THE PERFECT STORM, INTO THIN AIR, THE WORST HARD TIME: What makes some non-fiction so suspenseful?

By mcmckit on Jun 6, 2011

When we think about books that have really thrilled us in the last two decades, we think of non-fiction. We vividly remember listening to THE PERFECT STORM (pub.1997) as we drove the Merritt Parkway so enrapt we were only intermittently aware of the road or the traffic. We would have been safer texting.

What is about these books that grabs us so completely?

A lot of them involve the weather which apparently took over from the cold war as the great source of anxiety in people’s lives during the nineties. (Arguably, natural disaster books replaced the thriller during that decade when many people pronounced the genre dead. That was before this summer when the weather became seriously scary.) Way, way back when we were in local news and some major disaster occurred – the kind that inspired wall to wall coverage – it was a good bet that sooner or later a reporter would be sent out in pursuit of the answer to the question, can it happen here. We think the same kind of question is a reason these books are so thrilling. Based on real events, they beg some variation of the question: can it happen here, or can it happen now, or can it happen again.

We have recently finished reading RISING TIDE (1998) about the famous 1927 flood of the Mississippi River. (This is the same 1927 flood that the John Goodman character in Treme is writing a novel about.) We picked the book up because it is happening again – now. The flood gates of the Morganza Spillway were opened last month, inundating the Atchafalaya River Basin, much of the same area that flooded in 1927.

RISING TIDE pulls the reader along several plot lines which author John M. Barry alternates so that finding out what happened in Greenville, MI, was often delayed while we read about events in New Orleans. The book – as all these books – is full of interesting characters, often behaving badly. And we very much want to know just how low some of them can go.

Barry also teases the reader along. At the end of chapter 16, he writes: “The struggle against the river had begun as one of man against nature. It was becoming one of man against man.” At the end of Chapter 30, he says, “But a reckoning would come.” And didn’t we want to know about that struggle and what reckoning would come?

Our summer fiction break continues with drought. We are on to the dustbowl in THE WORST HARD TIME and EMPIRE OF THE SUMMER MOON.

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Writing Spaces: A room with a view – or not

By mcmckit on May 30, 2011

A famous writer told us recently that he plays a certain piece of music by Igor Stravinsky every time he sits down to work. We guess the music signals to his brain that it is time to go to the writing place. The remark got us wondering about the conditions in which writers write. Below, some famous writers describe their writing places. We found them on The Guardian’s Website so they are mostly British.

Sebastion Faulks: “I admit that the decor – if that's not too strong a word – is the subject of some hilarity to female interviewers.”
Jane Gardam: “I move around the room when it gets too untidy, like the Mad Hatter's Tea Party.”
Marina Warner: “I used to write in a burrow downstairs, and moving up into the roof and light and air lifted me and my writing.”
Jane Austen described her writing as being done with a fine brush on a 'little bit (not two inches wide) of ivory'.
Martin Amis: “My writing room is a detached building at the end of a small concrete garden. The glass ceiling is covered with leaves and squirrels. It's ideal – you can't hear the children and you can smoke.”
Penelope Lively: “I can't sit at a desk or a screen on account of a back problem, so I work with an ancient electronic typewriter on my lap.”
Jonathan Safran Foer: “I used to work in the Rose Reading Room of the 42nd Street Branch of the New York Public Library. The library was built upon what used to be the city's main drinking source, a massive reservoir that stretched from 40th to 42nd Streets, and 5th to 6th Avenues. Once you know that fact, it's hard not to imagine either the books underwater, or people drinking them.”
Antonia Fraser: “It's all rather untidy, but that gives me a sense of security. I want my mind to be the only orderly thing in the room.”

