Author Archives: Richard Bowker

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About Richard Bowker

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

Rule 9: Strive to eliminate skimming

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Here’s another in my randomly numbered rules for fiction writing, which apply to folks who aren’t good enough to break the rules.  That includes you.  And me.

This rule came to mind as I considered the Ohlin/Giraldi bad review controversy, which I wrote about here (and which generated a lot of search hits–it’s a popular topic!).  First, there was the review itself.  When I read a book review, what I want to find out is whether the book is worth reading–not whether the reviewer is clever.  So I found myself skimming the first paragraph, which quotes Ezra Pound and throws in references to Middlemarch and Don Quixote and calls entirely too much attention to itself.  Just tell me about the book!

But when he finally does start to discuss Ohlin’s work, he makes what seem to be valid points.  If an author’s prose is flabby–if her descriptions and narrative are filled with clichés–then why bother reading that prose?  If I ever do read the book, I know I’m going to start skimming. (Of course, I did read the first chapter of Ohlin’s novel and didn’t skim, which makes me wonder if the reviewer was overstating his case.)

If readers aren’t going to read your words, why bother writing them?  The only way you’re going to find out if readers are skimming is to get yourself some readers–and that’s another rule, which I haven’t written yet–maybe because it’s so obvious. Short of that, here are some things worth thinking about–at least, they’re the kind of things I think about:

  • Have I eliminated all unnecessary words?  This is standard writing hygiene.  Make every word count.  Don’t say “in order to” if you can just say “to”; don’t say “all of” if you can just say “all”.  It makes the prose tighter and clearer.
  • Have I right-sized my descriptions?  This probably deserves to be yet another rule, but the idea is to make your description the length that is appropriate for the significance to the story of the person or thing or event you’re describing.  For example, minor characters don’t deserve fully developed back-stories; we don’t need to know exactly what they’re wearing or where they grew up or what their politics are.  If a meal isn’t a major event, we don’t need to know what everyone ordered and what kind of wine was served.
  • Are my descriptions too ordinary?  This is one thing Giraldi complained about. You can’t just say, “She was medium height, with brown hair, green eyes, and white teeth.”  Why bother?  Typically, a physical description has to merge into characterization.  For example, if you describe someone’s teeth are “impossibly white,” you are starting to say something about that person.
  • Have I de-clichéd my prose?  This is another Giraldi complaint.  If you’re going to say “Nice guys finish last,” you’d better have a good reason for it–for example, it could be funny or ironic in context. Otherwise it’s pure deadweight.

My first drafts tend to be underwritten–I’m too eager to get through the story and reach my destination.  I add detail and depth in succeeding drafts. But sometimes I overwrite, which will happen when you’re not sure of yourself–you’re describing a character for your own benefit, not just for your readers.  Then you need to prune ruthlessly.

I sometimes worry that I worry too much about skimming.  I recall taking out a lot of detail in the final draft of Replica, concerned that the pace was too slow for what was supposed to be a breakneck thriller.  When I re-read it recently in the process of turning it into an ebook, I thought maybe I had gone a little overboard.

There are no right answers; that’s why they call it art.

Meanwhile, back on Mars

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I’ve temporarily replaced Mars with Fenway Park in my header, but that doesn’t mean I’ve lost interest in Mars!  Here’s a video of the descent:

This comes via Jerry Coyne, who has more detail.

And here is Sarcastic Rover, whose Twitter feed is pretty funny.  If I knew how to show tweets in a blog, I would do so.  Anyway, here’s a sample:

Hey NASA? If I find life, am I supposed to kill it, or be friends with it? If the answer isn’t kill, then forget I said anything.

It’s probably funnier as a tweet.

The greatest trade in the history of the multiverse

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Is there a bigger place than the multiverse?

The woman at work with the Red Sox lunchbox came over to me late Friday afternoon and said: “Beckett.  Waivers.  The Dodgers.”  The news was too important for verbs.

But wait, there’s more — Gonzalez!  Crawford!  Punto!  (But wait, we like Punto.)

