Tag Archives: writing

A Popular Writer Opens a Bookstore

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“I have no interest in retail; I have no interest in opening a bookstore,” said Ann Patchett, whose Parnassus bookstore opened Wednesday in Nashville.  “I also have no interest in living in a city without a bookstore,” she continued.

Author Ann Patchett welcomes customers to Parnassus Books

Nashville, once called “the Athens of the South,” lost it’s last independent bookstore and its Borders, in what one local writer called, “a civic tragedy.”  Cultural leaders held meetings in the public library, and hatched such ideas as a co-op bookstore, with individual investments of $1000 to startup.  Nothing came of those suggestions.  Then Patchett, the best selling author of Bel Canto and Truth and Beauty, began to think of opening a store.

In April, she met with Karen Hayes, who had worked with a large book wholesaler and as a sales rep for Random House.  The two  became partners and co-owners.  Patchett, whose most recent book, State of Wonder, reached number 3 on the New York Times bestseller list, put up an initial investment of $300,00.  When she went on a 15 city book tour last summer, she was bursting with questions for the owners of all the stores she visited:  How many square feet?  How many employees?  What makes this store work?

“Put the children’s section in the back of the store,” (so if they bolt, they can be stopped before they hit the street).  “If you hang signs from the ceiling, people will buy what’s advertised on them.”  “Make your store comforting and inclusive, smart but not snobby.”  These were bits of advice she gained from others in the trenches.  Like other independent bookstores, Parnassus will use Google to offer ebooks to customers.  (“Novelist Fights the Tide by Opening a Bookstore,” by Julie Bosman, The New York Times, Nov. 16, 2011, p. A1).

Stocking the children's section

In an NPR interview, Ann Patchett said she felt nervous, “like the first day of school,” but added, “I actually think this is going to go really, really well.”  http://www.npr.org/2011/11/16/142413792/ann-patchett-opens-parnassus-books-in-nashville

Patchett says Parnassus is her “gift to the city.”  Compared to the bookstores Nashville lost, Ms Patchett’s store, at 2500′, is tiny, but she says, “This is the way bookstores used to be. This is the bookstore of my childhood, and I feel fantastic being back here.”

I think maybe all of us can remember the magic of childhood bookstores and wish Ann Patchett, Karen Hayes, and the city of Nashville great success with their latest enterprise.

Writer’s Digest Annual Writing Competition

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I just received this announcement for the 81st annual Writer’s Digest writing competition, seeking entries in ten categories:

  • Inspirational Writing (Spiritual/Religious)
  • Memoirs/Personal Essay
  • Magazine Feature Article
  • Genre Short Story (Mystery, Romance, etc.)
  • Mainstream/Literary Short Story
  • Rhyming Poetry
  • Non-rhyming Poetry
  • Stage Play
  • Television/Movie Script
  • Children’s/Young Adult Fiction

As one would expect, there are nice prizes and nominal entry fees, with the top ten winners in each category to be named in the November, 2012 issue of Writer’s Digest.  Here is a link to the announcement page, where you can find links to the rules and regulations, as well a place to sign up for notification of the many contests WD holds every year, especially for short fiction and poetry.

http://www.writersdigest.com/competitions/writers-digest-annual-competition

If you’re interested in the Children’s/YA section, you will notice that although the category is listed on the main page, details such as word count are missing from the rules and the FAQs.  There is a “Contact us” link that gives phone number and email for questions like this.

Good luck to everyone.  I know several people who have been listed in the “top ten,” and it’s quite an honor, since the Writer’s Digest competitions always draw a large number of entries.

Back When Vampires Were Vampires

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Bella Lugosi's Dracula

When I was 15, my family lived in Europe.  My room, at the far end of the house, opened onto a patio through French doors that you could unlatch with a butter knife.  I decided it would be fun to read Dracula late at night, after everyone else had gone to bed.  Dumb – really dumb!  I know I’m not the only one to seek the thrill of a scary movie or book and get a whole lot more than they bargained for.  Let’s just say that for weeks after that, I took a clove of garlic to rub the French door frame every night before bed.

When I first went to college, we had a saying:  “Wherever two or more are gathered, they will start a film society.”  Friday nights on campus, I watched, Nosferatu, 1922, which made Bela Lugosi’s count seem tame.

Count Orlock in Nosferatu

Then there was Carl Dryer’s 1932, Vampyr, a movie whose plot I have never been able to decipher, but whose haunting imagery gives a truly creepy feeling of being in a coffin and seeing the face of the vampire who killed you peering through the glass in the lid.