We too have decided – and opposite – opinions about writing spaces. One of us likes “cozy;” the other likes to project herself into the nearest tree. Here in an unprecedented break into the first person singular are our descriptions of our writing spaces:

Linda: “The windows in my office offer a close-up view of the brick wall next door. I always thought it would be wonderful to work “with a view” but when I had one (at the beach overlooking the water) I became distracted and had trouble concentrating on what I was writing. My office is the smallest room in the house. My choice. I prefer “cozy” to “expansive”. (Is there a word for the opposite of claustrophobic?) I write surrounded by books and plants and pictures of loved ones, but they all kind of fade out as I interact with my (very big screen) computer.”

Molly: “If I don’t look out the window, I search the Web which does nothing to rest my eyes or my soul. The view from my very large windows is city roofs and gardens with a sizable sweet cherry tree in a garden across the way. Last week, it was full of migrating cedar waxwings feasting on unripened cherries. As I watched (through binoculars,) one CW picked a cherry and passed it to another on the same branch. The second CW hopped to the side, hopped back again and returned the cherry. The first CW then did the exactly the same thing, hopping sideways and back and giving the cherry to its partner. Very pleased, they performed this ritual four or five times before one of them ate the cherry. I am never alone in my writing place.”

What is your writing space like?

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Fictional Real Estate: location, location, and yes, location

By mcmckit on May 23, 2011

Try to conceive of Charles Dickens writing not about Victorian England but about suburban New Jersey in the fifties ala Philip Roth. Then picture Alexander Portnoy in Dickensian London. Take William Faulkner’s LIGHT IN AUGUST out of Mississippi and put it, say, in Kansas. Imagine Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade on the mean streets of Mayberry. Lift Pearl Buck’s THE GOOD EARTH out of China and plop it down in Normandy, France.

Some of these new books we might enjoy reading, but they would be vastly different from the originals. Relocating them is more than just moving the furniture, it changes everything – the whole story.

All of this is to say, location matters in novels. Much is made in writing manuals about how location can become a character in a story. It can have moods, think of the brooding moors in WUTHERING HEIGHTS. It can play a role in the plot. What wouldn’t Scarlett O’Hara do to save the plantation, Tara, in GONE WITH THE WIND? It can take action just as the Kansas tornado swept Dorothy to Oz. Above all, setting adds richness and meaning to fictional works. To neglect it is to miss an opportunity.

A good author will take any setting that is close to her or his heart – no matter how humble – and make it matter to the reader. Look what August Wilson did with Pittsburgh in his cycle of 20th century plays. But some of us don’t have settings hard wired into us; we have to choose.

We know firsthand that this is a choice that matters to editors and publishers. We had an editor once who was contemptuous of St. Louis as a setting for one of our books. Who knew? We loved St. Louis, but maybe the eroding industrial base and declining population should have told us something. This was at the beginning of the nineties boom.

In a 2006 survey (the latest we could find) Bowker.com identifies anywhere in the British Isles and New York as top locales for mysteries and romances. After looking at 13,000 titles Bowker found that about 12 percent were set in England, Scotland, Wales or Ireland. New York led the list of top cities, followed by London, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco and Washington D.C. California topped the list of state locations trailed by Texas, Florida, Virginia and North Carolina.

So rather than make a Carmen Sandiego spin of the globe for a location for your next novel, you might start with one of these. At least, you will know they are acceptable to the publishing industry. Whatever you choose, go there, soak up the

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The tyranny of book proposals: some guesses about where they came from but no excuses…

By mcmckit on May 16, 2011

If you want to sell a non-fiction book, you have to hand publishers a thirty to fifty-page document which, if done right, provides an overview of the book, summaries of every chapter, a sample chapter, author bio and a section that explains exactly what the market for the book is. The book proposal is painstaking to produce and authors have to do it even if they have already written their books. We write and edit a lot of book proposals for clients. What, we often wonder, is left for publishers to do? Don’t they know the market better than a single author? Shouldn’t they have an idea what is going to sell and what isn’t?

