Monthly Archives: July 2013

Why would a novelist Ask Amy about how to handle criticism?

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A first-time novelist writes in to Ask Amy with this problem: a friend does not like the way the novelist portrayed a character who is loosely based on her.  The friend has responded with a scathing, personal online review, saying the novelist needs counseling.  The novelist whines to Amy:

How can I convey to her that while this fictional character shares many of her attributes, it is not her?

The novelist published her book using a pseudonym because she was afraid of negative feedback. Amy says:

Negative feedback is one of many risks you take as a writer and until you can truly claim ownership of your work (no matter what name you use), you will be on the run — creatively, anyway.

Amy, that wise woman, is right, as usual.  This is a war a writer cannot win, so it’s not even worth trying.  At an extreme, here is how the conversation will go:

Ex-friend: “That awful character in your novel — it’s based on me.  Admit it.”

Befuddled writer: “How can the character be based on you?  It’s not even human!  It’s a telepathic slug from the planet Remulon!”

Ex-friend: “Sure, you changed a couple of the details.  But everyone can tell it’s me.”

Ultimately, of course, the writer has to choose which matters more: his art or his personal relationships.  And that brings us to this great quote from William Faulkner:

The writer’s only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much that he can’t get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is worth any number of old ladies.

Sorry, Mom!

I really don’t care what Harry Bosch had for dinner

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I like to listen to Harry Bosch novels on my endless commute.  They don’t require deep thinking, and the narrators are really good. One problem with audio books, though, is you can’t skim.  And there are lots of times in a Harry Bosch novel where I really want to skim.

I won’t bother discussing the endless descriptions of Bosch listening to CDs of jazz performances.  These are by definition boring.  Instead I want to talk about the endless descriptions of the restaurants he goes to and what he orders and what toppings he has on his pizza and how much macaroni and cheese is left over after dinner with his daughter and ARGGH!  Make it stop!

There is, I’m sure, a rationale for this obsession with Harry Bosch and food.  Presumably Connelly wants to show us how cops live in present-day LA.  Here are their hangouts.  Here’s where they eat when they go to court or the shooting range or the forensics lab.  And here’s the kind of food a typical cop likes to eat.  But I don’t care.  Just tell the story.

I have a personal rule for writing that says I don’t put in anything that I’m unlikely to read in someone else’s novel.   Five hundred words about a sunset?  No thank you.  How well a certain Merlot goes with steak tips?  Spare me.  Nothing about women’s shoes.  And, of course, nothing about jazz.  Never, ever, anything about jazz.

Just a quick visit to a parallel universe — what could possibly go wrong?

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Creativity is an odd thing.  Best not to think to deeply about it.

My e-book folks are working on the cover for Portal, and they asked me to come up with a tag line for it.  A tag line summarizes a book in about twenty words or less, in a way that will make the casual reader want to buy the thing.  Tag lines are hard.  I don’t do tag lines.  My brain was an utter blank for a week, so I started writing an email to them saying we’ll have to do without one.

And then creativity happened.

Print on Demand

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My e-book publisher has started a Print on Demand (POD) service to go along with its e-book publishing services.  I’m going to try it out for Portal.

POD fills a gap in the e-book self-publishing model: some people just prefer a printed book.  A guy at work said he’d like to read one of my books, but what he really wanted was an autographed copy.  Can’t autograph an e-book.  (It seemed kind of weird that a co-worker would want my autograph, but not totally weird.  There’s something about a signed copy of a book that makes it special.)

There are two major players in the POD world: CreateSpace and Lightning Source.  This article explains the differences in mind-numbing detail and ultimately recommends CreateSpace.  My publisher uses Lightning Source.  Oh, well.  The publisher’s model, as with e-books, is that I pay them a (relatively small) amount of money to do all the prep work. They also handle the ongoing dealings with Lightning Source, in return for a small cut of the royalties.  You can eliminate the middleman and do all the work yourself if you use CreateSpace, assuming you have the time and energy; I have neither.  Per-unit royalties through my publisher are much lower than they are for e-books, because there’s so much more overhead in creating a printed book.  The idea is that most of your revenue would be from e-book sales, but the printed option is there for people who prefer it.  I can, of course, buy any number of books at a steep discount, and then sign ’em for my co-workers, give them away to passing strangers, etc.

POD is another blow against the business model of traditional publishing.  Time to give it a shot.

“I could kill you now, Detective Bosch. But that would be too easy.”

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I’ve been listening to The Black Box, a Harry Bosch novel by Michael Connelly.  It turns out he uses an “I could kill you now, Mr. Bond” setup for his climax.  I expected more of Mr. Connelly, whose strong suit is his plotting.  Harry Bosch has been taken prisoner by the killer he has been tracking down.  He is at the killer’s mercy.  The killer points a gun at him.  It’s all over for Bosch!  But what does the killer do?  Instead of killing Harry, he handcuffs him to a wooden post in a barn and leaves him to go kill some other folks.  Why?  Connelly has Bosch come up with a reason eventually, but boy, is it lame.

