When Thanksgiving-the-holiday was new and writers were inspired by it…

By mcmckit on Nov 20, 2011

Thanksgiving may have begun with the pilgrims in 1621, but it wasn’t an official observation until 1863 when, in the midst of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln issued a presidential proclamation: “I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise….”

Around that time, Thanksgiving showed up regularly in stories and poems, a mini-era of turkey-day literature. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote about a Thanksgiving dinner that was crashed by a profligate daughter (1857). O’ Henry wrote about a bum who was stuffed with two Thanksgiving dinners while one of his benefactors, who had fallen on hard times, was starving (1907). Louisa May Alcott wrote about an old-fashioned Thanksgiving (1881).

Here are some quotes from these authors and others of the era providing us with a little Thanksgiving nostalgia as we prepare to lay off our computer keys in favor of knives and forks.

"Ah! on Thanksgiving day, when from East and from West,                 
From North and South, come the pilgrim and guest,
When the gray-haired New Englander sees round his board
The old broken links of affection restored,
When the care-wearied man seeks his mother once more,
And the worn matron smiles where the girl smiled before.
What moistens the lips and what brightens the eye?
What calls back the past, like the rich pumpkin pie?"
– John Greenleaf Whittier, "The Pumpkin" (1850)

"The observance of Thanksgiving Day–as a function–has become general of late years. The Thankfulness is not so general. This is natural. Two-thirds of the nation have always had hard luck and a hard time during the year, and this has a calming effect upon their enthusiasm."
– Mark Twain, Following the Equator, a Journey around the World (1897)

"Turkey: A large bird whose flesh, when eaten on certain religious anniversaries has the peculiar property of attesting piety and gratitude."
– Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary (1911)

"There is one day that is ours. There is one day when all we Americans who are not self-made go back to the old home to eat saleratus biscuits and marvel how much nearer to the porch the old pump looks than it used to. Bless the day. President Roosevelt gives it to us. We hear some talk of the Puritans, but don't just remember who they were. Bet we can lick 'em, anyhow, if they try to land again. Plymouth Rocks? Well, that sounds more familiar.”
– O Henry, "Two Thanksgiving Day Gentlemen" (1907)

“November had come; the crops were in, and barn, buttery, and bin were overflowing with the harvest that rewarded the summer`s hard work. The big kitchen was a jolly place just now, for in the great fireplace roared a cheerful fire; on the walls hung garlands of dried apples, onions, and corn; up aloft from the beams shone crook-necked squashes, juicy hams, and dried venison–for in those days deer still haunted the deep forests, and hunters flourished. Savory smells were in the air; on the crane hung steaming kettles, and down among the red embers copper saucepans simmered, all suggestive of some approaching feast.”
-Louisa May Alcott, "An Old-fashioned Thanksgiving" (1881)

"Two long tables have been made into one, and one of the big tablecloths Gran'ma had when she set up housekeepin' is spread over 'em both. We all set round, Father, Mother, Aunt Lydia Holbrook, Uncle Jason, Mary, Helen, Tryphena Foster, Amos, and me. How big an' brown the turkey is, and how good it smells! There are bounteous dishes of mashed potato, turnip, an' squash, and the celery is very white and cold, the biscuits are light an' hot, and the stewed cranberries are red as Laura's cheeks. Amos and I get the drumsticks; Mary wants the wish-bone to put over the door for Hiram, but Helen gets it. Poor Mary, she always did have to give up to 'rushin' Helen,' as we call her. The pies,–oh, what pies Mother makes; no dyspepsia in 'em, but good-nature an' good health an' hospitality! Pumpkin pies, mince an' apple too, and then a big dish of pippins an' russets an' bellflowers, an', last of all, walnuts with cider from the Zebrina Dickerson farm!”
-Eugene Field, "Thanksgivin’ Out West" (1885)

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If you can cut it, you probably don’t need it: meaningless phrases

By mcmckit on Nov 14, 2011

Something we do a lot as editors is cut meaningless phrases and word out of various manuscripts. As a result, we have some pronounced ideas about phrases that can just be eliminated from books altogether. Here are some examples:

As fate would have it
Fate always has it. There seems little point in telling the reader about it. An exception to this is when things turn out differently from hopes or expectations as:
I prayed for sunshine that day, but as fate would have it, it poured.