We googled every riff on ‘book proposal’ we could think of and still have no clue as to its origins. But we got a hint on the Web Sites of several agents, who note in their book proposal sections that it isn’t necessary anymore to actually write a book before selling it. Since these are folks with perspective on the book business, we paid attention.

Great numbers of people, who contact us, seem to take it for granted that actual writing is not required to sell (or even produce) a book, but really, there was a time when books had to be written before publishers bought them. We would bet that the change in thinking on this – and the dreaded book proposal – came about sometime during the nineties when publishers became very interested in mega-bestsellers and lost pretty much all interest in what are called mid-list books, books that sell only a few thousand copies. At that point, they must have been looking to be served up the next big idea on a platter. Hence, the book proposal.

A hundred years ago, getting published was a matter of contacting an editor at a publishing house. If the editor liked your book, he sought approval from his publishing house colleagues and published it. But by the early 1900’s that kind of personal transaction was already becoming obsolete. The first literary agent had appeared in 1875 and now, they were beginning to proliferate. So were books. In the decade between 1900 and 1910, 83,512 books were printed in the United States (THE BOOK PUBLISHING INDUSTRY, Albert N. Greco, Routledge, 2005). In 2009 alone, 288,355 new books and editions were published (Bowker.com). And that is traditional publishing; it does not include e books.

Wouldn’t you just know, a good number of those books are how-to’s on writing book proposals? A search on Amazon yielded over 14,000 results on the subject. That book proposals are now an industry demonstrates how much a part of the system they are. They are not optional; publishers expect to get them. Proposals do give authors an opportunity to promote their work. And, as big as the market is these days, wouldn’t you rather put your slant on it?

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What makes a good memoir? Does your life qualify?

By mcmckit on May 9, 2011

In the May 12th issue of the “New York Review of Books,” memoir reviewer and memoirist Ian Frazier predicts an onslaught of personal stories:

“Seventy-six million baby boomers are reaching retirement age. Many of us own computers, and we find ourselves fascinating.”

Oh, goody. In the same issue of the NYR, short story writer Lorrie Moore calls memoirs a “cultural condition” and asks a series of questions that might be considered pre-requisites for penning a memoir. They include:

“Are you connected to a fascinating and underexplored chapter in history in any manner whatever? Are you a professional story teller with a beautiful prose style and some autobiography begging for reportage? Are you a trenchant thinker with incisive analytical powers? Do you have a social cause you would like to advocate strenuously? And if none of the above, are you Brigitte Bardot?”

Moore is being largely facetious. As she obviously knows, today’s memoirs are very often concocted of flimsier stuff. So, in a more practical way, the question is worth asking: what makes a good memoir?

1) Frazier, whose TRAVELS IN SIBERIA was published last year, says that the memoir reader is going to be asking, why should I care – and the writer needs to address that question right away. That is probably a good jumping off point. Why should the reader care about your story?
2) We have edited lots of memoirs and have noticed that personal stories are more interesting when they are not so much personal but about other people as well. In other words, I, I, I is to be avoided. Boring, and it makes the writer look boorish.
3) Possessing information that the reader might be interested in learning is a good reason to write a memoir. We are currently editing a Hollywood memoir that is lots of fun because we are learning about an aspect of film making that we knew nothing about.
4) Family secrets make great memoirs. In fact, if there is a memoir formula, this is it. Find the secret in your family, investigate and write a memoir. Another of our clients was inexplicably deserted by his father at an early age. Later in life, he learns why. He has a built-in story. Similarly, a memoirist interviewed on NPR this weekend discovered in his twenties that his grandfather was a Nazi. Voila, memoir!
5) Memoirs can be advocacy pieces. Is your personal story a jumping off place for a wider examination of a subject? Has it given you a point of view you would like to express and feel others might benefit from?

If your personal story is unremarkable – and many of ours are – there are lots of other kinds of books to write. And, if Frazier is right about the coming tide, there may be a much better market for them.