The young protagonist of Vampyr. Is he really dead or only dreaming?

Once upon a time, vampires were not sensitive hunks and hunkettes.  Team Orlock?  I don’t think so!  And trust me, you don’t want a date with Dracula’s brides:

Dracula's better halves? Don't you believe it!

But alas, we are so besotted with undead who love poetry and walks on the beach that not even the current owners of Bran castle in Romania, the one that inspired Bram Stoker, are immune to draw of vampire fandom.

Sign on the way to Bran Castle, Romania

It turns out that the castle that overlooks the town of Bran is not even scary, although the real Dracula, Vlad the Impaler, is supposed to have passed through the valley in the 15th century. And NPR correspondent, Meghan Sullivan, says it’s a little disconcerting to see t-shirts on some of the pilgrims proclaiming that, “All Romanians are Vampires.”  http://www.npr.org/2011/11/13/142256325/in-transylvania-sometimes-a-bat-is-just-a-bat

Castle Bran, which inspired Bram Stoker

I guess it will just have to fall to the next generation to restore a fictional world where, to paraphrase Garrison Keeler, “All the women are strong, all the men are good looking, all the children are above average, and vampires are nobody’s sweetheart!”

One More Way to Publish A Book

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Think the new world of publishing is complicated these days? Here’s another option in the mix:  Espresso. That is the name of the new book printing device just purchased by the Sacramento Library.  Espresso is a $150,000 machine that works from digital files and can print and bind a softcover book, up to 800 pages in length, in about five minutes.  Only a few of the machines exist in California, and this is the only new model west of the Mississippi.  It comes to us through a grant from the California Library Association.

Printing costs are TBD.  Setup costs for original books are likely to run to $100, while ordering one of millions of books in available databases – titles no longer in print, or not to be found in bookstores or library shelves, are likely to be around $9.  Here are a few more things the downtown library plans to do with Espresso:

In connection with the original books, the library has started what it is calling the I Street Community Writing and Publishing Center.  The library will start holding writing classes in branches to try to replace the recently ended UC Davis Extension Creative Writing program.  “It’s really about working that connection between reading and writing and community,” said [Library Director] Rivkah Sass.  There are also discussions of using the machine to support 916 INK, a new program that includes publishing student authors as a key part of literacy education.  http://www.sacbee.com/2011/10/21/v-print/3992292/sacramento-library-will-unveil.html

I’ve never researched costs, procedures, and shipping options for print-on-demand, so I don’t know if this will be competitive for writers looking to self-publish quantities of books, but one exciting use comes to mind:  family memoirs, histories, and diaries.  Wouldn’t it be interesting to have the recorded thoughts of the ancestors who lived a few generations back?

In the first days of personal computers – of TRS-80’s, Commodore64’s, and Apple-IIe’s, there was a distinct, “Power to the People” ethic among the early adapters of gear that had once belonged only to corporate elites.  “Be careful what you wish for,” comes to mind when I confront my own elitist ideas on writing.  Everyone who has ever downloaded a really terrible, $0.99 ebook knows what I mean, and I did that a lot when I first got my Kindle.

Yet when I read of the library’s plans to offer and guide this advance in the democratization of publishing, I am filled with a lot of hope.  This Pandora’s Box is now fully open; there’s no going back, and up to us to apply creativity to the new tools.

I think it’s analogous to blogging.  There are hundreds of thousands out there, but given limited time, you have to be choosy.  Thanks for choosing The First Gates today!

Structure in Folktales, continued

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Red Riding Hood, by Gustave Dore

In my last post, I said I was going to review some folktales to see if any conventions of the “three act structure,” used in contemporary fiction and cinema, apply.  Lest I be accused of hubris, I did not say I was going to be systematic about this.  My qualifications are simply a lifetime of love for this stuff.  Here are a few random observations.

The first thing I noticed – and I should have expected this – was the apples and oranges nature of my comparison between long fiction and short, between modern novels and screenplays and the kinds of tales you find in Grimm and other folklore collections.

Some longer epics do mesh with the three act structure.  In Homer’s Iliad, plot point #1 is Paris taking Helen to Troy, and plot point #2 is the Trojans wheeling the horse into the city – this is how the 2004 movie, Troy, is structured too.  It seems the three act structure only really fits longer fiction.  This leads to the question of whether the concepts apply to short fiction at all and to folktales in particular.

