Telling the reader what happens next can build suspense. Really.

By mcmckit on Aug 29, 2011

Building suspense in a novel or non-fiction book is largely all about the meting out of information, telling the reader just enough to string her or him along without giving the plot away. The tendency – if our clients are anything to go by – is to tell too much. Novice writers sometimes think readers need to be pounded over the head to understand what is going on. This can be like pointing at what should be a plot subtlety and screaming, “HERE IT IS!” Bye-bye suspense. Usually.

Yet sometimes flat out telling the reader what happens next can build tension. We just ran across a good example of that in T.C. Boyle’s WHEN THE KILLING’S DONE. In this novel about the controversies that surround restoring native ecological habitat on islands off the California coast – a process that often involves the elimination of non-native species – Boyle does his usual excellent job of creating suspense. The reader rockets along understanding that all the various plot points are going to link up in some clever and surprising way. Then on page 356, Boyle takes what the reader on what seems to be a detour to a heretofore un-introduced freighter on its way to Long Beach with a load of Chinese-made textiles. The ship has encountered dense fog bringing Captain Nishizawa to the bridge of the seven-story high vessel to oversee its progress. Even in much better conditions, the captain would be unable to see a smaller craft below, Boyle writes. Nor could the Tokachi-maru be brought to a stop if it did.

Get it? Boyle is telling the reader that the 12,000 ton freighter is going to collide with another vessel:

Were there accidents? Of course there were. But in most cases the crew of a freighter or tanker never saw, felt or heard a thing when a small craft was unlucky enough to blunder across its path. Think of it this way: a heavyset woman, heavier even than Marta at the Cactus Café, a real monument of flesh and bone and live working juices, plods out to her car on aching feet after a double shift and can’t begin to know the devastation she wreaks on the world of the ant, the beetle and the grub.

(Since this is a book about the effects of humans on wildlife, the analogy of the heavy set woman tramping on bugs is not accidental.)

Boyle is wildly pointing to the accident-to-happen and yelling, “HERE IT IS,” and the reader is crazy to know what happens next (we were).

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When you are reminded (and reminded) the book is fiction but can’t help believing it is fact: metafiction meets realism

By mcmckit on Aug 22, 2011

Recently through another blog, we came across the following web site:

http://www.randomhouse.com/kvpa/egan/

Accompanied by some creepily contemplative music, the site opens to the depiction of a castle with blinking yellow windows backed by a billow of clouds. Across the keep is written “Hotel” and the viewer understands that the site is promoting a hotel called The Keep. Following the links, the viewer learns that this hotel has an unusual philosophy:

You are almost here. Which means you're on the verge of an experience that will send you home a slightly different person than the one you are right now. The Keep is an electronics and telecommunications free environment. Close your eyes, breathe deeply: you can do it. We have a secure vault, where all your gadgetry may be stored when you arrive. This ritual of renunciation is important. If you feel the urge to thwart it, pay attention. You may not be ready. We provide loose, comfortable clothing that looks the same rain or shine, day or night, no matter who wears it, so you can look at other things.

When we stumbled across the site last week, our first creeped-out reaction was: OMG, it’s all true! Jennifer Egan based her book, THE KEEP, on an actual place!

Then we saw the link to publisher Alfred A. Knopf at the bottom of the page and it dawned on us that this was a promotional site for the book and a very clever one because it took so little to push us into believing that aspects of THE KEEP are real. Egan does that good a job of telling her story.

The achievement is all the more remarkable because throughout the book Egan reminds the reader over and over that the book is a work of fiction.

The book opens as a communications-obsessed character named Danny is making his way to a castle, somewhere in Eastern Europe. Danny is invited to the castle his cousin Howie, who owns it and is renovating it into a hotel from which outside communication will be pretty much prohibited. No TV’s, No phones, so that guests can reconnect with their imaginations. Danny and Howie have a history. As children they invented a fantasy game called Terminal Zeus but their bond was broken when Danny abandoned his cousin in a cave. Howie was lost for three days underground. Thus, the castle invite he extends to Danny is suspect.