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Book blooper: the impossible narrator

By mcmckit on May 2, 2011

In the movie, “The Social Network” when Eduardo flies to California to see Mark, he arrives soaking wet from standing outside in the rain, his hair in disarray with his bangs down on his forehead. He and Mark then go speak privately, and in a camera cut, Eduardo’s hair is suddenly styled, the bangs being parted to one side. This kind of impossible transition is what aficionados of film bloopers relish.

There are similar impossibilities in books: book bloopers. An example is the shifting narration in Abraham Verghese’s CUTTING FOR STONE. We don’t mean to pick on Verghese; this is the second blog in a row about his book. But this book has been on the bestseller for many, many weeks demonstrating that book bloopers, like film bloopers, are invisible to the vast majority of the audience.

CFS is written from the first person perspective of a character called Marion Stone, who at the age of fifty decides to write his autobiography “to render some order to the events of my life.” Good plan. Stone is half of a set of conjoined twins and the story is largely concerned with their bonds and divisions. The problem is that Stone as a cognizant person doesn’t really appear in the book between the pages of 14 and 183. Up until then, the story is about events preceding and surrounding his birth, events of which he has no first-hand knowledge.

Verghese opts to have Stone relate these events in a third-person omniscient kind of way. Somehow able to get into the heads of his parents, his foster parents and other characters, Stone seems to know things about them it is impossible for him to know and at a level of detail that would be impossible to collect.

Here for example is a passage in which Stone’s mother is described nursing his father who is in a fever:
“He babbled about green fields and was unaware of her presence. Could seasickness be fatal, she wondered. Or could he have a forme frusta of the fever that afflicted Sister Anjali? There was so much she did not know about medicine. In the middle of the ocean, surrounded by the sick, she felt the weight of her ignorance.
“But she knew how to nurse and she knew how to pray. So, praying, she eased off his shirt which was stiff with bile and spit, and she slid down his shorts.”

The only person who could have told Stone about this event was unconscious. Thus, he has to be making it up, not so much relating his own story as inventing his mother’s – blurring the lines between Stone-the-autobiographical-writer and Verghese-the-fiction-writer.

This does not seem to interfere with the all-important story. The book club loved, loved, loved this book. It is a blooper, just like Dorothy walking along the pig pen fence at the beginning of “The Wizard of Oz.” She falls into the mud, yet when the Bert Lahr character helps her out of there, her dress is perfectly clean.

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Are you telling a story or trying to show the reader how smart you are?

By mcmckit on Apr 26, 2011

Often a fiction author will launch into a lengthy explanation of X,Y or Z that may only tangentially relate to the actual story being told but shows off the author’s knowledge of whatever subject is under discussion. One of our clients calls these data dumps – and we are of two minds about them. Readers do like to learn about things. But data dumps, unless they are handled skillfully, get in the way of the story.

Here is an example of a data-dumping from Abraham Verghese’s CUTTING FOR STONE. Hema, a doctor specializing in obstetrics and gynecology in an Ethiopian mission hospital reflects on advances in medicine in the developed world.

“But of late she felt the huge remove between her practice in Africa and the frontiers of scientific medicine epitomized by England and America. C. Walton Lillehei in Minneapolis had just that year begun an era of heart surgery by finding a way to pump blood while the heart was stopped. A vaccine for polio had been developed, though it had yet to make its way to Africa. At Harvard in Massachusetts, a Dr. Joseph Murray had performed the first successful human kidney transplant from one sibling to another. The picture of him in “Time” showed an ordinary-looking chap, unpretentious.”

This information is not necessary to the story and we wonder if it would really be rattling around in Hema’s head. Verghese makes the point again two paragraphs later in a more succinct and believable way:

“When she read her “Surgery, Gynecology & Obstetrics” (each month’s volume arriving by sea mail weeks after publication, bruised and stained in its brown wrapping), the innovations read like fiction.”

CUTTING FOR STONE is a hugely successful book and readers, we have talked to, all mentioned what they learned about Ethiopian society and practice of medicine. We, however, found ourselves skipping over many of the data dumps to try to get to the story and we wonder if other readers didn’t self edit as well.