Really
The use of this word is usually redundant. How is I really thought he did a good job different from I thought he did a good job?

As a matter of fact or In fact
Unless, you, the writer are in the habit of lying to your reader, isn’t everything you write a matter of fact, at least as far as you know it? Even if you write fiction, you usually are making an honest attempt to convey something to the reader.

Let’s start at the beginning
Where else would you start?

That said
If it was just said, you don’t need to point to it. The reader has read it.

In order to
This is just pompous, three words when the simple preposition “to” will do:
I put on my boots in order to go out.
I put on my boots to go out.

One way to stop yourself from using meaningless phrases in your writing is to follow George Orwell’s third rule for effective writing. He wrote six, which appeared in his 1946 essay, "Politics and the English Language." The third rule is: "If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out."

Review what you have written. If you can cut out a phrase and your sentence still has all its meaning and descriptiveness, then you don’t need the phrase. Probably the sentence is clearer and cleaner without it.

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Short sentences can open the door to the imagination; they can also close it

By mcmckit on Nov 7, 2011

When Ernest Hemingway advocated short sentences – first on his list of four good-writing rules – he wasn’t advocating a drum roll of facts. On the contrary, his short statements omitted as much as they revealed which is exactly what gave them substance and depth. To illustrate his point, Hemingway once told a story in only six words:

For sale: baby shoes, never used.

What we know in this miniscule story is that never used baby shoes are for sale. What we guess though is that something happened to the baby before it got to wear its shoes. That the shoes are for sale suggests need, a grieving mother who cannot afford to keep even this memento of the child for whom the shoes were intended. What is left to our imaginations adds to the depth and interest of the tiny story.

The trouble with short sentences is they can just as easily slam the door on the imagination. We recently picked up a copy of TWILIGHT by Stephanie Meyer. This book opens with a short paragraph – Hemingway’s second rule is that opening graphs should be short – constructed of short sentences. Here, the sentences are entirely literal.

My mother drove me to the airport with the windows rolled down. It was seventy-five degrees in Phoenix, the sky a perfect, cloudless blue. I was wearing my favorite shirt – sleeveless, white eyelet lace; I was wearing it as a farewell gesture. My carry-on item was a parka.

All that we found to ponder here was why a favorite shirt might be a farewell gesture. The parka is explained in the next paragraph. By the time we had read several pages of this book, we felt beaten over the head by the relentless rollout of facts. Granted this is a young adult book, but young adults, as much as we don’t like to think about what they imagine, have imaginations too. The writing in TWILIGHT – we say nothing about the hugely successful plot – doesn’t seem to call on them much.

By contrast, here is the opening graph from another young adult novel, ALLIGATOR BAYOU by Donna Jo Napoli:

The night is so dark, I can barely see my hands. It’s eerie. As if Cirone and I are made of nothing but air.

One can only wonder who the narrator is or why he/she is out in the dark with somebody named Cirone, not a common American name. And aren’t you curious why the two of them seem to be made of nothing but air?

Hemingway’s other two rules for good writing are: Use vigorous English and Be positive, not negative. He doesn’t say anything about holding back a little information here and there – but maybe he should have.

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Five parts terror, three parts horror with a dash of repulsion….

By mcmckit on Oct 30, 2011

If you want to write something with a better-than-average chance of selling, you can do worse than take a stab at the horror genre. Today’s readers really, really like to be scared. In the past twenty years, more horror novels have been published than in the previous 650 years since the invention of the printing press. More than 100 million books by Stephen King alone are in print.