Every one of the folktales I reviewed has what Syd Fields called, an “inciting incident,” an event or situation that sets the action in motion.  The king is sick, the princess is missing, a dragon is loose on the land.  Often this is right where the tale begins, without any other preamble.

In terms of the major plot points, most of the folktales I looked at only have one.  Some have two and a few do not have any.  Are there any plot points, in the sense of a major crossroad, in the tale of Red Riding Hood?  Not really.  The unfortunate girl obeys her mother – “Take this basket to grandmother” – and events roll on to their unfortunate conclusion.

Cinderella has a single plot point.  The fairy godmother asks, “Do you want to go to the ball?”  When Cinderella says yes, her happy fate unrolls like destiny.

Cinderella by Edmund Dulac

Another common folktale set up has just one decision point:  three brothers or three sisters set off on quest.  Each of them meets an “insignificant” or repellant creature as they set out.  The older siblings are arrogant and come to an unfortunate end.  The younger sibling behaves with respect, and the creature’s advice and boons are key to fulfilling the quest and often finding love and riches as well.

A Grimm’s fairytale, “The Water of Life,” is a good example.  The king is sick and only the water of life will heal him.  Two brothers set out, but disparage an “ugly little dwarf” who offers advice.  They wind up stuck – literally – in a mountain pass.  The youngest brother, who is open to help, receives it in abundance, both for the immediate quest and in overcoming the treachery of his brothers later on.  Although the action is rather complex, the only real decision the brothers face is whether or not to befriend the little man at the side of the road.  That choice determines their fate.

Beauty and the Beast by Warwick Goble

Some stories with two plot points echo the three act structure.  An example is, “The Pedlar of Swaffham,” which I discussed here a year ago:  http://wp.me/pYql4-85.  A poor pedlar in the English village of Swaffham dreams he will find gold if he travels to London Bridge.  Unlike most people who do not act on their dreams, he decides to go (plot point #1).  He spends three days waiting fruitlessly.  His decision to stick it out, to believe in his dream, is the second key plot point and is rewarded when a shopkeeper asks what he’s doing.  When the pedlar tells him, the shopkeeper says dreams are a lot of foolishness:  “Why just last night I dreamed of a bag of gold under the peddlar’s oak in the village of Swaffham, wherever that is, but you don’t see me running all over the countryside, do you?” 

A story like this seems so modern in it’s emphasis on trusting oneself and following dreams, it may be surprising to know that Rumi recorded the first version 900 years ago.  In other variations, the poor man travels to Baghdad, Jerusalem, or Krakow.  Still, in conforming (sort of) to the three act structure, “The Pedlar of Swaffham” is the exception and not the rule.

*** 

Every story has a beginning, middle, and end.  How long the sections are and how we move between them is the province of structure.  If you’ve ever heard a good storyteller, you’ve seen them adjust the pacing to match the mood of the audience.  You’ve seen gesture, expression, and silence used to enhance the tale in ways a written transcription can never capture.

It’s easier to gain an intuitive sense of how to tell a story aloud than to write one, and easier to structure a short story than a novel or screenplay.  Some people may gain a sense of how to structure a novel by reading them, but for the rest of us, constructions like the three act structure form a useful skeleton to build a story.  It isn’t the secret of what makes a novel or movie compelling, but I find it a useful bridge to that destination.

In a similar way, structure alone does not explain the magic in my favorite folktales.  For that I will have to slow down and consider each one more closely.  And there is a topic for more than one future post!

Puss In Boots by Gustave Dore

Structure in Folktales

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I found a great post on story and movie structure on one of the blogs I follow, Albert Berg’s Unsanity Files.  http://unsanityfiles.wordpress.com/2011/10/28/building-on-the-bones-or-why-structure-doesnt-have-to-be-boring/

Despite Mr. Berg’s caution that discussions of structure has been known to cause some Californian’s heads to explode, I suffered no ill effects (well, maybe a facial tic or two, but I’m still perfectly normal…honest!).

Actually, I credit a Californian, Syd Field, a hugely influential teacher of screenwriting, with formalizing the three act structure as we know it in movies and novels.  You hear Field’s book, Screenplay, recommended at writer’s workshops and conferences.  It is one of the best references I know on plot and structure. For anyone interested in writing, the “Three Act Structure” is required learning.  Even to rebel against it, you need to know what it is. Here is a simple diagram:

This, of course, is a variation on Aristotle’s observation that every story has a beginning, middle, and end.  In modern usage, it has become more formal than that.  The length of the acts in movies and in books is not arbitrary:  it’s 25%, 50%, 25% by default.  These numbers are sometimes even spelled out in screenplay contracts, and they are quoted in numerous other books on writing.