Absorbed in this story, the reader learns that it is being written by a guy in prison named Ray, and a whole other story unfolds about Ray and the teacher of his prison writing workshop, a recovering meth addict named Holly.
Thus, Danny and Howie are designated as fictional characters and the castle with its turgid “Imagination Pool” into which Danny’s cell phone disappears, network of subterranean tunnels and off-limits keep, as a fictional place, the web site notwithstanding. Fiction that deals with the writing of fiction is known as metafiction. Metafiction became prominent in the 1960’s with books such as John Barth’s LOST IN THE FUNHOUSE and Thomas Pynchon’s THE CRYING OF LOT 49.

What makes THE KEEP remarkable is that Egan is able to manipulate the text to make her points about writing fiction and still make the reader believe deeply in the story, both the stories. “Very few writers, or our time or any other, have been able to bring that combination off,” wrote Madison Smartt Bell in the New York Times when the book was first published in 2006.

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The real, historical guy behind a fictional bit part

By mcmckit on Aug 16, 2011

Visiting a good friend last week, we went to see the 1976 Clint Eastwood movie, The Outlaw Josey Wales. It was retro Wednesday at the 1909 opera house in the small town where she lives. The movie – with an outlaw hero and the Redlegs, an adjunct of the Union Army, in pursuit – is considered revisionist for turning characters normally considered “bad” guys into “good” guys and vice versa.

One of the turned tables has Wales (Eastwood) talking a Comanche Chief named Ten Bears (Will Sampson) out of an attack on Wales and his friends in an exchange that Wales can’t have with the Redlegs who are determined to kill him no matter what.

Ten Bears: These things you say we will have, we already have.
Josey Wales: That's true. I ain't promising you nothing extra. I'm just giving you life and you're giving me life. And I'm saying that men can live together without butchering one another.
Ten Bears: It's sad that governments are chiefed by the double tongues. There is iron in your words of death for all Comanche to see, and so there is iron in your words of life. No signed paper can hold the iron. It must come from men. The words of Ten Bears carries the same iron of life and death. It is good that warriors such as we meet in the struggle of life… or death. It shall be life.

Ten Bears, whose birth name was Paruasemena, was a real Comanche Chief. He was a fierce warrior and later, tried to broker peace between the United States and the Comanche. He would have been old at the end of the Civil War when the movie took place. But he is pictured in the film as a young man.

At about the time of the movie in October, 1867, the real 77-year-old Ten Bears attended a council at a place known as Medicine Lodge Creek in Kansas. In EMPIRE OF THE SUMMER MOON, a wonderful book about the rise of fall of the powerful Comanches, S.C. Gwynne says the council was “the last big gathering of free Indians in the American West.”

Of all the speakers at the council, Ten Bears was the most moving and to this day he is primarily remembered for his speech. Gwynne reports he pulled on his wire-rimmed glasses – even though he was illiterate – and delivered what was in effect an epitaph.

“You said that you wanted to put us on a reservation, to build our houses and make us medicine lodges. I do not want them. I was born on the prairie where the wind blew free and there was nothing to break the light of the sun. I was born where there were no closures and where everything drew a free breath. I want to die there and not within walls. I know every stream and every wood between the Rio Grande and the Arkansas. I have hunted and lived over the country. I lived like my fathers before me, and like them, I lived happily…
"If the Texans had kept out of my country there might have been peace. But that which you now say we must live on is too small. The Texans have taken away the places where the grass grew the thickest and the timber was the best. Had we kept that we might have done the things you ask. But it is too late. The white man has the country which we loved, and we only wish to wander on the prairie until we die. Any good thing you say to me shall not be forgotten. I shall carry it as near to my heart as my children, and it shall be as often on my tongue as the name of the Great Father. I want no blood upon my land to stain the grass. I want it all clear and pure and I wish it so that all who go through among my people may find peace when they come in and leave it when they go out."

