stout himself was overweight. (This was probably subconsciously reinforced by his surname.) Stout was anything but--from pictures I've seen of him, I think the best word for his physique is probably "lanky."

This also challenges the view of fiction as wish-fulfillment on the part of the writer, as I seriously doubt that the author really wanted to be obese but couldn't achieve it.

PPS Nero Wolfe provides a good touchstone for how bodies have changed over the 20th century. Wolfe stands 5 feet 11 inches and weighs 272 pounds (which Archie often calls "a seventh of a ton"). That's certainly obese, but today it wouldn't be the source of astonishment it was at the time; in the books, people stop and stare, and Wolfe has special chairs designed to support his elephantine bulk. He's less than 100 pounds overweight according to his BMI--a lot of extra weight, but no longer circus-freak quality. Today he probably couldn't even get a slot on The Biggest Loser; he's too svelte.

Cutting Down a Tree

2010-11-13T15:19:00.000-08:00

Over the past three weeks or so, I've been cutting down a rather large banyan tree (ficus microcarpa) in our front yard. Now, I'm not fond of tree-killing, though I seem to have done more than my share over the years; but the damn thing is cracking our neighbor's wall and patio, and they aren't happy about it. Our front yard is ridiculously overarboreal anyhow.

Banyans do have a tendency to spread. Despite what the Little Prince thought, it's banyans, not baobabs, that can take over planets. (The photo is a banyan on Maui, not in our front yard. But you can see how our front yard might look in the not-too-distant future.)

Cutting it down over three weeks? you ask. Don't you just take out a wedge on one side, cut through from the other, and cry, "Timber"?

One might. But that approach works better with pines and firs, the classic pole-shaped trees. A banyan spreads easily as wide as it is tall, so lopping the branches after it is toppled is a risky proposition.

Plus, I'm an incrementalist. Rather than drag out the chainsaw first thing, I climb up into the tree with a pruning saw and, well, prune. Little branches and then bigger branches and finally major branches, until at the end the two-and-three-hundred-pound branches are the last to fall. All that takes a while, especially if you're doing other things. In this case, it has taken weeks.

So, it's a process rather than an event. I don't even think of it as chopping down a tree. I think of it as editing. Really aggressive editing.

A new X-sport for writers. (Next week on Extreme Editing: Reginald pares down a rampaging Bull Elephant.)

The Violin Face

2010-10-15T12:40:00.000-07:00

I've been remiss in not posting this sooner, but, as I've already admitted, "Remiss" has been my middle name for the last couple of months.

I blogged some time back about Australia's Seizure Magazine, which publishes serialized novels, both online and in hardcopy. The magazine's stated goal was to later publish the best of the books as full novels--a modern version of how Dickens' publishers went about things.

Well, they've done it. Rufi Cole's The Violin Face was published in hardcover in the US on the first of September. At present, it's only available from Amazon and Barnes and Noble online, but it will be making some appearances in the brick and mortar world soon--no mean feat for an upstart press from Down Under.

The novel is a bit of a structural marvel; each first-person narrator passes the baton to another character who serves as first-person narrator for the next chapter, and only one of the narrators makes a second appearance, bookending the novel. Rufi manages to make each narrative voice distinctive, yet maintain a tone for the novel as a whole (no mean trick).

The book follows a sequence of interconnected events around a nucleus of friends, family, and lovers in 1990s Central California. For those not familiar with nuances of Californian sociology, many parts of Central California have continued as white-trash heaven long after the days that Stenbeck chronicled, and The Violin Face has its roots in rather gritty soil. Yet it's still modern California, so there are minor Land-of-Fruits-and-Nuts touches, as well as elements of low-life drug and biker culture. And did I mention that some of the narrators are barely post-pubescent?

So I guess I'd have to call it a New-Age Trailer-Park Young Adult Literary novel.

Don't look for that section in your local bookstore. But do look for the book.

An Interesting Factoid For All You Crime Writers

2010-10-10T10:40:00.000-07:00

My sig other, Pamela, recently volunteered for a program where you mentor an economically disadvantaged, college-bound teen on their journey from the 8th grade to (one hopes) college.

(Since 8th through 12th grade coincides with the period where parents are most likely to consider shoving their little darlings in front of a passing bus, this might at first seem like signing up for five years of hell. But the job is made easy by the well-known fact that to teenagers, anybody seems cooler than their parents.)

Although Pamela's the ideal mentor for this sort of thing--grew up in a large, low-income family, and made it all the way through her PhD in geophysics with no financial support from her parents--she had a bit of trouble getting approved as a mentor. In fact, it took the better part of a year.

Why? Because they need to do a background check to make sure you aren't a child molester, murderer, or insurance salesman.

When you have a name like "Pamela Blake," you can't exactly Google it and come up with anything but confusion. (10,800 hits, including Pamela Blake the movie star; Pamela Blake, the MD and director of the Headache Center of the Northwest; Pamela Blake of the Women's Royal Naval Service in WWII; Pamela Blake of the Sweatlodge and Shamanism Circle...well, you get the idea.)

So, the obvious thing to do is run her fingerprints through the FBI database, right?

Yes, except for one little problem. Pamela doesn't have fingerprints.

Here's the promised factoid. According to the policeman in the fingerprint lab, "A lot of people lose their fingerprints as they get older."

Now, she hasn't exactly lost her fingerprints, at least not in the sense that you might lose your car keys. But after a number of tries, on a number of different days, there isn't enough of a distinctive structure to her prints to scan them into a data system for identification. It's as if she's worn them off from overuse. So be forewarned and stop touching everything.

Here's another interesting detail. While she was in the identity laboratory, a policeman entered with a black Labrador police dog. He was there to have a picture taken for his ID badge. But not the policeman's badge. The dog's badge.

Can anyone--even a dog's owner--tell one black Lab from another in a mug shot? (Description: 26 inches in height, 45 pounds, short, glossy coat, snout enlongated but square. Floppy ears. Hair: Black. Eyes: Brown. Teeth: White. If you see anyone answering to these particulars...)

Pamela was eventually approved by doing a background check on her name--which, as far as I can tell, means you send her name to the FBI, and they run it through Google.

Meanwhile, Pamela's off on a crime spree. Hey, the odds are on her side now: She's got no fingerprints.

In Which I Interview Myself

2010-10-03T17:57:00.000-07:00

I was lucky enough to find myself in my comfortable book-lined office. Over a glass of Petite Verdot, I was kind enough to respond to my questions.

Q: You seem to have been, ahem, missing from this blog for some time now. Two months, I believe. Where have you been?

A: I've adopted the Pentagon approach: Don't ask, don't tell.

Q: Been getting any writing done?

A: Define "writing." I've been doing a lot of writing...

Q: I meant fiction.

A: You would, wouldn't you? Hardly any. I've been working, but haven't written a word of my novel since August.

Q: I thought you were happy with how it was going. What happened?

A: Work, work, and then some more work. Even last week, when I went on what I laughingly call a vacation, I worked about 30 hours.

Q: You seem out of sorts.

A: You're wickedly insightful, you know that? You ought to consider doing this professionally. Of course I'm out of sorts. I haven't been writing, I've been working on this ridiculous deadline, and--

Q: I notice your foot is in some sort of big orthopedic boot.

A: Nothing gets past you, does it? Yes, I've been clomping around like Boris Karloff for more than two weeks now. I overstretched my Achilles tendon and it responded by pulling this exquisite little crescent moon of bone off the back of my heel.

Q: From running in Vibram Five Fingers, I suppose?

A: Nope. In fact, my injury is from yoga. In some positions, they tell you to "let your heels yearn for the floor." Shows what an unrequited yearning can do to a guy.

Q: So, you're not getting any work done on your novel right now, and you're not even managing to post on this blog...

A: ...and I'm in the middle of cutting down a tree in our front yard and haven't been able to finish it, and I'd torn off some sections of woodwork on the outside of the house that needed replacing and of course the clouds have been dumping water on us, and I can't really do much about fixing the hole in our house with my foot like this. And even though it's the weekend all these geniuses in London and Singapore and Hawaii are pestering me with e-mails asking complicated questions about arcane aspects of the work that I'm not finished with yet. It makes me think of a poem...

Q: Yeats, no doubt. "Things fall apart..."

A: No, not that one. I was thinking of Richard Brautigan's At the California Institute of Technology:

aaaaaI don’t care how God-damn smart
aaaaathese guys are: I’m bored.

aaaaaIt’s been raining like hell all day long
aaaaaand there’s nothing to do.

Q: That's odd. Because you just gave me the impression you had too much to do.

A: Well, the answer to that is a stanza from another poem:

aaaaaNow it's over
aaaaaI'm dead,
aaaaaand I haven't done anything that I want
aaaaaor I'm still alive
aaaaaand there's nothing I want to do.

Q: You're fooling no one. That's not really a poem, that's the chorus from the song Dead by They Might be Giants.

A: They also have a song called My Evil Twin. If you're so damned smart, why don't you write the next post?

Q: I just might.

California Grievin'

2010-07-27T17:26:00.000-07:00

aaa“You gotta car?”

aaaI shook my head, trying to be cool despite the fact that, in SoCal terms, she’d just asked, You gotta penis? and forced me to admit, Nope, ain’t got one.

That's a short exchange out of a novel of mine, written from the POV of a 15-year-old boy in 1960s California.

It goes without saying that we're a car culture here; even in car-mad America, California stands out as obsessive. In California, especially in Southern California, cars are nearly a necessity. For many (though I am not one of that number), they are also a deep source of pride and identity. Particularly in Hispanic Cruiser Culture (okay, amongst Pachucos), cars are decorated like shrines. (The word is chosen with deliberation. Sure, there may be fuzzy dice hanging from the rear-view mirror, but you are also likely to find a St Christopher medallion dangling beside them, and a statuette of the Virgin Mary on the dash.)

The custom of having the name of the boyfriend calligraphed on the driver's-side door, and the girlfriend's name on the passenger-side door even spread as far as Hawaii. (One car I saw in Honolulu had its doors labeled "Driver" and "Passenger," which I thought was pretty amusing.) That's one of the reasons that the song says Breakin' Up is Hard to Do; you need to have names scraped off, and that isn't cheap to accomplish without ruining the paint job.

Black American culture may be the source of the phrase "pimping your ride," but they are late in coming to the game. From flames on the side to faux-fur seats to hydraulic-lift struts to spoilers on the trunk, the Mexican Americans were there first.

And, of course, they were also the first to adopt custom rear window decals. These are large affairs, two to five feet wide, white lettering and designs on a clear backing. They might say any number of things--the name of the owner, the name of the owner's car club, the name of the car; the usual stuff.

But for the last decade, it has been common for rear-window decals to say things like

Grace Yglesias 1957 - 2009
Gone but not forgotten

embellished, of course, with a few angels and rays of light. And the practice seems to be spreading out of the Mexican-American community and onto the rear windows of all manner of other Californians.

At first, this seemed weird, and not just because it's odd to drive around in a cenotaph. (I've been waiting decades to use that word.) I mean, cars don't last forever. Are there tearful scenes when it's time to trade them in? ("But--but the Chevy is all we have left of Grandma!") Is there a scraping-of-the-decals ceremony? Do the cars have lower resale value because they seem haunted?

But then I understood. On average, most people keep their cars four or five years. That's a suitable, perhaps even excessive, period of mourning. But it's a way to get, as the psychobabble people have it, closure.

Trade in the car and close that chapter. One can't grieve forever.

Of course, this raises other issues.

"I can't believe he already sold the Jag--she's hardly cold yet!"

"I say she's still not over him. She's driving the Volvo around town, but I saw the Beemer is still parked in her garage."

As attractive as closure through trade-in might be, I think we ought to take a tip from the Vikings; when someone dies, we put them in their own car, set the thing on fire, and send it rolling down a symbolic stretch of freeway. More impressive by far, and a move that would certainly be supported by the automakers.

Of course, the California Air Resources Board isn't going to be too happy with this idea...

A Minor Yet Perplexing Problem

2010-07-27T16:48:00.000-07:00

Remember the Tommy Tutone song Jenny? It's the one with the refrain, "Eight six seven, five three oh nigh-ee-ai-yine..." Naturally, many listeners decided to call that number, driving quite a few unfortunates insane in every area code.

Hence the convention with which all American movie audiences are all familiar: In movieland, all phone numbers start with a 555 prefix. That's never a working prefix except for connecting to certain phone-company phones (555-1212 is information in many area codes).

The Jenny problem makes many writers (and their publishers) leery about citing phone numbers in books. Some degree of caution also applies to addresses; some cite them quite cavalierly, while others take some pains to ensure that any specific address cited is nonexistent. (A lot of novels set in Manhattan are fond of giving street addresses that run beyond the end of the street, thereby situating the house or apartment somewhere in the river.)

We're pretty casual about made-up names in the US, which is a good thing, as no matter how improbable the name, someone out there probably wears it already. (One of my characters was named Boyce Hammond, which seems like a reasonably unusual name to me, but checking the web I find that there's at least a few out there.)

My current problem is one I haven't seen before. I've got a scene set in a columbarium (which sounds like a fancy name for dovecote, but is actually a series of vaults with niches for holding funeral urns). And my faithful protagonist is, for reasons irrelevant to our discussion here, seeking out a few particular niches--which need to be identified by their, erm, addresses.

The columbarium I'm using in the story is a real place. Any 'addresses' I might use will either be 1) already occupied, 2) empty and unassigned, 3) empty but already purchased by someone, or 4) nonexistent.

Damned if I can make up my mind the best tactic to take. If the address is 1), I may bother someone by asserting that someone else is stored in Grandma's niche. If the address is 4), anybody informed or curious enough to check will complain that there is no such place. And, if unoccupied, there's no way for me to tell whether the niche is 2) or 3). (And, presumably, all 2)s will someday become 3)s... )

It's a silly thing to worry about, I suppose. But it's a useful way of avoiding finishing the chapter.

Revenge of the Words

2010-07-15T14:47:00.000-07:00

I don't exactly pine for them, but the years 1965-1974 had some advantages. Well, at least one: People used to listen to music. I mean really listened. It wasn't uncommon for someone to arrive at a party with a new album, and all conversation would cease while everyone present sat around and paid attention to the music.

Well, you might say, that's because of all the acid and hash and marijuana. And you might be right. The Age of Uppers which followed--a wave of cocaine that worked its way down into our present era of bathtub meth--almost inevitably ushered in multitasking and increased multichannel input, and all the other elements of Short-Attention-Span Theatre, and the consequence was one of the most ghastly inventions of all time, the Music Video. At last: A way for people to decide what music they liked by the way it looked.

Yeah, yeah, I know--some good directors learned their chops in the music vid business, blah blah blah. Well, HIV was good for the condom business, too, but that doesn't mean it was any kind of net boon to the world.

Over the last couple of years, however, music videos have been hoist on their own petards (and no mean trick, that, given how scarce petards have become). Words are now having their revenge through the medium of Literal Music Videos.

For those few who don't know, a Literal Music Video is one where the lyrics of the song in a music video are replaced with new lyrics that describe what is happening in the video--which, as we all know, usually has only a remote connection (if any) with the original song.

When I am overexposed to music videos, either from a party where they are playing on a television, or from foolishly watching the video of the theme song of the movie in the DVD extras, or after I've been around any of my nieces or nephews, I head for the computer and watch a few Literal Music Videos to wash the taste out of my mouth.

LMVs are like everything else: most are mediocre, some are appalling, and a few are outstanding. The masterpiece of the field is still David A. Scott's version of Total Eclipse of the Heart:

A picture may be worth 10,000 words, but a few words can reveal how pretentious a picture is.

And where, apart from the captions on a Literal Music Video, can you find lines like:

And they shouldn't fence at night
Or they're going to hurt the gymnasts... ?

Oh, sorry. You're right. Schizophrenics say things like that all the time.

========================

Extra credit question: Why are so many of the funniest LMVs takeoffs on Jim Steinman songs?

How Long is a Novel?

2010-07-11T13:51:00.000-07:00

Writer Tikiman posts that his 52,000 word manuscript was rejected by an agent because it is too short to be a novel.

So, how long is a novel, anyhow?

A lot of sources used to peg it as a work of more than 50,000 words (and NaNoWriMo uses 50K as their definition of whether or not you have completed your novel in a month).

In that case, rounded to the nearest hundred words, The Great Gatsby (50,100) just barely qualifies, and neither Farenheit 451 (46,100) nor Slaughterhouse-Five (49,500) are novels.

On the other hand, Bradbury and Vonnegut are both arguably science-fiction writers, and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America define a novel as a work of 40,000 words or more.

A lot of agents and publishers now seem to believe that 70,000 words is the starting point for a novel, and one publisher who takes submissions over the transom refuses to consider works shorter than 80,000 words. Even a baseline of 70K would exclude some rather wonderful books; right offhand:

The Color Purple (66,600)

The Hours (54,200)

Lord of the Flies (59,900)

A Separate Peace (56,800)

The Sun Also Rises (67,700)

It's still possible to find advice from publishers, literary agents, and writers advising "beginners" that to be published, they should keep it short--certainly under 80K. These same sources usually note that novels 100K and over should be avoided.

The problem with such advice is that it was usually either written in the 1960s and 1970s, or was written by people who last paid attention to the world in the 1960s and 1970s. The world has changed.

In the 19th century, the whopping great long novel was the style: Crime and Punishment runs more than 200,000 words, Middlemarch more than 300,000 words...and let's not even talk about War and Peace.

But in the 20th century, both literary fiction and pulp fiction began to run far shorter. Next time you're in a used bookstore that carries a lot of paperbacks, look at the mysteries and sci-fi from the 60s and 70s--slim little volumes, typically running about 200 pages. Longer books might be accepted for literary merit, and bestsellers tended to run long (even To Kill a Mockingbird approaches 100K), but the bread-and-butter of the industry was in the range of 40-70K.

It no longer is. Cozy mysteries run short, as do some of the categories of romance; but I'd guess that a typical non-cozy mystery nowadays is over 80K. Thrillers seem to average 100K or more.

There was a time when a unknown writer would have been considered insane for submitting a novel of 120,000 words. I'd guess that length is now about typical for first fantasy novels.

It's odd that, in a time where everyone talks about the shortage of time and the competition between books and other media, that novels seem to be getting longer. I can only conjecture that those people who still bother to read want something they can curl up and live inside for a while.

Another possibility is that books are now so expensive that publishers don't feel that the public will feel it is getting its money's worth from something slim. How this will balance out against rising paper costs in the longer term remains to be seen; but, then, in the longer term, we may all be reading on Kindles and Nooks anyway.

Which may offer hope to our pal Tikiman: In the future, length may vanish as a major consideration. Today, so much is constrained by the production and distribution costs of a book. So far electronic books are a sideline in the industry, but if they become the dominant form, life might be quite different.

There's nothing better than a good novella, but marketing considerations have driven them from the shelves. There may come a day when we'll see novellas and short novels as the market leaders. Right now, size matters. Tomorrow could be very different.

Giving My WIP the Treatment

2010-07-10T15:22:00.000-07:00

I'm incapable of outlining a novel, because I never know what the heck the story is until I'm writing it. I'm hardly unique in this regard. (Ryan David Jahn has a nice post on the problem.) Someone at a writing conference once claimed to have done a survey, and had determined that two-thirds of writers outlined, and one-third didn't. I'm not sure if this was a survey of writers in general, published writers only, or what. The writers I seem to know aren't outliners--though some of them do plan in some fashion or another.

One thing I think would be nice about an outline is that you could see the shape of your story. That's very appealing. But since I discover my story as I write it, that isn't an option.

This time, however, I'm trying something new. (New for me, that is. I'm sure others have done it before me.) With 14 chapters now in hand, I'm writing something very much like a story treatment--those short narratives that describe the proposed course of a screenplay. These are invariably written in third-person present tense, and so I am doing likewise, hoping that the kazillions who have gone before me will have worn a path in the fabric of existence in which it will be easy for me to plod along.

What I'm doing is laying out the narrative with each chapter taking up a single, numbered paragraph. And, that now done, I'm using the white space beyond my current chapter to add notes about where it is going--things I now know are inevitable, things I'm toying with, things that might happen, questions to myself. The sort of stuff that used to show up in my little pocket notebook, but now laying out there as possible extensions to portions of the treatment that are already "in the can," as Hollywood has it.

It's far from a pre-writing outline, but I'm finding that it's nice to be able to scan the shape of, as the Prince Valiant comic strip used to say, Our Story So Far.

Perhaps I'm just fuzzy-minded, but I find that when I'm in the middle of a novel and think back on what I've already written, I don't have much sense of the proportions or patterns the plot is following. This gives me a little bit more of a clue.

Those authors of more stable mind probably don't need to be reminded of what they have only recently written. It seems that I do, and this little "treatment" is what I'm trying for the moment. If that doesn't work, I'm going to try the tattoo approach used by the fellow in Memento (see photo).

I'm hoping I can get by with my current methdology, as the tattoo approach could get expensive.

Further to "Everything Happening for a Reason"

2010-07-09T17:47:00.001-07:00

On the Comment trail, Frances suggests that this whole question revolves around whether or not one is religious: If there is a God, then things happen for a reason; if not, then there is no overseeing power, and the answer is that everything is random.

I'm not sure that the question is as simple as the existence of "God," however, as monotheism accompanied by omniscience and omnipotence is only one option. Even the Old Testament Jehovah seems to be rather less than omniscient--he's always discovering, invariably to his displeasure, that something has happened without his awareness.

The Romans, for example, were often quite religious, but they were polytheistic, and recognized the idea of foreign gods they had never met. Sometimes it was a matter of 'my god can beat up your god,' and they were quick to adopt new gods and bring them on home. And the Greeks, of course, had a reasonably consistent pantheon, but interacting in an ongoing soap opera--and one god was often doing something while another was distracted.

Even so, it's not at all clear that the Romans or Greeks believed that everything happened because one god or another willed it. Their gods didn't necessarily pay much attention, nor did they seem to have a "plan" for humankind. They became intensely involved in the affairs of certain groups or certain individuals at certain times, but that's quite different from any sort of masterplan.

The idea that "God" is responsible for every detail of every thing that happens, with individual angels plucking leaves from trees at some predetermined moment, is very much a medieval Christian theory. Many Buddhists are quite religious but manage to get by quite well without a detailed plan from God; and, in Thailand, where the dominant religion is Buddhism well-supplied by Hinduism and whatever other pantheistic beliefs happen to appeal, there is a belief that prayer and sacrifice can influence events, but that doesn't mean that god(s) determine everything that happens. Sometimes they get involved, sometimes they don't.

Thailand is also a hotbed of astrology, and astrology presetns some interesting questions. Astrology doesn't always assume a god or gods. Nor do all forms of astrology assume the predetermination of events, despite the emphasis on timing. Some forms of astrology claim that certain 'flavors' of events will happen at certain times--for example, that one will go through a creative spurt, or will be physically challenged--but they attribute this to something more like the underlying laws of the universe, for which the movement of the planets is a sort of large clock.

In the view of some astrologers, we are on boats floating down a great river. The cosmic clock is able to tell us the sorts of things we will encounter as we float down the river--at this time there will be turbulence, further on the river will widen and smooth out--without attributing agency and purpose.

As to the people who RDJ meets in Los Angeles who say that everything happens for a reason--well, I suspect that most of them are vaguely New-Age California types, who would describe themselves as 'spiritual but not religious,' and don't believe in god or gods in the traditional sense, but have some sort of belief in a big soft fuzzy benevolence on the part of something out there somewhere.

Me, I believe in the Norse Gods and the Frost Giants. Ragnarok is Coming!

"Everything Happens for a Reason"

2010-07-06T10:25:00.000-07:00

On his blog, Ryan David Jahn tells a fascinating true-life tale about a recent encounter in Los Angeles. (Go read it. It's a slice of life cut at a very strange angle.)

After recounting the incident, RDJ observes:

But it doesn’t mean anything. There are no epiphanies to be had. You want there to be some purpose to life and the things that happen in it. This is why people say obviously false things like “Everything happens for a reason” when something shitty happens. But I think most of us know everything doesn’t happen for a reason.

Well, I dunno. I'm not too sure how the universe is organized. Maybe everything does happen for a reason.

My problem with people who say "Everything happens for a reason," is that I suspect all of them are starting from the premise that the universe is not only purposeful (as reflected in their mantra), but that it is also:

1) Benevolent, and
2) Gives a damn about us as individuals, and,
3) Doesn’t dislike them in particular, and
4) Is essentially fair.

There are other, less comforting hypotheses that explain all the facts while still assuming that "everything happens for a reason." Here's a dozen. I'm sure anyone can add more.

1) The universe is malevolent and is messing with us, and in situations where that appears not to be the case, the universe is setting us up for a really big, nasty surprise.

2) The universe is highly personalized, as in the case of the Old Testament Jehovah, and huge volumes of suffering, pain and death occur just so God Almighty can win bar bets with Satan (cf. Book of Job, and also Archibald MacLeish's play J.B.).

3) The universe cares strongly about certain people at certain times and is quite willing to wipe the floor with the rest of us. Much like what we as writers do with our secondary characters. As the Qabalists say, As Above, So Below.

4) The universe is gradually evolving a species of superwasp that will wipe out all life on Earth before colonizing the rest of the galaxy, and everything that happens is in support of that.

5) The universe is run by an evolving power that presently has the overall maturity and attitude of a very young human, probably male. The Bible tells us we are created in God’s image. Why should we be surprised when he/she/them/it decide(s) to pull our wings off and stomp on us?

6) The universe ensures that everything happens for a reason, but a universal idea of what constitutes ‘a reason’ doesn’t quite agree with ours.

7) The Egyptians (or perhaps the Yanomamo in the Amazon) worshiped the only true gods, and we are all heretics who are being punished.

8) There’s a reason, but it’s based on the branch of quantum physics called statistical mechanics, and it doesn’t care much about the trajectories of individual particles.

9) Sartre and Camus were right; everything happens for a reason, but it’s up to us to create that reason.

10) HP Lovecraft was right. Nyarlathotep and Azoth and The Old Gods are still out there and dreaming, and sometimes they roll in their sleep and one of us gets crushed. Despite this, be glad they are still asleep; were they awake, they would flay you and hollow out your bones to make pipes upon which they would play, among the gibbering half-mad spirits in the cold spaces between the stars, as your soul twisted in eternal torment.

11) God is sloppy. There are innumerable instances of this in the Bible, where The Lord gets annoyed with an individual and wipes out whole cities. Precision isn’t his forte.

12) There is a reason for everything, and the universe is essentially benevolent, but it’s run by a bureaucracy whose performance leaves much to be desired. The wages of sin are death. Quit whining and be glad that the taxes of sin aren’t a bigger percentage of your paycheck.

I don't know why I took the time to post all this. But I figure it happened for a reason. Probably because it's time to go upstairs and write Chapter 14.

Further on Long Shadows in the Genres

2010-07-05T09:57:00.000-07:00

Many genre writers may feel smothered by the overwhelming effect that a single successful writer may have on a field; in some cases, that writer may seemingly end up owning the entire field.

This kind of success, can actually prove beneficial to those who swim against the tide--once again, Tolkein case in point. One can get a certain amount of notice simply by establishing a fantasy world that is distinctively and actively non-Tolkeinesque.

Of course, there is room in the genre of fantasy for any number of worlds. The process is more clear in other genres. Take Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, which almost single-handedly created and then dominated the spy thriller field in the 1950s and 1960s. There had been novels of espionage and international intrigue before Fleming, of course; writers as great as Conrad and Greene had dabbled in it, and Fleming owed a good deal to John Buchan. But Buchan's Richard Hannay is a far cry from Fleming's cold, competent, hedonistic, jet-setting Bond.

Now, Bond--love him or loathe him, as Frances would have it--and his glossy-surfaced world cast a huge shadow. Not only was he widely imitated, the Bond movies turned him into an imitation, and then a caricature of Fleming's actual creation. The Bond of the books is, despite a certain degree of surface polish, something of a bright thug. (In this regard, the recent "reboot" of Bond in the movie Casino Royale is closer to the original character than the other movies--and far closer than any of the post-Connery Bonds.) There's actually very little gadgetry in the books, and although the Bond of the books is rather chilly and glib, he doesn't use every bullet or bomb as an opportunity for a wisecrack.

One of the consequences of this kind of success, though, is that it creates opportunities for writers who initally define their work by way of contrast. There is no doubt that much of John Le Carre's success with The Spy Who Came in From the Cold is owed to the fact that it is the Un-Bond--unglamorous, downbeat, and disturbingly realistic. Initially publishers would have nothing to do with it; and most of those who picked it up looking for a Bond imitation were either furious or bored. But word of mouth (plus great reviews from critics who were sick to death of Fleming wannabees) eventually gained the book a huge following, and it had a built-in hook: It's a spy novel, and it's nothing like Bond.

Without icons, iconoclasts have nothing to shatter.

On Ephemerality

2010-07-02T11:53:00.000-07:00

I was pondering on the ephemeral nature of human endeavor the other day—yes, I really do spend my time that way, whenever I’m not surfing the web for free porn or spray-painting DI wuz hea on freeway overpasses—and it occurred to me that I’m laboring in the most ephemeral of all the genres. Thrillers—and other sorts of crime novels to various extents—have the advantage of being able to address issues of the moment. The reverse side of that coin, though, is that thrillers probably have the shortest shelf life of any sort of novel—with the possible exception of science fiction that predicts the near future.

(Oddly enough, the trick to writing near-term predictive science fiction that survives seems to be naming the book after the year it is supposed to take place: 1984 and 2001 still stand up quite well despite the fact that those years have come and gone. Oh, sure, you can argue it’s because they are outstanding novels, and I wouldn’t disagree. But it’s also curious that they are both named for years now past.)

Now, this set me to thinking about which genre has the longest shelf-life. And it seems to me that it ought to be historical fiction, which doesn’t risk being overtaken by events or fashion. But historical fiction risks assault from those within its own ranks (our Faye Booth is a case in point) who want to give conventional views of the past a good shake, and say, no, it wasn’t like that, it was like this.

It occurred to me that in principle fantasy novels ought to do best, since they don’t risk being overtaken by any aspect of reality whatsoever. (Though even then I suppose they have to worry about revisionist works like Wicked reconstituting the Oz novels.)

But in a post a while back, Tim Stretton pointed out that influence in literature, and especially in genre works, has a bi-directional time flow. Before you think I’m referring to some sort of quantum effect, let me hasten to explain: Tim was simply saying, rather more eloquently than this, that while it is obvious that books affect other books that come after them, it is equally true that how books are seen is greatly affected by later books. This is true for each reader—which is why Tim cautions that re-reading favorites is a risky business—but also true for the story-consuming public as a whole.

Tim mentions the case of Tolkein, who offers a fine example. Now, I think Tolkein’s achievement was staggering—a fusing of ancient threads and themes with certain examples of striking originality. He also stands as a monument to monomaniacal devotion, and, quite possibly, to Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. To a great extent, he created the modern fantasy novel.