The Horror Writers Association says the horror genre is all about emotion, but because the emotion isn’t always horror, HWA prefers to call it dark fiction. In an 1826 essay, gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe (THE MYSTERIES OF UDOLOPHO) drew a distinction between two elements of dark fiction: "terror" and "horror." Terror is the feeling of dread that takes place before an event happens, horror is the feeling of revulsion or disgust after an event has happened.

Former English Gothic scholar Devendra P. Varma wrote in his 1966 book, THE GOTHIC FLAME: “The difference between Terror and Horror is the difference between awful apprehension and sickening realization: between the smell of death and stumbling against a corpse…. Terror thus creates an intangible atmosphere of spiritual psychic dread, a certain superstitious shudder at the other world. Horror resorts to a cruder presentation of the macabre by an exact portrayal of the physically horrible and revolting, against a far more terrible background of spiritual gloom and despair.”

Think of the difference between a mind-game sort of book and one that is full of monsters.

Stephen King added “revulsion” to this pair, although he does not hold it in high esteem. “I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out. I'm not proud.”

And dark fiction writer Robert McCammon sees no reason to stop at merely three emotions. "Horror fiction upsets apple carts, burns old buildings, and stampedes the horses; it questions and yearns for answers, and it takes nothing for granted. It's not safe, and it probably rots your teeth, too. Horror fiction can be a guide through a nightmare world, entered freely and by the reader's own will. And since horror can be many, many things and go in many, many directions, that guided nightmare ride can shock, educate, illuminate, threaten, shriek, and whisper before it lets the readers loose." (“Twilight Zone Magazine,” October 1986)

Members of the Horror Writers Association have drawn up a list of their favorite authors, and you might assume, the authors who have influenced them. It can be found at: http://www.horror.org/readlist.htm

Happy Halloween!

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How to How-to: Know Your Reader

By mcmckit on Oct 23, 2011

It seems to us that a good relationship between author and writer is critical to writing a good how-to book. Why would readers follow advice in a book if they did not feel like they liked and trusted the author? If you want to write such a book, it is a good idea to be very clear about who your reader is and how you want to address that person.

How-to books that hop around among first (I, we), second (you), and third (he, she, they) persons are a little bit like talking on an old-fashioned telephone party line. The voices come out at the reader from every direction.

Here is an example from Amazon’s top 100 books list:

Change rites as the mood strikes you. As long as the rite attunes you with the deities, all is fine. Don’t shut out the physical world in favor of the spiritual or magical realms, for only through nature can we experience these realities. We are here on Earth for a reason.
Do, however, use ritual to expand your awareness so that you are truly at one with all creation.
—WICCA: A GUIDE FOR THE SOLITARY PRACTITIONER by Scott Cunningham

Is this author writing for you, the individual reader, or for we, some larger group? Why does he differentiate between you and we? Why not just write for one or the other? And what does this say about his relationship to the reader? This may not seem like much, but if you look at the examples below – also from the Amazon 100 list – you will see how much more comfortable it is for the reader when the author is clear about voice – and the phone line is a dedicated one.

We, all of us:
Atoms have always existed, but it was only rather recently that we became sure of their existence, and it is likely that our descendants will know many more things that, for now, we do not. That is the wonder and joy of science: it goes on and on uncovering new things. This doesn’t mean that we should believe just anything that anybody might dream up: there are a million things that we can imagine that are unlikely to be true…
—THE MAGIC OF REALITY: HOW WE KNOW WHAT'S REALLY TRUE by Richard Dawkins, Dave McKean

We, the authors; you, the reader:
Most people think the economy will get better soon. It won’t. We can tell you what you want to hear, or we can help you enormously by showing you how to prepare and protect yourself while you still can and find opportunities to profit during the dramatically challenging times ahead. We may not give you news you like, but it will definitely be news you can do something about…
—AFTERSHOCK: PROTECT YOURSELF AND PROFIT IN THE NEXT GLOBAL FINANCIAL MELTDOWN by David Wiedemer, Robert A. Wiedemer