It couldn’t possibly happen — something was bound to go wrong.  But as I type, Boston.com is reporting that the deal has been finalized.  The Red Sox save $275 million in contract obligations and clear out three players who had either worn out their welcome with the fans or just couldn’t play in Boston.  They’re now in another league, on another coast.  Good luck to them!

Who’d we get in return?  Mostly prospects.  But that doesn’t really matter.  What matters is that Ben Cherington has somehow begun a new story, in a season where all the stories had turned ugly.  Nothing is likely to happen for the rest of this season, but at least there’s something to talk about, something to look forward to.

Here is a funny, if somewhat forced, analogy from The New Yorker.

Leaving moral and political issues aside—this isn’t about right or wrong, but about models of disintegration—and admitting that the stakes of the great Pedro versus Clemens battles were lower than those between Khrushchev and Kennedy, the Red Sox of 2012 are, in fact, quite a bit like the U.S.S.R. in 1989. They tried to keep up financially, and intellectually, with their rival for many years. Glasnost has passed; the end is here.

Makes sense, sort of.  But what makes the writer think that the stakes of the Pedro versus Clemens battles were lower than those between Khrushchev and Kennedy?   Is he from the West Coast?

Gorbachev won a Nobel prize, right? Is there a Nobel prize for baseball general managers?  If so, Cherington gets my vote.

Ben Cherington, possible Nobel laureate

Ebook Originals

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It appears that major publishers are thinking about entering the world of ebook originals — books that are sold only in digital editions.

One such book that I’m aware of is The Rent Is Too Damn High by Matthew Yglesias, published by Simon & Schuster.  It’s just too short (about 64 pages) to be worth printing and distributing.  On the other hand, Sam Harris’s Free Will (which I will report on before long) is just slightly longer, and it is available as a paperback for $9.99.  Pretty expensive for the amount of content!  His essay Lying, which I talked about here, is available as a Kindle single, which is a very interesting model for making short-form content like that available. (By the way, some authors do quite well with their Kindle singles.)

I can see the attraction to publishers of putting out their authors’ shorter content as ebook originals — it makes the authors happy, keeps their names in the public’s consciousness, and eliminates most production costs.  But now my friend Craig Shaw Gardner reports that he may soon be signing a deal with Ace to write one of his trademarked funny-fantasy trilogies as ebook originals.  That’s a model I’m still puzzling over.

For the publisher, I guess the advantage is that it’s low risk.  Their costs go way down if they don’t have to print, warehouse, and ship hardcopy books.  Publishing becomes mostly a marketing effort (although they still have to create a cover and do their usual editorial work).  If the ebooks become really successful, they can always come out with a print edition.  But they’re giving up their major asset — their access to shelf space in bookstores.

For the author, I guess the advantage is that you get some money up front, and you don’t have to spend your own money on covers and other production costs.  And conceivably the publisher can do a better job of marketing your book than you can on your own (although I have my doubts).  But in return you’re giving up a large chunk of the royalties you’d get if you went the ebook self-publishing route.

Is it worth it?  Ace and Craig seem to think so.  So I wish them luck!  Also, prepare to be entertained!  I have read a chunk of the first book in manuscript, and I can say that, once you meet Bob the Horse, you will never forget him!

Bad Reviews 2: The Alix Ohlin Story

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Here we pondered a bad review of Lawrence Krauss’s A Universe from Nothing in the New York Times.

The latest kerfluffle is about an especially scathing review in the Times of Alix Ohlin’s latest books — a novel called Inside and a volume of short stories, Signs and Wonders. I’ve never heard of Ohlin, but her books have A-list publishers — Knopf and Viking — and bunches of good reviews and blurbs.  The review is by William Giraldi, whom I’ve also never heard of.  He’s published a novel called Busy Monsters.  So what’s up?  The review is online, and here’s the first paragraph:

There are two species of novelist: one writes as if the world is a known locale that requires dutiful reporting, the other as if the world has yet to be made. The former enjoys the complacency of the au courant and the lassitude of at-hand language, while the latter believes with Thoreau that “this world is but canvas to our imaginations,” that the only worthy assertion of imagination occurs by way of linguistic originality wed to intellect and emotional verity. You close “Don Quixote” and “Tristram Shandy,” “Middlemarch” and “Augie March,” and the cosmos takes on a coruscated import it rather lacked before, an “eternal and irrepressible freshness,” in Pound’s apt phrase. His definition of literature is among the best we have: “Language charged with meaning.” How charged was the last novel you read?