Tim’s point is that when Tolkein is re-read, he is re-read in the context of what has happened since, both in the wider context (writers rebelling against the Tolkein template), and in our personal experience (including everything we have read since, be it fantasy or lit-fic or noir).

I happen to know a lot of writers younger than me, and a fair proportion of the really young ones are fantasy writers. And I’ve known some of these fantasy mavens when, after growing up on fantasy novels and movies and comics, finally read LOTR for the first time. In general, they weren’t impressed. Why? Mostly because of context. These people had been reading stories with elves and dwarves—whose modern personae were largely codified by Tolkein—and orcs and wraiths and hobbits (who were all invented by Tolkein), for the whole of their reading lives. They also took for granted the inclusion of tons of maps, and appendices, and invented languages, and elaborate mythologies. I mean, that’s what fantasy writers do, isn’t it?

Well, not until Tolkein, they didn’t. And even today, I find it hard to point to anyone who did it at his level of detail (probably because he cared more about the history and linguistics of his invented world than he did about any given story placed in it).

In effect, what my young friends were saying is similar to the old joke: I can’t stand Shakespeare; the guy uses too many clichés.

There is a danger in casting too broad and long a shadow: those who grow up in your shadow may take it as the normal level of illumination. And in a way, I guess this shows you just can’t win. Write something ephemeral, and you disappear; but, write something iconic enough to influence all that follows after, and you may find yourself blending into the furniture.

Well, I need to go upstairs now, and work on my ephemera.

What I meant was...

2010-06-29T15:57:00.000-07:00

Alas, the terminology of writing is far from universal. Frances has mentioned that my preceding post might be clearer if the reader knew what exactly I meant by "close third-person POV." I suppose it's clear as mud without a definition, so here goes.

"Close third-person narration" to me is identical to "third-person limited." (There's a definition that wouldn't clarify much for most people.) The narration is written in third person, but there is nothing even approaching omniscience on the part of the narrator. The narration is married to the POV character's perceptions; the narrator doesn't tell un anything that the POV character doesn't know.

We don't see expressions on the POV character's face, for example, because the character has no means of watching his own face. (Well, except for mirrors. But that trick tends to make editors, no small number of readers, groan.) A character can feel a silly grin spreading on his face, for example, but such a character can't "look stunned." (The character can conjecture that he might or even must look stunned, but this can't be reported as fact, or we being to move away from close third.)

It's very subjective narration that stays close to the consciousness of the POV and never backs up for wide shots. It may get so far from the inside of character's head that it needs to worm its way back in via "he thought" until we are clearly established (after which thoughts can be directly reported).

Shock and Awe was third-person multi-POV. In most cases, each chapter 'belonged' to a single viewpoint character. The book wasn't written entirely in close POV, although much of it was quite close; there was a distinct narrative voice that sometimes took a wide view before modulating down into a POV character's thoughts and emotions.

Shock and Awe required multiple POVs simply because of the architecture. I could have written multiple first-person, but multi-first tends to be stressful for both reader and writer.

My WIP has only one POV character. This is more common in mysteries than in thrillers, but it's not unheard of. Thrillers often up the suspense by showing the reader mounting dangers of which the protagonist is unaware. This requires either omniscience or multiple POVs (or both).

Mysteries, on the other hand, often have only a single POV character--often the detective, but sometimes a Watson or an Archie Goodwin. This restricts the reader's knowledge to what the POV character knows. Some argue that this is inherently less suspenseful than letting the reader see dangers while keeping the protagonist in the dark.

I'm not taking a position on this, as some artists have done both in different works. For example, Alfred Hitchcock's movies achieve suspense thrugh both tools. Hitch was fond of letting the viewer see the bomb ticking away under the dinner table while the protagonist sits ingorant with his feet inches away from the explosives; but in some of his most gripping scenes in Psycho the camera remains fixed on the POV character, who is unable to see around corners or up beyond the top of the stairs.

Lee Child is unusual in that some of his Jack Reacher novels are written in third person, while others are in first person--and the dividing line seems to be whether or not they require multiple POVs. If he wants us to see the bad guys at work, then the whole book will be in third person; but if he doesn't need any "meanwhile, back at the ranch" scenes, then he'll stay with Reacher's POV--and do it in first person, to boot.

So here I am, writing in a single POV, and staying very close, without a hint of omniscience. And I'm wondering why, as long as I'm staying tied to this one person's perceptions, I'm not just letting him tell the damn story. It's already very much in his voice, and I'm beginning to think that the mechanics of presenting his thoughts and moving exposition along would be far easier if he just told the damn story himself.

I'm a bit confused as to why I'm in third person to begin with. I'd like to think I had a reason.

The character is quite a bit younger than me. Maybe I didn't feel ready for that level of impersonation--similar to the way that some people are reluctant to go first-person on characters of the opposite sex.

Or maybe I just didn't think it through. It wouldn't be the first time, and I'd venture it won't be that last.

I comfort myself with the fact that rewriting in first would be easy, and would probably be more fun. Well, if I decide to go that way. I'm still hopping from one foot to another.

A pause for head scratching

2010-06-29T00:02:00.000-07:00

Okay, so you're writing from one POV in a novel. And it's pretty close third-person POV throughout.

First person is more sympathetic. First person doesn't require reminders and tags when you modulate from narrative voice to internal reflection. And first person eliminates a whole slew of pronoun problems.

So remind me again: at page 100, why am I writing my current WIP in close third? I'm sure there's a reason...

Plot versus Story versus Godzilla

2010-06-25T12:03:00.000-07:00

One of Aliya's posts on plot and literary fiction had me responding at enough length on her Comment Trail that I realized I ought to bring what I had to say over here, rather than inflicting it on unwary visitors to her blog. In other words, I plan to inflict it on you--but I'm assuming that by this point in our relationship, anyone arriving here is a wary visitor.

At the risk of getting off into abstractions, I'd like to distinguish between "story" and "plot."

I do tend to require that novel-length fiction has a story of some sort. For me, "story" boils down to either characters experiencing conflict (within some setting or parameters), or characters on some sort of journey. (Helps if the journey involves some conflict rather than just being a travelogue. But the entirely episodic, picaresque novel has a long and honorable history, and sometimes we're just along for the sightseeing. Hey, if it works, it works.)

Even some of the most purely "literary" fiction that manages to engage me has some sort of conflict. In much of Beckett, it's a matter of someone in conflict with himself, or in conflict with meaninglessness, but you can still say, "This is a story about..."

"Plot," for me, is another matter entirely--it's the mechanics of how the story unfolds. And the mechanics can be big and loud and obvious, or so extremely subtle and apparently minor that people might assert the story is "plotless." (In a successful stream-of-consciousness novel, the 'plot' is disguised as free association; but the mechanics are still put there by the author, who decides what thought will stir up what new association. Thinking about horses and then segueing into a childhood carousel ride flashback is just as plotted as having a man walk in with a gun.)

If you can still say, "This is a story about a man who can't muster up the motivation to get out of bed," then you have a story. Probably not much of an evident plot. Whether the writer can make such a story interesting to the reader is another matter, and I think has a good deal to do with whether the writer is actually engrossed in the story (including the character) to begin with.

I believe that plotless stories tend to become boring when the writer doesn't care about the story or the conflict, and is only writing to watch his or her own cleverness at laying down verbiage. When a good writer cares, it drags the reader right along. But in the worst forms of lit fic, the writer really doesn't give a damn about the story.

I will concede that Joyce probably didn't care all that much about the plot, such as it is, of Ulysses. But he cared powerfully about the characters and what they experienced during the course of that long journey through a day. (Finnegans Wake, on the other hand, doesn't seem to me to have a story anyone cares about; it really is a lot of self-referential cleverness. Some of which is incredibly clever and fun to read aloud, mind you, but it no longer feels like a story. I'm not even sure I consider it a novel: more like an alien artifact.)

It is quite possible to write genre fiction that commits the same sin of not caring about the story. In genre fiction, this usually happens when the writer cares primarily about the plot, but not about the characters except insofar as they serve the plot--which is another way of not really caring about the story.

There's all kinds of ways of breaking the rule that you have to care about the story, or have a story. Borges did it routinely; so did Donald Barthelme. And I adore much of their short fiction. But expand any of those didactic or satiric short pieces to novel length, and you'll find me dropping the book on the floor somewhere around page 20.

On the genre side, the same thing holds for puzzle mysteries--such as the 'locked-room' mysteries which were so popular in the early years of the 20th century: I can enjoy them (well, actually I don't, but I can imagine that someone might) for ten pages or so, but there isn't enough story for a book; it's all plot.

I guess what I'm saying is that I dislike reading hundreds of pages of fiction unless the author gives a damn about something other than his own precious self.

Of course, giving a damn isn't sufficient; there's a lot of heartfelt fiction out there that is just plain awful because of lousy execution. But I'd argue that caring about the story you're telling is a necessary prerequisite to any kind of success in reaching a reader.

Probably the reason that so many lit-fic writers fail in this regard is that they sat through too many classes where professors said things like, "What Shakespeare is teaching us here..." or "What Tolstoy is trying to tell us..." (Many teachers seem to have truly great works of literature confused with Aesop's Fables or Rudyard Kipling's Just-So stories.) Then these students move on to other classes where someone's prose experiments are praised, simply because they are experimental.

No wonder so many MFA students write such lousy novels.

And where does Godzilla fit into all this? Well, what Godzilla was trying to show us was...

Writing and Peripheral Vision

2010-06-20T14:37:00.000-07:00

I've made no secret of the fact that 2009 ranks as one of my least favorite years. My health issues so contaminated the novel I was writing that I had to set it aside entirely; even now, it exudes a miasma that seems unhealthy. Since publication of Shock and Awe at the end of 2007, I've completed one novel (Earthly Vessels, which, alas, is entirely unsuited to my MNW autorial persona), and had two others grind to a halt 100-200 pages on in glorious 2009.

I'm not ready to return to those WIPs, though I think both of them are potentially good novels. So I've been working on something new, based on a single opening chapter I wrote some time back. And, to my amazement, it's going swimmingly, and I'm eight chapters along. (Well, as swimmingly as writing has ever gone for me, which is to say 'flounderingly.') I've found I can even write and maintain something akin to normal blood pressure as long as I eventually get up from my desk and go do something reasonably fierce in the way of exercise to blow the tension out of my system.

Since I'm not much of a plot-ahead kind of guy, there are always what-happens-next roadblocks, both large and small. Once I've written a couple of chapters and the characters are alive and contributing their suggestions, I have a good sense of the general direction I'm heading, but the details remain fuzzy. With apologies to Aliya Whiteley's brother and sister characters in Mean Mode Median (and to Tim Stretton for citing a fantasy character with an apostrophe in his name), the best analogy I can come up with is that used by Paul Muad'Dib in Dune when discussing seeing the future: You can get a glimpse of a few hilltops and ridges in the distance, but you have no idea what awaits in the valleys between them.

And, of course, most of one's time is spent traversing the valleys, and sometimes they aren't the valley you're expecting: Instead of the Valley of the Jolly Green Giant, you find yourself in the good old Valley of the Shadow of Death. But there are constant what-happens-next-and-how questions, large and small.

Which brings me, in my typical blabbermouthed fashion, to the point of this post. Very seldom can I solve a story problem by focusing on it. It isn't math(s). Staring longer doesn't allow me to break it down into logical steps.

I should add that it isn't that I'm incapable of coming up with something to happen at the next major undecided point. It's that I can come up with several things, each of which, on careful interrogation, turns out to be unsuitable in some way.

(First ideas for solving intermediate plot points are almost always stale, derivative, or obvious. Well, I speak only for myself, there. Perhaps your first ideas are always strikingly original. I sometimes have strikingly original ideas, and when I get them early and easily, it's almost always a sign that they are striking, and original, and unworkable.)

A certain amount of staring is needed to get the problem fixed in my mind. This can often be achieved by pinpointing exactly why your proposed solutions so far suck. But after that, I have to count on peripheral vision--the answer that is handed to you when you are apparently paying attention to something else.

When I'm lucky, what I'm paying attention to is the writing; the answer to a given plot issue will often pop up--sometimes because some minor element I've written in along the way turns out to be more than merely descriptive, or will fulfill dual roles.

When I'm less lucky, I have to resort to some kind of activity to occupy a part of my brain. The physicist Niels Bohr was famous for solving conceptual problems by fixing the issue in his mind and then forgetting about it by going to see American Westerns--just diverting enough to keep his frontal lobes distracted, but not so complex or emotionally involving as to take over too much of his subconscious mind. (So who says that movies that are all fluff aren't useful?) And I know one oft-published novelist who says that any movie at all will work for him.

Not so for me. Sometimes home-construction tasks will turn the trick, but these can also become so demanding that they take up too much of my all-too-limited brainpower. Gardening works well sometimes, but not always, and that old standby, the shower, sometimes produces results--but one can only spend so long in the shower.

For me, physical motion seems most effective. Walking often allows solutions to pop up; hiking is good, too, except that there is usually a long period where the scenery pushes everything far down, and there is the added problem that when you've solved your problem you are anywhere from ten to a hundred miles away from your keyboard.

Joyce Carol Oates claims to get her best work done while she is running, but Ms Oates is built like one of the more slender species of antelope, and running for her is probably like walking for me. If I could muster up the focus to work on a story issue while running, I would no doubt resolve most of my plot issues by having all my characters sit down and gasp for breath.

Long drives can help, and I find that drives in heavy, high-speed, freeway traffic work best--for some reason, knowing that it's life-endangering to make so much as a note seems to encourage the subconscious to become especially fecund.

The protagonist in my WIP solves urgent problems by thinking hard about something else. This has given me the challenge of coming up with complete non sequiturs for him to contemplate, and "now think of something completely unrelated" isn't as easy as it sounds.

Luckily, my protag doesn't need to get up and move around for this to work. I hope to learn something from writing him.

But meanwhile I need to go exercise. My protag has raised my blood pressure enough for one day.

Prince of Persia--a flap over nothing

2010-06-13T20:09:00.000-07:00

I haven't seen Prince of Persia, nor am I in any great haste to do so. But I have noticed, as many probably have, the huge flap on the web over the fact that "a white actor" is playing a Persian.

Sigh.

Persia, of course, is largely that area now called "Iran." ("Persians" incidentally, always called the place "Iran." The Greeks are the ones who called them Persians.)

Hands up, anybody who knows where the name "Iran" comes from? Anybody? Yes, Ashley?

That's right. "Eran" which in Latin was "Arianus," which in English, is "Aryan." Yep. Hitler's master race. The white people. The Aryans were the root race of what we call Persia.

Now, things changed a bit when Alexander tromped through and his troops inseminated many of the Aryan women there. Though, being Greek and following Alexander, they may have inseminated more of the Aryan men.

And, of course, the Mongol hordes passed through, and killed about a zillion of the Aryan men, and, of course raped many of the women.

And, fairly recently as such things go, the Arabs stormed into the place, killed about a zillion of the men, raped the women, or, worse, married them, and converted everyone to Islam at swordpoint. So now there is a lot of Arab blood running in modern Iranian veins...along with an occasional touch of East Asian that can be seen in the eyelids (the same effect you sometimes see cropping up in Eastern Europe and Germany), as well as some Greek genes, which is why--no, wait, I already did the obvious Greek joke.

I've met many Iranians, and, yes, some of them look a good deal like Arabs. But I've met many who look like total honkies, because--well, if you buy any of the Aryan race crap, they are the spring and lifeblood of honkydom. Which the Germans long recognized, and why Germany and Iran/Persia/Whatever, have long been so cozy.

The Jews and Arabs are the Semitic peoples--or, as Hitler and his gang called them, "mud people." The Persians are the Master Race (and some of them actually believe it).

So, the outrage over casting Jake Gyllenhaal as a mo-fo honkie haole fishbelly ghost person Aryan strikes me as pretty weird. (Plus, the guy isn't as white as, say, Paul Bettany. I've seen lightbulbs that looked dark compared to him.)

Look, I understand that for decades white actors were cast as other races, pushing aside some excellent actors in the process, and that's reprehensible.

On the other hand, I've always enjoyed it in modern film and theater when someone is cast in a different gender--Cate Blanchett as Bob Dylan, for example--or a black man is cast in what is a white role without any comment whatsoever, such as Denzel Washington playing Don Pedro in Branagh's production of "Much Ado About Nothing." So I've always hoped that in the future, no one would much give a shit.

I understand the urge to redress wrongs. But I think the lines often get drawn in the wrong places, and I think this is a great example. I think Jake Gyllenhaal can play an Aryan without any issues whatsoever being raised.

The funny thing is, if they had cast an Arab or a Turk in that role, I don't think we'd be hearing any noise whatsoever--even though racially that's just as extreme as casting Marlon Brando as an Okinawan. (Bad idea, that one--but it was done.)

Then again, I think about it and realize that most Americans think Iranians are Arabs. Hell, the other day I heard someone bitching about all the Middle Easterners moving into his neighborhood, and, after asking a couple of questions, realized he was talking about people from India. So I guess a lot of people are all riled up because they think Jake Gyllenhaal is going to be playing an Arab. Or an Indian. Or, well, one of those kind of people, and a Persian should be played by, like, you know, an Arab or Indian or Mexican or somebody, well, ethnic.

Here's the real problem. The US is filled with people like Miss Teen South Carolina.

I'm much more bothered when Hollywood rewrites stories so that the races of the original characters are changed to white (whatever the fuck that is). There's the problem.

Jake Gyllenhaal playing an Aryan? No problem. Though if I were king, I'd have gone with Jude Law.

=========================

PS There was also a lot of outrage when Jonathan Pryce--a great actor, IMHO--was cast as a Eurasian in Miss Saigon. I couldn't really get that wound up about it. People are pissed that a European was playing a Eurasian--because they thought it needed to be an Asian? Umm, big disconnect for me. "Eurasian" is typically what Hawaiians call "hapa"--50:50.

I can't wait to see what happens when they do a Tiger Woods biopic. Because my guess is that Asian actors won't even be auditioned--even though plenty of Cambodians, Indonesians, and Malaysians look more like Tiger Woods than most black Americans do.

I think they'll probably cast Will Smith.

That special time of the year...

2010-06-06T12:04:00.000-07:00

Christmas in June? No (although the excellent but generally forgotten band The Young Adults had a great song called Christmas in Japan in July). And not summer vacation, either, although I guess it's that time of the year.

No, it's the annual Rancho Mirage Writing Workshop, in the blasting heat of the California desert. A baker's dozen of writers working together and critiquing, under the sharp-tongued guidance of Raymond Obstfeld.

This had become an annual event for me...except for last year, when my health problems kept me from attending. Not so this year. I'm annoyingly hale and hearty, and have my nose and consciousness buried deeply in my latest novel.

We've all received 20-35 pages of each other's manuscripts, and we'll start off with a round-robin critique at 5 this evening. There's some good stuff here, and some very odd stuff, and some familiar stuff that is farther along (pages 540-560 of one manuscript that I last saw many pages back). Some of the writers are veterans of this little workshop, others are fresh meat. This loooks like fun.

So I'm looking forward to a week of nothing but writing and critiquing. Well, along with a few drinks in the evening. And heaving myself into swimming pools to try to dump some of the heat.

"But it's a dry heat," the apologists all say. Yeah, well it's still 110 frigging Farenheit. And with all the golf courses in the area (this is right next to Palm Springs), it ain't really that dry anymore, either.

But it's a dry heat. Yeah, Satan probably says that about Hell, too.

Philip Space, Kelly Day, Ben Dover, et al.

2010-05-24T11:14:00.000-07:00

I've just been musing on character names. I put a good deal of time into selecting names for my characters--perhaps more than I ought--and I'm not sure sometimes where to draw the line.

It's clear to me that, as in everything else, we have less latitude in fiction than the degrees of freedom granted to reality. I don't know that there is a Philip Space or a Ben Dover out there in the real world, but there are certainly Kelly Days (most of them probably unaware they are bearing a punning name). Joke names in a novel strike me as a little too sophomoric, but it's amazing how far some writers have pushed that envelope in comic novels. Although the characters Benny Profane and Herbert Stencil in Pynchon's V. aren't exactly punning constructions, they go far beyond the limits of credulity; but, then, Pynchon clearly didn't want us to be involved in his story in any traditional sense.

Here again, reality has us at a disadvantage. If I had an actor as a character in a novel, even a comic novel, I wouldn't name him something like "Rip Torn." But Mr. Torn (whom I admire) is only the latest in a family of Torns where the older males were nicknamed "Rip." In life, it's a conversation starter. In a book, it would be a bit silly and distracting (cf. Benny Profane).

To take another example, until recently the CEO of the Boeing Company was a man named* "Harry Stonecipher." Could we get away with that? No way--not unless we were writing a sequel to V..

But there are milder forms. I have a good friend named "Steve Steele." That's a fine name, but iffy in a novel (and, in my opinion, only serviceable if the character is not any kind of action hero). "Steele" in its possible spellings is a common surname (although famous Hollywood producer Dawn Steel inherited the surname from a father who changed it from Spielberg). But use it in a book and it seems as if the writer is trying to make some not-too-subtle point.

I used to know a fellow named "Bob Dollar." That's a fine, solid surname deriving from the Celtic. (It means, roughly, "from the dales," and has no connection with currency.) Nothing wrong with "Dollar" in real life. But it would be poison in anything but a comic novel, and maybe a little sketchy even there.

There are some names that, for me, land right on the line. "Billy Pilgrim," for example, in Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, is a feasible and undistracting name for a protagonist--except that it is a little too, as they say in screenwriting, "on the nose." (It also seems to be begging the critics and scholars to dissect it.)

I would never intentionally give a character the initials "J.C.", though writers from William Faulkner to Stephen King have done exactly this, quite purposefully and thematically.

Even though readers will suspend disbelief, at some level they remember the writer is up above the stage, pulling the strings. Names carrying too much obvious baggage or portent seem to aim the spotlight away from the stage and up at the writer. (Which a writer like Pynchon probably desires.)

I can enjoy preposterous and unlikely names as long as they aren't overly burdened with meaning. To take one of Vonnegut's recurring characters, how can one not like "Kilgore Trout"? Dickens was especially delightful and prolific in this regard, although some of his wonderful surnames are so marvelous as to be distracting. (Honeythunder? Pumblechook?)

Many writers can't resist saddling minor characters with real but unusual surnames. I've encountered the English surname "Gotobed" at least a hundred times in novels without ever bumping up against it in the real world. This is never laden with meaning; the writers have simply been amused by the name, and decided they needed to use it someday, somehow, for something. (It always knocks me out of the story by making me think of the Monty Python skit featuring a fellow named Smoketoomuch.)

Of course, what is unremarkable for one reader may be startling for another. An Iranian friend of mine told me that when he first moved to England for college he cold hardly resist laughing every time he met someone who was named for a color: Mr. Green, Mrs. Black, Mr. Brown, Miss Grey...

I'm rambling, here (and, yes, I'm stuck for a surname in my novel at the moment).

I prefer names to be somewhat evocative, but more enigmatic than emblematic. One of my favorites is Orwell's "Winston Smith," a pedestrian surname preceded by a Christian name with aspirations. It's a name you can spend some time considering, but also a name you can skate right across without a second glance. If you want to read something into it, you can, but it doesn't demand anything from the reader.

Ultimately, though, I pick names because I like the way they sound--and because, in my mind, they fit the character. By that I don't mean that they fit the character profile, or the character's thematic role. I mean that in in my mind's eye, if I call the character by that name, they answer.

========================
* n.b. English versus Americanlish:

An interesting divergence of usage has emerge in how our two countries use the word "called" with respect names. In the UK, "named" and "called" are apparently used interchangeably. In the UK, it seems that "In the village lived a man called Smith..." means nothing more than that there was a fellow whose name was Smith.

In Americanlish, "called" is generally used to identify a label for a person which is not the person's given name--that is, the person is named one thing, but called another: "The man named Smith was called Little Smith to distinguish him from the three other Smith families in town in the town..."

BRIT: "In the village lived a man called Smith..."

YANK: "Why did they call him that?"

BRIT: "Well, because it was his name, I suppose."

And a unassailably good reason for calling him that, too. But to the American ear, it seems as if an element of the story is being left out...

Babies and Stories: The Dirty Harry Effect

2010-05-11T00:15:00.000-07:00

A rather long article in the New York Times Magazine discusses recent research on the moral sense, if you can call it that, of infants. The psychology of babies is a fascinating but relatively new field. (Q: Do I get points for not calling it an "infant" field? A: No, not if I go ahead and say it anyway in this parenthetical.)

I don't plan to summarize the whole of the article. Instead, I want to concentrate on how babies' innate moral senses affect our sense of satisfaction with stories. (As to how babies preferences are determined in this research, you'll have to follow the link and read it there.)

The basic setup is this: Babies are shown a character attempting to do something. Two additional characters are then introduced: one who assists the character ("the helper"), and one who does things that frustrate the character in achieving its goal ("the hinderer").

First result: Babies tend to like the The Helper and to be repelled by The Hinderer. Simple enough. Surprising to those who think babies have no real consciousness, perhaps, but not to the rest of us.

To complicate matters, now introduce two other characters: The Rewarder and The Punisher. (These two characters either provide or take away treats from other characters).

Second results: Babies prefer The Rewarder to the Punisher. Again, not surprising. The Rewarder is being nice. The Punisher is being a bit unpleasant. The Rewarder is like The Helper, and the The Punisher is like the Hinderer.

But now it gets more subtle. First, let The Rewarder and The Punisher interact with The Helper. One might easily predict the outcome. The baby likes The Helper, and is also biased to like The Rewarder and dislike The Punisher, so naturally the baby approves of The Rewarder's actions, and is repelled by the unfair Punisher. Stands to reason: who's gonna like somebody who is mean to the nice one?

But the results are much more interesting when The Rewarder and The Punisher interact with The Hinderer. In this case, babies prefer The Punisher to The Rewarder. Even though they don't like The Punisher much as a character, they want to see The Hinderer punished (and, presumably, are driven a bit daffy if they see The Hinderer being rewarded).

I think of this as "The Dirty Harry Effect," from the iconic Clint Eastwood movies. Harry Callahan isn't anybody you might like, much less anybody a baby might like. He's brutal, breaks the law whenever his sense of justice demands it, and is about as far from being The Rewarder as one might imagine.

When the movie Dirty Harry first hit movie screens in the US, pundits attributed its popularity to many factors: The growing insecurity of white males, the sense of chaos in our urban centers, the frustration with the ineffective and uneven adminstration of criminal justice. Some even warned that the movie would spawn a wave of vigilantism in the country. (I think it had much the opposite effect; as with pornographic movies of the day, I suspect the viewers, erm, got it out of their systems in the theater.)

This new research shows that the appeal of the Dirty Harry setup runs deep. Even babies want to see the bad ones being punished--even though they are instinctively repelled by The Punisher. This appears to be innate in the human personality rather than something that is taught.

In some ways, this research is inspiring, suggesting a deep sense of justice and fairness in human nature. Before we break out the champagne and start toasting ourselves, however, other baby research reveals some rather disturbing further information. All things held equal, babies prefer others who are similar to themselves. As the article reports:

There’s plenty of research showing that babies have within-group preferences: 3-month-olds prefer the faces of the race that is most familiar to them to those of other races; 11-month-olds prefer individuals who share their own taste in food and expect these individuals to be nicer than those with different tastes; 12-month-olds prefer to learn from someone who speaks their own language over someone who speaks a foreign language. And studies with young children have found that once they are segregated into different groups — even under the most arbitrary of schemes, like wearing different colored T-shirts — they eagerly favor their own groups in their attitudes and their actions.

At an abstract level, we like justice; at a more concrete level, our reaction is to side with our tribe in the most simplistic ways, and justice be damned. Hello, Lord of the Flies.

Is Obama Moby Dick?

2010-05-06T08:48:00.000-07:00

First of all, let me say that I would have been happy to vote for Obama regardless of his race. And I suspect that there are many out there who would have been happy to vote against Obama regardless of his race. Nonetheless, it would be disingenuous to pretend that his race isn't a factor in how he is perceived.

It's weird to me that Obama, who is half Caucasian, is always referred to as "black;" but, then, Tiger Woods is always referred to as "black" rather than "Cambodian," so I guess any percentage black still trumps all in the eyes of both blacks and whites. But what is odder yet is that the world's most famous black man seems to be turning into the world's most famous White Whale.

Now, by the nature of the job, the President of the United States can't help but be something of a symbol. But in Obama's case his symbolic capacity seems limitless; people project a bewildering array of attributes and motives on to him. At first this seemed simple enough: the liberals saw him as a symbol of hope and progress, and the far right saw him as a symbol of creeping socialism and of the first days of The Last Days.

I find it exceedingly peculiar that Obama is perceived by the right as being either anti-Christian or even Muslim, while the left seems to overlook his deeply Christian religious history. Obama has far more Christian credentials--and fundamentalist Christian credentials at that--than a poseur like George W. Bush. But I guess it isn't really that odd in America: people with no combat experience or real military service, like Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush, are seen as "tough guys," while real combat heroes, like John Kerry or George Bush, Sr., are seen as "wimps." In light of all that, perhaps I shouldn't be surprised by Obama's White Whale status.

But the projections onto Obama seem to be at a whole new level of weirdness. I'll give just three examples.

1) Former New York Mayor Ed Koch, speaking to a crowd in Manhattan, described the Obama administration's push for a settlement freeze in East Jerusalem as an effort to "undermine the legitimacy of the state of Israel," and on Fox News (where else?) said, "I believe the Obama administration is willing to throw Israel under the bus in order to please the Muslim nations." Since every US adminstration I can recall has pressured Israel on the settlements issue, it's hard for me to understand this level of hysteria over something that is merely business as usual...except in the context of Obama as Symbol. Of something.

2) Listening to the radio yesterday, in the aftermath of the riots in Greece, a reporter was interviewing a young, angry business student who was criticizing the IMF's bailout terms. In broken English, which I won't attempt to render here, he said, "It's all because Obama wants to destroy the Euro so he can have a stronger dollar!"

Ill ignore the raw stupidity of the conjecture that the US is pushing for a stronger dollar at the time that we're trying to increase exports and cut imports. What's striking about this idea is that it's conceived of as Obama's doing. I've heard all manner of world-domination-via-the-IMF accusations hurled at the IMF and at perfidious American plutocrats or the shady New World Order, but I can't recall hearing anyone attribute US strategies vis-a-vis exchange-rate policy to the President personally. (I suppose this is something of a backhanded tribute to Obama. No one would ever have accused his predecessor of formulating international economic policy.)

3) Last week I was walking in downtown San Francisco and a young man with a clipboard accosted me on the sidewalk. At first glance he looked like a Greenpeace fundraiser, but he opened by saying, "Do you want to help save the US Space Program?"