In a similar way, the plot points are not just ordinary troubles:   they are sometimes called, “doorways of no return.”  Examples of Plot Point 1, the first doorway, are when Luke leaves with Obiwan, when Frodo agrees to carry the ring, and when Louise pulls the trigger.  After a character steps through the first doorway, plot point #1, their old lives are gone, no longer an option.  Plot point two is when the last battle is joined.  When Frodo and Sam gaze down into Mordor, they still have an option to cut and run.  That choice disappears once they continue.   Once they reach the valley, their only options are victory or death.

If you know the running time and have a watch, you can spot these plot points occurring right on time in recent movies.  One thing I like to do, because I love old films, is try to see when and if they occur in the classics on TCM.  I watched for this recently as I viewed Lost Horizon, and sure enough, this structure was there.  I’ve come to the realization before, that Syd Field was not creating something new, as much as clarifying and codifying something successful screenwriters had already been using because because it works.

Which finally brings me around to the point of this post:

I was paging through some Google search results on “three act structure” and saw one author claim it was “fundamental to storytelling.”  As someone who spent 20 years in the Sacramento Storyteller’s Guild, I thought, “Wait a minute.  If you want to get ‘fundamental’ you aren’t going to do it with written fiction.  Fundamental storytelling means our worldwide oral tradition.

You find it in collections of folklore, the older the better:  in epics and fireside tales and sacred stories from all cultures:  in recordings of storytellers from library archives or recent storytelling festivals.

It also means stories we can hear at this years Tellabration, a day of storytelling that will happen around the world this year on November, 19.  http://www.tellabration.org/

What I am going to do is informally browse and listen to some of my favorite folktales to see what relationship they may or may not have to the three act structure as it has evolved in our literary and cinematic arenas.

We know that every story has a beginning, middle, and end – if it doesn’t, it may be a vignette or a character portrait, but it is not a story. We also know that the progression of folklore and myth tends to be “simple” rather than “complex.” In other words, you aren’t going to find a lot of twists and reversals.

What else?  That is what I am going to explore for next time.

Shangri-La in Books, Movies, and Legend

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I recently wrote a short story about a group of people trying to find Shangri-La. For decades, the name has stood for an earthly paradise, difficult to attain. The name was so popular in the 30’s and 40’s that before it was renamed Camp David, Franklin D. Roosevelt named the presidential retreat ground, Shangri-La. After my story was finished, I began to research this mythical place about which I realized I knew very little.

The name, “Shangri-La” entered public awareness through a novel and a movie, which I will discuss today. In my next post, I will explore the Tibetan legend of Shambhala from which core elements of the story may derive.

In David Hilton’s 1933 novel, Lost Horizon, Hugh Conway, a world-weary British diplomat and WWI veteran, along with three others refuges from an uprising in India, board a plane that is hijacked to the remote mountains of Tibet. They crash land in the snows and find their pilot dead. The group is rescued by a postulant lama named, Chang, who leads them to the hidden lamasery of Shangri-La, high above a fertile and temperate valley. Here Conway finds peace, the stirrings of love, and a sense of purpose when the High Lama tells him he has been chosen to oversee the mission of Shangri-La – to preserve the best of modern civilization during a world war the lama, (who is 300 years old), has seen in vision.

Did Hilton foresee WWII when he wrote his book in the early 30’s? Perhaps, but he also studied a 1931 National Geographic account of an expedition to the borders Tibet. Unexpectedly temperate valleys lie along the Nepalese border, and Hilton may also have read of the legend of Shambhala, with a similar prophesy of a world war. This prophesy is part of the Kalachakra teaching cycle the Dalai Lama presents, most recently in Washington, DC, last summer.

Lost Horizon won public notice only after Hilton published, Goodbye Mr. Chips, the following year. Because it was later published as Pocketbook #1, Lost Horizon has been mistakenly called the first American paperback.

Frank Capra read Hilton’s book and immediately decided to make the movie version. Production began in 1936, with a budget of $1.25 million, the largest for any film at the time. After a $777,000 cost overrun, Lost Horizon, was released in 1937 to critical acclaim. A New York Times reviewer called it, “a grand adventure film, magnificently staged, beautifully photographed, and capitally played.” It won Oscars for Art Direction and Film Editing, and was nominated for Best Picture.