I, as an example:
Yet, as I thought about happiness I kept running up against paradoxes. I wanted to change myself and accept myself I wanted to take myself less seriously – and also more seriously. I wanted to use my time well but also to wander, to play, to read at whim. I wanted to think about myself so I could forget myself…
—THE HAPPINESS PROJECT: OR, WHY I SPENT A YEAR TRYING TO SING IN THE MORNING, CLEAN MY CLOSETS, FIGHT RIGHT, READ ARISTOTLE, AND GENERALLY HAVE MORE FUN by Gretchen Rubin

You, as the person to whom this book is directed:
What flows through your mind, sculpts your brain. Thus, you can use your mind to change your brain for the better which will benefit your whole being and every other person whose life you can touch.
This book aims to show you how. You’ll learn what the brain is doing when the mind is happy, loving and wise…
—BUDDHA'S BRAIN: THE PRACTICAL NEUROSCIENCE OF HAPPINESS, LOVE AND WISDOM by Rick Hanson, Richard Mendius

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The Staying Power of Books

By mcmckit on Oct 17, 2011

This past holiday weekend, we stopped for a night in very-historic Burlington, New Jersey. The list of notables who have darkened various doors in Burlington include Ulysses S. Grant, whose family spent the war in Burlington; Benjamin Franklin, whose son was the last NJ royal governor; and James Fenimore Cooper, who was born there.

While we were in town, we visited the library, the seventh oldest in the country. The building that houses The Library Company of Burlington is a mere 147 years old but the library itself was chartered by King George II in 1758. For thirty years after its chartering, the library had no building. The books were kept in private houses and more than 70 people pledged 10 shillings a year to maintain and increase the collection.

In the traditional sense, a library is a collection of books, not a building. Today, we think of libraries as structures and marvel at the notion that we can now check out e books and search reference files without physically going anywhere.

The Burlington Library Company has an extensive rare book collection, some 250 books were printed before 1758. The library’s oldest book – THE BLOOD OF CHRIST – was printed in Latin in 1551 just over 100 years after the invention of the printing press. Printing had spread like wild-fire. By 1500, printing presses operated throughout Western Europe and had produced more than twenty million volumes so TBoC had company.

When the book arrived on the banks of the Delaware River it had to have been almost 100 years old at the very least. (The first recorded settlement in Burlington was 1624.) By the time TBoC made it into the Burlington Library in 1758, it was 200 years old and presumably still read. Obviously, back in the day, books had more than the three-month shelf life publishers give them today. They also had tremendous impact, bringing knowledge and enlightenment with them throughout Europe and to the colonies. Books brought the world out of the dark ages.

It makes one wonder where e books are going and what influence they will have.

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Dear reader, the most verstile straight man ev-er

By mcmckit on Oct 3, 2011

“The world is dark, and light is precious.
Come closer, dear reader.
You must trust me.
I am telling you a story.”

  -THE TALE OF DESPEREAUX by Kate DiCamillo

If you are going to address your story to a “dear reader” as DiCamillo does in the quote from her award-winning children’s book above, you bring a whole new character into your story: the dear reader (which brings to mind the dear leader, North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-il.) And, as we told a recent client, this should involve some thought. Tossing in the term “dear reader” just because you want the reader to know you like him or her doesn’t really cut it. The term, after all, is a little old-fashioned and its use can be seen as pretentious, like you are trying to channel Dickens (who did, in fact, include a DR in HARD TIMES). So if you are going to summon the dear reader in the 21st century, it is best to know why and what purpose the DR is going to serve in your story.

In the example above, published in 2004, DiCamillo is deliciously creepy. She is using the DR to demonstrate her untrustworthiness. She says the reader must trust her and at the same time that she is telling a story (an untruth?) making one wonder if she really holds the reader and his welfare dear at all in her rarely-lit world.