Still walking, I offered that I had nothing against the US Space Program, but that I was on my way to an appointment.

He responded by shouting, "If you want to save the US Space Program, the first question we need to answer is: Where was Barack Obama really born?"

That makes my Top Ten Non Sequitur List--unless the young man was about to argue that Obama was in fact born on another planet and wanted to discourage space exploration for fear it might reveal his extraterrestrial origins. (That wouldn't be a non sequitur. Insane, maybe, but a logical train of deranged thought.) I almost regret not stopping to hear out his crackpot reasoning, but that would have violated one of the key commandments of living in California (#7: Never stop to talk to someone on the street in the Bay Area, even if you have to walk out into traffic to avoid them).

Critics have argued for decades now about the meaning of the White Whale, but, like any good symbol, Moby-Dick remains always present yet elusive. As for myself, I hope that I can some day introduce into one of my stories a symbol as powerful and yet open to interpretation as our first Black President.

The South, Part I

2010-04-19T19:29:00.000-07:00

I haven't spent a lot of time in the South, and much of the time I've spent there has been in areas that aren't the "classic" South (like Oak Ridge Tennessee--the city with the highest per capita concentration of PhDs in the nation--or Miami, which is more Cuban than Southern, or Houston and Dallas and Austin and San Antonio, which are, well, how do I put this?--Texan. Which is a whole different animal or two .)

In the last month, though, we've had call to be in Central Florida (Orlando, Tampa, St Petersburg, and a whole passel of dinky places in between), and South Carolina. Now, that's the real South, and, what's more, the swampy part. Which is okay with me. As a SoCal desert boy, any place with large volumes of fresh water (although "fresh" might not be the right adjective for swamp water) is exotic.

I live in Huntington Beach, not far from Disneyland--yes, the real Disneyland, the original Disneyland, which was conceived about the same time that I was, though my gestation was about 12 months shorter. That's in Orange County, California. By some strange Doppelganger logic, the latecomer Disney World is in Orlando, which is in...wait for it...Orange County, Florida.

Now, we had no desire to visit Disney World. We were in Florida to attend a wedding, which was on the other side of that (very skinny, and apparently flaccid) state. But it's easier and cheaper to fly into Orlando than just about anywhere else, so that's where we arrived, and where we booked our very cheap lodgings.

In case you haven't heard, Florida is an economic disaster area. We've had an economic slump in California, but Florida has slid several rungs down the evolutionary ladder, and now survives by eating a diet typical of Fiddler Crabs: theatre popcorn, detritus, and, when they can get it, plankton. Here is a sign posted in Orlando, and it was only one of many similar do-it-yourself cries for help.

In case you can't read it, this is advertising a one-bedroom, one-bath condo unti for $19 K--that is, $19,000. At today's exchange rates, that's about 12,500 British pounds, or 14,150 Euros. In other words, you can buy a modest apartment for the price of a decent used car. (If you want the place, the phone number is right at the bottom. If it's already sold, there's plenty more available.)

I have no urge to leave Orange County, California, for Orange County, Florida, but the economics are compelling. Anything here--and I mean anything--would cost literally ten times as much. But if I were going to leave California for the South, it wouldn't be for Florida. I'd rather go whole hog and relocate to, say, Faulkner country.

Still, the swamps are tempting. I'm one of those people who's drawn as much by ecosystems as by culture. And swamps are fascinating. I'm not going to wax poetic about fecundity and the waters of life, but a subtropical swamp is something to behold. Here's a picture I took of an alligator, out in the wild, in Florida--a medium-sized lady about six feet long, protecting her young. "Alligator" is a mangling of the Spanish "El Legarto," the lizard, and I must say that these beasts are The Lizard indeed; even the Lizard King, displacing Jim Morrison of The Doors.

Anywhere on the planet you can encounter something like this outside a zoo has some redeeming features, even if the local cuisine consists mostly of breaded deep-fried balls of lard. And, hey, if you have $19,000, you could live almost next to El Legarto. (Or is that La Legarta?)

Next stop, Charleston, South Carolina, where I promise to say something more writerly, since it's a literary city. I'm afraid Orlando and its environs aren't really that literary.

Though if prices stay down, I can imagine it might become a destination for expatriate European artists and writers who need a cheap place to play bohemian. Picture it. Orlando: the Left Bank of the 21st Century.

The Problems of Feedback, Support, and Critiques

2010-04-06T07:46:00.000-07:00

The always-readable Emma Darwin has a brilliant post on this broad topic. Anyone who has ever participated in a writing group, writing workshop, or writers' forum will find this interesting.

I was especially impressed by her insight that the critiquing style of the reviewer needs to match the listening style of the writer or the whole thrust of the critique may be missed or overinterpreted. This would be a good article to print out and distribute to writing groups or classes (and I plan to steer some of my acquaintances to it).

Evolutionary Benefits of Fiction

2010-04-01T10:14:00.000-07:00

A recent article in the New York Times discusses the hot new trend in English departments--the study of why we read fiction in the first place.

This is still far from being a cohesive area of study. Some are pursuing the idea that fiction provides models for altruistic cooperation, or other patterns of human interaction. This, of course, is an old idea, which harks back to Colin Wilson's contention that a novel is a "philosophical experiment." (Wilson meant this in the most literal, scientific sense: he argued that fiction acted as a lab experiment where we could take certain kinds of characters, situations, and approaches to life, and set them in motion to see the results.)

Others think that fiction is innately attractive because constructing theories as to the inner workings of the minds of others--their "intentionalities," in the jargon of the studies--has an intrinsic evolutionary value to creatures as social as humans. Included are level problems of tracking who knows what--does Tim know that Jill knows that Bob knows about X? Scholars who puzzle over such things have decided that Virginia Woolf is often difficult because she is demanding that the reader track too many different minds and intentions.

A researcher with the marvelous (if implausible--but this is nonfiction, here) name of Lisa Zunshine claims that our ability to track states of knowledge drops off quickly when more than three minds are included. The article gives the example of "“Peter said that Paul believed that Mary liked chocolate” as a case that we can follow with some degree of ease; add another link in that chain, and our comprehension of what is happening drops off quickly.

Furthermore, Zunshine and others claim that following the interaction of three minds has an innate draw for humans. That's certainly true; while the protagonist/antagonist duo are the pillars of classical storylines, it's hard to get a story rolling without throwing in a third element to thicken the plot; and what's a love story without a triangle?

I've also read elsewhere that most primitive arithmetics use a counting system which itemizes as "One...Two...Three...Many." Some psychologists have argued that the brain has an innate understanding of one, two, and three, but that when we see larger numbers, we "re-chunk" them; that is, when we see three people walking down the street, we know instantly we are seeing three people, but when we see four people, our initial impression is that we see "many," which we promptly chunk into, say, two pairs of people to arrive at four. And why not? After all, we live in three dimensions.

The article also reports that some of the fiction researchers are hoping to deploy the current sexy science device, the MRI brain scan, to study changes in the brain while we consume fiction.

I have to confess a high degree of skepticism about MRI brain imaging. Last year Science News published a short review of the statistical and interpretive problems with such studies, highlighted by by a study where emotional reactions were traced in the brain of a salmon when it was shown humans engaged in various activities. It would be amazing if a fish were reacting to such stimuli in a predictable way, but what was truly fascinating about this particular experiment is that the fish was dead.

Either there are some basic flaws in how this data is analyzed (which the Science News article argues most convincingly), or fish consciousness survives death, and hangs around the region of the fish's body before passing to the Great Beyond.

In any case, we will soon have more pictures (possibly of questionable value) of Your Brain On Fiction. And, with a bit of luck, perhaps we'll also know how many levels of intentionality a fish can track.

What's up with "Could"?

2010-03-25T07:27:00.000-07:00

I suppose the title of this post doesn't convey my question very well.

What I'm wondering about is why I see so many narratives where we are told that some "could see" or "could hear" something. For example:

She could see the ducks in the pond.

Or

He could hear the rumble of trucks on the nearby freeway.

Why "could"? (Which is one of those words that starts looking odd after you've written it too many times...)

In the case of the first example, the author might have instead written

She saw the ducks in the pond.

Or even, if we are clearly embedded in her POV,

The ducks paddled across the pond. (etc)

Why the "could see" construction? When I read it too many times, I find myself asking, "She could see? But what? She could, but chose not to? She could see, but instead put her hands over her eyes?"

Now, there are completely legitimate uses of this construction, especially when it follows a change in conditions:

Standing on the box, he could see over the fence

Or

Once he turned off the car's engine, he could hear the chirping of the crickets in the field.

But the longer I think about it, the less I like

He could hear the chirping of the crickets in the field.

all on its own. Obviously the writer is telling us that he heard them, not that he could have but overlooked them, or the writer would have said something like

Were he not so distracted by his mobile phone, he could have heard the chirping of the crickets in the field.

So why are some writers so tempted to avoid saying

He heard the chirping of the crickets in the field. ?

It has an air of the hypothetical case about it. Are people drawn to the "could" construction because it's a little weasely? My dictionary notes that could is sometimes used as "an alternative to can suggesting less force or certainty or as a polite form in the present ". In other words, yes, weasely (which in my opinion usually weakens fiction).

Or perhaps it simply has a fine, slightly archaic ring to it (as it were)? I was at a graduation ceremony not too long ago where I heard the slightly formal hypothetical used in an unending stream. As each graduate was announced, we heard something like

John Richard Smith...John would like to thank his parents, and Mrs. Jones at the school library.

Uh-huh. He would like to, but he can't? He'd like to, but is having us do it instead? I, well, could think of reasons he would like to but won't, and after I hear a speaker repeat 'would like to thank' a dozen times, I not only could think of reasons, but I actually do think of reasons. He'd like to, but at the moment he's too stoned to talk. He'd like to, but unfortunately they never helped him, and in fact were the major impediment to his success. He'd like to, but he was captured by Moorish pirates and had his tongue cut out.

(Hey, it helps pass the time. If there's any thing more boring than a graduation ceremony, I never want to attend it.)

I note that could and would are both similar, very old words. And when I think about it, should is pretty fuzzy, too. It must be those -ould words--shifty and circumlocutive.

Of course, I exclude from this category -ould words like mould, which is a very different matter. But perhaps that's why on this side of the Atlantic we spell it mold. I could believe that. I would like to believe that.

I should be ending this post now.

Working Titles

2010-03-11T21:50:00.000-08:00

Over on his blog, Tim Stretton mentions that, despite possible uphill publication battles, he is immersed in his next Mondia novel (to which fans of Dog of the North and Dragonchaser, amongst whom I am numbered, can only say, Bravo and The Sooner the Better.)

He discussed many aspects of this venture, but the one that drew most comments was the fact the he hadn't yet chosen a working title. A couple of novelists I won't name (okay, he said, breaking down at the first threat of torture, they were Aliya Whiteley and LC Tyler) were a bit surprised that Tim didn't have a working title. Indeed, Tim himself seemed a bit surprised, though not really bothered.

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A digression: Working Title Films is a great Irish/British/Hollywoodish production company, whose name has always amused me. (Wingnut Films, Peter Jackson's production company, is equally well-named.) Working Title has produced big films like Atonement and Elizabeth and Pride and Prejudice, offbeat films like Bob Roberts and The Tall Guy, Richard Curtis' Four Weddings and a Funeral and Love Actually, the two wonderful Simon Pegg vehicles Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, and most of the Coen Brothers films from The Big Lebowski and Fargo on down to their recent A Serious Man. (If you haven't seen A Serious Man, check it out. Truly original, peculiar, and delightful.)

I've always wondered how many of their films really had working titles different from their release titles. (Other than Atonement and Pride and Prejudice, of course.)
------------------------

Based on a highly scientific survey of the field I have ascertained that authors can be sorted into four classes on this issue:

1) Those who must have a title to proceed, even if it is likely to be changed. Aliya and Len fall into this camp. There is something admittedly seductive about a good title. It is fraught with potential and promise. Tim joked that he was calling his new novel War of the Midget Trolls, and I don't think there was a follower of his blog who didn't want to read that book. Of course, I can't see any way that a book with that title would fit into the aesthetic of Mondia, but it's an irresistable, pulpy, preposterous title that almost makes you want to write the book yourself if Tim won't. (War of the Albanian Dwarves is equally provocative, though that's off in Whiteleyland.)

Titles can be a kind of muse or irritant, and some writers flourish with them, flounder without them, and basically can't function unless they have them on at least a temporary basis. About half the writers I know seem to be in this camp.

2) Those who discover titles--sometimes many of them--somewhere along the way. I'm in this bunch. I don't mind calling it Untitled or My Current Book or Work in Progress or The Effing Novel until something leaps out and grabs me. And even then I'm not married to it until I'm near the home stretch.

And, as it turns out, however, even if I'm married to it by the end, I'm not really a till-death-do-us-part kind of guy on the title thing. I'm kind of attached to my title by the end, but, hey--was she really all that better than Untitled or My Latest Thing? Come to think of it, the other titles were less demanding, more affectionate, and didn't leave their pantyhose hanging on the shower-curtain rod to dry. So when my publisher suggests another title might work better, I'm quite capable of dumping the one that has emerged over the course of the novel.

In this I don't think I'm more of a sinner than the writers who have to have a title from the outset. Okay, I made a mistake, but we acted like adults, and our ways parted without a lawsuit or coverage in People Magazine.

I had a long lonely time in the world of Untitled before I discovered The Right Title, and then I dropped The Right Title for The New Title, who was younger and had fewer wrinkles, less emotional baggage, and support from my publisher, but I don't see that this makes me a bad person.

Well, okay, in fact it does make me a bad person, but it's certainly no worse than the writers in Category 1) above. They commmited to titles, real titles, knowing all along that those titles weren't Ms Right, just Ms Right Now. (Those of different genders and/or sexual orientations and/or states of feminist awareness are invited to insert Mr, Miss, or whatever title pleases into the previous sentence.)

I can live with the uncertainty of Untitled for quite some time. In fact, I fancy it gives me an air of mystery--sitting alone at a table in a cafe with no title beside me, a far-away look in my eye. It makes me want to adopt a slight accent, or perhaps obtain a good imitation of a Heidelberg dueling scar on my cheek.

"What are you working on?" they ask. "What's it called?"

A weary sigh from me. "I'm not sure yet." A languid, French throwaway gesture with an uplifted palm. "Ah. The title." Shrug. "She will come when she pleases."

This can also be done in Zen Monk form, with remarks about not pushing the river because it flows by itself.

Truth is, I wish I had a title before I started writing. It just doesn't work like that for me.

I believe I'm in about a quarter of all writers in this Untitled/Soon-to-be-Titled crowd. Which gets us to perhaps 75% of the writing community.

3) The third group of writers--almost another quarter of the whole, which gets us near to one hundred percent--claims they have working titles, but they aren't fooling themselves or anyone else who is beyond the age of believing in the Easter Bunny. A lot of famous writers fall into this class. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, even pop writers like Margaret Mitchell, all settled on titles--and sometimes title after title--that are so irredeemably stupid and unmarketable that they are either designed to make listeners change the subject, or are carefully constructed strategems to force their editors and publishers to think hard about a decent title and allow the writer to get on with his or her work.

Gone With the Wind. A nice title. But earlier she claimed it would be called Tote the Weary Load, or Pansy, or Tomorrow is Another Day. Yeah, sure. Those have bestseller written all over them.

The Great Gatsby. Iconic, no? Except perhaps when it was named Trimalchio in West Egg, or Hurrah for the Red, White and Blue, or The High-Bouncing Lover. Scotty was a master of language, so I have to believe he was having us on.

And, of course, Hemingway was the master of offering titles he could never have intended. A Farewell to Arms is good. But The Sentimental Education of Frederick Henry, or Those Who Get Shot, or Love in Italy...well, come on. Did he ever really believe those were the titles?

I'm not sure if the writers in this class simply rattle off titles as a way of telling folks to Go Away, or if they want to get their editors working on titles that fit the market, and hope to strike fear into their publishing hearts with preposterous possiblities. But it's pretty clear to me that this crowd of of writers are disingenuous. Their books are really called Untitled until the last minute, and in the interim they'll call them any damn thing that comes to mind, which amounts to the same thing.

4) David Thayer. As far as I know, Mr Thayer is the sole occupant of this class, though there may be others. David calls every new novel the same thing--in his case, An Aztec in Central Park--until the final title comes to him.

It's not that David's bad with titles. Some of the ones he's settled on for various books--Tossing the Jack, The Working Dead, Flamingo Dawn--are evocative and potent. But all of these at some point or another were An Aztec in Central Park.

Problem is, David recently wrote a novel that involved--you guessed it--a person of Mexican ancestry, with a good deal of Aztec blood, who spends some time in Central Park. And the title got attached to that book, because, well, it was a sort of irrevocable molecular attraction.

I'm not sure how David gets through his novels now that his Single Working Title has been abducted. It's the problem I'd face if I suddenly wrote a book and settled on Untitled.

But there you have it. Those who use titles as a sort of muse; those who grope for titles; and those who claim to have titles when they are still waiting for inspiration (or suggestions) to arrive.

And those who call everything An Aztec in Central Park.

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PS. I don't really call everything Untitled. Like the Jews after they'd settled down from their wanderings in the wilderness, and like the Christians ages later, I just call whatever I'm struggling with The Book.

Or, sometimes, The Goddamned Book.

Hey, come to think of it, that's not a bad title...

Failure and Experience

2010-03-03T12:56:00.000-08:00

Ryan David Jahn has a stimulating post on the myriad ways our works fail, and the extent to which we can be embarrassed by our early efforts...or even, in retrospect, by our published efforts.

His assessment, like Paul Valery's observation about poems, is that a work is never really finished, only abandoned. The hope, I suppose, is that as we mature we do our reworking more completely and more expeditiously, and therefore abandon our fiction a little more closely to the ideal, unattainable, point of true completion.

I can't argue with that. But reading RDJ's description of his filing cabinets full of early stories and novels--works he now sees as having been nowhere near as good as they could have been--has made me reflect on the role of experience in our writing process.

I'm not talking about life experience here. I'm familiar with the belief that a wide experience of life and years of hard knocks are vital seasoning for a writer (though I'm not sure I entirely buy it. For every Ernest Hemingway or Jack London you can name, I can give you back a Stephen Crane or F. Scott Fitzgerald, or, best of all, an Emily Dickinson. Some writers get lifetimes of perspective from the merest crumbs of life experience.) What I think is often overlooked is writing experience--the sheer number and variety of works undertaken.

I've seen any number of writers spend years writing and rewriting the same novel, to the exclusion of all other projects, and this kind of dedication is often extolled as the kind of devotion that singles out the true writers--the Joyces, the Flauberts. Real writing is rewriting, we are told, and this is so widely repeated by writers that one must take it seriously. (Though I also take Byron seriously when he said, "...I can never recast anything. I am like the tiger. If I miss the first spring, I go grumbling back to my jungle again; but if I do hit, it is crushing.")

There are many metaphors and analogies for the novel, from Colin Wilson's "philosophical experiment" to the various architectural images on down to the concept of a journey or expedition. All are valid. And no one wants a sloppy experiment or a slapped-together cathedral or a stumbling-blind journey. Fair enough.

Yet there is a kind of knowledge and skill which cannot be gained by the meticulous reworking of a single novel. Failed novels and stories are, as RDJ notes, often blush-inducing (despite occasional flashes of quality). Yet I think these failures are valuable in terms of writing experience. The range of characters, the different approaches to style, the possible story structures--and all of the ways those can either fail or enhance a work--are the kind of bone-deep understanding that comes only from experience.

What's my point? I suppose I'm saying that, as everyone (except Byron) agrees, rewriting is vital. But so is first-draft writing itself. Most of us are standing atop a considerable stack of unpublished and unpublishable work. Do I wish I had stayed focused on improving that first novel I cranked out? Not really. I learned from my efforts at rewriting it, but I think I learned much more by moving on to the next, and the next...

And, who knows? Maybe I'll go back and do more rewriting on some of those old manuscripts some day.

Meanwhile, I'll go grumbling back to my jungle.

My Year in Review

2010-02-16T16:04:00.000-08:00

The past twelve months have not been amongst my favorites. In fact, to use the scientific term, they have pretty much sucked. That, however, was the past twelve. Like someone who missed New Years because of a coma and has now awakened, I presently feel free to resolve to have a better year this time around.

On February 17th of 2009, they discovered I had severe high blood pressure, and the fun began. A good percentage of my blood pressure problem was real, but an equal percentage was what’s called “white coat hypertension,” which is an exaggerated blood pressure response to being in a doctor’s office. At least 20 percent of the population suffers from white coat syndrome, which means that, despite all the ranting by public health officials about the dangers of undiagnosed hypertension, literally tens of millions of people are taking blood pressure medications they don’t need.

It’s been quite a ride, and everything that I’ve discovered along the way has made me wary of the medical system. I’m a member of Kaiser Permanente, a large HMO, which has some benefits; they have a wide-ranging system, and also keep all their records electronically so that anyone anywhere can pull them up with the touch of a button. But Kaiser also makes system-wide policy decisions that are based on research that, although it has been adopted by government panels as best practice, is around twenty years out of date and considered ridiculous or even dangerous by scientists engaged in current research.

The systems first response was to put me on medication. (As the doctor in Urgent Care told me as she wrote the prescription, “You should count on taking these for the rest of your life. People always say they’ll make diet and lifestyle changes, but I’ve never seen anyone do it.” Good attitude, huh?)

When I complained to my primary physician about side effects from the first drug (an ACE inhibitor), he responded by adding two more—a beta-blocker and a thiazide diuretic. He also—without asking how much salt I ate—ordered me to cut down on salt.

Now, I was losing weight at a good clip, and also exercising. In particular, I was doing a lot of Bikram Yoga, which is a strenuous practice done in a room heated to 104 F. So if there was anyone in the world who didn’t need a diuretic, and who needed higher salt intake, it ws me. But the doctor paid no attention to this, with the result that I passed out after one class, and had a mild seizure at home on another occasion (because of natropenia, or lack of sodium).

Now, many people take beta-blockers, and get nothing but benefits. But beta-blockers work by suppressing the sympathetic nervous system—and they actually prevent your heart rate from rising much. It’s a godawful feeling, exercising and having your heart refuse to respond. And I’m one of those people who responds to beta-blockers by becoming severely depressed. After only two weeks on them, I was starting my day by getting out of bed and sitting down on the floor and sobbing. Every day I felt worse, and, quite frankly, suicide began to seem like an attractive option compared to going on like that.

And why didn’t I contact my doctor? Because I no longer trusted him in any degree. So I stopped taking the beta-blocker, even though the label warns you that discontinuing the drug abruptly can be dangerous or fatal. To tell the truth, dying from stopping the damn drug seemed more attractive than continuing to take it.

I felt better immediately. Not great, mind you, but as if I might want to live. And I went through the tedious process of changing primary-care physicians, which at Kaiser is sort of like rolling dice. But I got lucky; my new doctor was far more reasonable. When I told him I had stopped the beta-blocker, instead of lecturing me, he remarked that I should have never been on it in the first place, and he promptly took me off the diuretic as well. In addition, he told me that new research showed that only a small percentage of people had their blood pressure increased by salt intake, and that an equal percentage of people had their blood pressure increase when they limited their sodium intake, and that he thought that in most cases the “authorities” were a decade behind the times.

Of course, Kaiser policy is to counsel severely limiting salt. And beta-blockers and diuretics are both considered by Kaiser to be first-line treatments for all cases of high blood pressure.

As it turns out, recent research shows that long-term use of both beta-blockers and diuretics are diabetogenic—that is, in many people (and perhaps everyone, if administered long enough), they cause adult-onset (Type II) diabetes. We are constantly hearing about the epidemic of Type II diabetes, and hear about the need for diet and exercise, but no one seems to want to discuss the fact that the many cases of diabetes are probably the result of years of taking these safe, proven blood-pressure drugs.

Kaiser is so behind the times that they are still focused on cholesterol and LDL cholesterol. It isn’t surprising when Joe Public believes that cholesterol causes heart disease; he’s had that message hammered at him since the 1970s. But Kaiser ought to know better. A recent editorial in Cardiovascular Drugs and Therapy (told you I’d learned a lot in the last year) says that the link between cholesterol and heart disease “…continues in popular folklore and government dietary policies but it seems to have been quietly dropped by most cholesterol-heart researchers.”

Indeed. Part of the confusion is because of the bestselling statin drugs, which lower cholesterol. These drugs have been shown to have some cardiovascular benefits, but it has been conclusively demonstrated that they do create these benefits by lowering cholesterol! (When a non-statin cholesterol-lowering drug, ezetimbe, was recently tested, it dramatically lowered cholesterol…and displayed no cardiovascular benefits whatsoever.) Statins do something beneficial (and also have a huge number of terrible side effects), but these appear to have nothing to do with cholesterol. Some people think that they have a useful anti-inflammatory effect; other researchers have shown that they increase circulating levels of Vitamin D. (The drug companies aren’t enthusiastic about the latter possibility, since it would mean their expensive drugs could be replaced by a cheap, safe vitamin.) But, of course, Kaiser pushes hard for anyone with blood pressure issues to get started on statins, despite the risk of liver damage and memory loss.

So, I'm pretty much in the position of having to ignore my HMO; they seem to know roughly as much about health research as your average TV news anchor. I concentrate on the things I can control. I’ve lost about 60 pounds, and actually gained some muscle; my body fat percentage is now below 12 percent. My blood pressure is generally around normal--unless I have to go to the doctor.

But although I’m healthier, it’s been a drag getting here. Working, or writing, have been nigh unto impossible. I have to get myself into something of a hyper state to do either, and—surprise, surprise!—doing so pushes my blood pressure up.

In the earlier months, an hour or two of working or writing took my blood pressure up into the danger zone. As I’ve gotten healthier, the increases are more moderate, but a good session at the keyboard still takes my blood pressure up to sketchy levels. The solution, I’ve found, is to do the work, but then blow it out of my system by following it with intense exercise. My blood pressure plummets after yoga or a run, often dropping down to 95/60.

It’s been kind of a wasted year, especially from a writing point of view. But that all changes tomorrow. It’s New Years, right?

Microsoft versus Amazon

2010-02-03T09:18:00.000-08:00

A reader of this blog (well, to be precise, it was my mom) sent me a news article about a recent court decision in favor of i4i Corporation against Microsoft. It seems that Microsoft violated some of i4i's patent rights in a recent version of Microsoft Word, and will have to pay a fine and cease selling copies of the program that contain the illegal code. (Microsoft plans to have a compliant version for sale almost immediately.)

What my mother points out is that Microsoft did not respond by reaching out into our computers and yanking out the violating copies of Word. Nor did the court, nor the plaintiff, suggest that this would be a reasonable course of action--even though Microsoft has access to most of our computers through its online updates.

Amazon Scares Me

2010-01-30T09:40:00.000-08:00

It has been reported that, because of a pricing dispute over e-books, Amazon US has removed Macmillan books from its website. It's not just the e-books that have been removed; all of the Macmillan US book imprints have been hit, including some of Macmillan's biggest cash cows.

It takes a while to see what has happened. For example, if you search on Robert Jordan (published by Macmillan subsidiary Tor), you are steered to plenty of titles--but they all turn out to be used copies from third-party sellers. This, of course, is even nastier than pulling the title entirely, since it encourages customers to buy only from sources that don't benefit the author or the publisher.

Amazon is not a monopoly, but its market share is so large that I think it ought to be treated like one. No matter what the provocation, this move is an abuse of power that is a slap in the face not only to publishers, but to customers.

Amazon has been worrying me for a while now. You probably recall the flap when Amazon "recalled" digital books from its Kindle devices last year, automatically erasing all copies of certain digital editions of books they had already sold and downloaded. (Ironically, as the NY Times article linked to notes, Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm were among the books that Amazon seized and destroyed.) Until then, most Kindle owners weren't aware that Amazon could reach out and destroy copies of books that readers had already bought.

Now, Amazon has said that they won't do this again; and it isn't clear from the Kindle contracts that they had the right to do this in the first place. But I find the fact that they have the power to do such a thing to be frightening--and the best argument that can be made against digital books.

It has always been hard for even the most devoted book-burners to eliminate all the copies of a book once it is printed. But with digital books on wireless readers, all copies could be obliterated at the touch of a single button in some central office. And even if Amazon claims they would never do such a thing, what would prevent a government from compelling them to do so? (In fact, what would prevent, say, the NSA or the government of China from hacking in to the Amazon computer and simply doing it themselves?)

It doesn't take much of a sci-fi magination to suggest that if Kindle-type devices become the sole medium of book distribution in the future that the whole of literature and written history would become deletable--or worse, rewritable--by whoever is in power. The Stalinists would have loved a Kindle-based library system; whenever they wanted to rewrite history, they had to send men to the libraries with razor blades, glue, and new pages, a process that was both cumbersome and also obvious even after the deed was done.

Side note: When we lived in Hawaii back in the early 1980s, a Soviet commercial vessel developed mechanical problems and was towed into Honolulu Harbor for repairs. As a goodwill gesture by the US government, the crew not needed onboard were issued temporary visas and allowed shore leave.

And we all know what sailors do when they get onshore, right? Well, not Soviet sailors. Instead of heading for the downtown brothels and bars, to our wonderment, they all piled onto public buses and rode up to the University of Hawaii, where they headed for the history section of the library. Those who knew English proceded to pore through history books and encyclopedias, and fielded questions from those who only spoke Russian.

At about this same time, I had a number of young Chinese researchers working with me at the East-West Center--some of the first Chinese who had been allowed to train in the West. In discussions, I found that some of what they accepted as historical fact was more than a bit surprising. For example, they had all been taught that the American Civil War wasn't between American states, but instead was a massive uprising of black slaves against the whites--a revolution where the blacks won their freedom. (Why the victorious former slaves then agreed to form a poverty-ridden underclass was left as a mystery.) For their part, they were shocked we all believed that astronauts had ever landed on the moon, since they had seen proof--positive, incontrovertible proof--that the moon landings were done in Hollywood studios. (It should be clear to anyone that if this were the case, the footage and special effects would have been far more impressive than the home-movies look the actual landings generated.) End of digression.

And, of course, it wasn't that long ago that a "glitch" caused Amazon to de-rank thousands of books--an overwhelmingly high proportion of which were Lesbian or Gay Themed Books (LGTBs, in the trade).

I've heard a lot lately about how digital communications, wireless connectivity, and the internet make it impossible for information to be controlled in today's world. Perhaps. But the Chinese and Iranians have both been quite successful in using the internet to spy on their own dissidents, and Amazon has now shown how it will someday be possible for governments or businesses--and, in the near future, the two will be indistinguishable--to engage in comprehensive and lasting censorship.

