Author Archives: Richard Bowker

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About Richard Bowker

Author of the Portal series, the Last P.I. series, and other novels

My second draft is starting to feel like an alternative universe

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My novel The Portal takes its inspiration from the idea of the multiverse, in which there are an infinite number of alternative universes, each slightly different from one another.  In the sequel to this novel, my second draft is starting to feel like its own alternative universe.  I’m 12,000 words in, and it’s becoming a strange near-replica of the first draft.  Characters are slightly different; motivations are slightly changed; plot elements are slightly rearranged.  It’s frustrating that I have to throw away so much work, but it’s also kind of interesting.  Where is our hero going to end up in this draft?  Maybe there should be an endless series of drafts, each one heading in a different direction.  No need to end up in either Oakland or Aukland–the journey is what matters.

In which I tell you what you should think about “Go Set a Watchman”

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In case you haven’t already made up your mind.

I agree with the editor who rejected Go Set a Watchman.  But I can also understand why he didn’t want to give up on Harper Lee.  She obviously knew how to write.  She could create vivid characters and evoke a sense of time and place.  What she didn’t demonstrate in this book is that she knew how to write a novel.  Just at the point when you expect the tension to ratchet up–when she discovers that her beloved father and the man she thinks she’s going to marry have joined a citizens’ council to fight integration–the plot stops dead in its tracks, and we have to endure a series of long conversations between the narrator and her uncle, lover, and father.  Show, don’t tell, Harper!

I actually found those conversations reasonably interesting.  Here are smart, presumably reasonable men at the dawn of the Civil Rights era making the best case they can that Civil Rights is a bad idea, both for them and for Negroes.  I don’t find it a convincing case, and neither does the narrator, but it’s well presented.  What Lee should have done is dramatize the case they are making, but she doesn’t (and maybe couldn’t).  She walks right up to the drama–she has Atticus agree to defend a black man for running down a no-‘count white drunk; but he does this only to keep the NAACP lawyers from taking the case and potentially riling up the town by getting the black man off on a technicality. That has a lot of potential, it seems to me.  But ultimately this goes nowhere.

Her editor could have told her to focus on that plot element, but instead he evidently told her to focus on her childhood; the reminiscences that are interspersed in Go Set a Watchman are charming (and also completely extraneous).  It made perfect sense to weave a novel out of them.

And it also made sense to avoid focusing on the grown-up Scout.  Lee gives her a good narrative voice, but her life never really comes into focus–what is she doing in New York?  Is she happy there?  I got the sense that Lee really wasn’t particularly interested in her; Atticus was all that mattered.  I wonder why.

What makes a plot “arthritic”?

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In my post on Ann Tyler’s A Spool of Blue Thread I quoted the Washington Post’s assessment (at the beginning of a rave review) that its plot was “arthritic”  I don’t know what that means.  Presumably the reviewer is talking about the events of the novel, which are standard-issue Ann Tyler: ordinary people working their way through ordinary problems.  But isn’t that what most literary fiction is about?  Alice McDermott’s Somewhere and Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteredge, for example, are no different, except in their locations.  (I talk about them briefly here and here.)

Maybe the reviewer doesn’t like how Tyler lays out the structure of the events?  But that can’t be it.  The structure is perfectly comprehensible, but she fractures the time sequence and the points of view in interesting and modern ways.  The novel begins by hopping forward through time a bit, and it ends unexpectedtly with two deep flashbacks, one with about the grandparents, who are dead long before the main action begins, and the other about how the parents fell in love, decades before the action begins.  And it ends with a brief scene that gives us the first point of view section of a main character (perhaps the main character).  Again, this is similar to what McDermott and Strout do in their novels, which hop around endlessly in their time sequences.

Ultimately, I think the reviewer just felt the need to make a glancing reference to Tyler’s age.  She’s been writing fine novels for 50 years, and she knows what she’s doing.

I wish I could do it.

 

My Kindle Paperwhite and me

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I finally splurged and bought a Kindle Paperwhite–and immediately thereafter Amazon went ahead and announced a new improved model at the same price.  Oh, well.

My lovely wife got an early-model Kindle a few years ago, and neither of us used it much–the interface was clunky, and the resolution wasn’t very good.  I then used the Kindle app on my iPad 2, which was much better, but the iPad’s weight and form factor weren’t ideal for casual reading.  The Paperwhite is much better.