That paragraph was written by a guy who is trying way too hard.  To all you would-be writers out there: Take my advice and never use a phrase like “the cosmos takes on a coruscated import it rather lacked before.”  Your readers will be forever grateful.

Giraldi’s complaint about Ohlin’s work is that it “enjoys the complacency of the au courant and the lassitude of at-hand language.”  And he gives plenty of examples.  She describes teeth as white; people’s hearts sink and sing; she uses clichés like “Nice guys finish last.”

So anyway, thanks to Amazon, I was able to take a look inside Inside.  And the

Alix Ohlin, apparently dreaming up banal things to write

first chapter was, well, pretty good.  She sets up an interesting situation and draws a couple of interesting characters.  A young female psychotherapist goes out cross-country skiing and literally runs into a guy who has apparently just tried to hang himself.  She takes him to the hospital; she takes him back to his apartment afterwards; she takes an interest.  The dialog is snappy and occasionally unexpected, and the language was cliché-free; no one’s teeth are white in Chapter 1.

So then I looked at Giraldi’s novel. It too has good reviews and a mainstream publisher.  But he tries too hard.  He describes someone as “heaving his psychosis our way, sending bow-tied packages, soilsome letters, and text messages to the bestial effect of, If you marry that baboon, I’ll end all our lives.”  Soilsome?  WordPress’s spellchecker doesn’t recognize that word, and neither do I.

His novel is probably fine, too — it just inhabits a different universe from Ohlin’s.  He will claim it’s a better universe; he’ll claim he has Thoreau and Pound on his side (neither of whom wrote any novels that I can recall).

So why would the New York Times assign Ohlin’s books to be reviewed by someone you can be reasonably confident is going to hate them?  Dunno.  Why bother?  And, if you’re Giraldi, why write a review that makes you look like a dick? How is this going to help your career?

Here’s a balanced article in Salon about how to write a bad review. It ends with this advice:

In the end, the literary world is basically a small city. We could maybe all comfortably occupy Madison, Wisc. And so a book review is not being read in a vacuum: when you angrily eviscerate somebody’s work, you are shitting where you eat. It is important both to support each other and criticize each other, and to find ways to do both, respectfully and constructively. This means thinking things through before you open your piehole, whether it’s on Twitter or in the pages of the Times. Is that so hard?

Sounds right to me.

In which I report on the 24th best English-language novel of the 20th century

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That would be Winesburg, Ohio, as determined by the board of the Modern Library. It was recommended by my very fine commenter Col, so how could I go wrong?  (Also, it’s short!)

Let’s make one obvious point right off the bat: If I were the writer whose novel came in at position 101 on the Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels list, I would be lodging a formal complaint with the international governing body of top 100 lists, because Winesburg, Ohio isn’t a novel; it’s a short story cycle.  I have nothing against short story cycles — The Martian Chronicles is a good one — but they bypass problems that novels have to solve — like sustaining a narrative arc, like introducing characters at the appropriate time and developing them in sufficient detail to justify their roles.  No one is going to admire Winesburg, Ohio for its plot, because it ain’t got any.

Sherwood Anderson: Does this guy look happy to you?

What it has are lots of small-town turn-of-the-century characters afflicted with “vague hungers and secret unnamable desires.”  People who go for long walks in the dark and the rain pondering the waste of their lives.  People who dream of leaving and never leave.  People who leave, then return as failures.  People who leave and are never heard of again.  People who long to make a connection with other people, but never quite manage to do connect.  Lots and lots of sexual repression.

What it doesn’t have: Humor.  Warmth.  Happiness, except in fleeting moments. Did I mention that it doesn’t have a plot?  It has recurring characters, especially the young reporter who shows up in most of the stories and (spoiler alert) finally leaves town at the end of the book. But nothing much in the way of character development.