In the United States, anyone who makes a billion dollars in technology-related fields is praised as a "visionary," and Jeff Bezos, Amazon's founder, is one of those who is widely adulated and invited to speak at government gatherings. I used to be somewhat contemptuous of him, as I didn't see anything visionary or uplifting about what he has achieved. Yes, he has been very financially successful, but all he has done is carried retail sales onto a new platform, the achievement of an uber-techno sales clerk. If he hadn't done it first, someone else would have been right behind. And while Bill Gates has many annoying features, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is doing billions of praiseworthy work around the globe for the the neediest, Bezos' latest "visionary" scheme is space tourism for billionaires (estimates of the price tag for a trip into space are about $3 million per customer). Bezos' plan is a self-indulgent moneymaking scheme; Gates' foundation is the largest philanthropic effort ever undertaken. It hasn't been hard for me to decide which of these guys is the visionary.

So, while I used to think Bezos was just a glorified department-store owner, I've changed my view. The guy's a visionary after all. He's created a bullying, arrogant company that is leading the way to a future where businesses or governments will have total control over what we can and cannot read; and, best of all, retroactive control, so the past can be rewritten.

Think I'm overstating things? Just wait and see.

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*Update: Amazon's delisting of Macmillan books is not limited simply to US subsidiaries. Amazon has also disappeared Macmillan New Writing books from its sales. As of this writing, Terence Morgan's Master of Bruges is available only from second-hand sellers on Amazon, but not as a new copy from Amazon itself.

I'm happy to report that Pan paperbacks have been spared this fate--but persumably only because no one at Amazon has worked out that they ar epart of Macmillan.

====================
Second Update:

Ryan David Jahn has covered this fiasco in some detail on his blog, including multiple links and updates. Go check it out. I'm also grateful to him for pointing out John Scalzi's blistering response.

Ultimately, though, the question is why, if Macmillan and Amazon cannot come to terms on ebooks, Amazon's response wasn't simply to refuse to carry Macmillan's ebooks on terms they found objectionable. And the answer is simple: they are bullies who are trying to exert monopoly power. As Teresa Nielsen Hayden (an editor at Tor, last time I checked) notes in her comments on Cory Doctorow's post on the topic:

'Does anyone recall that Amazon has done this before? They pulled every POD title because they wanted POD publishers to print their books exclusively via Amazon's CreateSpace. This isn't a case of "If they do it once, they can do it again." They have done it before, and it's clear that they have no hesitation about doing it again.'

Book Review: Born to Run

2010-01-20T16:10:00.000-08:00

No, it’s not a biography of Bruce Springsteen. The full title is Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen.

Now, normally I wouldn’t have picked up a book about running. The list of nonfiction topics that interest me more stretches for miles.

But Pamela—who runs well, and ran well back in high school—recently bought a pair of Vibram Five Fingers—a sort of foot-glove with no cushioning, not arch support, no ankle support. I was curious about the rationale and research on the VFFs, and so I browsed the web a bit, and found myself repeatedly directed to Born to Run. So on my next trip to a bookstore, I picked up a copy, opened it to the first page, and found myself hooked.

McDougall is a sports journalist, but he mixes much of the craft and structure of the novel with his story. It opens in media res, in a small town in Mexico’s Sierra Madre where McDougall is trying to find an elusive gringo called Caballo Blanco, the White Horse. According to hearsay that smacks of legend, White Horse is a crazy American runner who has drifted into the near-inaccessible Copper Canyon region, where the Tarahumara Indians still preserve much of their traditional way of life—including a peyote-based religion and footraces that stretch fifty to a hundred miles.

By four pages in, McDougall has found White Horse, and when he tries to speak to him, the Horse bolts for the door. End of chapter.

In the next chapter, McDougall says, “It all began with a question no on could answer…in January, 2001, I asked my doctor this: ‘How come my foot hurts?’”

Because, as it turns out, McDougall is one of those guys like me—one of those people that make sports docs shake their heads and say, “Well, some people just aren’t built for running.”

From there, the story jumps around in time, leaving threads hanging, leaving big questions outstanding, and generally employing the techniques of a suspense novelist. We journey into druglord country and meet the Tarahumara; then back in chronology to the 1994 Leadville 100, the annual high-altitude, hundred-mile race in Colorado, where a few Tarahumara showed up, won the race with ease, and then—poof!—vanished back to Copper Canyon.

We also meet the American Ultrarunners, a handful of truly odd people who run ultramarathons (distances in excess of 50 miles). Scott Jurek, probably the world’s leader in this kind of competition, is a sort of happy Zen geek, and he seems the most normal of the lot. Among the others are Jenn Shelton, a young, innocent-looking, hard-drinking riot of a Grrrrrl who shows up—and wins—ultraraces when hung over from too much pizza and beer the preceding night; Barefoot Ted, a manic, nonstop-talking maniac who runs 100-mile wilderness trails barefoot; the mysterious Caballo Blanco himself, whose biography is stranger than fiction by far; and other equally colorful characters. (I might add that ultrarunners are a different breed from other athletes. There really isn't much money in it, if any, so they're more like a club than competitors; there are many cases where a runner has stopped for prolonged periods to make sure another runner is okay to continue. See if you ever catch top marathoners letting their finish time slip by five minutes to help another runner.)

McDougall and Blanco eventually decide to hold an ultrarace in Tarahumara country; this time the gringos will come to los Indios. And, as a kicker, McDougall—who can’t run a mile without pain—decides to train up and compete himself.

Now, suddenly, the whole book veers off into a new structure, alternating chapters of science with the adventure of getting to and running the race in Copper Canyon, but by this point no reader would want to put the book aside (and the science is anything but dull). The science argument McDougall marshals is too complex to treat with any justice here, but to try and summarize a few points:

Humans evolved for running. We are the only primates with Achilles tendons to capture recoil from our feet. We are the only primates with nuchal ligaments, which stabilize the head when moving fast. Our close relatives, the chimps and apes don’t have a nuchal ligament. Horses do, though. So do wolves.

Did I mention that humans evolved for running? Quadrupeds compress their lungs with every stride, and therefore they are stuck in a pattern of one stride cycle = one breath. Humans can breathe in whatever pattern they like. Our upright stance may be entirely an adaptation for endurance running. (All the other explanations I've heard for why we are bipedal have been quite unconvincing.) Furthermore, we’ve lost most of the fur on our bodies so we can perspire all over; most mammals have to dump heat entirely by panting, which works fine for a while but isn't naerly as efficient as our acres of sweat glands.

It now appears that, back in the days when the Neanderthals were the big hunters on the block, already equipped with spears and fire, our direct ancestors down in Africa were obtaining most of their meat by chasing down prey, what is known as “persistence hunting.” We weren’t faster than many animals, but we had the endurance to chase them hour after hour, until they had nothing left and just stood staring at us, panting and helpless, as we closed in on them.

Kinda creepy, really.

So, if we evolved for running, why do most runners get injured? Answer: Shoes.

Running shoes encourage bad technique. We land on our heels and steer the impact up into our knees and ankles. No one would land on their heel running barefoot—or, if they did so, they wouldn’t do it twice. Our feet are filled with sensory feedback neurons along with a positively geodesic network of bones and tendons. Our feet tell us how to run, and if we run incorrectly, it will hurt—not later, not with a delay, but right then. Watch a top Kenyan or Ethiopian runner—all of whom learned to run barefoot—and you won’t see a long, reaching stride with a hard landing. Even though they tend to be lanky and leggy, they run with light steps and short strides, and a very rapid pace.

Running barefoot tends to make the runner move with the light, quick touch that someone shows when walking barefoot on hot pavement or pointy gravel. No crashing down. Little, light, fast steps.

Running with massive padded running shoes is the foot equivalent of running blindfolded, and the more specialized running shoes have become, the higher the rate of injury. (Even Nike has finally realized this, which is the origin of the minimalist running shoe, the Nike Free.)

All of those sports-medicine corrections and orthotics for pronation and supination? It turns out our feet are supposed to roll and flex at every step. The human foot--what Da Vinci called "the masterpiece of engineering"--is designed to not only absorb and spread impact, but also to capture some of the energy of impact and utilize it for recoil. Encase your foot in a shoe designed to keep the foot from rolling through its full range of motion and you have eliminated not only a self-protection mechanism, but also a means for running with less energy expenditure.

The Tarahumara don’t run barefoot. They run in huaraches, sandals that are no more than a thin piece of tire rubber that ties on to the foot. This is enough to protect from puncture woulds, but not enough to imprison the feet or prevent feedback from the ground.

In early December, I bought a pair of VFFs, and went for a very tentative, very cautious run. You can feel the gravel under the soles of your feet. Put you foot down heel-first and you will gasp in pain—and you will adjust how you run.

My calves have been sore since December—sometimes a mild soreness, like I’ve had a good workout with weights, sometimes a more pressing soreness that told me I had pushed a little too far too soon. But I now have almost 100 miles on my VFFs, and my knees and ankles and hips all feel fine.

In other words, I’m a believer. I’ll never be a great runner, but if I feel like getting some exercise by running a half dozen miles, I can now do it without fear of injury. It’s one of the things all humans were designed to do.

And McDougall’s book? Yes, they finally do have the race, though for a time it seems it won’t be possible.

But it would be wrong of me to tell you how it all ends. You actually might want to read it. And, if you do, and you’re a writer, stop every so often to admire McDougall’s command of structure. Tricky, tricky, tricky storytelling.

A Book Review That Never Gets to the Book Review

2010-01-17T12:11:00.000-08:00

This is a book review. Really. Problem is, I seem to have such a lengthy preamble below that I don’t get to the book. I'll review it in the next post. Promise

Let me make something clear from the outset: I’m not a runner kind of guy.

Oh, I’ve tried over the years. It goes something like this. 1) Make up my mind to take up running. 2) Run a few times. 3) Develop persistent pain, usually in knee. 4) Take time off until knee stops hurting. 5) Run again, this time injuring knee within minutes. 6) Repeat perhaps five cycles of 4) and 5). 7) See sports medicine doctor, who prescribes orthotics and increasingly boat-sized running shoes. 8) Re-injure self anyway. 9) See doctor again, who says, “You know, some people just aren’t built for running.” 10) Quit for a long time.

Now, it’s a bit odd to me that I can walk forever, or even rack up 20-mile days wearing a full backpack, and suffer nary an ache or pain. Start up even a slow jog, however, and every step is a danger to my knees. And ankles. And those around me, upon whom I might topple.

When a doctor tells me some people aren’t built for running, I’m inclined to accept the analysis. When I was young, my legs were all out of whack; I was born so pigeon-toed and knock-kneed that they used to make me wear these painful leg braces at night that twisted my feet outwards so that my toes pointed to the wall. To this day I have spectacular turnout, but that really only useful if you’re a ballet dancer.

On top of this, I have what one doctor described as “Irish knees,” which sounds like a build-up to a joke, but isn’t. In this condition, the thighbone is more-or-less above the shinbone, as ought to be the case, but the knee is offset inward. As the doctor pointed out, this makes for quite a handsomely shaped leg (especially in women), with a flow and shape to it; but, alas, it leaves something to be desired in a mechanical sense.

As if all that weren’t enough, I have what is commonly called Morton’s foot, though as far as I can discover Morton didn’t have it himself. My toes are uncommonly long—finger-feet, some people call them—and the longest by far is not my big toe, but my, if you will, index toe. That’s Morton’s foot, sometimes called Morton’s toe.

My foot, unretouched. And to answer the inevitable question, yes, as a matter of fact, I can peel bananas with my feet.

Once again, some people think there is an aesthetic advantage, though looking at the picture above might seem like a good counterargument. Morton’s foot is also known as Greek foot or Classical foot. Greek statues usually have Morton’s foot—as opposed to the big-toe-biggest foot which the Greeks labeled Egyptian foot. And later artists seem to have agreed with the Greeks; paintings of people frolicking in glades and gardens form the 18th and 19th centuries generally show people with Morton’s foot.

No matter what the art schools say about it, though, Morton’s foot is unbalanced. If someone like me tries to stand on the balls of their feet, they instead find themselves balancing on the protruding bone behind their longest toe. People with Egyptian feet can rise up onto the balls of their feet and the base of all of their toes will touch the floor firmly. Do this with a good case of Morton’s foot, and you will teeter side-to-side; you can be on the ball of the Morton’s toe and the ball of the big toe, or on the ball of the Morton’s toe and the ball of the three little toes, but there is no way you will be balanced on all five at once.

The ball of the Morton’s toe is also the part that strikes the ground first, and that’s apparently not a good thing. One wonders how Phedippedes, who ran the first marathon, managed it; I mean, if anybody was going to have Greek foot or Classical foot, a Classical Greek seems like a primary candidate. Maybe the Morton’s foot is why he died when he arrived in Athens after running from Marathon. (n.b. In the preceding days he had run from Athens to Sparta and back to Athens—a distance of 206 miles, so it’s rather doubtful that the puny 26 miles from Marathon to Athens actually killed him, Greek feet or not.)

(Before I go any further, let me come clean about something. I'm a Pisces. That sign rules the feet, or perhaps the other way round.)

As far as I know, there’s no Greeks or Irish in my family tree, so the Irish knees and Greek feet seem a bit suspicious to me. Perhaps my mother had an affair with, perhaps, Aidan O’Pappadopolous? Or maybe from the waist down I’m one of those pan-EU projects, and I just haven’t yet discovered that my shins are from Denmark (“We call these Danish Modern shins”), the underside of my foot is from London (“We call this condition Marble Arch”), and my thighbones are from one of those former Eastern Bloc countries.

In any case, I’m now running again, and this time running injury-free (knock wood). I’m still not anyone you might mistake for fast, and the Olympic Committee hasn’t taken an interest in my prospects, but at least it’s another exercise option open to me. And I owe it to a remarkable book. No, it’s not the Bible, and it’s not an instructional manual, and it’s not from the self-help section. But I’ll explain what it is, and why I beleive it is brilliantly put together, in the next post.

I once took a computer graphics class, and in one of the assignments we had to do a series of self-portraits. Naturally I did at least one of my foot.

Well, okay, the real article isn't quite that stretched-out and melty. And isn't that green and scaly, either.

At least not most days.

Dickens Era Redux, Wave of the Future, or Something Else Entirely?

2010-01-12T15:04:00.000-08:00

I'm talking about the cocky Australian upstart Seizure Magazine--which appears as Seizure Online (the purely electronic version) and Seizure Offline (a monthly paperback). And, although it's nominally Australian, the primary print release is through Amazon US, and the electronic release is, well, the internet, and the authors are from anywhere, so it's really an international venture.

The world doesn't stand in dire need of another online story outlet. (But another one certainly can't hurt, either.) While Seizure does publish a certain number of short stories, however, the central aim of Seizure is to publish novels--serialized at first in both digital and hardcopy form, and then, if markets, money and whatever allow, as standalone books.

Seizure came to my attention because my enfant-terrible acquaintance Rufi Cole has given them her first novel, The Violin Face, which began its serialization in the first issue. (I think she ought to have gone down the conventional route; she's publishable and agentable--but for the fact that she doesn't have the temperament to put up with the hefty helpings of bullshit involved in getting to standard publication these days.)

The Violin Face has a structure that I think lends itself to serialization--the prose equivalent of what theater calls "French scenes." In classical French plays, Character A would be onstage and would be joined by Character B; then Character C would enter and Character A would leave, etc.. It was as if the focus of the play was handed from one character to another. Violin Face does this with a rotating POV, where each chapter is told from a different POV, and that POV belongs to someone who was portrayed in the previous chapter. Only one character has two chapters (the first and last chapters of the book.) This POV discontinuity makes it a natural for publication as a periodical.

There was a time when a great many novels were published first in magazines, but the practice has nearly disappeared. I'll be following with interest to see if the tradition can be revived in a 21st-Century fashion.

As to the terms and conditions, I'm not quite sure how they all work. The magazine has an editorial team and works closely with writers in prepublication. The writer retains most rights. How the details of profit-sharing work isn't clear.

Like MNW, they want submissions over the transom--the first 10,000 words, via e-mail. An interesting policy is that they prefer their reads to be wholly "cold"--no synopsis, no blurbs. (That alone makes me want to give them at least some applause!)

I'll be following the fortunes of Seizure with great interest. Any attempt to launch a new (or maybe rather old) publishing model in the present bookselling climate is both bold and admirable.

The Talented Miss Highsmith

2010-01-05T12:22:00.001-08:00

To my mind, two of the most brilliant and underappreciated authors of the last century were American women working repressed and female-unfriendly years of the 1950s and 1960s, Patricia Highsmith and Shirley Jackson. Highsmith has always been more admired in Europe than in the US; and Jackson has never really had the recognition she is due.

I’m presently meandering my way through The Talented Miss Highsmith, the massive new biography of Highsmith. Joan Schenkar has attempted a biography shaped to the ideal design put forth by Virginia Woolf: a “husk” (the chronological events of the life) and the “atom” (the interior world). Schenkar has placed the chronological material in a lengthy appendix titled “Just the Facts,” while the bulk of the (quite hefty) book is organized along thematic chapters.

Schenkar clearly admires Highsmith (called “Pat” throughout the book), but she also clearly doesn’t like Highsmith, and, as with so many biographers, there is an undertone of surprise throughout the book as she notes that Pat Wasn’t A Very Nice Person. (I encountered this reaction in its most severe form a few years ago reading a biography of Peter Sellers. The author was continually shocked—shocked, I’ll have you know—at Sellers’ nastiness in interpersonal relations.)

Exactly why artists are expected to be generous, balanced people has never been clear to me, and actors, who spend their careers pretending to be other people, and writers, who spend their careers cloistered with the problems of imaginary people, don’t strike me as obvious models of mental stability. Highsmith herself said, “All writers are in the business for their health,” and I don’t think she meant the aerobic benefits of hammering on typewriter keys. I’m not proposing that all writers must be misanthropic or cruel to those close to them, but I’m not taken aback when I discover they aren’t paragons of behavior, or even the sorts of people you’d want to meet for a drink.

Schenkar is smart enough to understand that much of Highsmith’s genius arises from her rather twisted approach to life, but she is bothered by some quirks that I pass over with a shrug. In particular, the biographer dwells on the idea that Highsmith wrote her diaries (a major source for the biography) with an eye to posterity. She becomes particularly exercised when Highsmith has a series of dated entries that had to have been written days after the events described.

I find I can’t be bothered by this, and I don’t even accept that it is a deceptive or deplorable practice. After all, unless you are Richardson’s Pamela, who seems capable of writing letters or making diary entries in real time while the house burns down around her, diaries are always recollections. True, the convention is that the entries are the dates of the writing, but I see no reason that someone shouldn’t write down their recollections of November 17th dated November 17th, even if they are writing on November 20th. Nor am I wholly convinced that diarists like Highsmith are journaling for posterity; even if such a writer strikes poses or distorts facts in what they commit to paper, I think most of us engage in something less than searing honesty or icy clarity about ourselves even in our private thoughts.

Looking back over what I have written here, I realize it sounds as if I’m complaining about Schenkar’s book. On the contrary, I’m enjoying it, and, as this post shows, it provokes a lot of pondering on my part. And the title is well-chosen: although Highsmith might not have left a trail of well-concealed murders behind her, she was as amoral and focused as her anti-hero Tom Ripley. She might not be a model for how to conduct your life, but she offers a fine example of how a mental illness (in her case, I suppose a shrink would diagnose some form of sociopathy) can be channeled into art. Good for Pat, I say, and kudos to Joan Schenkar, too.

With a little luck, she’ll turn her attention to Shirley Jackson next. I've read about Jackson's husk, but I'd like to understand her atom.

Typewriters and the Movies

2009-12-15T10:50:00.000-08:00

A few days ago, Aliya discussed the history of her typewriter, which she may or may not cart along with her after the Apocalypse. Shortly thereafter, Ryan David Jahn posted a discussion of the effects of typing on the composition process. In honor of what seems to have become Typewriter Month, I thought I'd add a few words of my own.

I haven't had a typewriter in ages. If I had one, my daily consumption of Wite-Out would run into the gallons.

Nonetheless, typewriters are very cool because they are so cinematic. Or, at any rate, they are more cinematic than anything else writers do (apart from getting druink and falling over at parties). Movie directors still invariably have writers banging away on typewriters. You can 1) zoom in close on each letter as it embosses onto the paper; 2) amplify the hammering sounds; 3) have the loose sheets of the manuscript fly away--out the window, or under a car, or into a pond. (This latter movie cliche was used as recently as Love Actually.)

What we do is about the dullest thing in the world to film, which is why they usually show the writer sitting down to write and then cut to the writer sitting back and wiping sweat from the forehead, a stack of finished manuscript pages beside the typewriter. Very seldom so they do more because, well, a story about someone making up a story turns out to be a bit dull.

Two movies have fine openings with the writer working at the typewriter. The first is Romancing the Stone, which opens in the romance-novel ending being written by Kathleen Turner's character, complete with her cheesy prose as voice-over. The scene then cuts to her teary-eyed face at her typewriter, as she says, "Oh, God, that's good...The...End."

The other, and my favorite, is the beginning of Throw Momma From the Train. The movie opens close in on the page as the typewriter stamps out "T...h...e... ...n...i...g..h...t... ...w...a...s..." and then switches to the face of Billy Crystal's character, who for almost the rest of the film is stuck on his novel's opening line, "The night was..." For the next few minutes of screen time, Crystal moves in and out of the frame (which stays fixed on his typewriter), doing all those things writers do, and a few I've never thought of, when we are stuck and pretending we are working. Nice scene.

No typewriter for me, though. I probably delete twenty words for every one I write and keep. Typewriters may be more cinematic, but if you're anything like me, avoiding typewriters keeps innumerable acres of trees thriving.

Though I have to admit that it would sometimes be satisfying to crumple up what I had just written and hurl it into the trash. Not only is that cinematic, but cathartic as well.

Some Good News in Publishing (for a change)

2009-12-07T11:30:00.000-08:00

I'm a writer.

That first sentence wasn't a complaint. Or not much of one. After all, worse things could happen to a person than being a writer. You could be, for example, an actor, where the odds are even worse, the pay inequity between the top and the bottom even wider, and the rejections far more personal (and usually delivered to your face).

So I count myself lucky. And I'm even luckier than it might seem: I'm a novelist. I could have been born a short-story writer. Oh, I know the advantages of writing shorts. Your head isn't buried in the same damn thing for months or even years. Each individual rejection means less. You can explore ideas that are interesting but not plottable enough for a longer form. You can play with style, perspective, or narrative form in a way that might be annoying, cloying, or just plain too precious at book length. You can take strange risks.

But where do you sell short stories nowadays? Especially if you are thinking you ought to be paid...? There are many places to publish short stories on the web--if you want to give them away--but the classic outlets for short stories, the magazines, have progressively published less fiction.

There were loud cries of dismay a few years back when The Atlantic--which, along with The New Yorker and Playboy, were the flagships of non-academic short fiction in the US--announced it would no longer be publishing short stories on a monthly basis, but would instead convert to putting out an annual Fiction Issue.

Well, after that long preamble, here's the good news. Although The Atlantic has not decided to expand the fiction content of it's monthly issues, it has decided to publish short stories on the Amazon Kindle, beginning with one from Christopher Buckley and another from Edna O'Brien.

As the article mentions, this opens up some interesting possibilities. In effect, stories will now be published on a a stand-alone basis, without the associated content of a magazine, but with the imprimatur of the Atlantic's editorial staff. And the Kindle is a more flexible medium than print; it can just as easily handle short-shorts or stories that would have been too long for magazines, but too short for publication as a book. This development even offers some hope for the novella--arguably the most perfect of fiction forms, but one that has never really been able to find a market in the world of print.

Some things about Kindle make me nervous in a sci-fi paranoia way (I'll post again on that later). But The Atlantic's move strikes me as cause for celebration. I don't like short stories, but I do enjoy reading them, and am happy to see someone giving writers some incentive to produce them.

Not that short-story writers seem to need any encouragement. The supply of short stories seems to have no relationship to whether or not anyone is buying them (or even reading them). The short-story coat of arms ought to read Ars Gratia Artis...except for the fact that MGM Studios already uses that as their motto.

Even if deciding to remake the movie Fame calls into question their devotion to that principle. After visiting a brothel that catered to, umm, specialized tastes, Voltaire famously observed that "Once is philosophy, twice is perversion." Well, sometimes even once isn't philosophy. Or Art.

Blockbusters versus The Long Tail

2009-12-02T14:19:00.000-08:00

You may have missed reading Chris Anderson's The Long Tail, but you have certainly heard its main thesis summarized: The development of netcentric distribution means consumers have access to ever-greater variety than what is on offer in stores, and suggests that a massive total demand exists out in the niche markets. Anderson believed the future of profits in retail and media existed out in that long tail rather than at the crest of the wave of wildly popular items.

I enjoyed The Long Tail, and hoped that it indeed predicted the shape of the future. Recent history suggests that Anderson may have missed a few important points, and an article in the November 28th issue of The Economist discusses The Tail versus The Blockbuster.

What appears to be losing out is the midlist. We now have many more books selling a handful of copies, and many more small, low-budget indie films. But blockbusters are faring better than ever. It's the middle that is dropping into oblivion*. The Economist notes that the traditional bookshop, which has always carried the bestsellers as well as a good helping of the midlist, is under attack at both ends: Amazon can do better at covering the full range of books, right down to the obscure and self-published, while competition on the bestsellers comes as much from supermarkets and discount department stores as from the web.

Something I had never considered is what a different audience blockbusters reach. The article notes that a study at the Wharton Business School has found that on Netflix the customer reviews of blockbusters--even blockbusters that are generally deemed by the movie community to be irredeemable garbage--get better ratings from their viewers than more obscure films. Why? The Economist puts it so nicely that I won't attempt to paraphrase:

...William McPhee noted that a disproportionate share of the audience for a hit was made up of people who consumed few products of that type...A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel. for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot. That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better. An American who read just one book this year was disproportionately likely to have read "The Lost Symbol" by Dan Brown. He almost certainly liked it.

(The article goes on to make many other interesting points about distribution channels, word-of-mouth, piggybacking, and cross-merchandizing, but most of these points are more applicable to movies and television than to novels. It's worth a read in its entirety: here's the link again.)

Now, I may be chided for not realizing the obvious long before now, but this was news to me: Success in terms of number of copies sold inherently means that your book has been bought largely by people who don't read much. (In the case of JK Rowling, it may even mean that your book converted millions of non-readers into readers--but I suspect that can only occur write Young Adult fiction.) I'd conceived of the bestseller as a phenomenon where, through some magical process, readers of diverse tastes converged on a single title that had appeal across genre and style boundaries. Surely those people may be included as the readers of a bestseller. But the majority of readers of a bestseller are actually people we would class as non-readers.

Note that I said "readers of a bestseller." There are also those bestsellers that are more sold than read (Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient after the release of the film, Julia Glass's Three Junes, Seamus Heaney's new translation of Beowulf). But that's another post entirely.

------------------
*James Michener famously commented that America was a country where a novelist could make a fortune, but not a living. He should see it today.

How Did Walter Tevis Do It?

2009-11-25T17:12:00.000-08:00

Walter Tevis was one of my favorite novelists, and I like both his science fiction and his mainstream novels equally well.

He wasn't a prolific writer; when his first two books (The Hustler and The Man Who Fell to Earth) made his name and gained him a professorship, he proceded to spend most of the next couple of decades in an alcoholic haze, not writing (although his students remember him as a briliant teacher). In the late 1970s he resigned his teaching job and went back to novel writing full time, producing four novels in four years (Mockingbird, The Steps of the Sun, Queen's Gambit, and The Color of Money) before dying of lung cancer.

Tevis classed himself as a second-rank novelist (and most critics agreed), but I think he has been undervalued; his books draw me back again and again, and I discover new pleasures in them each time I read them.

But his mainstream novels--The Hustler, Queen's Gambit, and The Color of Money--mystify me from a craft point of view. All three novels are center around games (billiards, chess, and nine-ball pool, respectively), and manage to be absorbing even if you aren't an aficianado of the games. Indeed, they work even if you can't even follow the descriptions of the games.

Now, the games aren't the only stakes in these novels. These are stories about people who undermine themselves, stories about weakness, about character. Hemingway's reification of "grace under pressure" isn't the challenge here. The protagonists in Tevis' novels aren't so much characters who are bad losers as people who can't succeed to their full potential because they are bad winners. They are most likely to crumble when they are scoring major victories.

I understand that part of the stories. What seems magical to me is that Tevis keeps readers mesmerized by the games themselves. Of course, we have to care about the characters to care about the outcome of the games, I understand that part; but I don't comprehend how he manages to inject the tension into the description of a game.

A game seems too simple, too fully in the author's hands. The character dribbles down the court, spins, throws for the basket--it glances off the rim and flies high in the air or maybe The character dribbles down the court, an opposing player blocks him, he stumbles, and, at the last second, in desperation, takes a wild shot that arcs through the air and dops neatly through the basket...It's transparently in the author's power to do both with equal conviction and equal probability.

In the emotional tangle of a relationship, or the plot tangle of a good thriller, certain events seem plausible and certain events are simply ruled out, but in a game this is less the case; whether a ball rolls into a pocket or bounces back has a huge effect, but it isn't really determined by a large number of forces the writer has built up. In short, the writer can do whatever the writer damn well pleases, and the reader knows that, and therefore the outcome is arbitrary.

Yet Tevis holds me transfixed while he describes someone running a series of bank shots or fighting a losing battle against the onslaught of a chess opponent. I can't figure out how he does it.

When he was asked how he did his amazing onstage leaps, Nijinsky said something like, "I jump up, I remain in the air for a time, and then I come down."

I understand those words. But that doesn't mean I can do it.

First Names, Surnames/His Names, Her Names

2009-11-15T13:39:00.000-08:00

I believe that most writers contemplate character names more than they care to admit. They're the one tag we hang on a character that really sticks. The reader might forget that Dirk's eyes are blue, or that Caroline chews the inside corner of her mouth when she is about to say something important; but if the reader forgets whom you mean when you say "Dirk" or "Caroline", we may as well pack up and go home, because the poor reader won't be able to follow the story.

I don't feel that we really invent our characters. Mine sort of manifest, sometimes whole and finished from the outset, sometimes beginning as ghosts and becoming more material as I watch them. The process is more like God, Adam, and the Naming of the Animals: We don't actually create the characters, but we do get to name them as they are paraded before us. It's our little bit. The rest of the time, all we can do is follow them around, scribbing down what they do.

(Nabokov, of course, violently disagreed, stating that all his characters were entirely invented de novo by him with full conscious forethought, and that they were his "galley slaves" who would do whatever he demanded of them. I find this exceedingly unlikely. But, then, I also don't believe that Nabokov truly composed every sentence on its own index card and only later puzzled out how to order these perfect sentences into a perfect narrative. My take is that Vlad liked to test the credibility of interviewers.)