Thoughts on the Paperwhite so far:

  • The weight and form factor are fine.  You can hold the thing in one hand while holding your beer in your other hand.
  • It’s easier to use in sunlight than the iPad.
  • The resolution in my model is good enough for me, although I’m always happier to get better resolution. The ability to change font size and screen brightness is a big plus (as it is on the iPad app).
  • The built-in dictionary and Wikipedia are probably the biggest advantages for me over reading printed books.  I’m currently reading a novel set in the ninth century called Pope Joan, and the author doesn’t spare the medieval vocabulary.  (She does a good job with the olde-time dialog, although her characters aren’t particularly interesting so far)  At my age I should know what a posset is, but OK, I don’t.  It’s so easy to highlight the word and have the Kindle tell me what it means.
  • I sure wish it had color, if just for the book covers.
  • A battery charge lasts, like, forever.

And, of course, there’s the content. I was listening to Being Mortal, a wonderful book about old age and dying. The author mentioned Tolstoy’s novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich, which I haven’t read in decades.  So I went to the Kindle store and found it for $1.99–in a book with everything else Tolstoy ever wrote.  So now I have War and Peace and Anna Karenina on my Kindle, just in case.  If I get tired of Tolstoy, I can always dip into the complete stories of H. P. Lovecraft, which I also picked up for $1.99.  (I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that Tolstoy is a better writer.)  Or the complete stories of Chekhov.  Or an old P. G. Wodehouse novel.  Or the Federalist Papers, which I never got around to reading when I was in school.

So far I haven’t spent more than $1.99 on anything I’ve bought for the Paperwhite, and I probably have enough on it to last me the rest of the year.  The older content has its share of typos and faulty layout, but the price is right.

Have I mentioned lately that my novels are all available for the Kindle Paperwhite at astonishingly low prices?  No typos, no faulty layout.

How did I become so darn creative?

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The blog The Passive Voice points me to some guy I’ve never heard of who offers six ways to boost your creativity:

  1. Wake up early
  2. Exercise frequently
  3. Stick to a strict schedule
  4. Keep your day job
  5. Learn to work anywhere, anytime
  6. Realize that “creative blocks” are just procrastination

Well, you know, I do all that stuff, and everything the guy says makes perfect sense.  Like his comment on #3:

It’s a common misconception that in order to be creative, one must live life on a whim with no structure and no sense of need to do anything, but the habits of highly successful and creative people suggest otherwise. In fact, most creative minds schedule their days rigorously. Psychologist William James described the impact of a schedule on creativity, saying that only by having a schedule can we “free our minds to advance to really interesting fields of action.”

So read the post and do everything this guy says.

Writing olde-time dialog

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My brother passed along this article from the New York Times about writing dialog in a historical novel. The writer puts her finger on the central issue:

The problem for a writer who has seized upon a story set in the past is how to create a narrative voice that conjures the atmosphere of its historical times, without alienating contemporary readers. It’s a complicated sort of ventriloquism.

In other words, you want to be true to your characters and your time, but you also need to be comprehensible.  She goes on:

The best writers — from Charles Frazier in “Cold Mountain” to Junot Diaz in “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” — deploy foreign or arcane words sparingly, to give a realistic flavor of an era or a culture, but they also channel the atmosphere of time and place through the rhythms of speech.

Anyway, I’m facing a version of this problem in my sequel to The Portal.  We’re in an alternative universe where people speak Latin.  Some of the characters know English, but it’s not necessarily our English.  And some dialog takes place in Latin but is translated into English.  So how does one handle all this?

I’m pretty much doing what the author suggests.  I sprinkle in enough Latin words and phrases so that the reader doesn’t lose sight of the exotic locale.  A school is referred to as a schola, for example; a village is a castellum.  And I use a slightly formal, slightly non-standard rhythm to the English dialog, avoiding all modernisms.  I think this will probably work.  We’ll see.

 

Jon Vickers

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The great Canadian tenor Jon Vickers died today.  My most memorable evening in the theater was seeing him, Renata Scotto, and Cornell MacNeil at the Met in the Zeffirelli production of Otello.  (Seems to me that Otello is that rarest of creatures that is actually better than its Shakespearean source.)

Here is Vickers in the final scene of Verdi’s opera.  Art just doesn’t get any better than this.

Second draft: Did I write THAT?

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The one downside of working on a second draft is that you’re sort of obliged to read your first draft.  My first draft is always better in recollection than on the page.  Now that I know where I’m going, I see that I’ve gotten pretty much everything wrong on the page.  I’m now about 7000 words into my rewrite, and probably 5000 of those words are new.  That’s pretty depressing.

On the other hand, those new words are great!

At least, they will be until I have to re-read them.