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PowerPoint Fiction

By mcmckit on Apr 17, 2011

The book that has impressed us most recently is Jennifer Egan’s A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD. We have hesitated to blog about it because it is so seamlessly good, it is hard to pick apart for lessons about writing. Happily, Egan has spoken up to teach us a thing or two.

GOON SQUAD is a series of thirteen interconnected short stories. Each one has a different main character and voice, ranging from first to third person and to PowerPoint. The stories shift in time from 1979 to the future and are told out of sequence. These are hallmarks of a post modern novel. Yet transcending the form, Egan sweeps this all together into what the New York Review of Books calls “a great, gasping, sighing, breathing whole.” How does she do it?

It is worth noting Egan didn’t set out to write a post modern novel. She was just telling a story, and since it was about a large group of decentralized characters over a long period of time, she opted for a variety of styles and forms. In an essay on her publisher’s Web Site, she writes:

I wanted to provide the greatest possible range of reading experiences: some parts of the book are unabashedly tragic; others are satiric; a few moments are openly farcical. One chapter is written in the form of a celebrity profile; another is in PowerPoint. I tried writing a chapter in epic poetry, but it turns out that to write epic poetry, you have to be a poet.

The PowerPoint chapter, which we have to admit we approached with a sinking feeling, is the heart of the book. PowerPoint is a series of snapshots. In this, it duplicates the structure of the book as a whole. Yet, the chapter is also the book’s emotional core. Written in the voice of a twelve-year-old girl, it tugs at the heart strings in spite of its dry, corporate format. In an interview for EW.com, Egan says the PowerPoint allowed her to be sentimental in ways she couldn’t have been in conventional prose. She goes on to explain how she developed her slides.

I finally settled on a methodology something like this: I’d pinpoint the fictional moment I wanted to portray (PowerPoint only allows for the creation of moments, without connective tissue). Then I’d list what seemed to me the essential component parts of that moment as a series of bullet points. Then I would study those bullet points and try to understand their relationship to each other: Was it cause-and-effect? Was it circular? Was it a counterpoint? An evolution? Having identified the relationship of the parts to each other, I would choose (or, when I really got comfortable, create) a graphic structure to house the bullet points that would clearly manifest their relationship.

Even for authors who are not planning to write fiction in PowerPoint, this is an instructive quote. Putting together something like this would be a good framework for a novel in traditional prose. It would force an author to be very clear and organized. And with key moments delineated, all that would be needed is the connective tissue.

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It takes more than imagination to come up with the good stuff

By mcmckit on Apr 11, 2011

Reading Howard Norman’s WHAT IS LEFT THE DAUGHTER, we were wowed by (among other features of the novel) the quirky detail. For instance:

• The book is largely set in Middle Economy, Nova Scotia, which sits between Lower Economy and Upper Economy. “Locally the joke was, if you were traveling west to east along the Minas Basin, your financial prospects got worse by the mile, until you finally ended up in Lower Economy. I never once heard the logic of that joke reversed…”
• The World War II-era characters find meaning in a volume called THE HIGHLAND BOOK OF PLATITUDES. “Those platitudes aren’t much good for predicting life, but they often manage to sum up what has just happened pretty well.”
• One of the characters is a professional mourner, which is to say she is hired at funerals to express grief on behalf of the deceased. “As my aunt liked to point out, Tilda seldom did anything halfway, and as I soon observed, mourning was no exception….she fell into a strange marionette’s flailing of arms, wailing and moaning.”

How did Norman come up with all that, we wondered. What kind of imagination thinks that stuff up?

Last week we had a chance to find out at a local literary salon where Norman was the featured speaker. He is the author of numerous books, perhaps most famously THE BIRD ARTIST, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. He looked like an author in a tweed jacket with rumpled hair and that writer’s knot between the eyes. And he was forthcoming about where he gets all his unusual tidbits: research.