There are certain unstated rules about how we use character names in narrative. In the mouths of other characters, of course, character Jeremy Brooks may be anything from "Jeremy" to "Brooks" to "Jer" to "Snooky-Ookums," but the narrative voice has to settle on something and stay consistent. (Unless, of course, the narrative voice is deeply in rotating POV, in which case Jeremy's naming will change depending on whose POV is invoked.)

True, when you first introduce the the character, you may call him "Jeremy Brooks" in full. If the narrative voice continues to call him "Jeremy Brooks," though, it will have a strong distancing effect on the narrative, keeping us at armslength. (Even more distancing are pseudo-pronoun constructions, where the narrative voice refers to a major character as "the dapper detective" or "the burly prizefighter." Tossing in titles as part of the name, such as "Mrs. Carruthers" or "Professor Smythe" has the same distancing effect, assigning a role and often pushing the character toward caricature or stereotype )

Jumping back and forth, calling our character "Jeremy" at one moment and "Brooks" at another, serves only to make the reader's work more difficult. Do this with very many of your characters and it will seem to the reader that the number of players is multiplying out of control, and three people in a scene can feel like like a throng.

For some reason, using first names in the narrative increases the degree of intimacy and tends to soften the character. Jeremy leaned forward or Jeremy wondered is automatically closer and more kindly disposed than Brooks leaned forward or Brooks wondered. I'm not sure why this should be the case. To some extent it may come from formal manners, where traditionally we must be at a certain level of intimacy with someone before we call them by their first name. But the use of first names also automatically connotes diminutization in the backs of our minds; anyone is allowed, and even expected, to call a child by their first name, even upon first acquaintance.

And this, alas, leads us into linguistic politics, and, even worse, linguistic sexual politics. With Jeremy Brooks, we can choose from the outset that he will be "Jeremy" in the narrative (and, ceteris paribus, closer and more vulnerable) or be "Brooks" (and therefore slightly more distant and also tougher). This is only a nuance, and a thousand things we do in the writing beyond the choice of narrative naming will affect our closeness to, and perception of, Jeremy Brooks; but it is one of our earliest and most permanent choices (and probably says something about how our subconscious feels about the character at the outset). But if the major character in question is, say, "Elaine Carver"...

Well, sorry. She's going to be "Elaine." Refer to her in the narration as "Carver," and you don't just toughen and distance her, you start changing her gender. Reference by surname connotes maleness in our reading and writing conventions--and, for that matter, in most of our conversational style. Women will sometimes refer to other women by surnames, especially in direct address or when the context is chummy, but it's usually kept with a circle of girl-chums. (I had to ponder this problem in Shock and Awe, where Carla Smukowski is, in fact, pretty tough, and, being surrounded by military folk, is often referred to in dialogue as "Smukowski." But she has to be "Carla" in the narrative. [And "Carla" itself is of course a feminization of a masculine name.])

Is this because the language inherently speaks down to women? Is this a way of ensuring that women remain forever girls? Is it tied up with feudalism, where the master of the estate is referred to by the name of his property (his wife being one of those properties)? (This latter aspect lingers on in the fact that, formally speaking, there is such a person as "Michelle Obama," but no such person as "Mrs. Michelle Obama;" she is, properly, "Mrs. Barack Obama.")

I suppose it's a mix of all the above. But if you expect me to take a stand against this convention of our language, don't look for it to happen in my fiction. It's hard enough to keep the tissue of the dream intact without constantly having the reader struggle to keep in mind that the character I keep calling "Carver" is a woman.

Some Comments from Stephen Kelner

2009-11-11T15:47:00.001-08:00

A while back I chatted about Stephen P. Kelner's Motivate Your Writing! (Two posts: here and here.) He dropped through the comment trail, and I thought what he had to say was entertaining enough to share. So, without further commentary from me:

Hi, folks --

happened to Google myself (probably a side effect of too much Power motive) and found a recent reference to my several-year-old book, which was a nice surprise. Thanks for the shout-out, David, and a pretty pithy summary of the motives, too. For the record, it was a working title (exclamation point and all), and my editor kept it. I expected him to change it, to be honest. Who am I to question?

Just FYI, the standard deviation -- average variation around the mean -- for Activity Inhibition is 0.25, which means anyone with 18 is beyond the beyond as far as the ability to channel or manage their motives, even if you are teddibly British. (I've had opportunities to work with a lot of Brits over the years, and having 18 would still qualify you by a mammoth margin, I think.)

One reason I wrote this, David, was because even experienced award-winning writers get stuck sometimes, and because motives are nonconscious, they may not know what to do about it or why it happened. (It's all in the book, as you know.) One writer who was already pretty productive told me she got more so after I advised her on her motives, so that's not bad either. (She tweaked her writing group practices.)

By the way, I finally broke academic habit and started referring to the Power motive as the Influence motive, which is much more neutral. All three names really suck, and David McClelland, the genius who really made this research live, used to complain about that all the time. Such is academia.

Best,
Steve Kelner (still on LiveJournal, LinkedIn)

Thanks, Steve.

Explosive Radiating Growth

2009-11-02T16:30:00.000-08:00

No, I'm not talking about nuclear bombs. Explosive radiating growth refers to the sudden appearance of species at certain periods in the fossil record (we mammals did this once the dinosaurs were kind enough to disappear).

I was sitting here contemplating the rows (now two shelves) of Macmillan New Writing books and contemplating how the format has changed.

Back when Mike Barnard and the gang were considering launching the imprint, there was some consideration of putting them out in a highly standardized form, with the covers differing only in the title. Arguments in favor were lower costs, and a uniformity that would let both the publishing world and the public know there was a new kid on the block.

The idea about identical covers was scrapped (thankfully), but a very specific format was adopted—black spine with white title lettering (though the author’s name varied in color) in what I believe is known as “B” format height and width. The MNW logo began as black on white and switched to white on black for the 15th book, Matt’s The Secret War. (It jumped back to black on white once for Shock and Awe, probably by mistake, but possibly for reasons having to do with Freemasonry and the Illuminati.)

The design stayed basically the same for the first 38 books. Okay, they used a cursive font and (gasp!) a colored font on the spine title of Ann’s A Personal History of Rachel DuPree, and on Gavin Smith’s Dogfellow’s Ghost they introduced the new MNW logo. But they remained black-spined B-format books, all in a neat little row.

Until the 39th in the series, however. Matt’s Hoard of Mhorrer jumped up in height and width, and though it kept a black spine, the spine sported a pair of baleful red eyes and a calligraphed title in scarlet.

Since then, there is no telling what will happen. Doug's Thin Blue Smoke and Terri Wiltshire's Carry Me Home are both the same whopping size as Hoard of Mhorrer, and drop the traditional black spine, wrapping the cover color all around the dustjacket. (Truth is, they might have done that with Matt’s book, too. Since the cover itself is black, it’s hard to tell if it has a black spine.)

Len’s Very Persistent Illusion, sandwiched in between Smoke and Carry Me Home, reverts to Standard MNW Format (though they did go a bit wild and put a box around the title and author’s name on the spine). But Illusion might be the last we see of that format.

Indeed, there haven’t been two books in a row with the same design concept since Hoard of Mhorrer broke the mold. (Come to think of it, it was Matt’s first book where they decided to change the logo. Matt must have a mutagenic effect.) James McCreet's The Incendiary’s Trail is unusually tall and thin. Maggie's Beachcombing is the first paperback original; Faye's Trades of the Flesh is a paperback original, but a different size from Beachcombing, and Ryan's Acts of Violence is back to something like B format but is a laminated hardcover.

I’m neither approving nor condemning these changes, just noticing. If you line up all the MNW books in publication order, it is a smooth file of soldiers, differing only in girth, until you reach the last eight titles. Those eight look like—well, like the most of the rest of the bookshelves in my house.

I suppose it's very much like what one would get by lining up all the books of any other imprint by publication date (an exercise I’ve never undertaken). I guess this, plus moving out of the one-per-month mode, are the best signs that MNW is now an established imprint--with different methods than the mainstream, perhaps, but without a need to pointedly establish an identity through idiosyncratic dressing habits.

Now, tell the truth: Can you type?

2009-10-20T21:38:00.001-07:00

Since Shock and Awe is now available in many Barnes and Noble bookstores, some of the students in a novel-writing class at a local college (a class I once attended, I might add) organized a signing. It was great fun; the Q&A went on for a good hour, no doubt throwing the class quite off schedule.

At one point someone asked how fast I write, and I replied that my average was a page per minute. But, then, I added, my typing skills are limited to four digits (left index, right index, right middle, and the left thumb for the space bar).

The professor then surprised us by announcing that he was limited to two index fingers ("Like a chimp with a typewriter.") He has knocked out roughly forty books this way since the 1970s, and he claims he averages 65 word a minute--"Too fast to be able to afford to learn to do it right."

I was thinking about this because a while back Alis Hawkins had a post on her blog that mentioned:

I know that lots of longhand first drafters say that when they type up what they’ve written and see the words appearing as print onscreen, they immediately see what needs to be changed, rewritten etc. The change from scrawl to ‘clean text’ seems to be part of the editing process.

That, coupled with the fact that my handwriting looks ridiculous, is one of the reasons I compose onscreen--the need to transcribe it would be incredibly painful. Putting words down out of my head isn't so bad, but I find transcription, even of my own words, to be tedious and headache-inducing. (Apparently JRR Tolkein wrote all of his manuscripts in long-hand, and then, after massive rewrites and revisions, typed them up himself. He claims that the books were long in coming because he couldn't afford to pay for "typing by the ten-fingered.")

The how-do-you-compose is probably the question writers get asked most frequently. (In moveis, of course, they compose on actual typewriters, because the hammering is so much more cinematic.) But the question that is left often asked is, can you, in fact, really type? With all ten fingers? (I've met several now who can't.)

Well, can you?

Good Books and Rereadable Books

2009-10-17T21:51:00.000-07:00

I'm a big rereader, and there are books I return to again and again.

I won't try to sort out why I'm this way, as I don't know, and sorting it out might confront me with some unflattering truths. (Such as the fact that I have the emotional make-up of a five-year-old, and want to hear the same story over and over.)

But what puzzles me is that there are books I greatly enjoyed and admired that I feel no urge to revisit. Most of the Pynchon canon, for example. Ditto Jean Rhys. Much of Nabokov (although I expect to reread Lolita and some of the short stories a few more times before I go to that great library in they sky). I'm reading At Swim-Two-Birds right now, and having a great time, but despite that I doubt that it will land on my To Read stack again.

You might be tempted to remark that of course these are literary fiction, and therefore challenging rather than comforting, or some similar bit of reasoning. Nope, that's not it. I find much of Evelyn Waugh, and Robertson Davies, and John Barth, and Donald Barthelme, and several others, to call to be reread. Heck, I even want to revisit John Hawkes at times, and he's just plain difficult. (And Gatsby and Sun Also Rises get reread, but that goes without saying; and, in any case, both of them are easy reading as well as instruction manuals on craft.)

It isn't a literary thing. I once cheerfully read Dorothy Dunnett's Lymond Chronicles, but doubt I'll take them off the shelf again. Yet I've plowed through O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin novels more times than I care to admit. And, sure, O'Brian is a far greater writer--one you can read for the sheer joy of his prose--but that's not the key. I've also read Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy a few times, and expect to read it again...even though no one would ever mistake Asimov for a master of prose, and even though his characters are largely interchangeable, not only within a given novel, but between completely different books.

I think Alan Furst is brilliant, but I can't imagine I'd reread his novels. Some of James Ellroy, on the other hand, calls out for multiple perusals. Chandler, I want to reread. Hammett, not so much. How come? Dunno.

There's a third category here, too: Books I reread because I foolishly read them too young the first time around. In the last few years, this has included Crime and Punishment, Madame Bovary, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I was absorbed in them when I read them in my youth, but they were beyond me in many ways. Having reread them, I might or might not reread them again. Depends on how long I live, I suppose.

Come to think of it, there's a fourth category, nostalgia books. Here I'd place Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, Ian Fleming's James Bond novels. Possibly Poe. (And possibly not. Poe is confusing. When you're young you think he's marvelous because he's so shocking, morbid, and gloomy. Get a little older, and the excesses of the language seem a bit silly. Get older yet, and you see that those excesses were carefully crafted, and that they author is winking at you from between the lines. I veer from thinking I've outgrown him to thinking I'm finally catching up with him, and expect a few more of these cycles over the coming decades.) These books are like visiting the old neighborhood, and it's hard not to be comforted by them.

I'm glad I don't have to try to justify my preferences under cross-examination, because many of the books I value are books I don't care to read again, and some of the books I choose to reread don't have clear and obvious virtues. When it comes down to it, I have no idea why I read what I read in the first place, much less a second time around.

No wonder the publishers and booksellers are always nervous. If I'm any kind of example of the public, they have good reason to wonder what the hell people could be thinking.

Motivate Your Writing! by Stephen P Kelner, Jr (Part 2)

2009-10-10T22:30:00.000-07:00

Now that we know statistics show that writers are megalomaniacs, we might wonder why we aren’t out leading the French Army against Russia, or at least dressing up in cone-pointed bras and vogueing on stage with Madonna. Kelner has an answer for this, too, though it requires some background.

There is a psychological tool called a Picture Story Explanation. (Those with good memories may recall Malcolm McDowell’s Alex being shown short versions of these in his hospital bed in the penultimate scenes of the movie A Clockwork Orange.) PSEs display an ambiguous situation and then ask the subject to tell—or write down—a story to explain what is happening. There are long and short versions; five minutes of writing and thirty minutes of writing are common.

PSEs are used to measure all manner of things. One of them is “activity inhibition,” sometimes simply called “socialization.” The simplest way to measure this is to merely search for the occurrence of the word “not” in the narrative of the PSE (including the “n’t” suffix).

Thirty-minute PSEs average 450 words. An average American will use 1.75 “nots” in those 450 words. If an American uses more, then he or she is well-socialized; that is, they are able to channel and control their basic motivations. Someone well-socialized may want to compel others to act in certain ways, but they are more likely to do this by exhortations than by fisticuffs.

While an American is well-socialized at a mere two “nots,” however, our British cousins aren’t considered well behaved unless they include at least four “nots” in every 450 words. (At the risk of perpetuating the mirror-reflection stereotypes of the inhibited Brit, researchers have found that among the French, Italians, and Spanish, even one “not” is considered massively socialized. Ah, those hot-blooded Mediterranean types.)

As enjoyable as it is to have our prejudices reinforced, that wasn’t the point of this discussion. Let’s recap those cultural differences. To be considered significantly inhibited, people display the following “not” frequency:

French, Italians, Spanish: 1 or more
Americans: 2 or more
British: 4 or more

The average for published writers in Kelner’s survey is 18. Should I spell that out? E-i-g-h-t-e-e-n. Twice nine, three times six. A whole buncha nots.

Kelner quotes psychologist David McClelland: “When a typical person gets mad at you, he hits you. When a mystery writer gets mad at you, he takes a year to write a novel killing you off.”

So, as a group we writers are all so power-mad as to be dangerous; but luckily for the safety of our streets, we’re all so inhibited that this drive all gets channeled into furious scribbling.

I’m afraid I’m giving a distorted impression of Kelner’s book, since I’m dwelling on the parts that interested me the most. In fact, Kelner’s book is about how to motivate yourself to write—not a problem that most of the visitors to this blog probably have.

Confused, frustrated, even sometimes blocked, we might well be at times; but I don’t think most of us have trouble finding the motivation for writing. Finding a way to channel that impulse elsewhere might be a more useful self-help book for many of us.

At any rate, if you want to write but don’t seem to be motivated to write but still want to write anyway, whatever the heck that means, this book might help you.

My advice, though: If you don't want to write, fer heaven's sakes don't write. For some it's a pleasure, for others an affliction, and for many it's both. But what it definitely isn't, is a duty.

Motivate Your Writing! by Stephen P Kelner, Jr (Part 1)

2009-10-05T16:55:00.000-07:00

This is an unusual book, which I came across in a spirited discussion on a writer’s forum. From the title one might assume that it is about the problem of character motivation, but, no: This book purports to explain why writers write.

Now, I’ve always wondered why writers write, though secretly I’ve always assumed it was because they couldn’t dance. Here was my chance to find out for sure.

As it turns out, while the book examines the motivations for writing, the thrust of this treatise is describing how to motivate yourself to write. Now, that’s baffling. If you don’t want to write, then cry hallelujah and go do something else. I can see why someone who doesn’t want to exercise might want a book on how to motivate yourself to exercise, or why a student who doesn’t want to buckle down and study would want a book on how to become studious, but if breathing is the least optional of human activities then surely writing is at the polar opposite end of that continuum. Many people have not written and have apparently suffered no ill effects, while many who have in fact written have suffered greatly.

Lawrence Block once said, as an illustration of nutty thinking, that many writers were afraid to stop writing because they might discover that they liked not writing and then they’d stop writing even though they didn’t want to. Well, I’m crazy, but I’m not that crazy. If I really don’t want to do something, I start casting about for a way to avoid it, not for ways to make myself do it.

Even though I clearly am not the target demographic for this book, I admit that it’s damned interesting material. The author is a motivational psychologist, and the leaders of his field have broken down human motivations beyond the basics (hunger, thirst, sex, etc.) into three main categories: Affiliation, Achievement, and Power. Beyond getting wined, dined, and laid, the reason we persist in any activity is supposedly one of those three motivators. Now, I think these could be better named, but that’s academia for you. Here’s what these are all about:

Affiliation. This means maintaining or extending relationships with others in your life. If you write for affiliative reasons, then you do it to please friends or relatives and to cement existing bonds. What close associates think of your work is vitally important to you, more important than what a wider public thinks of your work; more important, in fact, than your assessment of the intrinsic worth of the work.

Achievement. This one is particularly poorly named. “Achievement” is not necessarily a matter of recognition or awards; it can be nothing more than being motivated by a desire to accomplish certain artistic tasks to one’s own standards of excellence. Better terms might be “craftsmanship,” or “originality,” or “mastery.” Achievement can be satisfied in many ways depending on your own goal; the goal might be writing a story that rivals Joyce’s The Dead, or might it be writing a comprehensible novel without ever using the letter “k.” It might or might not matter whether your friends or relatives like it, and it might not matter if it is published; the only criterion is whether or not you met your stated goal as you perceive it.

Power. Again, a bad name. “Power” in motivational psychology apparently refers to “influence” or “having an impact.” Having power means that you can affect others—either convert them to your way of thinking, or open up new vistas for them, or, hell, just make them laugh or cry.

Motivational psychologists have studied people and developed profiles of the extent to which individuals are driven by these three poorly named factors. The author has also conducted such interviews with published writers. Care to guess which factors predominate?

Published writers rank far below the average on Affliation*. They might care what Mom or Uncle Bob think, but not as much as most people, and when it comes to friends, I guess writers figure that if their friends don’t like their writing, it’s time for a new set of friends.

You’d think writers would be high on Achievement*. Writing is one of the most painstaking of crafts, and every story or novel must succeed in its own framework. The archetype of the novelist is someone obsessively scribbling away in a garret, sure of his or her genius—possibly grumbling about being misunderstood, or possibly serene in the knowledge that their masterpiece will be recognized as a major work of art. Sorry. Published writers rank far lower on this measure of motivation than normal, nonwriting folk. (Note the caveat that these are published writers. The confident genius in the garret may be a perfect description of the average unpublished writer.)

Sorry to be the bearer of this tiding, but where published writers’ motivational energy is high is in Power*. Yep. We’re power-hungry nutjobs, driven by this mad lust to a far greater extent than Joe Citizen. “Power” isn’t a particularly popular word with delicate flowers like us, but there it is.

A friend of mine attended graduate school in psychology. On the opening day of a class in communication theory, the professor said that he wanted to start with a statement that he considered self-evident, but that many students would take issue with: The purpose of communication is to effect a change in another person.

The statement caused a slow but increasing uproar. Why, that isn’t communication—that’s manipulation! I don’t communicate in an attempt to change anyone—I’m just sharing! I’m not trying to affect anyone else—I just want them to understand me! And so on, ad, I gather, relatively infinitum.

That’s us, I’m afraid. People might write for any number of reasons, but those who go through the trouble to publish their writing want to effect a change in the readers. The goal might be as big as changing the reader’s mind about some social issue, or as small as changing the reader’s mood.

We’re power-mad. How about that?

More on this topic in the next post.
----------------------
*If you’d like the hard numbers, published writers scored in the 20th percentile on Achievement and the 18th percentile on Affiliation, meaning that about 80 percent of the population is more driven by Achievement and Affiliation. On the other hand, published writers scored in the 88th percentile on Power…

Hi From the Chelsea Hotel

2009-09-29T12:47:00.000-07:00

I first heard of the Chelsea Hotel—which, incidentally, is actually named the Hotel Chelsea) back in the late 1960s, when Arthur C. Clarke related an anecdote in an essay about UFOs. The thrust of his argument was that most UFO sightings are easily explained by a thoughtful observer, but that a few remain a puzzlement.

He said that when he was staying in the Chelsea Hotel, simultaneously writing the novel 2001 and working with Stanley Kubrick on the screenplay for the movie, that one evening he and Kubrick got together. At one point, a bright object appeared in the sky, came closer and closer, and then remained hovering, seemingly gazing in the hotel window. Both of the men were a little punch-drunk from hammering away at the rather transcendental script, and for a time they both felt certain that alien powers had been alerted to the 2001 storyline, and were descending to stop them from relating a tale that was too close to the truth.

Eventually the light retreated, but Clarke, even with his wide astrophysical and aeronautical contacts, was never able to glean any clue as to what they had seen that night.

I was so enamored of Clarke in my early teenage days that the Chelsea was forever branded into my memory. Imagine—the kind of hotel where the world’s greatest sci-fi writer elected to stay! (Of course, in my estimation his masterpiece was Childhood’s End, not 2001, but still…) I pictured it as a shiny, austere, modernistic sort of building, perhaps similar to the set in 2001 where Dave, having passed through the monolith, finds himself in a sterile environment where he passes through old age, death, and eventual rebirth as the StarChild.

It wasn’t too long before I discovered I was wrong about the Chelsea. It started showing up in songs (notably Leonard Cohen’s Chelsea Hotel #2 and Joni Mitchell’s Chelsea Morning), and then in things I read. Not all of these were positive, mind you. The hotel is perhaps best known to many as the site where Sid Vicious stabbed his girlfriend to death, but it has witnessed many other passings, some far more august: Dylan Thomas wrote his last poems there before dying there of alcohol poisoning, and Thomas Wolfe spent his last, anguished days as a permanent resident. Many stories and books were written there, although it’s hard to see how the writers were able to concentrate with the racket from all the musicians who stayed there. (Dylan Thomas’ namesake Bob Dylan composed the double album Blonde on Blonde at the Chelsea.) So, while it was indeed Clarke’s choice of residence in NYC, it was more bohemian than futuristic. (n.b. Back in those days I was also unaware that Clarke was gay. That might have made me suspect a higher degree of incipient bohemianism, even if his author photos suggested he would be best suited for a job as an accountant with a 1950s aerospace firm.*)

I've been to New York City before, but the choice of where to stay has never been up to me. So, that’s where I’ve been for the last few days—at the Hotel Chelsea. And I’m happy to report that it is neither vastly expensive nor wholly gentrified; it’s still a bit funky, rather low-key, and cheap by Manhattan standards. Nice location, too—just south of Madison Square Gardens, just north of Greenwich Village and Soho, just northeast of Union Square (which has my novel stocked in the local Barnes and Noble), and convenient to, well, Chelsea. (n.b. Yes, the Chelsea district is named after the district in London. NY’s Soho district, however, is a syllabic acronym invented by real estate agents to mean SOuth of HOuston Street, which New Yorkers insist on pronouncing as “Howston Street.” [Tribeca, TRIangle BElow CAnal Street, is carrying this idea to a silly extreme.])

Could I feel the ghosts of artists past lingering in the building? Sure. But it’s pretty easy, given that the lobby and hallways are decked out with examples of eclectic art, much of it, one suspects, rendered up by previous residents in lieu of cash payments.

It’s easy to imagine working there. The rooms aren’t elegant—in fact, far from it—but they are relatively spacious, and designed for long-term occupancy; the desks are designed for workspace rather than fiddly little plastic signs and piles of brochures. And the clientele still seems to be composed of artists or poseurs. (If you can give me a way to distinguish between the two, I’ll be grateful.)

We had time to fool about on this trip, and even to catch Jude Law doing an astonishing, and highly idiosyncratic Hamlet on Broadway. (Who knew he was that good?) We also had plenty of Walkabout time, and traipsed all over the island, and not only across the Brooklyn Bridge, but back across the less-revered Manhattan Bridge. (Though I believe it is the even-longer Washington Bridge that Parker trudges across in the opening to Point Blank. We only drove across that one.)

Nonetheless, the best part of the trip for me was the Chelsea. I can’t really imagine living in NYC…but I could imagine living at the Chelsea for a while.

==================

*Arthur C Clarke was never an accountant at an aerospace firm. He was, however, one of the inventors of radar; and, though he never even considered applying for a patent, he outlined the operating principles for the communication satellites that now encircle the globe.

Wild Kingdom, Huntington Beach Style

2009-09-19T19:05:00.000-07:00

I guess we'd be living in suburbia but for the fact that the nearest real urbia is quite a drive. Huntington Beach used to be an isolated little beach town, but it's now surrounded by Orange County sprawl.

Despite that, there's still a bit of wildlife. The Bolsa Chica wetlands and the marshes surrounding Anaheim Bay both abut the city, and there are strange pockets of ponds scattered along the San Gabriel and Santa Ana Rivers, as well as dozens of channelized creeks that were formed when much of land around the town was origiannly drained. There are also de facto greenbelts along the edge of some or our mesas, owing to the fact that the grade was simply too steep to stuff in more houses.

So there's wildlife aplenty around the wetlands--herons, kingfishers, ospreys, skimmers, assorted raptors, and the two remaining nesting sites for the endangered least tern. The wetlands also have raccoons, coyotes, fox, and even the occasional cougar. But although we don't live next to a marsh, our back yard can get pretty darned busy.

I've already mentioned our accidental pet crows. We also have two bullfrogs in the back yard, the result of buying a trio of tadpoles to eat up the algae in our pond. Who knew they would grow to adulthood and begin serenading us, like a pair of libidinous foghorns, on summer nights? We've also had our share of possums, who are innocuous, but not terribly good company; after all, what do you say to someone whose reaction to anything new is to freeze? (Makes it easy to snap their photos, though...)

Like most cities in Southern California, we also have raccoons wander through every so often. But recently one of them has done more than wander through. He has set up housekeeping in our back yard.

He (or she) is a young adolescent, obviously only recently seperated from his mother. We first saw him stealing food we had put out for the crows. Not unusual behavior, except for the fact that he was placidly muching away in broad daylight.

At first we thought this was raw courage, but we have come to understand that it is a deliberate strategy. The night belongs to a gang of larger raccoons who maraude the neighborhood, and he isn't part of that gang. By creeping out in the day, he has a whole new ecological niche to exploit (although he has to put up with almost incessant scolding from the crows. Come twilight, her retires to a nest in the line of Italian cypresses that lines one side of our property.

He isn't fearless by any means, but he is surprisingly unafraid of us. One of our beach towels went missing; when we were sitting outside one afternoon, we saw him up on the deck wrestling with it and dragging it about. When he saw us watching him, he gave as a what-are-you-looking-at glance, and went back to killing the terrycloth.

He also stole one of Pamela's rubber sandals, though he was good enough to bring it back a few days later (somewhat chewed up).

Since he seemed desperate for entertainment, as a joke when we were at the market we bought him a couple of squeaking rubber dog toys and left them outside for him. We had no idea what a hit they would be. He absconded with them immediately, and seems to keep them hidden up in the trees. In the afternoons, and sometimes late at night, we can hear the trees going squeak! squeak! squeak! (God only knows what the neighbors think.) He also seems to use the toys as a novel form of defense; when the gang of bigger raccoons comes through at night and tries to chase him off, we can hear him snarl and whine, alternating with vicious chomps on the squeaky toys. It seems to baffle the opposition; at any rate, he's still here.

He's cute isn't he? Yeah, yeah, I know the rules: never get attached to a wild animal. It will end in tears.

But, then, doesn't everything, eventually?

Hey, Look--I'm in Bookshops in the US!

2009-09-11T08:10:00.000-07:00

I received a very surprsing e-mail from my friend Vickie yesterday. It began, "I recently (as of today) bought your book 'Shock and Awe' at Barnes and Noble...It was so cool. I was looking for John Irving's 'The World According to Garp'; wasn't there but as I scanned the shelf, your book popped out at me. I was giddy to say the least; it had finally come to America."

This seemed unlikely to me, but I figured perhaps someone had special-ordered it and then failed to pick it up. So I went online. Vickie lives near Fashion Island, so I checked that inventory at that store. Yep. In stock. Also in stock in Bella Terra and South Coast Plaza, the other two Barnes and Noble locations near my house.

So I drove up to Bella Terra to check. Sure enough--three copies, face out if you can believe it, stuffed between John Irving and Susan Isaacs (two writers I adore). And in the Fiction/Literature section instead of off in Mystery/Thriller (not sure if that's a good thing or not...). Here's a snap:

I was astonished. So I started trying to reason it out. Perhaps an enthusiastic friend had talked the superstores in my neighborhood into ordering the book. So when I got home, I checked inventory for three stores in Oakland. Ah, just as I suspected; no copies.

But I decided to see how far my secret friend had gone, so I did a broader search around my own zip code. Orange, Long Beach, Irvine, Spectrum, Tustin, Fullerton, Carson...in stock in every store. Then Laguna Hills--nope. But Aliso Viejo, yes. Puente Hills, no, Del Amo, yes, Chino Hills, no, West Covina, Corona, Manhattan Beach, Glendora, yes yes yes yes, but Montclair, no, Tyler Galleria, no, but Pasadena yes...

Well, you get the picture. This was clearly beyond anything that a local pal had arranged. Did B&N somehow decide to do a big trial run of the book in Southern California for some obscure reason?

So I did a wider search in the Bay Area. And although it wasn't as plentiful as in SoCal, some of the stores stocked it. Ditto Seattle, Denver, Washington DC, New York, Miami, Boston, San Diego...

Crazed with success, I ventured into the middle of the country. That was, it turned out, a big mistake. Chicago? Nope. Wichita? Get real. St Louis? Ha ha hahahaha. Kansas City? Nada. And not a single copy to be found anywhere in Texas, not even in the People's Republic of Austin.

I guess it's just a bicoastal sort of book.

I don't know how this happened, but I'm pretty damned pleased to be on the shelves in dozens of Barnes and Nobles and B. Daltons around the USA. (Now pray that the books actually sell.)

I'm also on the shelf at the world's best bookstore, Powell's City of Books in Portland, Oregon.

But when I check the inventory at Borders, alas, they tell me, "This book is available online but is not carried in our stores." Sheesh. And after Borders was so nice to me in the UK...

