The hardest thing about writing fiction…

Posted on December 29, 2014 by Richard Bowker

. . . is transitions.

I have spent most of the day getting my characters from one place to another. They were doing something interesting in the place they left. I am confident that they’ll do something even more interesting when they arrive at their destination. There’s really not a whole lot to say about the journey, though. You can’t just say, “After a dull journey they arrived where they were going.” But you don’t want to go on for too long about what they saw and heard and thought about and felt during the journey, because none of that really matters. You have to right-size the thing.

I’m exhausted.

High standards in publishing

Posted on December 28, 2014 by Richard Bowker

Here’s a passage from Kurt Vonnegut’s first novel, Player Piano (1952), which imagines a world in which managers and engineers run the world. A woman is explaining why she has become a prostitute. Turns out her husband is an unsuccessful novelist. In this world, all novels are reviewed by the National Council of Arts and Letters.

“Anyway,” said the girl, “my husband’s book was rejected by the Council.”

“Badly written,” said Halyard primly. “The standards are high.”

“Beautifully written,” she said patiently. “But it was 27 pages longer than the maximum length, its readability quotient was 26.3, and–”

“No club will touch anything with an R.Q. above 17,” explained Halyard.

“And,” the girl continued, “it had an antimachine theme.”

Halyard’s eyebrows arched high. “Well! I should hope they wouldn’t print it! What on earth does he think he’s doing? Good lord, he’s lucky if he isn’t behind bars, inciting to advocate the commission of sabotage like that…”

The writer is ordered to go into public relations rather than fiction-writing, and he refuses.

“This husband of yours, he’d rather have his wife a– Rather, have her–” Halyard cleared his throat “–than go into public relations?”

“I’m proud to say,” said the girl, “that he’s one of the few men on earth with a little self-respect left.”

This comes to mind when reading this story, about Amazon removing a novel from sale because it had too many hyphens:

“When they ran an automated spell check against the manuscript they found that over 100 words in the 90,000-word novel contained that dreaded little line,” he says. “This, apparently ‘significantly impacts the readability of your book’ and, as a result, ‘We have suppressed the book because of the combined impact to customers.’”

Reynolds complained, pointing out “that the use of a hyphen to join two words together was perfectly valid in the English language”, and says he was told by Amazon: “As quality issues with your book negatively affect the reading experience, we have removed your title from sale until these issues are corrected … Once you correct hyphenated words, please republish your book and make it available for sale.”

This article treats the issue humorously, but it does play into the doomsday predictions of writers like Ursula K. LeGuin that Amazon is aiming to control who and what we can read. After all, if they can control the number of hyphens in a novel, can’t they control its readability quotient?

Well, sure. But the difference between our world and Vonnegut’s is that Amazon has competition (at least, so far) and will respond to a public outcry (again, so far). I can imagine a world where this would be different, but that dystopian future is not here yet.

(By the way, I found Player Piano much less compelling than it was when I first read it. Vonnegut hadn’t quite found his voice yet.)

Joe Cocker, RIP

Posted on December 22, 2014 by Richard Bowker

Here is Joe Cocker at Woodstock. I was at Woodstock (weren’t you?) but somehow I have no memory of this amazing performance. I did see him in concert a few years ago, minus the tie-dyed t-shirt and without quite so much of the spasmodic air guitar. But he still had The Voice.

“I Feel Fine” is 50!

Posted on December 21, 2014 by Richard Bowker

Yesterday we pondered the genius of John Donne. Today we honor another British genius, John Lennon. Fifty years ago this week “I Feel Fine” was the number one song in the US. Seems like only yesterday.

Donne was a great poet, but it clearly never occurred to him to add guitar feedback to a rock-and-roll song. It fell to Lennon to come up with this idea three centuries later.

A Nocturnal Upon Saint Lucy’s Day, Being the Shortest Day

Posted on December 20, 2014 by Richard Bowker

Saint Lucy’s Day is December 13, which used to coincide with the Winter Solstice. “Lucy” is derived from the Latin word for light, and Saint Lucy’s Day is celebrated as a festival of light in Scandinavian countries.. Here is John Donne’s great poem about dark and light, loss and love, death and rebirth.

‘Tis the year’s midnight, and it is the day’s,
Lucy’s, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks;
The sun is spent, and now his flasks
Send forth light squibs, no constant rays;
The world’s whole sap is sunk;
The general balm th’ hydroptic earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the bed’s-feet, life is shrunk,
Dead and interr’d; yet all these seem to laugh,
Compared with me, who am their epitaph.

Study me then, you who shall lovers be
At the next world, that is, at the next spring;
For I am every dead thing,
In whom Love wrought new alchemy.
For his art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations, and lean emptiness;
He ruin’d me, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death—things which are not.

All others, from all things, draw all that’s good,
Life, soul, form, spirit, whence they being have;
I, by Love’s limbec, am the grave
Of all, that’s nothing. Oft a flood
Have we two wept, and so
Drown’d the whole world, us two; oft did we grow,
To be two chaoses, when we did show
Care to aught else; and often absences
Withdrew our souls, and made us carcasses.

