Tag Archives: writing

Literary Comfort Food

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In early March I was searching the shelves at a Barnes&Noble for a mystery for Mary’s birthday, when I spotted a treasure – one of Tony Hillerman’s Navajo Tribal Police mysteries neither of us had read.  The Shape Shifter (2006) is the last of the 18 titles in this series that won Hillerman (1925-2008) numerous awards both as a mystery writer and as a friend of Native Americans.  I will review The Shape Shifter when I finish, but starting it today reminded me of other stories that represent pure reading pleasure to me.  Books that carry me into another world.  Books that I read because I like to hang out with the characters, almost regardless of what they are doing.

I realized this morning as I sat down to coffee with Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn, and officers Jim Chee and his new wife, Bernadette Manuelito, that the greatest pleasures I’ve had in reading, bar none, are books in which I just want to be with the characters, almost regardless of whether they’re solving mysteries or buying groceries.  In addition to Hillerman’s tribal officers, other examples come to mind:

  • Frodo Baggins and friends.
  • Holmes and Watson.
  • Amelia Peabody and family in Elizabeth Peters’ Egyptian mysteries.
  • Rat and Mole and Toad in Wind in the Willows.
  • The sometimes annoying but always brilliant, Hercule Poirot.
  • Lirael and the disreputable dog in Garth Nix’s Abhorsen Trilogy.
  • Hamish Macbeth, the irrepressible Scottish detective in M.C. Beaton’s series.

I have also spent way too much money and time reading second rate fantasy series in the often vain hope of recapturing the Tolkien experience.

It’s important to realize that in stressing the importance of characters, I am not referring to the contemporary buzzword, “character driven.”  That has little or nothing to do with my list of comfort-food books, since with the possible exception of Wind in the Willows, these titles all belong in the “plot driven” category;  most mysteries begin, not with the detective’s quirks but with the discovery of a corpse, and problem of the Ring of Power was independent of Frodo.

As I said – these fictional people are friends, whether they are solving mysteries, dodging orcs, or sitting down to second breakfast.  This is a real clue for me, something to remember as I juggle plot elements.  Even though that is critical work, I find myself anxious to get back to the characters, both the heroine and the villain.  That, more than anything else, tells me I am heading in the right direction.

But now, before that or anything else, I have to get back to the The Shape Shifter, where storm clouds, both literal and metaphorical, are gathering over the reservation.

True North

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In December, 1975, my sister sent me a small wrapped box with a note attached.  Our mother had died suddenly the previous May, but my sister found a small package, wrapped for Christmas the year before, at the back of a closet.

Inside was a compass.  I’m sure my mother intended it as a pragmatic gift – I was spending a lot of time on back roads and camping out in the southwestern deserts where you really want to know where you are and where you are going, but ever since, that particular compass and compasses in general, have carried a lot of symbolic meaning for me.  Finding true north.  Finding one’s way.

The earlier name for a Compass Rose was Wind Rose

My ideas have changed since I got that compass.  I used to imagine “one’s way” as “one way.”  As if our lives were like trains, and we are either on the track or off.  Now I imagine something more like “possible futures,” (a classic sci-fi term).  Not a single track, but an ongoing dance between ourselves and the world, of choices and unfolding events.

***

Recently I posted that I am rethinking the plot of the novel I’m writing because my forward progress had slowed and a step back showed there were flaws and gaps in my core conception.  Later I realized some of the story elements had become so common as to have already become cliches.  I understand how fast that can happen; Thomas Edison used to speak of times when “ideas were in the air,” and I’m sure there were far fewer inventors in his day than young adult writers in ours.

I’ve taken my own advice recently, and done a lot of free-writing, easily filling up single spaced pages with several alternate plots that seems fresher to me, but remain similar in setting and character to the story I was working on before.  One in particular sparked my excitement.  Then I spotted a review of a recently published, YA novel that had features strangely in common with my current conception.