Much as I like visiting England, it's nice to finally see myself on the shelves of neighborhood stores 'round here.

Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones...

2009-09-04T17:19:00.000-07:00

...but words can make my head explode.

More and more often I encounter sentences that hurt me. It isn't a problem of poor grammar--though that can play a role. It isn't that the intention of the sentence is dumb, though the dumbness coefficient can be a factor. The kind of sentence that hurts me is one that is slightly off-kilter and makes me stop and think about what exactly what is wrong with it and ponder on what sort of person could say it without making their own head throb.

A simple example. There is a church not too far away that puts up "clever" things on a sign out in front. The most recent one proclaimed, "God opens doors no one can shut."

If the goal was to make me think, it succeeded. My first thought was, "Huh?" and that ought to have been enough. But the statement is the kind that nags at me because it lacks both symmetry and focus. If it were, "God opens doors no one else can open," I'd be fine with it. It's banal, but it has a clear message.

I guess I'd even be happy with, "Once God opens a door, no one can close it again," which is what I think the framer of the sentence meant, though it leaves me wondering if God can close a door God has opened. It would be pretty inconvenient in the Celestial Mansion otherwise. I mean, how would He let the dog out without the door remaining stuck open forever? Perhaps God has servants, and they can both open and close doors, so long as God stays away from the the doorknob. Presumably God has to be careful not to absentmindedly pop open the door for the mail guy, or the whole thing is ruined--nobody can shut it again, and there's nothing for it but to board up the gap with plywood and use the sliding glass doors out on the patio to enter and leave.

But the statement calls for a deeper metaphysical examination. If no one can shut it, how did the door get closed in the first place? I've hung a few doors, and I can assure you that they don't start off shut. You have to get things all lined up, and the pins hammered down, before you can do anything with them at all.

I can't believe that these are the thoughts the pastor wanted to evoke when the decision was taken to tell everyone driving down Baker Street in Costa Mesa that "God opens doors no one can shut."

Here's another, more screwed-up example--and I wanr you in advance that this one can cause lasting neuralgia. Until very recently, there were large signs in baggage claim at Honolulu International Airport which informed us that "Just because a bag looks like yours, it might not be." Let's say that again:

"Just because a bag looks like yours, it might not be."

Not only is that grammatically inscrutable, it appears to be asserting something utterly bizzare: Because that looks like my bag, it might not be my bag. The reason it might be somebody else's bag is because it looks like mine. So does it follow that bags that don't look like mine probably are mine? Is there an equally problematic corollary that states "Just because a bag doesn't look like yours, it might be" or, with somewhat better agreement between the parts of the sentence, "Don't assume a bag isn't yours just because it doesn't look like your bag"?

Why not just post a sign that says "Many bags mutate during transit. Assume nothing, trust no one."?

I don't see why they couldn't say something more straightforward, like "Many bags look alike. Please check luggage tags carefully." They might have considered a few alternatives before they had dozens of large expensive signs manufactured.

This problem of agreement between parts of a sentence not only stops me dead, it can hit me with real, physical force. The kind of yoga I practice (Bikram Yoga) was taught to all of the instructors by the originator of the system, who speaks English as a second language, and many of them tend to parrot his precise locutions. I can forgive being told to do something "with your exactly forehead," or even with "your both arms"; indeed, it's sort of charming.

But in one of the most strenuous of the balancing postures, Standing Bow (dandayamana dhanurasana), they occasionally encourage us by asserting, "The harder you kick, you can stay in this posture forever!"

The clause that prefaces this sentence demands agreement or contrast. I guess the original sentence was probably something like "The harder you kick, the easier it is to stay in this posture. Kick hard enough, and you can stay there forever!" But the way they actually say it, leaving the "harder" seeking a comparison word in the next part of the sentence, is enough that it sometimes knocks me right out of the pose. One of these days I'm going to fall down and injure myself, all because of that lonely "harder."

I'm not one of those Men Too Gentle To Live Among Wolves. I can survive and thrive in a world filled with unneeded apostrophes ("Apply now for Summer Job's!") or quotation marks for emphasis where they really imply sarcasm ('Try our "delicious" food!'). But ill-conceived sentences scar the actual tissue of my brain.

To show how permanent the damage is, I'll leave you with one more, which I first saw in a menu at a Zippy's restaurant in Hawaii...back in 1979. Beneath a picture of an unusually extragant ice-cream sundae was a description that began "An illusion of grandeur!"

That's a true gem. In fact, that's screwed up in too many ways to discuss. And in only four words.

Come to think of it, even though I promised that would be the last one, now that I'm off on Hawaii, I can't resist mentioning the sign at the University of Hawaii Computing Center that warned "No smoking, beverages, food, and pets." If there is anywhere on earth that ought to know the difference between AND and OR, it is a university computer center. "IF (Huge) AND (Gray) THEN (Elephant)" is standard computer logic, "IF (Huge) OR (Gray) THEN (Elephant)" will tell you that you have an elephant when you are looking at a mouse.

I was often tempted to stroll in the door with a lit cigarette, a Coke, and a dog. According to the sign, I wouldn't be breaking the rule.

But I knew how this would be received. Some surly computer center employee would have tossed me out, and when I explained the literal meaning of their sign, they would have snarled that I could understand what they had meant.

Well, you know what? The fact that people can probably puzzle out what was meant ain't enough.

God can answer questions no one can ask.

A Writer's Geography, II

2009-08-29T12:20:00.000-07:00

Life at Hollywood studios disagreed with many fine writers, notably F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner. The studio heads wanted their writers to work in offices at the studios, where the passing producers could hear the typewriters banging away as a song of productivity. Neither of these folks were inclined to produce on schedules, nor to hammer at the keyboard unless they had something to say.

Legend has it that Faulkner once found himself blocked, and finally asked if they would allow him to work at home. Since having Faulkner wokring for the studio was a matter of prestige, they reluctantly agreed.

One day director Howard Hawks needed him. After a series of frantic phone calls, they finally reached him at home--back in Oxford, Mississippi.*

Some writers, like Faulkner, seem to be rooted in a place, and need to be there to work at their best. Others are stimulated by places, but can write about them from a distance; think of Flannery O'Connor scribbling away about the South while ensconced in snowy Iowa, Wodehouse nattering on about Jeeves and Wooster from New York and Paris, or Willa Cather telling tales of the prairie from her apartment in Greenwich Village.

I find that new or unusual places generate ideas and enthusiasms, but if there's any linkage between where I live when doing the actual writing and the quality of that writing, I haven't found it. In fact, I seem to write best in featureless environments with minimal input. If I'm placing a scene in, say, Santa Barbara, California, then doing my writing in Santa Barbara only complicates matters by giving me extraneous details. The truth is, the Santa Barbara in which my story is set is not the Santa Barbara of the real world, but the Santa Barbara of my mind, and I have to believe that the concrete details my mind has stored up as representing Santa Barbara will be the best for evoking Santa Barbara in the mind of a reader.

At home, one of my desks faces a wall, and the other faces a window with the shade and curtains drawn. Much of my writing has been done in hotel rooms--the more generic, the better. I need to be looking inside my head, not around at the world.

Georges Simenon had the same approach, but to a more pronounced degree. To write his novels, he came up with a sketchy outline; visited his doctor to be pronounced healthy enough to tackle a novel; and then booked himself into a random hotel room where he proceeded to hammer out the book in anywhere from one to four weeks. (The fiery pace--and his concern about whether or not his health could sustain it--was at least partly owing to the steady use of amphetamines during these writing jags; his speed was at least partly due to, well, speed.)

I'm not sure it matters where on the globe I reside while doing my scribbling. In many cases, there seem to be advantages to being in a place unlike the one where the novel is set. This shouldn't be too astonishing; after all, writers set their stories in other time periods, in worlds that don't exist, or on undiscovered planets. It would be inconvenient if they needed to be in those environments to do their work.

But that's just me. There are writers who can't work well unless they are immersed in the bustle of Manhattan, and others who can't work well unless they are shut up in some hut in the Great White North. Some, if they are writing about modern Rome, need Rome right outside their doorstep so they can dash out and examine the cobblestones so as to better describe their shape and texture; others do best at describing Rome from afar.

Do you have a best environment for writing? Does it matter where you live?

Do you write well in hotel rooms?

A Writer's Geography, I

2009-08-25T10:54:00.001-07:00

Over the weekend, we drove a visiting friend up to San Luis Obispo. It was a disastrous drive--indeed, nearly it nearly became a fatal drive when we blew a tire at high speed in the fast lane of Interstate 5 in a section where ongoing construction had eliminated both of the road shoulders in favor of waist-high concrete barriers. But I digress.

While we were making our painfully slow way to San Luis Obispo--known as SLO to the locals, possibly becasue it can take so damn long to get there--we began discussing the virtues and drawbacks of the town. By the standards of Coastal California, SLO is relatively isolated; it's halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles, which means it's about 200 miles from either of them. It's a charming little town of about 40,000, with a good-sized university located on the outskirts and a decent beach not too far away. Much of the old-town section has been preserved or renovated, and it's a great walking-around town, with good restaurants, laid-back neighborhoods, and eclectic shops. It's smack in the middle of Central Coast Wine Country, so the supplies of big, fat, loud reds (Zinfandels, Syrahs, and Petite Sirahs in particular) are plentiful. (My palate isn't subtle, so I say big, fat, and loud by the way of compliment.)

A nice place. Would I want to live there? I'm not sure. It's a long, long way to any major symphony orchestra, and I wouldn't count on Death Cab for Cutie* or King Crimson swinging through town on tour, either. The movie theatres aren't exactly cutting edge, and the university is better known for agriculture and engineering than for the arts. And, although the restaurants are wonderful, it wouldn't be long before a resident exhausted all they had to offer.

It's the kind of town I think many writers imagine settling in--quiet, civilized, walkable. But it ain't Manhattan.

This got me thinking about the whole issue of the fantasy of the writer's life. One of the key elements of this fantasy is that, if you were supporting yourself well from your writing (I'm not), you could in principle live anywhere on the globe. This might mean retreating to a rural town with a hermit's writing hut out back of the cottage, ala JD Salinger, or staying in the metropolis to write in the mornings and emerge as man-about town in the evenings, like Noel Coward. As soon as they had the means, some writers--Somerset Maugham and Patrick O'Brian come to mind--immediately headed for the South of France, while others, like Stephen King and John Grisham, haven't budged from their native haunts (Maine and Mississippi, respectively).

Where would I live if there were no constraints? Heck if I know. I like seclusion, so way off in the country has an appeal. I like human-sized, walkable towns, so a small city might be nice. But I'm a sucker for cultural amenities, and I like having grocers nearby that can supply, say, seitan, natto, and garam masala.

In other words, my perfect fantasy city doesn't exist. This presents no real problem, since I'm not in a position to move there anyway, but says something (probably something unflattering) about the way my mind works. Or fails to.

Where would you live if making a living weren't an issue? Are your fantasies as confused as mine?

I'm not asking, mind you, where as a writer you ought to live. We'll get on to that in the next post. I'm asking about your fantasy.

===================================
*Factoid: It's reasonably well known that the band "Death Cab for Cutie" takes its name from the title (and chorus) of a Bonzo Dog Band song. Less known is the origin of that song title itself, which was inspired by the title of a story in a trashy American true-detective magazine from the early 1960s.

The Bonzos planned on doing a second song based on the title of another story in that same issue, but unfortunately Stanshall and Innes never got around to it. Too bad: the title was "It Was a Lovely Party Until Someone Found a Hammer." One can only imagine.

Famous Dictators and the Cave Of Caerbannog

2009-08-18T15:26:00.001-07:00

BROTHER MAYNARD: It reads, 'Here may be found the last words of Joseph of Aramathea. He who is valiant and pure of spirit may find the Holy Grail in the Castle of...uuggggggh'.

KING ARTHUR: What?

BROTHER MAYNARD: '... the Castle of uuggggggh'.

SIR BEDEVERE: What?

BROTHER MAYNARD: He must have died while carving it.

SIR LAUNCELOT: Oh, come on!

BROTHER MAYNARD: Well, that's what it says.

KING ARTHUR: Look, if he was dying, he wouldn't bother to carve 'uuggggh'. He'd just say it.

BROTHER MAYNARD: Well, it's what's carved in the rock.

SIR GALAHAD: Perhaps he was dictating.

KING ARTHUR: Oh, shut up.

=============================================

But with all due respect to the King, perhaps he was. It's not unknown. Henry James dictated much of his later work, as did Joeseph Conrad; and Mark Twain dictated his memoirs and other minor pieces.

The topic comes up because, as the result of Repetitive Stress Injury, the estimable MFW Curran is using Dragon Naturally Speaking to dictate his work-in-progress.

Now, talking a book into existence has always seemed like a great idea to me--and has also seemed impossible for someone constituted like mine own self. I mean, the way I talk and the way I write are certainly somehow related, but so are Conrad Hilton and Paris Hilton. That doesn't mean anybody would confuse the two.

On the other hand, Tim Stretton pointed out that Jack Vance used speech-recognition software for his later novels, and that there is no discernible change in Vance's inimitable style (and Mr. Stretton, who is something of a Vance scholar, would know).

I do my thinking on the page; the page reflects my sentences back to me, and my intent and the sentences continue to interact until I get at least within shouting distance of something that satisfies me. Dictating has always seemed impossible because my words would be spilling out into the ether, and would only be retreived to be scrutinized (and mumbled over and over under my breath) well after their utterance.

But then I realized that dictation, in the classic sense, and speech recognition are not really the same thing. Dictation is speaking to a person or a recording device without any immediate feedback. Speech recognition software, on the other hand, spills your words onto the computer screen. Dictation is impromptu composition, while speech recognition might be thought of as typing carried out by other means.

Dictating seems to me an impossible form of composition, but I can begin to imagine composing by speaking and seeing my words appear on a screen--though Matt's posts on the topic make it apparent that there can be many frustrations (many flocking frustrations) built into the process. And with the endless in-process revision I do as I write, I shudder to think what it would look like as I tried a sentence first this way, then that way, then upside-down and in reverse...

For the moment, I'll continue to write in my standard hunched-over, gnarled-shouldered, sweaty-tense fashion--but it's nice to know there are viable alternatives.

Alternatives that don't result in ...uuggggggh...being carved into stone simply because I said it.

Imagination Is Powerful--An Average of 13.5% More Powerful

2009-08-16T13:18:00.000-07:00

Okay, we're fond of talking about the profound power of imagination, how daydreaming can lead to great things, et cetera, but when pressed for concrete examples we are liable to come up a little short.

I'm not sure how I missed this one back in 2001, but here's a solid, blissfully mundane example at last, and an odd one at that. At a Society for Neuroscience conference in San Diego, researchers from the Cleveland Clinic reported that people can increase their strength by visualizing themselves exercising.

The initial experiment was done with people visualizing moving a muscle in their little finger (sounds like the opening for a joke of some sort, doesn't it?), but they've moved on to bigger and better things. Volunteers were asked to spend a little time five times a week visualizing flexing their bicep muscles as hard as possible. The subjects wore electrodes during the visualization to ensure that they weren't unconsciously flexing their muscles while visualizing; the goal was to have it be a purely mental phenomenon.

The strength of the subjects' biceps was measured every two weeks. After a few weeks of purely mental exercising, the visualization volunteers had increased their strength an average of 13.5%--and they kept that increased strength for three months after they stopped the visualization exercise.

This has obvious medical applications for people too enfeebled to exercise, or for people who are constrained in their movements by temporary restraints like casts or stitches. Whether or not you can also get aerobic benefits by going for a mental run hasn't been determined. ("Shhh! Stop rolling around in the bed! I'm running a marathon!")

It's a bit of a leap from stronger biceps to better novels, but I suppose it can't hurt to picture how brilliant your next book is going to be, can it?

Do You Need (Or Even Want) An Agent?

2009-08-12T12:02:00.001-07:00

(More to the point, do I?)

Frances Garrood raised this question over on the MNW blog. Frances has two fine novels to her credit, and, of course, "two" is the magic number for the Macmillan New Writing imprint, the number beyond which you must move to another imprint within the Pan Macmillan family. On the other hand, if you make that move, it's expected that your editor will go along with you, so the net change may not be all that great.

Back in the golden age of publishing (back when all editors were Maxwell Perkins and all authors were Hemingways, Wolfes, Fitzgeralds, or similar cultural icons; back when 'advances' were just that--a way to keep a writer fed and out of the rain while they finished their latest opus), an author's primary relationship was typically with their editor, and there were many cases of author's moving with their editors, not only between imprints, but from one publishing house to another. Editors nurtured their writers, acting as guide, confessor, friend, drinking buddy, banker, and, I gather, sometimes even doing a spot of editing on the side.

That's the legend (and, like the Arthurian legends, it's more fun to enjoy it without looking too closely into the specifics). Certainly editors dominated the literary landscape and agents played only a minor role. For those of us who have worked with a good editor, this would seem to be the logical state of affairs; after all, if an editor is doing their job, the editor has the most intimate relationship with a novel of anyone excepting the writer.

So, if you're lucky enough to be published at a house where you have an ongoing relationship with a good editor, do you really need an agent?

I'd answer with a definitive maybe yes, maybe no.

When do I think an agent would be useful to someone who has a good editor? Under any of the following circumstances, an agent might be in order even if you're already happily published:

1. You wear many writerly masks. Editors have many jobs beyond gently pointing out our more egregious blunders. One of them, crass as it may sound, is to develop writers as saleable commodities for their publishing houses. Sure, Iain Banks may be able to maintain an identity in two unrelated genres, but I'd bet no editor encouraged him to "branch out" into a wholly new identity. (Ken Follett has said that be received stiff resistance from everyone in publishing when he decided to switch away from his thrillers and write his first historical novel. Hardly surprising.) An editor needs to convince a house to publish a book in the first place, and then needs to cultivate that writer’s success (if any) by building their brand. Encouraging a writer of, say, military fiction to try their hand at a Harlequin romance doesn’t really make much sense for the house, the editor’s career, or most probably for the writer’s career.

Now, to be fair, no agent is likely to greet a writer’s desire to adopt a second genre with cheers of encouragement—unless the writer’s career in their first genre is flagging. But the agent is more likely to be able to go along (perhaps quite grudgingly) with the writer’s mulish, wrong-headed determination, because the agent is in a position to select from all the possible houses and imprints in the wide world to place the book (possibly under a pseudonym); the editor has no such luxury.

So, if you’re foolish enough to have novels in more than one genre, you most likely will need to seek an agent.

2. You have a novel you believe in that has been rejected. If your editor has said no to a book, that doesn’t necessarily mean it shouldn’t be published. It might mean that the editor can’t convince the house of its commercial prospects; it might mean that it doesn’t fit with the way they hope to build you as an author; it might mean that the editor is simply wrong about the book. The why of it doesn’t matter. You have three options open to you: a) Forget about it; b) Get an agent to shop it elsewhere; or, c) Send it over the transom to another publisher.

Forgetting about a book you think deserves a chance is an uncomfortable decision to live with. Tossing it over the transom is fine, but there aren’t many publishers who are open to unagented submissions. If you believe in the book, getting an agent is probably the best course.

3. You need more guidance. The MNW crowd is lucky in that Will Atkins is a flexible, generous editor who is willing to kick around ideas and even offer advice about what you might try next, but he still has to view matters from the perspective of what is possible within the (admittedly large) Pan Mac empire. An agent can take a broader view of your career…if you are so lucky as to acquire an agent whose perspective harmonizes with your own. (Good luck on that.)

4. You just want someone else to talk to. Hey, it’s a lonely business.

5. You want to be able to drop the phrase, “I was talking to my agent the other day…” into conversations. In Southern California, this hints at a connection to the movies and makes you seem more glamorous. In other parts of the country, however, people will probably assume you are talking about your insurance agent.

Note that I prefaced this with “even if you're already happily published.” If you aren’t happy with your publisher, or you feel you could get a far better deal that you are receiving, then you probably need an agent--if nothing else, as a reality check..

In my case, if I wrote only thrillers, I’d be only too happy to avoid the process of seeking representation; so far I’m an instance of Case #1, above—though, living here in the Belly of the Beast as I do, #5 has some appeal.

I’m sure I’ve overlooked some perfectly good reasons. Feel free to supply them.

Defeated by spam...

2009-08-02T22:57:00.000-07:00

Okay, I thought that turning on comment moderation might discourage all the Chinese-language spam. I was wrong. Either it is sent out by automated programs, or it is sent out by someone who never checks to see if their comments get posted, or it is sent by someone who relishes the fact that I have to log on to Blogger just to say, "No, don't publish this."

So, from now on it's no comment moderation. But you will have to type in one of those verification words to post comments.

Oh, well. As many have noted, sometimes the verification words are fun.

Maria Tatar (my favorite books on writing)

2009-07-30T11:28:00.001-07:00

Maria Tatar's Enchanted Hunters isn't precisely a book on writing. Subtitled The Power of Stories in Childhood, it is actually a wide-ranging examination of how children interact fiction, beginning with the bedtime stories that are read to them, and then moving on to the active phase, where they begin to seek out books to read to themselves.

Some may find the title "Enchanted Hunters" a bit creepy in this this connection, since it is lifted from Lolita. There is a hotel by that name in Lolita, as well as a play by that name, and Humbert Humbert uses the phrase to characterize himself. Maria Tatar is deliberately rehabilitating the phrase, since she thinks it is more aptly applied to young readers exploring the world of books than to pedophilia; but it is still an unusual choice.

The discussion of the changing roles of "bedtime stories"--which transformed from an ancient fireside tradition for whole families into stories intended to enthrall children, and has finally morphed in recent years into stories specifically designed to put children to sleep as quickly as possible--is engaging and thought-provoking. Tatar also has fine discussions on the roles of fear and horror, on the kinds of children who become habitual readers (and often writers), and on the ways where fiction can fuse escapism with facing life's problems; indeed, with facing problems that go beyond one's direct life experience.

For writers, however, the most interesting parts of this book focus on how children's literature works, and Tatar raises two points I'd never pondered before with respect to writing for children and young adults.

The concrete versus the abstract. As writers, we've all been told to focus on the specific, the Chekhovian ideal of the telling detail, and to avoid speaking in generalizations and superlatives. After all, saying that someone is possessed of "radiant beauty" doesn't really say much, does it?

On the contrary. In works for children and young adults, abstractions for positive qualities flourish, and even seem to be more effective than the concrete. As Tatar says in discussing one of Perrault's fairy tales, Donkeyskin: "There is the stereotypical proliferation of abstract adjectives: 'elegant,' 'magnificent,' 'lovely,' 'beautiful,' 'fine,' 'fresh,' 'warm,' 'wise,' 'modest'--attributes that leave a good deal of room for the imagination. It is, in fact, not very easy to spell out what Perrault wanted us to see, for there are few practical instructions for visualizing the princess. Donkeyskin's dress of gold and diamonds dazzles, and that diaphanous state of illumination, I would argue, allows the author to shine beams on her many abstract virtues to produce astonishing effects. The light of the dress ignites our imagination, urging us to fill in the blanks and to participate in the process of creating Donkeyskin's superlative inner and outer beauty...Luminosity, glitter, and sparkle enable the mind to picture persons and things despite and because of a lack of specificity."

Though Tatar doesn't discuss the issue, I think the reason this works so well with young readers is twofold. First, it allows them to impose their own concepts of beauty, warmth, or wisdom rather than dealing with specific examples which they might not, in fact, find beautiful, warm, or wise. Second, it doesn't demand the construction of subtext, a skill that develops only as readers become more mature. A "good" writer for adults throws out concrete details, specific bits of action and dialogue, and the odd metaphor or simile, and expects the readers to put it all together and summon up an understanding of character and motivation. Show, don't tell, isn't necessarily the most effective prescription for readers who have not yet developed this skill at synthesis.

I think this lack of synthetic ability and limited grasp of subtext is the reason that adverbs proliferate in the dialogue tags of young-adult novels. The Harry Potter novels contain an endless torrent of adverbial dialogue tags (some of them unintentionally hilarious, such as Harry ejaculated), but these help young readers understand immediately what the character is feeling, without demanding they stop and try to puzzle it out.

After showing that abstractions work so well for young readers, however, Tatar goes on to make a striking point: Abstractions work well for positive qualities, but for the dark, dangerous, and horrific, the more concrete, the better. As the author puts it, "Evil has many different faces, and its devlish manifestations are often in the gory details. We do not need many cues to imagine beauty and its spiritual uplift, but our minds seem to hanker for clear instructions when it comes to imagining the materiality of violence and horror. Writers of childrens books do not fail to deliver...Descriptions of beauty often have embedded in them an astonished observer contemplating the sights. Horror, by contrast, compels observers to both look and look away."

In books for children and young adults, there is a time to show and a time to tell, and which is more appropriate seems to depend on whether one is describing light or darkness.

Learning the protean power of words. At the same time that children are learning that letters on a page can tell a clear and enthralling story, they are also discovering that words can be slippery, ambiguous tools, prone to twisting in your hand just when you think you've grasped them.

Tatar points out that many treasured stories, such as The Wizard of Oz ("There's no place like home!") and The Secret Garden ("The Magic is in me! The Magic is making me strong!") teach that words are powerful, life-transforming things.

At the same time, however, some of the books best loved by the more skillful young readers, such as Lewis Carroll's Alice books, or Norman Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth, revel in the plasticity of language, using it to confuse, to baffle, or to 'prove' nonsensical propositions. To those who have mastered the art of reading, this provides a new level of delight; but one can only imagine how frustrating such books must be for those children who read laboriously, struggling to piece together a storyline when often the intent of the writer is not to transfer plot developments but instead to play with the nature of language itself. Although Tatar doesn't discuss it, to my mind this must be the point at which lifelong readers become fully committed, and the less skilled drift away.

In focusing here on implications for writers, I haven't attempted to do justice to Maria Tatar's fine book; it goes far beyond the issues I have cited here. Her analyses of particular books are fascinating (who would have thought someone could write page after absorbing page on how Goodnight, Moon works?), and her overview of how the tone and goals of books for children have changed since the 18th century is absorbing. If you're interested in children's literature, I can't imagine a more enjoyable book.

Well, okay--I can't imagine a more enjoyable nonfiction book.

Moderation in Some, But Not All, Things

2009-07-25T09:58:00.000-07:00

I'm turning on comment moderation so I can decrease the amount of Chinese-language spam appearing in the Comment trail.

I've been reluctant to do this, but the Chinese spam is relentless and it's no longer amusing. In addition, it links to utterly boring sites; the most recent, to take a single example, appears to be a dermatology clinic. This isn't one of those dermatology sites that shows truly horrendous skin conditions that make you want to take bleach to your computer screen afterwards (and possibly rub bleach into your eyes just to be safe). No, this is a site that shows a lot of slight blemishes that are somewhat ameliorated by a combination of treatment and Photoshop.

I suppose a Chinese Certified Public Accountant webpage would be more more boring, but only slightly. I never thought anything could make me view penis-enlargement techniques, Canadian pharmaceuticals, and fake Rolex offers as a sort of golden age, but these folks have managed.

So, my apologies: there will now be a delay between the time you post your comments and when they appear on the blog. And, just so I don't get confused and delete your legitimate comments by accident, I urge you to avoid making your comments in Chinese ideograms. (If you can't resist making your comments in Chinese, please use Pinyin.)

Walking, Standing, Writing

2009-07-20T10:20:00.000-07:00

Okay, have you heard about all the research that shows that sitting down for hours at a time is bad for you? If you haven't, then let me summarize:

1) Sitting lowers the activity of various lipase enzymes involved in breaking down fat.

2) Lowering lipase enzymes has profound metabolic consequences including lowering levels of "good" HDL cholesterol, upping the bad kinds, knocking liver and pancreatic enzymes out of whack, and a bunch of other things you don't want to hear about.

3) It isn't simply that sitting implies a sedentary lifestyle. Sitting for hours makes changes than even an hour of vigorous daily exercise can't counter.

4) It isn't just about the exercise; simply standing instead of sitting makes a huge difference.

Hmm. A bit of a problem for us writerly types, isn't it?

But, then, Hemingway wrote standing up (supposedly because of a back problem). Thomas Wolfe also wrote standing up, though he never said why; Wolfe was six-foot-six, so he often found it convenient to compose using the top of a refrigerator as a desk.

Looking into it, I find that Virginia Woolf and Winston Churchill also wrote standing, and that Philip Roth continues to do so today. In fact, in the nineteenth century, "standing desks" were quite common, and Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll both composed while standing. (I'm sure Faye Booth could have told me all that, and probably even has vintage postcards showing what a standing desk looks like. No good Victorian home should be without one.)

Somehow standing and writing seems more compatible with scratching along with a pen or pencil than with tapping at a keyboard, but I'm assured by what I read here and there that standing and whacking at a keyboard is easy once you get used to it. Those folks who check you in at the airlines do it all day long.

Certainly I'm capable of thinking about writing while on my feet. After all, I get my best thinking about stories done while I'm out walking, and a good walk is usually my first remedy when I get stuck. There have been quite a few times where I vaguely wished I had a voice recorder with me, as sometimes the words start coming while I'm out walking, and I have to rush home like someone with a bladder problem. (Alas, when confronted with an actual voice recorder, the words in my head vanish. There's something about my writing process that requires seeing the words going down on the page--even if that page is in fact a computer screen.)

So I plan to try writing while standing and see how that works. For the moment, the arrangements will consist of a box stacked on top of my existing desktop. I'm also advised that it's useful to have something to prop up first one foot and then the other, sort of like a bar rail. I gather the Victorians had some sort of stools to lean back against as well, though I'm not quite sure how those looked or worked.

There are a surprising number of people out there now who are working all day while standing on treadmills moving at about a mile per hour. (By 'a surprising number' I don't mean many thousands. The fact that there's more than, say, three people doing this came as a surprise to me.) I am assured by enthusiasts of this technology that you adapt rapidly, and your mind is more active, alert, and less distractable. I have a hard time imagining myself typing while walking, especially while writing fiction; as it is, I already have a tendency to forget to breathe. Stumping along on a treadmill while trying to work strikes me as fraught with comedy potential.

Nonetheless, there are whole companies out there now devoted to treadmill desks--here's a video of one of the inventors. Even he admits that writing is better done sitting down, but not everyone agrees; one YA writer now works while on a treadmill desk.

I'm not ready to head down that road yet. Nor am I ready to buy the $3,800 "English Bamboo and Lacquer Standing Desk c1880" offered by One of a Kind Antiques of Essex, Connecticut--not only because I don't have $3,800 to spend on such an experiment, but also because the concept of "English Bamboo" makes my head hurt. No, for the moment I'll just use that plastic carton atop my desk and see how that goes.

And if that doesn't seem to work, maybe I'll subscribe to the approach favored by Marcel Proust, Mark Twain, and Woody Allen. They all wrote in bed.