But I am by her death—which word wrongs her—
Of the first nothing the elixir grown;
Were I a man, that I were one
I needs must know; I should prefer,
If I were any beast,
Some ends, some means ; yea plants, yea stones detest,
And love; all, all some properties invest.
If I an ordinary nothing were,
As shadow, a light, and body must be here.

But I am none; nor will my sun renew.
You lovers, for whose sake the lesser sun
At this time to the Goat is run
To fetch new lust, and give it you,
Enjoy your summer all,
Since she enjoys her long night’s festival.
Let me prepare towards her, and let me call
This hour her vigil, and her eve, since this
Both the year’s and the day’s deep midnight is.

In which NaNoWriMo makes me feel bad

Posted on December 15, 2014 by Richard Bowker

I was talking to a woman at work today. She’s had some health problems, but she’s feeling better and has a bit more energy. As a result, she told me, she just participated in National Novel Writing Month. How did that go? I asked her. Great! she replied. I wrote my 50,000 words.

Fifty-thousand words in a month. From a woman who’s working full-time and has health problems.

Where did I go wrong? My novel Where All the Ladders Start (which I swear is coming out real soon now) took me two years to write and contains about 85,000 words. In case the math is not evident to you, that’s less than 50,000 words per year.

The key to success in modern publishing, I am told, is to publish a lot, but make it high-quality. Here’s a post making this point, written by a guy who writes 7-10,000 words a day. I’m pretty sure I’ve never written as much as 2,000 words in a day. I’m pretty sure writing 7-10,000 words a day would kill me inside a month.

But as an experiment, I’m going to see if I can write my next novel — a sequel to The Portal — in under a year. I won’t lessen the quality, but I’m going to try to get it out in 2015.

Er, wish me luck.

The New York Times proclaims “Love, Actually” a Christmas classic

Posted on December 10, 2014 by Richard Bowker

I guess this is my annual Love, Actually post. The New York Times ran an article recently contemplating which recent holiday movies were classics. And Love, Actually makes the cut:

The director Richard Curtis fills the cast with nearly every great British actor, and they make even ridiculous moments — Mr. Grant’s dancing to the Pointer Sisters’ “Jump (for My Love)” through 10 Downing Street — seem like master classes.

Thanks to the way-back machine that is the Internet, we can see what the Times had to say about the film back in 2003, when it first came out. You don’t see reviews of major movies much worse than this one:

”Love Actually” is a patchwork of contrived naughtiness and forced pathos, ending as it began, with hugging and kissing at the airport (where returning passengers are perhaps expressing their relief at being delivered from an in-flight movie like this one). The loose ends are neatly tied up, as they are when you seal a bag of garbage — or if you prefer, rubbish.

Yikes. (Rotten Tomatoes gives the movie a 63%, slightly over the line from rottenness. Audiences like it much better, coming in at 73%.)

Speaking of hugging and kissing at the airport, the latest episode of The New Girl features the cast at the airport heading to various places for the holidays. It plays a cover of “God Only Knows” at one point as it cuts from character to character, clearly a reference to the soundtrack of Love, Actually. Does a movie become a classic when a sitcom pays homage to it?

Us lefties earn less because we’re more stupider

Posted on December 6, 2014 by Richard Bowker

This is the finding of a study by some Harvard guy reported here.

In the data, around 11 to 13 percent of the population was left-handed. And when broken down by gender — that is, comparing women to women and men to men — those lefties have annual earnings around 10 to 12 percent lower than those of righties, Goodman writes, which is equal to around a year of schooling. (That gap varied by survey and by gender, however.) Most of this gap can be attributed to “observed differences in cognitive skills and emotional or behavioral problems,” he writes, adding that since lefties tend to do more manual work than right-handers, the gap appears to be due to differences in cognitive abilities, not physical.

These problems only appear when the left-hander is the child of a right-handed mother. Like me.

Another study, reported in Wikipedia, came to a different conclusion:

In a 2006 U.S. study, researchers from Lafayette College and Johns Hopkins University concluded that there was no scientifically significant correlation between handedness and earnings for the general population, but among college-educated people, left-handers earned 10 to 15% more than their right-handed counterparts.

I am not smart enough to figure out why the two studies came up with different results..

The Vox article does throw us this bone:

Data has also shown that lefties, for example, are highly represented among high SAT-scorers and people with high IQs. What it may mean, Orszag notes, is that lefties are overrepresented in the intellectual stratosphere, but that for the population as a whole, it’s better to be a righty.

The “intellectual stratosphere” — I like that. On the other hand, there’s this, from Wikipedia:

There is a general tendency that the more violent a society is, the higher the proportion of left-handers.

There is presumably some advantage to being left-handed in hand-to-hand combat, because your opponent is less likely to have trained against people like you. (There’s a comparable effect in baseball, where left-handed batters are often helpless against left-handed pitchers, because they mostly face righties. This has led to the ultimate in baseball specialization, the southpaw who comes into the game in the late innings to face one critical left-handed batter, get him out, and then head for the showers.)

All in all, it’s a hard world for lefties. Now, in addition to being sinister, turns out we’re also cognitively impaired and doomed to earn less than our right-handed friends. Unless somehow we find ourselves in the intellectual stratosphere.