So Bosch is left by himself, and guess what?  Spoiler alert!!  It turns out the Bosch is an expert at unlocking handcuffs with random stuff!  He gets hold of a watch from a corpse the killer left at his feet and uses the winding pin to escape from the cuffs.  (The watch itself has been brought to our attention with a standard Chekhov’s gun maneuver — why, look at that interesting watch that this guy who is obviously going to get killed is wearing!)

This sort of thing is fine in The Heat and James Bond movies, where plausibility just doesn’t matter.  But it was just too over-the-top for this sort of novel.  Connelly can do better.

Should we boycott Orson Scott Card because he’s viciously homophobic?

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My lovely wife just read a book called Dickens in Love about Dickens’s love affair with Ellen Ternan.  “I didn’t know he was such a creep,” she said.  Well, yeah.  Lots of writers are solipsistic jerks, and lots of them have obnoxious political positions.

One quite reasonable interpretation of the scant documentation of Shakespeare’s life is that he was a money-grubbing, social-climbing adulterer.

Lord Byron probably slept with his half-sister, among many other offenses.

Knut Hamsun (winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature) called Hitler “a preacher of the gospel of justice for all nations.”

I read a bit of Orson Scott Card back in the 80s.  I enjoyed Ender’s Game, although I don’t recall thinking it was anything like a classic.  At some point I gave up on Card because I thought there was something weird about his treatment of violence.  I haven’t been paying attention to him since then, so I didn’t realize he was beyond-bonkers homophobic, to the point of advocating violent revolution to prevent gay marriage:

How long before married people answer the dictators thus: Regardless of law, marriage has only one definition, and any government that attempts to change it is my mortal enemy. I will act to destroy that government and bring it down, so it can be replaced with a government that will respect and support marriage, and help me raise my children in a society where they will expect to marry in their turn.

The movie version of Ender’s Game is coming out in a few months, and people are making noises about boycotting it.  In response, the terrified filmmakers say the movie and the book have nothing to do with gay issues, and, as the 16-year-old star cleverly puts it, “You can’t blame a book for its author.”

Absolutely true.  On the other hand, Card is still among us, and Dickens, Shakespeare, Byron, and Hamsun are not.  He makes money any time we purchase one of his works.  And he hasn’t been shy about expressing his opinions and trying to affect public policy.  There are plenty of good books to read and good movies to watch (well, I could be wrong about the supply of good movies).  I can’t think of any reason to support Card’s career.

By the way, here’s Dickens’s mistress, Ellen Ternan:

And here’s Byron’s half-sister, Augusta Leigh:

And here’s a very unpleasant-looking Knut Hamsun:

Backstory

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One of the hardest parts of writing a novel is dealing with backstory.  How much of each character’s past should you put into your story?  When should you put it in?  Backstory adds texture and depth and motivation to a novel, but you don’t want to stop the momentum of your story with endless flashbacks to someone’s childhood.

I’m dealing with two additional layers of backstory complexity in the novel I’m working on now, which is set in the world of Dover Beach.

First, as a sequel, the novel is dealing with characters and situations that have already been introduced in the first two novels in the series.  I can’t reintroduce the history of the characters and the plots of the first two novels without annoying readers of those novels.  On the other hand, I’ve got to say something about the stuff, or else new readers will be baffled; and I can’t assume everyone will start with Dover Beach and continue with The Distance Beacons before beginning Novel to be Named Later.  I’m not sure there is a good solution to this problem; at least, I haven’t found it.

The other backstory issue I have is the familiar science fiction problem — if your story doesn’t take place in the real world, then you have to somehow fill in sufficient history about the world you have created to satisfy your reader — again, without slowing down the story.  Your characters know this history, but your readers don’t.  The crude way of solving this problem is the jokey “As We All Know” approach — have a character deliver a speech that says, for example, “As we all know, faster than light travel was invented in 2050…”

I have made a conscious decision to dribble out only a small amount of backstory about the world in which The Last Private Eye novels take place.  After two novels we know there was some kind of nuclear war, but we don’t know who the combatants were, why the war was fought, who won . . .  We don’t know any of this stuff because it’s not relevant to the characters and their story.  They don’t really care; they’re just stuck in this world and trying to get by.  So the backstory is irrelevant.  Also, it would slow the story down.  But I can guarantee that you’ll know more of this backstory at the end of TNTBNL than you did at the end of Dover Beach.