POV Part X: More On Shifting POV

2009-07-13T23:16:00.000-07:00

No one uses shifts from consciousness to consciousness quite like Ann Patchett. Since she builds her fluid POV technique up gradually, it is impossible to do her craft justice in even a long quotation; by the time she gets rolling, we know the interior landscape of each major character intimately. Nonetheless, an excerpt from her wonderful novel Bel Canto gives an idea of how she wields POV.

A little background in necessary to follow the scene. A group of revolutionaries have taken over the Vice-President's house (in a country that is clearly Peru, although I don't believe the country is ever identified). The Vice-President was hosting a major diplomatic party, and now, a few days later, most of the attendees are hostages. Among these are Simon Thibault, the French Ambassador; Gen, a translator attached to a Japanese businessman; and Ruben, the Vice-President himself. Carmen, Beatriz, and Ishmael are among the youngest of the revolutionaries.

As the scene opens, Thibault, Ruben, and Gen are in the kitchen. The government forces outside the building have sent in more food, but on this particular day rather than prepared food it consists of raw vegetables and uncooked chicken. The revolutionaries confiscated all the knives from the kitched during their takeover, and the scene begins when Gen has just returned from pleading with 'The General' of the revolutionaries to provide them with knives so they can prepare a meal for everyone.

aaaaa“What about a simple coq au vin?” Thibault said.
aaaaa“They confiscated all the vin,” Ruben said. “We could always send Gen out for another request. It’s probably locked up around here somewhere unless they drank it all.”
aaaaa“No vin,” Simon Thibault said sadly, as if it were something dangerous, as if it were a knife. How impossible. In Paris one could be careless, one could afford to run out completely because anything you wanted was a half a block away, a case, a bottle, a glass…
aaaaaaaaaa[a long reverie/flashback]
aaaaa“Isn’t there some kind of coq sans vin?” Ruben leaned forward to look at the book. All these books in his home that he had never seen before! He wondered if they belonged to him or to the house.
aaaaaThibault pushed Edith’s scarf over his shoulder. He said something about roasting and turned his head away to read. No sooner had he looked at the page than the door swung open and in came three, Beatriz, the tall one, pretty Carmen, and then Ishmael, each of them with two and three knives apiece.
aaaaa“You asked for us, didn’t you?” Beatriz said to Gen. “I’m not on duty now at all. I was going to watch television.”
aaaaaGen looked at the clock on the wall. “It’s past time for your program,” he said, trying to keep his eyes on her.
aaaaa“There are other things on,” she said. “There are lots of good programs. ‘Send the girls to do it.’ That’s always the way.”
aaaaa“They didn’t just send the girls,” Ishmael said in his own defense.
aaaaa“Practically,” Beatriz said.
aaaaaIshmael reddened and he rolled the wooden handle of the knife between his palms.
aaaaa“The General said we were to come and help with dinner,” Carmen said. She spoke to the Vice-President. She did not turn her eyes to Gen, who did not look at her, so how did it seem they were staring at one another?
aaaaa“We are most grateful,” Simon Thibault said. “We know nothing about the operation of knives. If entrusted with something as dangerous as knives there would be a bloodbath here in a matter of minutes. Not that we would be killers, mind you. We’d cut off our own fingers, bleed to death right here on the floor.”
aaaaa“Stop it,” Ishmael said, and giggled. He had recently received one of the amateur haircuts that had been going around. Where his head had once been covered in heavy rolls of curls, the hair was now snipped with irregular closeness. It bristled like grass in some places and lay down neatly in others. In a few places it was all but gone and small patches if pink scalp shone through like the skin of a newly born mouse. He was told it would make him look older but really it just made him look ill.
aaaaa“Do any of you know how to cook?” Ruben asked.
aaaaa“A little,” Carmen said, studying the position of her feet on the black-and-white checkerboard of the floor.
aaaaa“Of course we can cook,” Beatriz snapped. “Who do you think does our cooking for us?”
aaaaa“Your parents. That’s a possibility,” the Vice-President said.
aaaaa“We’re adults. We take care of ourselves. We don’t have parents looking after us like children.” Beatriz was only irritated about missing television. She had done all her work, after all, patrolled the upstairs of the house and stood watch for two hours at the window. She had cleaned and oiled the Generals’ guns and her own gun. It wasn’t fair that she had been called into the kitchen. There was a wonderful program that came on in the late afternoon, a girl wearing a star-covered vest and a full skirt who sang cowboy songs and danced in high heels.
aaaaaIshmael sighed and set his three knives on the counter in front of him. His parents were dead. His father had been taken from the house one night by a group of men and no one saw him again. His mother went with a simple flu eleven months ago. Ishmael was nearly fifteen, even if his body produced no evidence to support this fact. He was not a child, if being a child meant one had parents to cook your supper.
aaaaa“So you know the onion,” Thibault said, holding up an onion.
aaaaa“Better than you do,” Beatriz said.
aaaaa"Then take that dangerous knife and chop up some onions.” Thibault passed out cutting boards and bowls. Why weren’t cutting boards considered weapons? Hold the two edges firmly in your hands and it was clear that the great slabs of wood were just the right size for hitting someone on the back of the head. And why not bowls, for that matter? The heavy ceramic in the color of pastel mints seemed harmless enough while holding bananas, but once they were broken how were they that much different from the knife? Couldn’t one drive a shard of pottery into a human heart just as easily? Thibault asked Carmen to mince the garlic and slice the sweet peppers. To Ishmael he held up an eggplant. “Peeled, seeded, chopped.”
aaaaaIshmael’s knife was heavy and long. Which of them wielded a paring knife for self-defense? Who had taken the grapefruit knife? When he tried to remove the skin he wound up cutting three inches into the spongy yellow flesh. Thibault watched him for a while and then held out his hands. “Not like that,” he said. “There will be nothing to eat. Here, give them here.”
aaaaaIshmael stopped, examined his work, then he held out the butchered vegetable and the knife. He held the blade out to Thibault. What did he know about kitchen manners? Then Thibault had them both, the knife and the eggplant, one in each hand. Deftly, quickly, he began to peel back the skin.
aaaaa“Drop it!” Beatriz shouted. On calling out she dropped her own knife, the blade slick with onions, a shower of minced onions scattering onto the floor like a wet, heavy snow. She pulled her gun from her belt and raised it up to the Ambassador.
aaaaa“Jesus!” Ruben said.
aaaaaThibault did not understand what he had done. He thought at first that she was angry that he had corrected the boy on his peeling. He thought the problem was with the eggplant and he laid the eggplant down first and then the knife.
aaaaa“Keep your voice down,” Carmen said to Beatriz in Quechua. “You’re going to get us all in trouble.”
aaaaa“He took the knife.”
aaaaaThibault raised up his empty hands, showed his smooth palms to the gun.
aaaaa“I handed him the knife,” Ishmael said. “I gave it to him.”
aaaaa“He was only going to peel,” Gen said. He could not recognize a word of this language they spoke to one other.
aaaaa“He isn’t supposed to hold the knife,” Beatriz said in Spanish. “The General told us that. Doesn’t anyone listen?” She kept he gun aimed, her heavy eyebrows pointed down. Her eyes were starting to water from the fumes of the onions, and soon there were tears washing down over her cheeks, which everyone misunderstood.

Overall, the scene remains Thibault's scene, but while we spend more time in his perspective than in anyone else's, we dip into the minds of everyone else in the scene--and even, at the end, are told that "everyone misunderstood" Beatriz' tears. There are also a few passages--such as the one about Ishmael's haircut--that are from the narrator's perspective, outside the minds of anyone present.

Patchett does all this with fine control, and I never find her movements from head to head to be confusing or jarring. But, then, I think Bel Canto is a brilliant book, while I've met some people who positively loathed it--and when asked why they disliked it, they usually cited the lack of a single protagonist to identify with. I agree that if it focused on a single character or two that it would be a very different novel; but it is the scope of POVs that makes Bel Canto such a singular achievement.

POV Part IX: The Wide World of Third-Person--Shifting POV

2009-07-13T23:00:00.000-07:00

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There are certain terms in writing that are used only when a common technique is used in what the critic feels is an unsuccessful fashion. For example, exposition that annoys is "info-dumping." Explaining that seems redundant in context is "countersinking." And switching POV in a disorienting fashion is "head-hopping."

All of these are in the eyes of the beholder. There is an unfortunate species of writer, common in the US (I'm not sure how well they breed elsewhere in the world), who believe that good writing never contains exposition, re-emphasis, or switches in POV (or, at least no switches in POV without breaks in the text). Since many masterpieces of literature contain some or all of these, it isn't clear to me how folks maintain this particular critical stance; but, then, since they are obviously idiots, we need not worry further about them here.

Frequent switches of POV without a major break don't usually bother me--though I don't tend to do it in my own fiction. This a probably in part owing to cowardice on my part (it's hard to do well), and partly a matter of choice in craftsmanship; I believe that shifts in POV tend to expand the scope of a scene, but pay the price of a reduction in intensity.

Larry McMurtry is a brilliant prose stylist and storyteller who has the ability to write in many different POVs. In the quartet of books spawned from Lonesome Dove, he shifts from head to head in the most blunt and unapologetic way. A particular passage from Lonesome Dove has become (in)famous as an example of head-hopping, and has been so widely quoted it is often just called "The Buttermilk Scene":

aaaaa"Want some buttermilk?” July asked, going to the crock.
aaaaa“No, sir,” Joe said. He hated buttermilk, but July loved it so that he always asked anyway.
aaaaa“You ask him that every night,” Elmira said from the edge of the loft. It irritated her that July came home and did exactly the same things day after day.
aaaaa“Stop asking him,” she said sharply. “Let him get his own buttermilk if he wants any. It’s been four months now and he ain’t drunk a drop—looks like you’d let it go."
aaaaaShe spoke with a heat that surprised July. Elmira could get angry about almost anything, it seemed. Why would it matter if he invited the boy to have a drink of buttermilk?

Most people would call that "head-hopping," and I'm inclined to join in with the chorus. Certainly it doesn't anchor us in any particular perspective, nor does it ratchet up the intensity of what is, after all, a rather trivial scene.

On the other hand, it is part of McMurty's strategy in the book. The whole style of the novel is rather laconic, and matches the nature of most of the characters (even the one character who is given to long, prosy speeches isn't inclined to a great deal of self-revelation). The narrative voice of the book is spare, like the barren landscape of Texas, and although that voice is omniscient, it is also rather reticent. It gives us a sentence of dialogue, an accompanying thought, an action, but it resists the urge to smooth our way. What you see is what you get, with the unusual proviso that what you see is sometimes inside a character's head. The novel has a straightforward, plain, declarative tone, and although it is fiercely ironic in places, the writer never stops to wink at us; indeed, the writer is relatively invisible.

At the other end of the spectrum sits a writer like Patrick O'Brian. O'Brian loves the intrusive expository voice; he is on record as believing that English prose style reached its height with Jane Austen, and there are many sly Austen references in his novels. Although in the Aubrey/Maturin novels he often embeds us deep in a character's POV, he feels quite free to flutter from one head to another, sometimes even revealing the thoughts of animals. The transitions in POV are often done by pulling back from a character's thoughts to a great psychic distance and then working down into another POV, but he is also able to vault from one POV to another without confusing or jarring the reader.

There are some passages where action carries us from one POV to another. For example, O'Brian will have a scene where we are in Stephen Maturin's POV while Maturin talks to an officer; we will then follow the description of the officer's movements as he travels through the various levels of a ship and arrives at Jack Aubrey's cabin and we will then slide into Aubrey's POV. This sort of "geographical" transition in POVs is clear, never jarring, and almost unnoticeable unless you are watching for it as a matter of craft.

But O'Brian can also use geographic shifts in a more rapid way. In the novel The Commodore, Aubrey and Maturin have captured and boarded a slave ship off the coast of Africa. We are first embedded in Aubrey's mind as he explores the horrors of the ship, and then:

aaaaaHe returned to the Bellona, took off his clothes, stood long under a jet of clear water, retired to his cabin and sat there considering, revolving the possibilities open to him, thinking closely, taking notes, and writing two letters to Captain Wood at Sierra Leone, the one official, the other private.
aaaaaDuring this time, or part of it, Stephen sat with Whewell on the slaver’s capstan, the wind being abaft her quarter and the air clean as the squadron stood south-east. He was reasonably satisfied with his patients; he had put salve and clean linen on many and many an iron-chafed wrist, and there was a somewhat more human feeling on the well-fed deck.

Simple as that. Many writers, of course, would have added a white-space break between the two paragraphs, but the omniscient interjection of "During this time, or part of it" makes that unneccesary; there is no real need for a break in the flow of the text.

On occasion, O'Brian will leap directly from head to head, and it is always fun to watch how he goes about it. Unlike McMurtry, who uses dialogue to let us know where we are and then drops into the speaker's thoughts without further ado, O'Brian usually carries some sort of a thread, like a classical composer modulating between distant keys. In another passage from The Commodore, we are deep inside Aubrey's mind as he reads his secret orders from the Admiralty:

aaaaaDisregarding the assurance (their Lordships’ graceful finishing touch) that he must not fail in this or any part of it or he would answer the contrary at his peril, he called Stephen in from the great stern-gallery, the most engaging piece of naval architecture known to man, in fact. But hardly had the Doctor turned before the radiance in Jack’s smile, face, eyes dropped by two or three powers: the French clearly intended another invasion of Ireland, or liberation as they put it, and he felt a little shy of broaching the matter. Stephen had never made his views vehemently, injuriously clear, but Jack knew very well that he preferred the English to stay in England and to leave the government of Ireland to the Irish.
aaaaaStephen saw the change in his face—a large, essentially red face in spite of the tan in which his blue eyes shone with an uncommon brilliance, a face made for humour—and the papers in his hand.

Once again we have made the transition via an omniscient observation--the look on Jack's face. This is an 'outside' observation rather than Jack's POV, mixed in with the narrator relating to us Jack's thoughts from a slight distance. This look on Jack's face, when seen by Stephen, acts as a thread that slithers us neatly into Stephen's POV.

I first read the O'Brian novels for the characters and stories, but I have returned to them simply to watch the ways O'Brian plays with the craft of writing--and 'play' is the operative word. O'Brian makes omniscience look like great fun.

But, then, snowboarding looks like great fun, too; nonethelss, I suspect it's actually rather hard work.

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Talent, Success, and Other Such Matters

2009-07-10T14:23:00.000-07:00

Last night we went with friends to the Hollywood Bowl to see Joshua Bell perform the Bruch Violin Concerto. I've seen Bell before--a stunning performer, once you get past the fact that he looks a bit too much like actor Hugh Grant. (Not that I have anything against Hugh Grant, mind you. But Grant just doesn't seem like a violin virtuoso.)

Primitive Man Discovers Fire

But first, a digression. We were dragging along a wheeled cooler filled with champagne on ice and a pile of finger food. About halfway up to the Bowl, it felt as though I were hauling a travois raher than a wheeled cart. On inspection, we saw that one of the wheels wasn't turning.

A closer look revealed that the axle pin of one of the wheels had become detached from one side, and was protruding from the wheelbase. I reached down and pushed on it with my thumb, thinking I could push it back into place, and gave a quick yelp of pain. The friction of being dragged had made the axle searingly hot--fully hot enough to burn my thumb. For those who believe I am overstating the case, here is a picture of my thumb taken just before I typed this:

Despite continued application of ice, I ended up with quite a blister. If you've ever doubted that fire could be produced by friction alone, ala the Boy Scouts, I'm here to testify that it can. Ouch.

But, As I Was Saying...

Joshua Bell gave an extraordinary performance (as always), and the seven thousand fans on their feet clapping persuaded him to come back for a a solo encore, which was even more impressive than the Bruch.

But after the rapturous reception of his performance, I couldn't help thinking of the experiment Mr. Bell participated in back in 2007, when he set himself up in a Washington, DC subway as a busker and played for 45 minutes. Hardly anyone stopped to watch--though he did collect $32.17, which isn't bad for a busker. On the other hand, those of us watching him last night paid $96 each.

I'm morally certain that if I walked past Joshua Bell playing in a subway, or anywhere else, that I'd stop dead in my tracks. (And cry out, "Look! Isn't that Hugh Grant?"). But perhaps in the event I wouldn't notice; perhaps I'd mutter to myself, hey, this guy's pretty good, must have some training, and toss a dollar in his hat.

As anyone who has ever seen their typescript set in print and slapped between two covers can testify, presentation matters, and, to a great extent, the platform determines how much attnetion you command.

Apparently even in the case of certified genuises.

POV Part VIII: The Wide World of Third-Person, Section 2

2009-06-28T10:45:00.000-07:00

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Back in my tinyhood, when I was being hustled through a bewildering array of church denominations, one of the catechism classes I attended taught me that God Almighty had three key attributes: He was omniscient, omnipotent, and omnivorous. Well, something like that. I admit I wasn't paying full attention.

As far as I know, only one of these--omniscient--is a narrative stance, but damned if I know what it means. Strictly taken, it means that the narrator knows everything, but as used in common writing parlance it is more a source of confusion than anything else. (The narratologists have tried to clarify things a bit, and have their own more-precisely targeted terminologies, though they are still locked in battle with one another. Emma Darwin once recommended an excellent book on the topic, Dorrit Cohn's Transparent Minds. If you care for such things, it's a great read--but be warned that, although readable and stimulating, it doesn't purport to be anything other than purely academic. Indubitable proof of this is in the pricing--$37.50 for a paperback.)

The omniscient narrative voice was the dominant approach of the nineteenth century, and its gradual displacement in the twentieth century has often been attributed to the supposed philosophic transition of the modern mind: The "death of god," loss of meaning, and increasing moral relativism, according to this theory, made an all-knowing narrator seem implausible to readers.

This makes for a nice story, but I think it's poppycock. (That seemingly insipid word, by the way, is from the Dutch pappekak, which literally means "soft or wet shit." Makes it a touch more vivid, doesn't it?) Although Somerset Maugham said that in his brash youth he adored an omniscient point of view, while as he grew older and less certain of anything he felt increasingly uncomfortable in anything but first-person, he is talking about his own writing process, not about what readers are willing to accept. In general, I don't think most readers have a problem with anything that stops short of knocking them out of the story, and I don't believe many readers wonder "How does the narrator know all these things?" any more than most movie-goers are wondering "How did there happen to be a camera there when all these events transpired?"

Some of the common conventions of older omniscient writing--for example, the direct address of "Dear Reader"--do draw the attention of the reader to the artifice of a novel. When done deliberately, this is often thought of as having a distinctly meta-fictional, post-modern flavor of the sort found in Barth or Vonnegut, but there is nothing new under the sun; Sterne took this sort of goofing around to its limits, and there is a distinctly ironic smile behind many of Austen's asides, encouraging us to enjoy the story both on the level of the tale itself as well as drawing our attention to the story as a constructed thing. But such intrusions are not a necessary part of the omniscient voice, and most readers couldn't tell you whether a book they've read is omniscient or not.

When you hang out with writers, you will find "omniscient" to be used inconsistently. It can mean any of the following:

1) A narrative voice that operates independent of any particular point of view and has knowledge that, if not necessarily boundless, is not bound to an individual

2) A third-person narrative voice that knows the future

3) A narrative voice that can enter multiple consciousnesses

Now, a true omniscient stance encompasses (at least as potentialities) all three of those. Among many writers, however, 'omniscient' is more often used as a label of condemnation than as a simple designation.

Complaints about omniscience usually don't include item 1). As discussed in the previous post, even works well-known for being written in the third-person-limited form often deviate into narrative that doesn't have a point of view attributable to any character in the story. This is common for scene-setting and exposition. In thrillers, suspense, horror, and adventure novels, it is often used to rachet up tension: The narrative switches to a description of the hurricane brewing out in the deserted ocean, or to the bomb ticking in the privacy of the vault, or the primeval ooze (contaminated with radiation of course) gradually coalescing into a shape vaguely humanoid. This approach is widely accepted by writers, and probably not even noticed by readers who are not writers themselves.

Item 2), a third-person narrator who knows the future, presents us with a curious situation. Except in the case of present-tense narratives, a narrator must be assumed to be placed somewhere in the future relative to the events being recounted. So the narrator ought to know all manner of things about the future course of the story, and, in principle, readers ought to get annoyed at all that is being withheld from them. Lucky for all of us who ever write in past tense, this doesn't seem to bother paeople.

(The same problem is presented in its starkest form in first-person past-tense. Should the writer tell the tale entirely as perceived by the narrator at the time the events were taking place, or should the narrator also enlarge the story with retrospection by looking back on those events? For purposes of drama and suspense the story is usually stronger without retrospective commentary--though many first-person narratives are bookended with retrospection, while the spine of the tale is related in a more naive fashion.)

What most writers mean when they complain about "omniscience" about the future is that the narrator is engaging in intrusive foreshadowing. There's nothing wrong with foreshadowing--in its sneakier and more symbolic forms it's one of the glories of storytelling--but intrusive foreshadowing of the "Little did he know..." variety is not only often cliche, but usually has the effect of knocking the reader right out of the flow of the story. Bad writers do this in the same way that bad film makers use blaring trumpets to tell us when to pay attention and syrupy violins to tell us when to cry.

On the other hand, the jarring and intrusive effect of this kind of clairvoyance can be used to great effect. For example, recall the first line of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez:

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

Like most strong effects, these mixings of time need to be used with some caution; but there is nothing intrinsically right or wrong about them.

The most common way the word omniscient is (mis)used, however, is as in item 3), meaning writing where the narrative travels into the minds of several characters.

Now, the odd thing about how most people use the term in this sense is that it is restrictive. If you only enter the mind of one character per chapter, they call it "multiple POV third person." And, in fact, if you go into more than one mind per chapter, but have a white-space break between the two POVs, it is still "multiple POV third person" to these folks. It is only talked about (or, more often, complained about) as omniscience when there is no whitespace signal, be it a chapter break or simply some blank lines.

Why the insertion of a few blank lines makes the narrative stance non-omniscient is a puzzle to me, but there it is. I agree it takes more skill to navigate from one mind to another without inserting a clean break, and that if done unskilfully it runs the risk of confusing the reader or diluting the effect of the story, but I'm not sure it constitutes the adoption of an entirely different narrative form.

In the same way that any exposition whatsoever can bring about cries of "info dumping" from a certain kind of writer, any shift in POV consciousness without a break can summon forth accusations of "head-hopping." Now, exposition that is boring or intrusive is generally a bad thing, and the same can be said of modulating between different minds in a jarring or confusing way, but that doesn't mean that exposition or shifting POV are inherently bad. Yet there seems to be a whole generation of writers who have been warned about the dangers of info-dumping and head-hopping and have taken these cautions about technique as moral lessons. It's fine to warn children about the danger of matches, but to see grownups clustering together and urgently whispering, "Fire bad!" is a little unsettling. It might seem as if they are hurting no one but themselves, but these writers might end up as critics or teachers some day.

Since Omniscience = Head-hopping in the minds of many, I'll devote a post or two to the ways different writers have attacked modulation of POV. For me it's always an entertaining topic (although sometimes substantial blocks of text need to be quoted to show the techniques). Plus it will allow me to fill up blog space without the necessity of inventing the sentences myself.

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POV Part VII: The Wide World of Third-Person, Part 1

2009-06-23T13:55:00.000-07:00

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I apologize for my long absence from this space. Although since February of 2007 I fancied my self quite the indefatigable blogger, it turns out that in certain circumstances I am quite defatigable indeed.

To tell the truth, I don't really want to write about third-person point of view. It's too damned polymorphous. Some of the techniques involved are fascinating, but the ways third-person can be used are too varied for a nice, clean discussion. In fact, I've never seen a classification of the dimensions of third-person that left me satisfied--and I'm sure to be dissatisfied with what I write here.

Oh, well. Being dissatisfied with what you write is part of being a writer. Here goes.

In first-person singular fiction, the narrator is known (even if unnamed). In first-person plural and second-person fiction, the identity of the narrator is deliberately blurred, hiding behind "we," or the elusive web of meanings of "you."

In third-person fiction, there is usually an unidentified narrator who stands apart from the narrative itself. At one extreme, this narrator knows only what the point-of-view character knows--so-called third-person limited; at the other extreme, the narrator can know everything, the third-person omniscient narrator.

But there is (at the minimum) another dimension to the third-person POV, usually designated as the degree of subjectivity; thus, there can be third-person subjective, or third-person objective. Third-person objective reads much like a camera, avoiding dipping into the character's consciousness; third-person subjective reads much like first-person with "he" or "she" swapped for "I."

Of course, this means that at the corners of our box, we have would have designations such as "third-person objective limited" or "third-person subjective omniscient," and the truth is that narratives are almost never written in such pure forms.

For example, I can't think of a single novel in third-person objective limited. (Perhaps you can; help me out here.) The best example of third-person objective limited POV I can produce (third-person objective limited singular, if you want to be picky) is Roman Polanski's film Chinatown (from the pen of Robert Townes). It is limited--the viewer never gets any information that the POV character isn't digesting at the same time--but it is also objective; we don't peer into the protagonist's mind, or know his inner workings except through his actions. In fact, at moments it is obvious that the protagonist is developing suspicions and theories that are not shared with us, because we know only what can be observed from the outside.

John Gardner once asserted that something was wrong with literature when third-person limited became the dominant narrative stance, but in fact strict third-person limited novels are rare. Third-person limited is popular in mysteries because it, like first-person, allows our understanding to be confined to what the character discovers, while simultaneously allowing the narrator the choice of revealing or concealing any given train of thought of the character. In a first-person detective, withholding thoughts or reasoning from the reader can seem coy or even unfair. Writing in third-person doesn't entirely solve this problem (the topic of withholding deserves a post of its own), but it certainly makes it easier than dodging the candor of most first-person narration.

One of the novels often cited as quintessentially third-person limited is Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, but, like so much said about Hemingway, this is an exaggeration. It's a good example of the use of third-person limited, but it often strays from the limitations of that voice. (I'm not complaining here; I think it's a better book for it.) Let's look at a few examples. The book opens with this:

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff on the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a boy had been with him.

Okay, those are all things known to the old man, so we aren't beyond the "limits" of the limited point of view. It continues:

But after forty days without a fish the boy's parents had told him that the old man was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky, and the boy had gone at their orders in another boat which caught three good fish in the first week.

Hmm. Getting a little further from the old man's direct knowledge here, although perhaps the boy told him all this. But the opening paragraph concludes thus:

It made the boy sad to see the old man come in each day with the skiff empty and he always went down to help him carry either the coiled lines of the gaff and harpoon and the sail that was furled around the mast. The sail was patched with flour sacks, and, furled, it looked like the flag of permanent defeat.

Now, I think this is a fine paragraph (perhaps even good and fine and true). But we are pretty far into what the boy sees and thinks and feels at this point, and that last line ("the flag of permanent defeat")--well, I like it, but it is clearly the viewpoint of the narrator, not the old man. (Further reading nails down the fact that neither the old man nor the boy think in such poetic terms.)

A few pages on, we read this:

They sat on the Terrace and many of the fishermen made fun of the old man and he was not angry. Others, of the older fishermen, looked at him and were sad. But they did not show it and they spoke politely about the current and the depths they had drifted their lines at and the the steady good weather and of what they had seen.

And, a bit later:

"Thank you," the old man said. He was too simple to wonder when he had attained humility.

We are clearly standing well outside the old man's limited sphere of consciousness and getting commentary from an independent narrator. In the last pages of the book, in fact, the old man is asleep, and we see what the boy is doing, and in the very last page we are focused on a scene told quite objectively where neither the old man nor the boy are present.

To be fair to those who cite the book as a model of the third-person limited form, the middle of the novella does hew quite closely to narration centered around the limited consciousness of the old man, with little in the way of commentary from an outside narrator. The opening and closing sections of the book are from a much greater psychic distance than the body of the book, and this allows a more omniscient voice to do the heavy lifting of getting the story moving and bringing it to a satisfying conclusion.

Ian McEwan's Saturday is perhaps a better example of strict third-person limited form. A sly writer, McEwan here (and in other novels) slides in information or observations that are probably omniscient but are also plausibly the thoughts of the POV character. For example:

From the second floor he faces the night, the city in its icy white light, the skeltal trees in the square, and thirty feet below, the black arrowhead railings like a row of spears...the streetlamp galre hasn't quite obliterated all the stars; above the Regency facade on the other side of the square hang remnants of constellations in the southern sky. That particular facade is a reconstruction, a pastiche--wartime Fitzrovia took some hits from the Luftwaffe--and right behind is the Post Office Tower, municipal and seedy by day, but at night, half-concealed and decently illuminated, a valiant memorial to more optimistic days.

Are those the thoughts and perceptons of our POV character, or of an independent narrator? Who can tell? McEwan is subtle enough that he can load plenty of information into a scene without it feeling as though there is a narrator intruding.

Mind you, I'm not claiming there is any special virtue in holding to a strict limited POV; I'm simply admiring the fact that McEwan can do it with such flair and without his writing seeming claustrophobic or limited. Most third-person narratives are a mixture of omniscient and limited, objective and subjective, and they are the better for it.

The only note of caution I would sound about bouncing between these four quadrants is that it is best to give the reader some clue as to the range of narrative forms that will be employed. Although the reader may not know quite what is wrong, if you have written chapter after chapter from a very limited, subjective view, if you suddenly drop in a passage where a distant narrator generalizes about the nature of life (or about the nature of the POV character), you run the risk of giving the reader a case of narrative whiplash. If you plan to segue from distant, omniscient views to tight internal POV, it may be best to ring many of the possible chimes early on so the reader can learn to anticipate the range of consciousness of the book. (Unless, of course, you deliberately wish to jar the reader for some reason.)

And what of switching character POVs? That, I'm afraid, is a topic of its own...

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NUCCA? Whazzat?

2009-05-29T15:14:00.000-07:00

Alas, another post that is only peripherally, and by your indulgence, related to the subject of writing.

Before our little jaunt to Hawaii, I thought my blood pressure was under control. Mornings it tended to be about 124/82; after yoga, this dropped to about 105/70 and tended to stay there for the rest of the day.

That changed in Hawaii, and for no discernible reason. Although a good yoga session in Honolulu still dropped my blood pressure an hour or two later to about 95/60, at odd moments earlier or much later in the day, it might go higher, up into the 140s/90s. And, on the night before we came home, it went very high indeed. We're not talking Dow-Jones-Industrials sort of high; but we're definitely talking numbers that, were they IQ scores, would get you into MENSA no questions asked.

This weirdness has persisted. Yoga invariable puts it below 105/70, but at other times I can get measurements as high as 170/105. There appears to be no particular pattern--although, of course, having something stressful happen will make it rise sharply. For example, yesterday I came home from a morning yoga class with a blood pressure of 91/53; after responding to a particularly upsetting e-mail, it had jumped to 165/100. (Unfortunately, the reverse is not true; relaxing doesn't necessarily make it come down.)