Conventional wisdom urges us not chase popular stories, but these days, my impulse is almost the reverse – it almost seems harder to run away from what other people have done!  Something else we are told often is, “tell the story that only you can tell.”  To me, this sounds a lot like the “true north” idea.  Our thoughts, our emotions, our memories are not stable, so why should our stories be?  That kind of imagined fixity  is something the conscious mind loves, but the unconscious or whatever you wish to call the wellsprings of our creativity, does not share in such linear thinking.

I used to admire an Arizona man named Frederick Sommer, who took hauntingly surreal photographs in the desert.  Once an interviewer asked him why he photographed, seeming, from the tone of the article, to want some kind of deep philosophical rationale.  Instead, Sommer shrugged and said, “You’ve got to do something during the day.”  I’ve always loved the irreverence of his response.  I remember it in moments when I begin to take myself and work too seriously.  As ego involvement grows, I risk mistaking what I do for what I am.

Frederick Sommer

In retrospect, I learned a lot when I was writing software.  I learned that when something isn’t working, you look at it closely, and if necessary, try something else.  I may have missed schedules but I seldom missed sleep.  The years that I spent writing software convinced me that I can solve problems – that if I keep looking long enough, I’ll find a creative solution that was there all along, overlooked.

I write for a lot of reasons.  One of them is that I have to do something during the day.

Four Key Ingredients – Part Two

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Wrestling with Originality:  A real-life Example.

It’s easy to talk in the abstract about things good fiction needs, but “originality” is an issue I have been wrestling with for real lately.  Recent “market research” – checking book jacket blurbs in stores and online – revealed a mass of new titles in the fantasy sub-genre where I have been working, in a two steps forward one back fashion, for several years.  Now that even the diehard fans are satiated with vampires, many hopeful writers have trooped to Faerie.

How many?  Well, two of the first half-dozen titles I sampled featured half-human/half-fairy protagonists – like mine.  A few discoveries like that throw the very possibility of being original into question.

I noticed something else too – several of these new books reuse a plot that was common in 1980’s adult fantasy – a war of good and bad fairies in which a human participant somehow tips the balance.  What I suspected then, I am sure of now – that storyline originated in the world of Dungeons & Dragons and online role-playing games.  It is simply not present in the original sources.

Given this seeming recycling of recycled plots, my choice seems fairly straightforward – give it up or dig deeper.  Donald Maass’ writing is full of encouragement for the latter choice, and I’m getting excited about some of the new ideas welling up since I started this process.  Here are a few of my current thoughts:

  • Go back to original sources.  In traditional fairy stories, there are no “good” and “bad” fairies – all encounters are problematic for humans.  Maass’ criterion of “inherent conflict” is built into the old tales and ballads of the relation between humans and the fey.
  • I’ve found a simple way around my heroine’s ancestry, since being half-fairy is now a cliche.  I like this even better.
  • I am probably going to rename the fairies and Faerie the way Sharon Shinn did in her 1995 YA story, Summer’s at Castle Auburn.  There the land and people are called, “Alora.”  Everyone gets it in “quack like a duck” fashion.

The point of giving these personal details is to underscore my belief in Donald Maass’ suggested lines of digging deeper.  “What if?” is a good question for any storyteller.  I have a long way to go, but I am enjoying the process again, and confident that I am on the right track.

Gut Emotional Appeal – Donald Maass’ Fourth Criterion for Really Good Novels:

There’s a formula for this:  create a likable character who must struggle to achieve something important.  Good as far as it goes, which is not very far.  And never mind that someone like Jonathan Franzen can throw out the advice and still win critical acclaim – the rest of us should not try that at home.  Most writers I know really care about their characters; the problem is how to make an audience care.

At a recent conference, a presenter used the Michelangelo analogy – chipping away what doesn’t belong – for the writer’s craft as well.  I think this is pertinent to the character breakthroughs I watch others make – they keep working, and eventually come to characters who somehow embody some of their own deeper truths.  In practice it isn’t nearly as weighty and ponderous as it sounds.