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Writing a novel that changes the world: the vision(s) thing

By mcmckit on Aug 8, 2011

“What does it take to persuade–to move people from one position to another, or to get them to care about an issue that has never stirred their interest? How do you get a critical mass of people to believe that a dispute affects their visions of themselves as individuals and the world in which they live?”

These are questions historian and law professor Annette Gordon-Reed poses in the New Yorker (June 13, 2011). She is referring to UNCLE TOM’S CABIN, a novel that did indeed persuade, move readers and change the course of historical events. Gordon-Reed goes on to say that for all the talk about divided government in 2011, 150 years ago, in 1861, “politics truly failed and the American government splintered” as the Civil War began. Harriet Beecher Stowe had published her seminal novel eleven years earlier.

(Gordon-Reed was reviewing David S. Reynolds’ new book, MIGHTIER THAN THE SWORD: ‘UNCLE TOM’S CABIN’ AND THE BATTLE FOR AMERICA. Reynolds makes the case that Stowe was indeed “the little woman who made this great war,” as Abraham Lincoln is reputed to have said. Hype surrounding his book has brought Stowe back into the limelight.)

So what does it take to write a work of fiction that moves a critical mass of people enough to alter the world in which they live? We recently read UNCLE TOM’S CABIN in part to find out. As it turned out we were charmed by the book, despite its depiction of both black and white characters in ways that make them hard for modern sensibilities to swallow. We simply accepted that Stowe is a Victorian novelist and moved on. But not so other readers. Writing in the New York Times, Director of American Studies at Columbia Andrew Delbanco says Stowe bent over backwards to counter the prevailing view that black people were inferior beings and in so doing elevated the black character to a state of impossible virtuousness. “In my experience, students can be embarrassed by it,” he says, adding that it is hard to make a case for UTC “as a literary work of depth and nuance.”

We wonder if UTC would be considered a better novel per se if the sticky subject of race were removed from it. Readers might be more willing to forgive Stowe her characterizations just as they do Dickens to some extent. Yet the book is one of the great, enduring, works of American literature because of its subject matter. Stowe paints a remarkable and truly comprehensive picture of the institution of slavery in all its many facets. Reading the book, we kept wondering where she got the nerve. Gordon-Reed says Uncle Tom came to Stowe in a vision; the author and her husband often had visions. And Stowe – from a family of preachers and social reformers – said she had a “vocation to preach on paper.”

Unquestionably, she had impeccable timing. The country was ready for Uncle Tom and little Eva. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if some fictional characters came along to solve the current political impasse? If one of you guys has written that novel, now it is the time to get it into circulation.

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The vernacular of fiction – and we thought we were being creative!

By mcmckit on Aug 1, 2011

How often, we caution our clients to avoid obvious cliché and find new ways of saying things. Now, it turns out that the “new” ways writers find to say things may just be accepted novel-speak, what word expert Ben Zimmer calls the “jargon of the novel’ in this week’s New York Times Book Review.

Zimmer, who is executive producer of Visual-Thesaurus.com and Vocabulary.com, cites the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) which has gathered some 425 million words of text in equal measure from fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, academic texts and transcripts of spoken English, all written since 1990. (A corpus is a collection of written texts.)

When Zimmer asked COCA (anyone can search the database on-line) what past tense verbs show up more frequently in fiction than in academic texts the top five were “grimaced”, “scowled”, “grunted”, “wiggled” and “gritted.” Zimmer says “sour facial expressions, gruff noises and emphatic bodily movements (wriggling fingers and gritting teeth)” rule in the world of fiction. Who knew?

COCA is also searchable for collections of words such as “bolt upright” and “draw a breath,” two that seem to be peculiar to fiction.