Here are some other DRs and the role they play in stories:

The term establishes a bond between the author and reader:

Then the lesser and the greater scamp looked at each other, and for a moment or two felt a warm, sympathetic, friendly emotion for each other, and quietly shook hands.
Depend upon it there is a great deal more kindly human sympathy between two openly-confessed scamps than there is in that calm, respectable recognition that you and I, dear reader, exhibit when we happen to oppose each other with our respective virtues.
– THE STORY OF A MINE by Bret Harte

Addressing the dear reader can be an aside, a way to step outside the action and comment on it.

"Dear me!" said Mr. Hoopdriver, veering round to the new wind. "How did you find out THAT?" (the man was born in a London suburb, dear Reader.)
"I guessed," she said

– THE WHEELS OF CHANCE by H.G. Wells

The term can be used (shamelessly!) to flatter readers.

Archibald, as he had stated to McCay, was engaged to a Miss Milsom–Miss Margaret Milsom. How few men, dear reader, are engaged to girls with svelte figures, brown hair, and large blue eyes, now sparkling and vivacious, now dreamy and soulful, but always large and blue! How few, I say. You are, dear reader, and so am I, but who else? Archibald was one of the few who happened to be.
– THE MAN UPSTAIRS AND OTHER STORIES (“Archibald’s Benefit”)by P.G. Wodehouse

It can be used to add another layer of comedy onto a story. Here the writer is apologizing for a character over which he has complete control.

Dear reader, I beg your pardon for repeating such things. I know most conversations reported in books are altogether above such trivial details, but folly will come up at every table as surely as purslain and chickweed and sorrel will come up in gardens. This young fellow ought to have talked philosophy, I know perfectly well; but he didn't,–he made jokes.

– THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST TABLE by Oliver Wendell Holmes

The dear reader can be used as a platform for explanation.

Dear reader, there are people in the world who know no misery and woe. And they take comfort in cheerful films about twittering birds and giggling elves. There are people who know that there's always a mystery to be solved. And they take comfort in researching and writing down any important evidence. But this story is not about such people. This story is about the Baudelaires. And they are the sort of people who know that there's always something. Something to invent, something to read, something to bite, and something to do, to make a sanctuary, no matter how small. And for this reason, I am happy to say, the Baudelaires were very fortunate indeed.
-A  SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS by Lemony Snicket

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How much would? We would chuck.

By mcmckit on Sep 26, 2011

The following paragraph is written by us but is representative of what we are getting from clients:

The last week in January, he would walk the snow-covered streets, thinking of his wife who was ill at home. Her cough told him that these would be her last days. During his solitary walk, he would feel the dryness of the cold air in his lungs as if he were breathing death itself. He would avoid going home as long as possible, and when he did, he would pause on the doorstep to steel himself before going in.

So, other than being depressing (Sorry about that, it’s what came out, complete fiction.), what is wrong with this paragraph? The answer is that pesky word “would.” It is not only grammatically incorrect, but gets in the way of the prose.

Dictionary.com gives five definitions for “would.” Most are clearly not applicable and one comes closest to what we think is being attempted here:

4. (used to express repeated or habitual action in the past): We would visit Grandma every morning up at the farm.

Yes, but the action in the above paragraph seems to take place during a specific week. It is not repeated or habitual and we assume this because the wife, who is on the verge of expiration, can logically only be there once and not in the last week of January, year after year after year, while her husband walks the same snow-covered street . Or maybe she is dragging on over multiple year in repeated and habitual death throes. The paragraph is at best ambiguous.

So what is this hypothetical writer and so many of our clients trying to do by employing “would” at every perceived opportunity. Good question. We suspect that people simply associate it with the past tense – or perhaps with a poetic sense of the past tense.

What it does is create a barrier between the reader and the story, a piece of "would," that has to be gotten over to get to the action. See how much clearer and simpler the paragraph is when we chuck “would.”

The last week in January, he walked the snow-covered streets, thinking of his wife who was ill at home. Her cough told him that these were her last days. During his solitary walk, he felt the dryness of the cold air in his lungs as if he were breathing death itself. He avoided going home as long as possible, and when he did, he paused on the doorstep to steel himself before going in.