One critique group friend has long been enamored of Raymond Chandler type hard boiled detectives, with a dash of James Bond thrown in.  My friend worked and worked, creating better and better versions of characters we have seen before.  Recently, his own humor and mischievousness got into the mix, and a hero emerged who parallels, in my opinion, the tongue-in-cheek charm of the chick-lit detective who curses the bad guys if she breaks a nail while taking them down.  My friend’s character, Jonathan, a wastrel ex-Royal Marine, returns fire when assassins attack him on the golf course, furious that they ruined his score.  The battle had me in stitches as it caught up a foursome of startled ministers who realize the Lord moves in more mysterious ways than they had imagined.

Another critique group friend, writing about a troubled teen, made a quieter but equally profound breakthrough.  You see it in a little shift.  The bravado falls away, and the character is quietly real and telling her truth beyond any stereotype.

We have to start with characters and situations that matter to us, and then go deeper into ourselves that we expected – this much I am sure of.  How and when that happens is a mystery.  None the less, I find Donald Maass’ criteria:  Plausibility, Conflict, Originality, and Gut Emotional Appeal valuable questions to ask of my own or anyone else’s writing.

You can’t always say what or how but you know writing that has these things.  And if they are missing?  It simply means there is more chipping away to do.

Four Key Ingredients – Part One

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Stories begin with ideas and these can come from anywhere. For some writers, some of the time, they may arrive fully formed, but I suspect that for most of us, they show up as seeds which we have to nourish and grow, in acorn-to-oak fashion.

Since I have allowed myself to drop back to the “acorn stage” of my own story, I turned once again to Donald Maas who has a lot to say about brainstorming and the care and feeding of story ideas as the critical first step in writing what he calls, “the breakout novel.”

Another name for that is simply “publishable novel,” because according to Maass, good is not good enough anymore.  I see antecdotal evidence to support his claim.  I still find the phrase “breakout novel” a bit high-falutin, so I just tend to think of “really good novels.”  Really good novels begin with a really good premise.

Maass uses the word “premise” both for the initial seed idea (“What if there were a whole other world at the bottom of that rabbit hole”) and for a more polished, high level description (“A girl named Alice follows a talking rabbit and…”).  He insists that really good, breakout ideas can be made.  He gives many useful examples of brainstorming and suggests that a key skill is learning to ask “what if” questions and then throw away one’s first responses which are likely to be obvious and cliched.

In the second chapter of Writing the Breakout Novel, he asks the reader to go find their three all time favorite books – the one’s we have read so many times the bindings are cracked.  The ones that have nourished our hearts and spirits for decades.  Maass suggests that four elements common to our favorite stories are likely to be, Plausibility, Inherent Conflict, Originality, and Gut Emotional Appeal.

Plausibility is perhaps the easiest of these concepts to understand and build into a story.  Avoid the extremes of the obvious and the impossible; according to Maass, we want our stories “surprising yet credible.”   As a fan of fantasy and science fiction, I would add that this applies to alternate universes as well.  Google on “world building” and you find a ton of information – much of it coming from gamers – on constructing internally consistent fantasy or extra-terrestrial worlds.  The internal consistency is what matters.  Orcs are all right in Middle Earth, in fact we expect them; Martians would be over the top.

Inherent Conflict:  If the story is set in an era and world where conflict is part of the situation, it aids the writer, but with craft, we can find or create conflict anywhere.  The nominally placid suburbs can be battlegrounds according to John Updike, and now Jonathan Franzen.  Anywhere you have teachers and students, parents and children, boys and girls you have the raw materials for conflict and tension.  Even better, according to Maass – you have conflict between groups or individuals who both have a claim to be “right.”.  It is our job as writers to find the conflict and keep in in the spotlight, for this is the stuff that generates excitement.

Originality:  This is one of those magical qualities – we know it and applaud it when we see it, but can we set out to deliberately be original?  To a degree, I think we can.  If we can allow ourselves to brainstorm or play with ideas, and are willing to reject our first (and usually obvious) solutions, we put ourselves in a place where something new can emerge.  (strictly speaking there may not be any “new” stories, but in practical terms, there are books that make us think, “Wow, I wish I had thought of that”).