We searched the database for a word that is something of a crusade with us. We are constantly telling clients not to use the word “suddenly”  or only very sparingly. If something happening in a novel is truly sudden, there are other ways to express it and most of the time the event itself denotes its own suddenness so “suddenly” is redundant and overly dramatic. COCA reported that “suddenly” popped up 26,159 times, in fiction. By comparison, magazines (the next highest usage) employed "suddenly" 7,705 times.

But there is hope: “suddenly” was used  in fiction 7,189 times between 1990 and 1994. Between 2005 and 2009, it appeared only 5,313 times. The trend is moving in the right direction and we hope we have something to do with it.

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The Future of Publishing: Bleak or Rosy?

By mcmckit on Jul 25, 2011

Here is a link to a video discovered by a young colleague that answers the question, what is the future of publishing. No matter what your opinion on that score, you will have to agree with at least a half of the presentation which was the brain child of U.K. publisher, Dorling Kindersley Books. Watch it at least half way to get the idea – and marvel at how the same words can be used to convey diametrically opposite ideas.

The Future of Publishing

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Book length: how long is too long?

By mcmckit on Jul 18, 2011

We chose Vikram Seth’s A SUITABLE BOY for reading while we were on vacation and were astounded to discover that the paperback is 1,474 pages long (591,552 words). One elderly relative had to rip it into sections so she could hold it while she read it. Wikipedia does not equivocate about this book but calls it “one of the longest novels ever published in a single volume in the English language.” WAR AND PEACE is shorter by about 30,000 words.

This brings up the subject of book length. A question we get all the time is “how long should my book be.” Our standard answer is “as long as it takes to tell your story.” In other words, don’t sweat the length, tell the story.

But once you have finished telling your story and you have a first draft, it is almost certainly too long, no matter what the word count. Most writers overdo it. They put in too much explanation, use extraneous words and often include unnecessary scenes. This is where editing comes in. A recent client was told by an agent that she would take him on, but only if he cut 200 pages from his book. When he and we had finished, it was a better book – and still 100,000 words long.

If you find yourself approaching 500,000 words, be aware that this is extreme, and the number of books of that length in print is few. There are just not too many stories that require that kind of length.

Is Seth’s book one of them, or is it too long? Friends and relatives utterly love this 1993 novel and report they could not put it down. We did put it down, but with the intent to take it up again because we did see merit in it. But as a result, we have nothing to report about the book except that its length is daunting.

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The baggage of writing; can’t we just do it for fun?

By mcmckit on Jun 28, 2011

Our daughter is taking a post-graduate writing class in creative non-fiction. We would so much rather she be studying engineering or plumbing or animal-husbandry – something with the letters j.o.b. appended.

When we – hovering anxiously – ask her why she is studying writing, she says she may need it sometime in her to-be-determined career or maybe she will blog or do some other form of writing for herself. What is clear is that she is really enjoying the course – which she paid for herself – actually handing in her assignments on time, something she almost never did from pre-K through college. 

What the daughter doesn’t say is that she is going to write the great American book of twenty-first century essays, get it published, become famous and live in luxury on the royalties.  Whew!  That is what we really didn’t want to hear.

Recently, a client decided to give up writing completely because “she wasn’t any good at it.” In other words, she had come to the conclusion she wasn’t going to write a bestseller, so why bother at all.

What is it about writing as an activity that lends itself to so much fantasy? And why can’t we just do it because it gives us pleasure and surprises us? How many golf players give up the game because they “are no good” at it? (Not enough, golfers who have to share the course might argue.)

People who paint or do other kinds of art don’t seem to place the same strictures on themselves as writers. Our artistic friends make art because they love it, because what they produce pleases them, and because art engages and expands the mind.

We feel sorry for our client who has given up something she cares about and might enjoy working on because she has decided it is “no good.” And we are cautiously proud of the daughter. We hope she can hang on to the joy and self-learning that come from writing without making it more than it is.