One decision I've made is not to read any e-mails I don't absolutely have to read. Another is that I have decided to drop out of my annual writing retreat in Palm Desert. This was wrenching; it's one of my favorite events of the year, and I look forward to it every summer. But things are so damn strange with me physically at the moment that I'm simply not up to it.

(There, see? I talked about writing. Sorta.)

This "labile" blood pressure is considered a very bad sign; but, then, it's usually seen in the latter stages of heart failure, which is certainly not what is happening to me. It's more than a little baffling--and would continue to be disturbing even if I manage to coax my blood pressure into the nice stable pattern I had before my recent unrelaxing vacation.

In searching the web for information, I came across a technique called NUCCA that has normalized blood pressure in a number of people. Now, as a Californian native, I know about "YUCCA," a large spiny flowering member of the agave family (and, weirdly enough, technically a sort of lily). But "NUCCA?"

As it turns out, NUCCA is the National Upper Cervical Chiropractic Association, a group that specializes in adjustments of the cerivcal spine, and, in particular, the so-called Atlas vertebra that supports the head where the brainstem narrows down into the spinal column.

It seems that a Chicago doctor had been sending a number of his patients to a NUCCA chiropractor for various kinds of pain, and he noticed that the patients who suffered from high blood pressure came back with their blood pressures substantially reduced and sometimes normalized. (He had to take a number of then off of their medications.)

This doctor contacted a the director of the Hypertension center at the University of Chicago, and together they proceeded to conduct a well-designed, double-blind study where neither patients nor doctors knew whether the NUCCA chirpractor on the research team study had given the patient an actual adjustment or a sham adjustment. The results were stunning, and also unassailable--despite the medical prejudice against chiropractic, the results were published in a majore medical journal and now seem set for a wider-scale trial.

"Is it going to be for everybody with high blood pressure? No," the lead researcher said. "We clearly need to identify those who can benefit. It is pretty clear that some kind of head or neck trauma early in life is related to this."

Well, as it happens, I am a survivor of pretty major neck trauma. When I was 17, I took a fall from a building that left me with a broken collarbone. The collarbone was treated, but the damage to neck was ignored. The disc between two of the cerivcal vertebrae was crushed so completely that the two vertebrae fused together, and the vertebrae directly above and below them aren't much better off. (I'm probably an inch shorter than I was when I was 17.) Doctors wince when they look at my x-rays.

This has been a source of ongoing pain in my shoulder, my back, my neck, and my left arm, and not just mild pain, either; but you can get used to pretty much anything. I wasn't worried about the pain, but I was hoping that NUCCA could do something about my fluctuating blood pressure.

Pamela, always the scientist, was somewhat excited by the idea, noting that the odd way my blood pressure fluctuated, and the fact that it responded so strongly to aggressive yoga (but almost not at all to other aerobic exercise) suggested a problem that was mechanical rather than chemical in nature. So, off I went in search of a NUCCA adjustment.

Now, not just any chiropractor can do this sort of adjustment. NUCCA is a very narrow, very precise set of techniques that has little connection with what people think of as chiropractic. They don't twist or shove, and above all the NUCCA techniques don't call for popping or cracking joints. Instead, a NUCCA practitioner takes a number of x-rays and then does a rather arcane series of calculations to determine how the bones in the neck (especially the all-important Atlas vertebra) need to be moved to return the body to alignment--and also to remove the pressure of the Atlas on the spinal cord.

As expected, my x-rays were a bit of a horror show. My Atlas was not only tilted but also revolved around my spinal cord; viewed in an x-ray looking down through the top of my head, you could almost see it pinching in on my brainstem. Nice.

The adjustments themselves are truly odd. You lay on your side, with your head supported on a strange little bench that can be cranked up and down to presie angles, and the doctor bends down over you and, well, sort of uses the edge of his hands to fiddle with your ear and jaw. Over and over again. What he in fact is doing is making small movements to lever your vertebrae relative to you skull, sort of as if he's "tapping" things back into place.

That part, at least, works. Even though it feels as if little has been done, the second set of x-rays show how much everything has moved. And my adjustment was unusually successful in terms of realignment.

Now the questions are 1) Will it have the desired effects? and 2) Will it stay adjusted?

Unlike most chiropractic work, this isn't designed to be a treatment that is repeated over and over; ideally it is a one-time adjustment that puts everything back where it ought to be. So I have to be very careful about my movements fro a few days, so as to let the body adjust and hopefully lock all the bones into their new positions. Unfortunately, this also means no yoga! (Ack! I'm going to have a hypertensive crisis!)

It's too early to tell if this will affect my blood pressure, since this takes time. But the effect on my arm, neck, shoulder and back has been dramatic. At one point last night, I woke up feeling strange. That strange feeling was being pain-free for the first time in almost four decades. It didn't last; I have some midl discomfort as I sit here typing this, but the intensity of pain has dminished by at least 80 percent, which is no small matter.

I am, however, afraid to take my blood pressure. Especially when I'm looking at three days without yoga. If you hear a loud BANG! it's probably my head exploding.

When Symbolism Invades Daily Life

2009-05-25T22:30:00.000-07:00

Well, rather opaque symbolism.

Here's the deal. A couple of years back, on a hot summer afternoon. various members of my family were over hanging out at the pool, doing family-summer-afternoon sorts of things.

Pamela heard a rustling back in the bushes by the rear wall of our yard. When she investigated, she found it was a baby crow, and when she tried to coax it out of the bushes, said baby crow made a mad rush around her and flung itself into the swimming pool.

Pamela, being the sort of person she is, followed the crow into the pool, and before a crowd of spectators that now included two cawing crow parents, we managed to effect a rescue that ended with the baby crow perched on my shoulder.

We have pet birds--a pair of cockatiels--though I must say they are rather less imposing than a fledgling crow. I admit that having two sets of large claws clinging to my upper trapezius muscle was unnerving, and even a young crow has a rather wicked scythe of a beak that it isn't relaxing to have poised near one's unprotected eyeball.

Nonetheless, we knew something about birds, and something about wet birds in particular. Barring the possible exception of waterfowl, what is it that a sopping bird wants most?

To be blow-dried.

We discovered bird blow-drying on a cold Seattle evening when one of our cockatiels insisted on jumping into the shower with us and then sat there shivering afterwards. Since this seemed like a recipe for overnight death, we tried gettting out the blow dryer...

She loved it. Sat there on my shoulder and leaned into the hot breeze with eyes shut tight in birdy bliss. Birds love being blow-dried, and it is entirely possible that the purpose of evolution all along has been to create a species that could construct blow dryers to serve the needs of some yet-uncreated Birdie Master Race.

So we blow-dried (blew-dried?) the crow. And, like our cockatiel, the crow treated the loud, roaring electrical device as if he had been waiting for us to get around to it.

My sister had her young son along with her, and amongst all the toddler impedimenta had brought some cooked chicken. Peeled off in long wormy strips, this morphed nicely across species into a crow snack.

Evening approached all too fast, closing our window of opportunity to reunite the crow with his parents. With the baby crow at last warmed up and fed, we took him outside. His parents flew back and forth above us, calling out, and we placed him atop a wall. They cawed for him to join them, and somehow, in the gathering dark, finally encouraged him to flap up and join them in a tree. Meanwhile, we humans all retreated into the house and patted ourselves on the back for a job well done.

A few days later, the crows were back. The parents stayed well away, but Crow Baby, now a bit more skilled in the skies, flew down and perched low on our roof, calling to us. He wasn't in need of blow-drying, so we brought out some food, and as soon as we backed inot the house, he swooped down on it and ate greedily, no doubt pleased at how well he'd trained us.

That's how we acquired a rather demanding resident crow. He comes when he hears the back door open, or even swoops past us, bitching about our tardy serivce, if we go out the front door and haven't yet fed him. And eventually he showed up with a mate; and at least once a year and sometimes twice, he now shows up with a two or three clumsy babies, all calling out to be fed. (What happens to these babies in the longer term I don't know. It seems that by now we'd have a flock of twenty-some crows, but it seems that at some point the youngsters get the boot.)

My, you're saying, what a charming story--or, perhaps, What the hell does that have to do with anything? Well, if you'll stop fidgeting and drop your gum in the wastebasket, I'll continue.

We have a huge chimney attached to our house, the sort of thing a Californian looks at and, inspired by its soaring height, says to himself, Lordy, it's going to cost a fortune when that thing goes down in an earthquake. Why we have fireplaces in Southern California in the first place is an unanswered question, much less the two fireplaces attached to this massive brick tower; but I didn't design the place. (From the looks of it, it was designed on Cape Cod about 300 years ago. It has gables and such.)

The crows like the chimney--it's both high and isolated. Plus you can cary nice bits of roadkill up there and crack the bones open against the mortar.

If you're an adolescent crow, you can also lose your balance and fall down the chimney. One day we heard this odd metallic banging. When it persisted, we peeked into the living room to find a young crow in the fireplace jumping and pecking at the firescreen in an effort to get out. We opened the back door, pulled the screen aside, and watched with some trepidation as he took flight toward the interior of our house and then, neat as you like, swooped about and whooshed out the back door just as if he'd been planning the whole display.

A day or two after we returned from our recent vacation, the crows--who brought off a clutch of three babies in our absence--were in an uproar, swooping around and cawing, and apparently dive-bombing the neighbor's dog. (They aren't quite large enough to carry the dog off and eat it. Unfortunately.)

The source of all this ballyhoo turned out to be another baby crow down the chimney. But this time the bird hadn't toppled all the way into the fireplace. There is a space back behind the flue door--a deep sort of trough that reaches down a foot or two behind the back wall of the fireplace. And in this trough there is, for unknown reasons, a hand-high gap in the brickwork which is perfect for a crow, or, I suppose, for any animal that can scrunch down into a hand-high ungraspable packet, to hide.

The entrance to our flue is quite narrow front-to-back. As it turns out, it is so narrow that when I kneel in the fireplace and try to reach up the flue, my arm makes it just to mid-bicep. So it fell to Pamela, who has rather daintier arms than I, to achieve a rescue, which she mamaged over the next ninety minutes (while I figdgeted and scratched and offered no-doubt invaluable advice.) I won't describe all the machinations, though I will note that a part of our rescue strategy involved pushing nearly all of our supply of towels into the weird trough so as to raise the floor, and then harrying the crow out onto the terrycloth platform.

After we finally managed to net the little bastard, he stood on my arm as if there wasn't much unusual. I suppose that from family legend he was expecting chicken and a blow-drying, but instead we took him out to his parents, and after he regained his bearings, he flew off and the five of them finally shut the hell up for the day. (One thing for sure: we need to put acreens over the tops of the damn chimneys.)

Now, if one put this sequence of events in a novel, it would mean something. Especially as it involves black birds. (And as it happened three times. The Goldilocks formula means that we have reached completion. Or, as Auric Goldfinger observes to James Bond, Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action. Three isn't just a crowd, it's a sort of storytelling touchstone.)

But what the heck does something laden with this sort of symbolism mean in real life?

And who is the protagonist? Me? Pamela?

The Crow?

A Long But Not Particularly Interesting Tale

2009-05-07T10:13:00.000-07:00

Some of you may have noticed a fall-off in activity on this blog as of late. I'm going to 'fess up as to why.

Readers may recall that about the middle of last summer I found myself embedded in the Consulting Project From Hell--a project that ran months over schedule, with co-workers failing to deliver their goods on time, agencies not providing promised data, the failure of a long-relied-upon software tool (which had to be rewritten from scratch by Yours Truly), and a series of other disasters too plentiful to enumerate lest we never reach the end of this paragraph.

By the time I reached London for the final presentation (and for the serendipitous MNW get-together at Len Tyler's home), I was something of a wreck. I'd gained weight, felt terrible, wasn't sleeping well, couldn't think straight. Tended to wake in the night with a panicky sense of doom.

Now, I've been through the consulting meat grinder many a time, and I knew that it might take some time to recover. But this time, recovery didn't come. Month after month I staggered through through each day doing the minimum necessary.

Then, in February, after I sprained my ankle, a visit to the urgent-care center revealed that I had high blood pressure. Not just any high blood pressure, mind you: I mean serious, hypertensive-crisis, call in the paramedics sort of high blood pressure. To be precise, my first measurement was 185/111; and, sitting there in the urgent care center, while the staff unhelpfully told me how dangerous this was and that I needed to "relax immediately!" it proceeded to climb as high as 221/120. Fun, huh?

Now, I've had my blood pressure creep up to borderline (like, say, 138/94) before, though this is complicated by the fact that I have 'white-coat syndrome.' (That is, having my blood pressure taken raises my blood pressure. It's a sort of Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, where the process of observing the state of an object alters the object's state.) All I'd ever needed to do was drop a few pounds, get some exercise, and stop living in hyperdrive.

This time, however, things were different. First of all, I had a sprained ankle, which somewhat limits exercise options. Second, they wouldn't let me leave the hospital without starting me on blood pressure medications. And, third, I couldn't downshift: my stress hormones stayed elevated , and I walked (or rather hobbled) around every day in a state that varied from low-level anxiety to downright panic.

Of course, no blood-pressure drug is without its side effects, and, in my hypervigilant state, all of the achy, dizzy feelings from the drug suggested to my subconscious that something was truly, deeply, horribly wrong with me. (Did I mention that some psychologists who study panic disorders have concluded that the number-one risk factor for developing ongoing problems with panic and anxiety is "a creative or imaginative personality"? Writers beware.)

I couldn't get much exercise, but at least I could lose some weight. Even without much exercise, this was easy enough, as I was so anxious that it was difficult to eat. But my blood pressure stayed high, in the 160s/100s. After a month, my doctor decided the ACE inhibitor wasn't enough. He doubled that dosage, started me on a beta-blocker, and threw in a diuretic.

Now, some people love beta-blockers. For most people, they have an anti-anxiety effect; they are the big underground drug in the performing-musician circuit, as they tend to manage stage fright. When you see a classical violinist perform a solo in front of a big audience, you are probably looking at someone taking a beta-blocker. (Pianists are less prone to use them, for some reason. I guess violinists are just more flighty by nature.)

I am not one of those people who love beta-blockers. I am one of those people who gets pain all over their body from beta-blockers, plunges into deep depression, has feelings that they are going to die, and has moments where death seems like a damned good idea. But I couldn't face up to discussing this with my doctor, as I knew he'd send me in for a gazilllion more tests, and immediately switch me to some other Frankenstein medication.

So I stopped without telling him. I know that's against the rules, but I felt better immediately. (And, guess what? My blood pressure didn't change.)

It was now about the start of April. I set about looking for another doctor, and, with my ankle more-or-less healed, was able to limp back to yoga class.

Over the years, I've done a fair amount of Bikram Yoga. For those not familiar with the system, it's a strenuous sequence of postures done in a room heated to about 105 F (that's about 41 C) and 40%+ humidity. This is a bit uncomfortable under the best of circumstances. In my condition, it was simply awful. For the first couple of weeks, I could only do every-other posture, simply standing in between and trying to calm my heart and steady my breathing.

Doing Bikram Yoga while on blood-pressure meds is quite an adventure. Not only do the drugs make you dizzy--which is a problem if you are in, say, Dandayamana dhanurasana, the standing bow--but it's easy to lose a couple of liters of sweat per class. If you're already on a diuretic, this pushes your daily water needs to ridiculous extremes. (Some days I was drinking in excess of five liters of water just to stay hydrated.)

But the system has a powerful effect on blood pressure. Even in the first few sessions, it wasn't uncommon for me to head into class at 155/98 and to emerge from the showers two hours later at 110/80. In the last two weeks I've done Bikram classes every day, and my blood pressure an hour after class averages 99/67. It does its best to climb back up later in the day, but in the same way it seemed to get 'stuck' up too high from stress, now it's showing signs of getting stuck down low. Of course, losing more than 30 pounds might have something to do with it, too.

It's been a little bumpy getting here. My previous doctor was utterly uninterested in lifestyle changes like weight loss, better nutrition, dietary supplements, or exercise--with the exception of telling everyone to cut sodium. I was dubious about cutting sodium, but followed his instructions...and, as anyone might expect, passed out after a Bikram class. (My sodium intake was down to about 700 mg per day, as opposed to a typical intake of about 5,000 mg per day, or a low-sodium-diet intake of 2,300 mg per day. Since you lose about 1,400-2,200 mg in a single Bilram class--or in a 90 minute run on a hot day--cutting sodium while exercising is one of the most dangerous things you can do.)

I still have a touch of white-coat syndrome. Nonetheless, my doctor's-office numbers are looking better, too:

Feb 17-- 185/111
Mar 25-- 171/104
Mar 27-- 160/98
Apr 27-- 126/76
May 4-- 130/82

Of course, at home my blood pressure is running well below those doctor's-office numbers.

That May 4th reading was on a visit with my new doctor, who is superb. He congratulated me on quitting the beta blocker on my own initiative, took me off the diuretic ("No one exercising 90 minutes a day needs to be on a diuretic, and no one doing anything whatsoever in 105-degree heat needs to be on a diuretic"), told me to eat a normal amount of salt ("Only ten percent of people are salt-sensitive, and even in them all you achieve by cutting salt is to knock two to four points off their blood pressure"), and said that he wants to see me in a couple of months to see if we can discontinue the medication entirely. Meanwhile, "keep doing what you're doing."

I like this doctor, and like him all the better for citing a research paper that was published just three weeks ago. The doctors I've worked with in the past never seem to keep up with medical research, and most of them seem to have lost all semblance of scientific curiosity. It's nice to see someone whose mind is still alert, and who is willing to question fashionable dogma as in the case of Killer Salt. (Despite the anti-salt recommendations of the AHA and other organizations, scientists are by no means all in agreement on the topic of limiting sodium intake. If you're interested, read Michael Alderman's editorial on the topic--or if you want to see the real science, read his excellent review article.)

I had a point here. Where'd it go? Oh. Yeah. My point was, I've been a disaster for several months, and in recent weeks I've been so focused on what's going on inside my body that I can barely think about anything else. But things seem to be settling down, and it looks as if I'm going to be able to rise from the grave and stalk the night once more, eating the brains of the living. On Saturday, though, we're off to Hawaii for a couple of weeks, so many of my posts may be those ditzy sorts of things you get from people on holiday. You may want to glance at the titles, wince, and quickly click the BACK button on your browser.

And, oh, yeah...I was supposed to be writing a book, wasn't I?

Another Way to Get MNW Books in North America

2009-04-29T09:45:00.000-07:00

Maggie Dana e-mailed me about a UK-based company called The Book Depository. They claim to provide free shipping anywhere in the world, and provide a modest discount on the cover price as well. Maggie says they are estimating a 7-10 day delivery time to the US on her forthcoming novel, which, given the 10-90 day delivery I've had from Amazon UK, looks very good indeed.

If this service works, it knocks the socks off Amazon. And Book Depository seems smugly aware of this fact--on the order page it lists the Amazon.co.uk price including shipping, and even offers you a button to click through and buy it from Amazon UK instead. In the case of the paperback edition of Shock and Awe, they will deliver it for $9.26, as compared to an Amazon UK price of $20.56 after shipping is included.

Of course, Amazon US offers the book for $8.95 plus shipping, so the savings aren't huge relative to ordering from Amazon US; and are slightly higher than ordering it from your local bookseller. But it's nice to have another route.

I plan to order the next few MNW titles from Book Depository and see how it works. I'll keep you posted. And thanks, Mags!

Various Bits of Happy News

2009-04-24T09:01:00.000-07:00

The mass-market paperback edition of Shock and Awe is now available in the USA. Sort of.

The "pub date" in the US is May 1, 2009, although it is still an import (though listed as Macmillan rather than Pan). Despite the May 1 pub date, there is at least one copy sitting on a shelf in a Barnes and Noble already (because someone ordered it and didn't pick it up. No, not me.)

That's likely to be the only copy on bookstore shelves over here, but this time round Borders and Barnes and Noble have it available online, and also will order it into their stores. So while it isn't likely to be thrust into anyone's face, at least it seems to be accessible. So if you haven't read my little opus and are so inclined, your local bookstore will get it for you for a mere $8.95.

That's the first cheery news item. The second is that our colleague David Thayer has landed a great NY agent for his novel Black Forest. Mr. Thayer is a killer writer and I can't think of a more deserving guy. Expect to be seeing a lot more of his name.

Third, Michael Stephen Fuchs' novel The Manuscript--one of the original six MNW launch titles--still seems to have some legs. All these years later, it is being released in a Czech edition.

I'm happy for MSF, but also a little jealous. I've had papers and speeches I've given translated into tongues that are mere hieroglyphics to me (Chinese and Thai, for example), and I always find it strangely exciting to see my words in print but rendered utterly unrecognizable. (Of course, for all I can tell, they might have been rendered nonsensical, too--how would I know?) I'd dearly love to see my fiction translated--preferably into something totally unfamiliar.

Is that desire weird, or normal. (Or, barring normal, normal for a writer?)

POV, Part VI: Second-Person

2009-04-23T10:50:00.000-07:00

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Hitherto you have lain perfectly still, because the slightest motion would dissipate the fragments of your slumber. Now, being irrevocably awake, you peep through the half drawn window curtain, and observe that the glass is ornamented with fanciful devices in frost work, and that each pane presents something like a frozen dream...
aaaaaaaaa--Nathaniel Hawthorne
aaaaaaaaaa The Haunted Mind, 1837

Second-person narration may seem oh-so-moderne, but it's been around for a while. It's certainly more common than first-person plural, and I'm told that after the success of Jay McInerny's Bright Lights, Big City in the mid-80s, writing classes were temporarily awash in second-person narratives. Tom Robbins, John Updike,William Faulkner, and many others have written in the second person, but second-person is more often found in short stories or individual chapters than as the sole POV for entire novels.

Most often the second person is no more than a swapping of "you" for "I". In McInerny's novel (which is in second-person present-tense--the sort of thing considered ultra-hep in the MFA programs of the Reagan era), there is no doubt that the narrator is telling you his own story. In Bright Lights, Big City, the technique works well, because the narrator is attempting not to own his feelings or take responsibility for his actions. It gives us only a distant connection with the narrator, and imparts a chilly feeling to the whole book. (I think the novel works brilliantly, but, as Dr. Johnson said of Paradise Lost, "...no one ever wished it were longer.")

One of the weasely features of the second-person POV is that the "you" can be read literally as "you" (the person I'm addressing), "I" (the narrator), or "one" (a universal, or at least something common to a considerable group). It can be hard to nail down, and "you" often creeps into conversational first-person narratives. It was especially popular in the glory days of noir and pulp, as in, She was the kind of dame that could make you do just about anything. That probably means "she could make me do anything," but it lifts responsibility from the narrator by also urging us to believe "she could make anybody do anything." The narrative "you" is a lot like the narrative "we" in that it might include or exclude us, the readers.

One of my favorite short-story writers, Lorrie Moore, often uses second-person, and sometimes uses it in a rather unusual form, with an imperative, instructional style. One of her funniest stories, "How to Become a Writer" (from her collection Self-Help) opens like this:

First, try to be something, anything, else. A movie star/astronaut. A movie star missionary. A movie star/kindergarten teacher. President of the World. Fail miserably. It is best if you fail at an early age -- say, fourteen. Early, critical disillusionment is necessary so that at fifteen you can write long haiku sequences about thwarted desire. It is a pond, a cherry blossom, a wind brushing against sparrow wing leaving for mountain. Count the syllables. Show it to your mom. She is tough and practical. She has a son in Vietnam and a husband who may be having an affair. She believes in wearing brown because it hides spots. She'll look briefly at your writing, then back up at you with a face blank as a donut. She'll say: "How about emptying the dishwasher?" Look away. Shove the forks in the fork drawer. Accidentally break one of the freebie gas station glasses. This is the required pain and suffering. This is only for starters.

The entire story is narrated exactly this way, in a rather odd tense, immediate but also retrospective. This narrator needs massive amounts of distance from the character (herself, of course) whose career she is narrating, and it is the distance that allows it to be so funny; would that we could see ourselves so objectively. (Moore has another similarly instructive story in the same book, "How to be an Other Woman," as well as several others also in second-person.)

If distance or plausible deniability are what you need, second-person narration is a good place to go. Second-person can be heartbreaking, but it's heartbreaking in an uninvolved, implied fashion, filled with irony. Strong emotion, strongly expressed, is difficult in second-person, because the form reads either as insincere or as objective and detached. When second-person achieves a powerful emotional impact, it is more by what remains unsaid, the notes that remain unplayed.

I think there are a number of things that can be learned about POV by playing with second-person. A good challenge would be to write a few pages where there was no question that every "you" refers to the narrator, and then write a few more where it isn't clear whether the narrator is speaking of himself or a group of people. (If you really want to break down the fourth wall, as they say in theatre, extend that last one to include the implication that the narrator is addressing the specific reader, the one holding the book.)

The "unreliable narrator" is often described as a concept that is only valid in first-person, as opposed to third-person, narrative. This isn't strictly accurate, but it's accurate enough for most purposes; if the narrator of a third-person novel tells us, as Orwell does in the opening of 1984, that the clocks are striking thirteen, we are supposed to be surprised at this fact, but we aren't supposed to question if the narrator is telling the truth.

Second-person narrators can be just as unreliable as first-person narrators. In fact, second-person narrators might be thought of as highly subjective first-person narrators trying to masquerade as objective third-person narrators. That seems suspicious all by itself, doesn't it?

In English, "you" is far less precise and nuanced than in many languages. We don't distinguish between a formal you and an intimate you; we don't even distiguish between you singular and you plural (except, of course, in parts of New York and New Jersey, where youse or youse guys is plural, and in the South, where you is singular and y'all is plural). When a narrator elects to say "you," we aren't sure if their meaning is "I," "one," you specifically, you as a group, you but not I--and there is not always certainty that the word is being used in the same sense from sentence to sentence. If it's imprecision you seek, if you want obfuscation, wiggle room, and loopholes in contracts, look no further. Second person is the shyster defence attorney of narrative form.

In my graph back in the second post of this interminable series, I showed second-person as having the narrowest range of psychic distances of any POV. It is the fuzziness of the POV that makes this true. The distancing effect keeps second-person from true intimacy, but its vagueness also prevents it from rising very high toward omniscience. The problem isn't that universal pronouncements can't be made in second person--in fact, it's the easiest form in which to make sweeping generalization. The difficulty is that the very viewpoint makes any generalizations slightly untrustworthy.

That said, though second-person POV has a narrow range of use, it is sometimes the perfect way to tell a story.

Usually a rather short story.

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POV, Part V: First-Person Plural

2009-04-20T18:00:00.000-07:00

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So, here we go again. Having dealt with the main permutations of first-person, the next--brief!--phase of the class would deal with the most slippery points-of view: first-person plural, and second-person.

Why deal with these two together? Partly because they are comparatively rare, and partly because I think they share certain common features.

Probably the most famous fiction in first-person plural is Faulkner's short story A Rose for Emily. John Gardner declared that the narrator ("we") of the story is the town, the community in which the events happened. I have to say both yes and no. Structurally that might be feasible, but it's apparent that there is a single narrator, speaking as the voice of the town. Read any of the criticism around A Rose for Emily, and you'll start finding critics speculating on characteristics of the narrator--is it male or female? Obviously not young, because of the narrator's thorough acquaintance with the town across time...

In other words, A Rose for Emily feels as though someone particular is narrating--an individual voice, not some collective. So after a time, the reader begins to wonder--is this person really speaking for the town, is this truly the collective wisdom of the town--or is this simply someone claiming to speak for the broader group?

On the other hand, the "we" of A Rose for Emily seems to know so many obscure details about Emily's life, that it verges on omniscient...but still comes to us through a quirky, personalized filter.

See why I call first-person plural "slippery"? Is this narrator a particular person in disguise, or is this narrator all-knowing, some entity looking down on creation (or, if not the whole of creation, at least, like Jane Austen's narrator, omniscient about a segment of creation)? In either case, why wear the mask? It seems a bit fishy.

And, speaking of the illustrious Jane, much the same obtains in the use of first-person plural in Karen Joy Fowler's The Jane Austen Book Club, where the "we" is the club. Probably. Or maybe just one member speaking for the club. But a lot of the wit is Austenesque, and therefore has an omniscient quality about it...

The Virgin Suicides is another well-known, well-executed novel in first-person plural. The narrative "we" in this case is a group of boys who knew the Lisbon sisters, and are, long after the events, trying to piece together an explanation of what happened and why. It's a marvelous read, but also slightly maddening in its elusiveness.

Sometimes the narrative voice of The Virgin Suicides takes on a nonfiction tone: "Supporters of this theory said..." At other moments, though, the adjectives and metaphors are so ripe or off-kilter that it is reminiscent of some of Tom Wolfe's early journalism, factual reporting and subjective reactions elbowing each other aside. Foretelling intrudes into the story (one of the sisters is said to have a long neck, and in the next instant we are told that "we" the narrators didn't suspect the day would come when it would be hung by a rope from a beam).

Yet the "we" of the novel isn't believable as a collective; the language turns too idiosyncratic to be a group creation. A group doesn't think that a young girl sunbathes next to a pool "sweating nectar." Trooping down into a basement recreation room, a whole group of boys do not simultaneously think that the light blazing up from below is such that it seems they are approaching the molten core of the Earth.

We are never sure how many boys constitute the "we," but some of the boys are described in detail, and some of those described in detail are not characters who would ever speak or think in the narrative voice of the book. Even more than in A Rose For Emily, everything points to a single narrator who has elected to hide behind a mask of "we." Why? Who knows?

Ayn Rand's slim little novella, Anthem, is first-person plural only in the most technical sense, as there is never any doubt that it is a single individual narrating. (Some might in fact say the whole book is merely a gimmick, and I suppose it is, but I thoroughly enjoyed it in my youth. Indeed, in retrospect, I would say the merits of Ms. Rand's novels are inversely proportional to their length.)

Apart from the fishy question of the narrator's identity (and the reasons it is concealed), first-person plural faces other challenges. First-person singular is as subjective and voicey as writing can be; even the most distressing first-person narrator (think of Lolita's Humbert Humbert) gains a fair degree of sympathy through their intimacy with the reader. That goes by the board once the narrator is "we." On the other hand, the narrative can't really swoop inside character's heads and dwell there in full POV, the way omniscient third can. "We" restricts the narrative to a certain distance from the characters, which can limit the reader's involvement. And, above all, "we" is one of those words that people hear mostly from the mouths of politicians, and this makes many readers immediately want to quarrel.

A piece that is absorbing enough, as in Faulkner, or clever enough, as in Fowler or Eugenides, may be able to overcome these challenges, but it sets a rather high hurdle for a writer and doesn't offer all that many apparent advantages. One of the assignments for the hypothetical class I'm victimizing here would be to try an write a piece that would arguably be best told from first-person plural. (None have ever occurred to me, so I'm glad I'm not in that class.)

We'll get to second-person in the next post. Honest.

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