I assume we all have practical ways of generating ideas – taking a walk, sinking into reverie, listening to music, keeping things silent, free writing, or some combination of methods like this.  The next step is to apply it.  If one can pull an entire plot out of ether, like a magician pulls an endless string of scarves out of a hat, bravo, but at some point, we’ll get stuck or have decisions to make.  I cannot remember where I got this piece of advice but I find it effective.  Ask an important plot question.  Write down 20 solutions.  Throw out the first 19 and the one that is left will be something original.  Twenty or ten or pick a number that works, as long as it doesn’t make things go too easy.

NEXT:  A real-life example and the fourth ingredient

Simple Things or Peeling Onions

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Since I couldn’t settle on one title to express what I wanted to say in this post, I chose a compound name which conveniently illustrates the opposite of what I am getting at.  I find myself wanting to get to the bottom of things, the root, the core, the ground, the seed idea.  For example:

  • I am back to the Tassajara Breadbook, and this time I’ve got some homemade sourdough starter going.  It’s appealing not only because I love sourdough, but because it is the simplest way to make yeasted bread.  Even so, something even more simple than that has gripped my imagination.  In an article called “Easy Dough,” in the Spring issue of Tricycle, Noa Jones describes a trip across the Sinai with Bedouins.  She describes how intrigued she was upon seeing how few supplies they carried.  None the less, each evening they mixed up dough and cooked it right on the campfire.  Jones describes the procedure but gives no exact recipe – figure it out for yourselves, she says.  I really can’t wait to try – flour, water, fire, and a pinch of salt; you can’t make a simpler bread than that.  This is the sort of thing I am getting at.
  • I’m at a similar point in my meditation practice.  Over the years I have learned and used some complicated techniques, but I find that all I want to do right now is the simplest practice I know.  It has a Japanese name which is usually translated as, “just sitting.”

I have mentioned that in my writing, I’m reviewing a half-dozen books to pick up ideas on spicing up plots, but I’ve even taken a small break from that to ask more fundamental questions about the story I’m working on.  Questions about all my current assumptions – everything on the table.

For instance, do I really want to write fantasy?  Well, yeah, at the moment I do – gut preference.

Do I really want to write young adult vs. adult fantasy?  I’m not so sure on that point – I sometimes go back and forth, but overall, yes, I am drawn to reading and writing YA fantasy.  Reminds me of the keynote speaker at a conference I went to saying, “You should be thankful for your crappy childhoods, since now you get to be writers!”

And finally – maybe the key question: what is my story?  Not for all time, but for now.  Clarity is required.  What is the core story I want to tell?

Well, I did some free writing, and out of that exercise, extracted a brief description and it hit me – the basic pattern of the story is, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.”  And beyond that lies Pandora.  Pandora has meaning for all of us, especially, when we are young.  We fling open doors and rip open boxes before we know what we’re doing.  No way to avoid it.  As Jung said, “All the major decisions in life are made on the basis of insufficient information.”  As Pandora discovered, we discover, once the horse is out of the barn…

I was very pleased to arrive at that point.  This is a solid discovery, the outcome of really important work.  Something to build on.  There are many more questions, a whole list of them, and I will be discussing more of them.

Meanwhile, to end this post, I found a version of a great old Shaker song that’s been going through my head for several days.  At first I could not find it, since I thought the name was “Simple Things.”   It is actually called, “Simple Gifts,” and it’s a nice hymn for the end of a post on Easter.

Between the Beginning and the End

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I recently wrote of my intention to take a step back from my current writing project to read six books with a view to understanding how their plots are put together.  https://thefirstgates.com/2011/04/04/a-conference-and-a-resolution/  As promised, I’ve posted reviews of the first three books I read.

I had not planned in advance what I would read next.  As I scanned my shelves, I happily found something I had overlooked, The City of Ember by Jeanne DuPrau.  I picked up a signed copy of the book a year ago when Ms. DuPrau was a presenter at the 2010 NorCal SCBWI conference (the link above explains what that is and has notes on the 2011 conference).