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Setting the scene in a novel: you have to do it again and again and again

By mcmckit on Jun 21, 2011

Every time an author starts a new chapter or even a scene in a work of fiction, she or he is almost starting from scratch. Every scene has to be established. Where and when is it taking place? What is the time of day and what relation does this scene have to the one that preceded it. Even if the entire book takes place in one room, work has to be done to show the changes in that room as the light shifts or the furniture gets moved or the occupants change. The writer has to do the work that film cameras do in movies by showing the setting.

Judging from some of our clients, this is something that often gets neglected. Racing to tell the story, writers frequently neglect to explain in what context it is taking place. Thus, the action seems to be floating in space, not a good look for a novel.

To illustrate, we randomly pulled Zadie Smith’s ON BEAUTY off the bookshelf. This turns out to be a brilliant choice because Smith hops around from point of view to point of view and place to place. Here is how she begins some of her scenes:

“The Bus Stop was a Wellington institution. For twenty years, it had been a cheap and popular Moroccan restaurant…”
“Only a mile down the hill, in leafy Queen’s Park, the numb practicalities that follow a death were being attended to…”
“A mega store demands a mega building…”
“’I need a homey, warm, chunky, fruit-based, wintery kind of a pie,’ explained Kiki leaning over the counter…”
“On Tuesday night, a water main burst at the corner of Kennedy and Rosebrook…”

In each of these examples, Smith establishes the setting in the first few words. The reader does not have to wonder where the scene is taking place. The technique not only eliminates doubt but draws the reader in to the richly described pie shop, funeral or humongous store. Far from floating in space the reader is there.

Setting the scene, to writers caught up in telling a story, may seem like tedious work, but it is necessary. The book won’t work without it.

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Good Reasons to Listen to Your Writing

By mcmckit on Jun 13, 2011

We have an elderly relative who says that older books – the classics – were written to be read aloud. He regularly reads aloud to his spouse; in doing so, maybe he has discerned something. His observation begs the question, do you think about how your writing sounds when read out loud? Do you read it out loud to yourself after you have written it?

This is not an irrelevant question in today’s book market. While it may be old fashioned to read aloud to one another, the market for audiobooks is quite large, more than $700 million a year. As long as Americans take car trips – where half of listeners use audiobooks – they need will need something to plug in or download.

Every year about this time, we start to have discussions about what we will listen to on our way to Canada. The truth is our success with picking audiobooks is mixed, and we have no idea what makes a good one and what doesn’t. We loved Jane Smiley’s GOOD FAITH about greed and real estate in the 1980’s, but were not enamored of her book about agricultural college, MOO. Got caught up in T.C. Boyle’s DROP CITY, but could not sit through his TORTILLA CURTAIN. Howled over Bill Bryson’s A WALK IN THE WOODS, did not finish A SHORT HISTORY OF NEARLY EVERYTHING. Thrilled to Wilke Collins’ WOMAN IN WHITE, were not wild about MOONSTONE.

Most audio book listeners (31%) favor mysteries and thrillers, which hardly rank on our list so we don’t claim to speak for anyone but ourselves on this. Mysteries are likely to be more predictable because they are more formulaic, but our record with other sorts of books does seem to indicate that what makes a good audiobook is some mysterious alchemy (We discount the audiobook readers because they seem uniformly excellent to us) of writing, story and our moods.

Whether you are shooting for an audiobook or not, there are good reasons to read your writing aloud to yourself. If the goal is to be conversational, reading aloud is a must. The practice can also pick up snags in the prose and help you smooth it out. Listening is different from reading. Books we have loved to read, we don’t always like to listen to and vice versa. So hearing your writing will give you a different perspective on it. It is a good way to self edit.
This summer, we are going to start out with Laura Hillenbrand’s UNBROKEN which we have great hopes for. But then again, who knows? What are your favorite audiobooks?

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