I know what you’re thinking about now.  What about renowned author Dan Brown?  How does Dan Brown handle the backstory in Inferno?  The answer is clunkily.  He feels the need to tell us a lot about Dante, so he has Robert Langdon recall a lecture about Dante he gave to some famous people at some famous place.  (Of course, he’s suffering from amnesia at the time he recalls this.)  The villain doesn’t like overpopulation, so he kidnaps the head of the World Health Organization and gives her a lecture about it, complete with graphs.  The name Thomas Malthus comes up in some communication from the villain, so a flunky who apparently skipped college Googles the name and prints out a bunch of information about Malthus and his theory.  Talk about slowing the story down…

Indulgences

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When I was a lad I had a missal that I very much liked.  At the back of the missal were prayers you could say, presumably during the boring parts of Mass.  Next to each prayer was the indulgence you would get for saying the prayer–that is, the number of days that would be reduced from the time you’d have to spend in purgatory for your sins. (Here is way more than you want to know about indulgences.)

I could never figure out the rating system — why was one prayer worth more than another?  And some prayers gave you a plenary indulgence — full time off.  Why would you bother saying a prayer that only gave you 100 days off, if you could say one that would get you out of purgatory for good?  I was a very literal-minded kid.

Now we hear that you can get a plenary indulgence for following Pope Francis’s Twitter feed. This has generated snark from the usual suspects.  And I can’t really disagree with the snark.  Shouldn’t indulgences have disappeared like 500 years ago?  The Wikipedia article shows that, as with most theological issues, the modern Catholic church has tried to become more sophisticated, which is to say, vaguer, with respect to the meaning of indulgences.  But it can’t seem to quit them.

What I tend to focus on, though, are the people whose job it is to come up with the rules for indulgences.  The classification of prayers by years and days has been done away with, but somebody has to figure out exactly what the rules are for indulgences.  For example, Wikipedia says reading Sacred Scripture for half an hour can get you a plenary indulgence on any day, but only once a day.  Who came up with half an hour, as opposed to, I dunno, an hour?  Who decided you could only get a plenary indulgence once a day, as opposed to once a week?  As with the Vatican office that determines who is suitable for canonization, smart people are spending their lives going to work each day and figuring this stuff out.  Such a waste.

But that would be too easy: Dan Brown’s “I could kill you now, Mr. Bond” problem

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The Heat is a hilarious movie that doesn’t bother much with plausibility. Towards the end Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy track down the bad guys to a warehouse, kill a few of them, but then get captured by the #2 bad guy.  He could simply shoot them, of course, but he decides to tie them up and torture them first.  Oh, no!  The torture is about to begin when he is called upstairs to a meeting with the #1 bad guy.  So Sandra and Melissa get to exchange some snappy dialog, figure out how to untie themselves, and carry on with the plot.

This is a standard action movie sequence.  The hero doesn’t get killed as the climax approaches; he gets tied up.  My friend Craig Gardner calls this the “I could kill you now, Mr. Bond” moment.  The evil mastermind has Bond in his clutches, but his hubris makes him say something like: “I could kill you now, Mr. Bond.  But that would be too easy.  Instead, I will let you watch as I carry out my plan for world domination. And then you will die a slow, horrible death.”

The evil mastermind’s hubris always leads to his downfall in these movies, of course.  And in the meantime we get to see the hero extricate himself from a difficult situation just in the nick of time to save the world.

Dan Brown’s Inferno is an action novel that features a standard evil mastermind with plenty of hubris.  Stripped of its endless lessons about art and literature and history and geography, it’s a James Bond novel.  Except that Brown makes a lot of odd plotting decisions that, for me at least, screw up this basic plot structure completely and fundamentally ruin the novel.  Spoiler alert: don’t read on if you are going to care about this plot:

  • First and foremost, the entire plot is predicated on the evil mastermind’s hubris, not just the climactic scene where he decides to keep the hero alive.  Nothing that happens in the book has to happen, except that this guy decides to leave some clever clues behind, mainly because he can.  He could simply have carried out his evil plan without telling anyone.
  • Second, and almost as bad, all the hero’s running around trying to stop the evil plan doesn’t amount to anything whatsoever because the evil plan has already successfully taken place by the time the novel starts.  We just don’t find out until page 400 or so.  So the action is doubly pointless.  Robert Langdon has raced around Florence and Venice and Istanbul for absolutely no reason.
  • Next, the evil mastermind is dead by the time the plot starts.  So there is no opportunity for a climactic confrontation, and his explanations for what he is doing all take place in flashback.
  • Finally–and I find this deeply weird–Brown seems to agree with the evil mastermind.  Well, Brown seems to be saying, his methods may not have been the best, but his analysis of the overpopulation problem was accurate, and obviously something more needs to be done . . .   He never allows any of the good guys to offer a convincing rebuttal to that analysis, although surely one exists (I could do a better job than the good guys, frankly).

So we spend the novel rooting for Langdon to succeed, but ultimately we find out that he couldn’t have succeeded, and we probably wouldn’t have wanted him to succeed.  What a letdown.