Author Jeanne DuPrau

The City of Ember (2003) is a middle-grade, post-apocalyptic fantasy – (is it just me, or is that really in the air these days?).  A movie version, starring Tim Robbins and Bill Murray was released in 2008.  I will review the book when I finish, but now I want to talk about some of the comments DuPrau made at the conference, since she shared some of the ups and downs she experiences in plotting.

Beginnings are relatively easy, she said, and her goal is to know the ending (more or less) when she starts, so her story has a destination.  She said wrote the first chapter of Ember, and knew the ending, ten years before she was able to complete the middle of the book.  She was working a day job at the time, but even so, months went by when she didn’t take Chapter One out of the drawer because she didn’t know how to proceed.  Traditional methods failed her, notably outlining.

Now this is stuff I personally identify with.  At the end of the conference, I picked up a written critique of my opening by Ms DuPrau that I had arranged for in advance.  It was pretty positive.  I think I do openings well, and then bog down in the middle, as she describes.  Outlining works to organize ideas I already have, but I’ve never been able to think my way into inventing something new.  I can write my way there and imagine my way there – sometimes – but these can be round about methods.  If I set out for San Francisco, but decide on the way to visit Carmel, I may eventually reach my destination, if I have enough time.  In plain terms, I’d rather not break DuPrau’s ten year record!

So what does she do?  According to my notes, she writes and imagines her way through the plot and keeps herself focused by asking one very specific question at a time.  Both free-writing and “focused” dog walks are methods she has evolved – ones that I have also applied, though not in so concentrated a manner.  In fact I found several pages of free-writing I’d done at breaks in that conference and appreciated the reminder that here is something valuable – a “disciplined” method of aiming toward an unknown destination!

***

The final thing DuPrau shared that day was the story of her success, and she revealed her method for that as well.  After Ember was finally done, she combed Publisher’s Weekly for contact information on new agents who were just setting up shop and looking for clients.  She cut a deal with the first agent she applied to who was actively seeking fantasy.  DuPrau’s story is living proof that even in this notoriously difficult age for publishing, the right combination of hard work, inventiveness, and luck can open doors to success.

Hollowland by Amanda Hocking – A Book Review

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If you are a writer, unless you’ve been living with wolves, chances are you have heard of Amanda Hocking, the twenty-something Minnesota author of young adult fantasies who spun the publishing industry in an unexpected direction.

One year ago this month, after a string of rejections from agents and editors, Hocking uploaded two novels in Kindle format.  She thought $43 for her first two weeks of sales was “pretty good.”  By the start of this year, she was selling half a million eb00ks a month, and in March she signed a reported $2 million dollar contract with St. Martin’s Press.

Amanda Hocking’s story has been told in the New York Times, the Wall Street journal, and on dozens if not hundreds of blogs, but one key question is seldom directly addressed:  are her books any good?  I just finished my first Hocking novel, and the short answer is, yes, it was lively, original, and I liked it a lot.

Hollowland starts with a bang and the action does not let up.  How is this for an opening sentence?

“This is the way the world ends – not with a bang or a whimper, but with zombies breaking down the back door.”

These are not your old-school, reanimated corpse type zombies.  No stiff, slow, shambling, mumbling, B-Grade movie zombies.  A mutation of the rabies virus has infected most of the population, causing them to become really angry, really psychotic, and ravenously hungry.  After her quarantine station near Las Vegas is breached by a coordinated zombie attack, 19 year old, Remy, and her friend, Harlow, set off across the desert, determined to find Remy’s brother.  Their first traveling companion is an African lion – animals are immune to this kind of rabies, and all the big cats from Circus Circus are loose.  That night they meet a rock star whose fame doesn’t mean so much in a post-apocalyptic world.  They pick up an SUV and a couple of refugees from a fundamentalist cult, whose leader has the habit of “cleansing” his female followers in his bedroom.  And so it goes.

It says a lot about Remy that she names the lion, Ripley, after Sigourney Weaver’s character in the Alien movies  That is the mojo you need when the zombies are winning.  Remy also has a charming irreverence, the kind of simple, eyes-open, speak-your-mind nature that you see in Amanda Hocking’s online interviews.