Yes, Virginia, there is an Economy, divided into Lower and Central, in Nova Scotia. THE HIGHLAND BOOK OF PLATITUDES was a real book, privately published around 1900. And mourner is – or was – a profession. Norman actually met and interviewed a professional mourner. The murder and trial in the book is based on a real murder and subsequent court case. (We give nothing away here because there is always a murder in Norman’s books.)

We had the sense that the audience was underwhelmed by Norman’s copping to research, but anyone who thinks that writing a novel is only a matter of consulting one’s imagination, might find this revelatory. You don’t have to dream up unique stuff, you can go out and find it. And Norman says one of the best places to find interesting detail is church bulletins.

Norman’s reverence for facts is shared by his first-person narrator who is writing an account for his daughter who he has not met since her birth. “Marlais,” he begins, “today is March 27, 1967, your twenty-first birthday. I’m writing because I refuse any longer to have my life defined by what I haven’t told you. I’ve waited until now to relate the terrible incident that I took part in on October 16, 1942, when I was nineteen.” Happily for the reader, grounding in dates and times do not prevent Wyatt from losing control of events: “On into the autumn of 1942, there was, to my mind, a nagging sense of life being off kilter.”

Life being off kilter is what makes this book such a wonderful work of fiction.

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Being more fully present by being absent: a lesson from a poet

By mcmckit on Apr 4, 2011

We are not poets so we don’t blog about poetry, but April is poetry month and recently, we had the pleasure of hearing poet Claudia Emerson speak at the annual launch of the Northern Virginia Review literary magazine. Much of what she had to say is applicable to writing prose.

Former Virginia poet laureate (2008 – 2010) Emerson read a yet-to-be-published poem called Cold Room. The poem is set in Emerson’s mother’s house where at holiday times, a room is allowed to be cold to store food that does not fit in the overflowing refrigerator. In the poem, the cold room is the one that belonged to Emerson’s brother who was far away that Christmas and, ill with cancer, unlikely ever to return to his child hood home. It is a deeply affecting poem.

In an early version of the poem, Emerson said she included herself. She wrote herself into the poem, opening the door of the cold room for her mother. In the final version, she took herself out – and the result she said, was a much better poem. Having listened to her read the final version, we can understand why the poem is improved by the omission. The mother, as she slices ham in the cold room for the holiday meal nobody wants to eat, seems utterly and poignantly alone with her grief. The act of slicing ham takes on larger significance; what she is slicing away is more than shavings of meat. “Just so,” the mother says at the end, “just so.”

Yet, Emerson says taking herself out of the poem has made her more fully present in it. And that is true too. The reader understands that the writer has to be in the room in order to record what happened there. The mother can’t be literally alone. But the presence of the writer is a very different thing from the presence of the daughter. The daughter opens the door for her mother but is then an awkward presence in the face of her grief. The writer, by being invisible, enables the mother to be alone – as we all are – with grief. And the writer shows the reader how much more is going on in the room then slicing ham. The writer gives the poem layers of meaning and breadth.

Since Cold Room has not been published, we can’t share it with you. Below is another poem by Claudia Emerson from her recent, Pulitzer Prize winning collection, LATE WIFE. Here, the eponymous late wife of Emerson’s soon-to-be second husband is completely present – in large part because she is so absent.

ARTIFACT
For three years you lived in your house
just as it was before she died: your wedding
portrait on the mantel, her clothes hanging
in the closet, her hair still in the brush.
You have told me you gave it all away
then, sold the house, keeping only the confirmation
cross she wore, her name in cursive chased
on the gold underside, your ring in the same

box, those photographs you still avoid,
and the quilt you spread on your borrowed bed—
small things. Months after we met, you told me she had
made it, after we had slept already beneath its loft
and thinning, raveled pattern, as though beneath
her shadow, moving with us, that dark, that soft.

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