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Getting the novel you are writing from A to B

By mcmckit on Sep 18, 2011

“I came for this reason: I want to know what happened between A and B.”
Bennie seemed to be waiting for more.
“A is when we were both in the band, chasing the same girl. B is now.”

The washed up guitar player, cum janitor, who makes these statements is a character in Jennifer Egan’s A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD. Scotty is expressing the central thesis of the book: the march of time that leaves us all wondering in certain moments, how we got here. The book is a series of connected short stories that depict moments of time over a thirty-year span that make the reader work to find out how the characters in the book got from one to the other.

The dilemma of getting from A to B is something writers deal with all the time. Moving a plot from beginning to end is what writing a novel is. It is impossible to show everything that happens between those two points so you have to choose. What scenes do you show and which ones can you simply relate in passing?

There is no easy answer this question of what to include and what not. It depends on the story and your style of writing. One piece of advice is not to skip out on big, critical scenes as some of our clients have tried to do lately. If an important character dies, in the course of the book, it is a good idea to show it. You can’t ask the reader to invest in a character, then kill the character, without showing it. The reader won’t stand for it.

Each scene should advance the plot and you, as the writer, should be pretty clear about how. If the scene doesn’t contribute to the unfolding of the story, then probably, it isn’t necessary and may even drag the story down.

In GOON SQUAD, Egan completely breaks these rules. In her book, major events mostly happen offstage. But this is purposeful. She is making the point that both in art and in life a lot happens in pauses. The result is an interesting read. This book was not a favorite of the book club which would have preferred a more sequenced narrative with straight line character development. But we think GOON SQUAD is brilliant. It really made us think about novel structure.

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Long Sentences: popular with writers, with readers, not so much

By mcmckit on Sep 11, 2011

One of our blog readers noted the length of the sentences in WHEN THE KILLING’S DONE, the TC Boyle book that was the subject of our last blog. She, helpfully, sent along some examples like this one:

It was May of 1979 and all the good feelings — the vibrations, the groove — of the shimmering bright era that had sustained her through every failure and disappointment had dwindled and winnowed and faded til she was angry all the time, angry at Toby for leaving her, angry at her daughter, angry at her boss and the landlord who wanted two hundred fifty bucks a month for a dreary clamshell-gray walkup over a take-out pizza shop on Route 1 in downtown Oxnard, where the fog hung like death over everything and the trucks never stopped spewing diesel fumes outside the window, which might as well have been nailed shut for all the air it gave her.

The example above is 118 words, a mere nothing when compared to the two sentences that comprise the famous Molly Bloom soliloquy in James Joyce’s ULYSSES (1922) which are 17 and 19 pages long. More recently, whole books have been written that are only one sentence long.

Long sentences can be hard for readers to deal with especially in the era of 140-character tweets. But writers love them. We were surprised to find that the Internet is full of Web Sites that teach how to write long sentences. In a 2010 essay in the New York Times, Ed Park writes, “there’s something about that slab of wordage that carries the eye forward, promising an intensity simply unattainable by your regularly punctuated novel.” Park is the author of PERSONAL DAYS, which ends with a 16,000 word (roughly 64-page) sentence.

Long sentences (like big words) can also be an affectation. Writers should have good, solid reasons to back up their use of them, such as point of view. Some characters, like Molly Bloom, simply don’t think in punctuated sentences. In other instances, long sentences can be necessary for wordflow, to create an ambiance or to convey difficult concepts.

In the case of T.C. Boyle, not all of his sentences are long. He breaks them up with shorter ones and the result is an ebb and flow, wonderfully appropriate in a book that is often set on the sea:

She was wearing an oversized cableknit sweater she’d fished out of her husband’s locker because the cabin was so cold, and every fiber of it seemed to chafe her skin as if she’d been flayed raw while she slept. She hadn’t brushed her hair. Or her teeth. She was having trouble keeping her balance, wondering if it was always this rough out here, but she was afraid to ask Till about it, or Warren either.

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