Both the book and the movie seem dated now. The romantic vision of humans-as-noble-savage will not appeal to our modern sensibility. The idea that people will be good if freed from want echoes both the pacifism that flourished after the first world war and the socialism that grew in response to the hard times of the ’30’s. I believe in the “higher vibration” of certain places, yet when Chang tells Conway the healing properties of Shangri-La have even eliminated human jealousy, it breaks my “suspension of disbelief.”

Even with this kind of flaw, I enjoyed the book and the movie. The specifics of the Lost Horizon’s 75 year old vision may be dated, but the archetypal longing for a golden age and heaven on earth is not. The book and movie tap into this, and the tale of paradise found then lost evokes our longing for the Garden of Eden, Atlantis, Avalon, and Shangri-La. “We are stardust / We are golden / and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the Garden,” sang Joni Mitchell in her song about Woodstock, another manifestation of longing for a world of peace and joy.

This longing will not go away because it expresses our true nature, according to the view that gave birth to the legend of Shangri-La. Next time we’ll look at the legend of Shambhala, which carries predictions that will echo some we have seen in Lost Horizon.

Openings

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Recently I was chatting with a group of other writers about the rule of thumb that you have to grab your audience in the first few pages or lose them.  The consensus was that nowadays, you have just the first few lines.  One man said, “And you have to start with action.”

I don’t believe this, and said as much here last year (http://wp.me/pYql4-4b).  For me, character is primary, and I also have a penchant for mystery.  Action for action’s sake usually puts me off – I need to bond with Jake and Elwood before I care about the car chase.

Yet the conversation started me thinking about the kind of books that instantly draw me in.  When I got home, I pulled down some novels with openings I admire to look again at what the authors do.

One of my favorite reads of the year was Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games, a stunningly original story and beautifully written as well.  It includes one of the best openings I have ever read.

“When I wake up, the other side of the bed is cold.  My fingers stretch out, seeking Prim’s warmth but finding only the rough canvas cover of the mattress.  She must have had bad dreams and climbed in with our mother.  Of course, she did.  This is the day of the reaping.”

In four sentences, we learn a lot about who we’re dealing with:  an articulate girl who notices details, loves her sister, does not have a father or very much money, and soon has to face something ominous called “the reaping.”  We meet an appealing character, two mysteries (where is her father and what is a reaping), and an instant sense of dread.  The opening of this best seller proves that you don’t need action to grab a readers attention:  nothing “happens” except the narrator reaches out and finds her sister is not in bed.

Another memorable book I read this year was The Cypress House by Michael Koryta.  The first two sentences drew me in:  “They’d been on the train for five hours before Arlen Wagner saw the first of the dead men.  To that point it had been a hell of a nice ride.”  Nothing “happens” except one man has a very unusual vision.

A favorite literary novel, Ariel’s Crossing, 2002, by Bradford Morrow starts like this:  “Dona Francisca de Pena never believed in ghosts, and even after she became one herself she couldn’t help but have her doubts.”

Maybe its just the season, but half the stories I pulled down featured ghosts.  Here is another, a favorite YA novel, Ghosts I have Been, by Richard Peck, which begins:  “I tell you the world is so full of ghosts, a person wonders if there’s a soul to be found on the Other Side.  Or anybody snug in a quiet grave.  I’ve seen several haunts, and been one myself.”

Such a compelling hook does not happen by accident. Once at a reading, someone asked Richard Peck how many times he revised his opening pages. “Sixty or seventy times on average,” he said.  Because of that focus, you can open almost any one of his more than 30 novels to find an enticing beginning.  On the Wings of Heroes, an historical novel published in 2007, even begins with action, but it is not action for it’s own sake.  It is action crafted to draw in an audience of middle-grade boys:

“Home base was a branch box elder tree in front of the Hisers’ house out by the curb.  We could count on the Hisers not to mind when we pounded in from all directions to tag out on their tree.  We plowed their sod when we skidded home, bled all over their front walk when we collided, knocked loose the latticework under their porch.”

This is admittedly a small sample of books that appeal to my taste, but they prove several points.  Book openings are critical.  It takes real art and sometimes sixty or seventy drafts to draw a reader into a story.  At the same time, it is no more correct to say a book must start with action than to say that it can’t.  There are lots of ways to pique curiosity and interest, and that is what it’s really about.