I can really see, though I have not found the words to express it, why the literary establishment would not cut Hocking a break.  There’s a hint of piety about the stories and characters you see in the YA fantasy section of Barnes&Noble.  The word “homogenized,” comes to mind.  And “processed food.”  And “inbred.”

This story was fresh, a little bit raw, a bit unpolished, but shaped by a writer whose imagination has not, and hopefully will not, be poured into the grooves shaped by others.  Hocking reminds me of Stephen King and not for the obvious horror licks that they share.  Both authors seem to gravitate to horror not just for its own sake, but to explore what ordinary people will do in impossible situations.

Hollowland is a available in both self-published text version, and Kindle format for $0.99, and in case anyone does not know, a Kindle device (though I love mine) is not required to read a book in that format.  Amazon has free Kindle apps for pc, mac, iPads and smart-phones.

Enjoy.

Gone For Good by Harlan Coben

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A few posts ago I said I was going to read six books straight through for pleasure, and then cycle back and analyze the ones with plot features I admire.  Book number two on my list was Harlan Coben’s Gone For Good, 2003.  Donald Maass had good things to say about this title in his Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook.  He said it takes a mystery cliche – a detective haunted by the murder of his wife or girlfriend – and turns it inside out by layering the plot and adding twists and turns.  I cannot recall a thriller with more surprising twists packed into its pages.

Will Klein’s mother tells him a few days before her death that his beloved older brother Ken is still alive. Ken disappeared eleven years earlier, wanted for the murder of Will’s former girlfriend. The family believes Ken is innocent but assumes he is dead – could he really be alive and in hiding? The day after his mother’s funeral, Will’s girlfriend, Sheila disappears. The next day at work, two FBI agents ask for Sheila’s whereabouts, and inform Will that her fingerprints were found at the scene of a double homicide in New Mexico. Meanwhile we meet two former classmate’s of Will’s older brother, one a gangster and one a sociopathic master-assassain known as “The Ghost,” and both have a keen interest in Will.

Got all that?  You need to, since this is just the basic setup of Gone For Good.  When Will sets out with his friend, Squares, to try to discover what is really going on, Squares warns him he may not like the answers.  “The ugliest truth, in the end, was still better than the prettiest of lies,” Will says, a sentiment that will be tested as the story progresses.

Perhaps the greatest take-away for me as a writer is the way questions can keep us turning pages as effectively as tension.  From the initial, “What’s going on?”, “Is my brother alive?”, “Where is my girlfriend?” mysteries, Will must face issues that cut deeper and deeper into the basic assumptions of his life and the people he loves.

This is not a perfect book.  During the second half, I found my attention wandering.  In part, the plot twists were coming with such frequency they felt expected and lost a little of their power to shock.  So I think when I review Gone For Good in greater detail, I am going to discover that for a large section of Act II, the stakes and the pacing of the revelations stayed somewhat constant.

Also, the most menacing character, The Ghost, was not fleshed out until the end of the book.  It is hard to write a convincing, three-dimensional, psychopathic killer.  It is the humanizing details that make them come alive.  Hannibal Lektor valued good manners and hated rude people.  The killer in No Country for Old Men had certain personal values – keeping his promises, for one.  Such quirks make them more believable than an apparently flawless killing machine.  The Ghost, we learn at the end of the book, is driven by a complex and unexpected sense of loyalty and fair play, but I think we would have found him more “real” and more frightening if we had known some of the details earlier.

As I now understand it, the whole point of this exercise – reading and then rereading six books to try to look under the hood – is to look deeply into what works in six unique approaches.  Having just finished a complex novel like this, I have several other opinions and hunches but I need to review them further.

I was reminded though, of the very first post I made on this blog at the end of last June.  I quoted Neil Gaiman’s comment as editor of Stories, that the measure of a storyteller’s success are the four words we all want to hear – “And then what happened?”  By that measure, Harlan Coben deserves the acclaim Gone For Good has won.