Still, I couldn’t put the book down.  Anderson’s descriptions of small-town life and small-town characters are powerful and often moving.  The stories are mostly pretty short–they make their point, and then move on–so I never felt bogged down.  I have a feeling that some of the stories are going to stay with me.

Ultimately, I think the book gets the high ranking that it does for historical reasons–its themes and style are daring for 1919, and it apparently paved the way for American writers we remember better. Winesburg, Ohio came out early in Anderson’s career, and nothing else he wrote made much of an impression.

So, who should I try next?  Theodore Dreiser?  Sinclair Lewis?  Ford Madox Ford? James T. Farrell?  They’re on the Modern Library’s list, but I haven’t read any of them.

So many good books, so little time.

Bad beginnings; also some good ones

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Here are the 2012 winners of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, which celebrates the worst opening sentences that people can concoct for novels you’ll never want to read.  This is the overall winner:

As he told her that he loved her she gazed into his eyes, wondering, as she noted the infestation of eyelash mites, the tiny deodicids burrowing into his follicles to eat the greasy sebum therein, each female laying up to 25 eggs in a single follicle, causing inflammation, whether the eyes are truly the windows of the soul; and, if so, his soul needed regrouting.

Here’s the winner in the crime category:

She slinked through my door wearing a dress that looked like it had been painted on … not with good paint, like Behr or Sherwin-Williams, but with that watered-down stuff that bubbles up right away if you don’t prime the surface before you slap it on, and – just like that cheap paint – the dress needed two more coats to cover her.

If you prefer shorter badness, you can try the Lyttle Lytton awards, which give you a maximum of 200 characters to be awful.  Here is the 2012 winner:

Agent Jeffrey’s trained eyes rolled carefully around the room, taking in the sights and sounds.

These entries are generally much more subtle in their awfulness than the Bulwer-Lytton ones, which rely on top-heavy metaphors and overly detailed descriptions for their comic effect.  Here’s a fantasy runner-up in the Lyttle Lytton contest that for some reason struck me as hilarious:

Kaldor fondled the hilt of his sword with his lanky fingers and inhaled the sunrise. “I taste the future blood of my enemies,” he relished.

So how about a few good beginnings to wipe that bad taste out of your mouth?  Amazon’s “Click to Look Inside” feature makes it easy to check out the opening of any book.  Beginnings aren’t as crucial to novels as their endings.  Sometimes the writer needs to take his time to set things up.  Here is the matter-of-fact beginning of Great Expectations, whose ending we talked about previously:

My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.

Then there’s the spectacular opening of Lolita, after the hilarious faux foreword, which tells us the story should make all of us “apply ourselves with still greater vigilance and vision to the task of bringing up a better generation in a safer world”:

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth.  Lo. Lee. Ta.

How about Gravity’s Rainbow, whose opening sentence is so central to the novel that it was reproduced on the cover of the original edition:

A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare to it now.

And here are the great opening sentences of Slaughterhouse Five:

All this happened, more or less.  The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.

Makes me want to read all these books all over again.

New, lower prices on my ebooks

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Regular blogging will now resume.  I hope you found other ways to entertain yourself in the past week.

Anyway, I just wanted to point out that my ebooks are on sale at Amazon and Barnes & Noble — and probably at other places as well.  My new publisher’s marketing scheme appears to be to set a list price of $4.99 on Amazon, and then discount from that, so the books look like they are on sale.  Which, I guess, they are.  So buy them while the prices are low.

Senator remains free. It’s been interesting to see how it has fared on the “bestseller” list of free Kindle books.  It peaked somewhere in the 100s on the overall list; now it’s down in the 800s.  For a while it was #1 in the political genre; it has now faded to #6.  It was also in the top ten for a while in the suspense genre; it is now at #24.  As the Underpants Gnomes say: Profit!!

Replica is now available for $0.99.  That’s a pretty good deal!  But has not yet broken into the top 100,000 for Kindle.  Shoot.

Pontiff and Summit are both available for $2.99.  Oddly, Pontiff is much higher on the paid Kindle bestseller list than either Replica or Summit.  I’m guessing that, at the sales level we’re talking about, a few copies can make a pretty big difference in a book’s ranking.

The ebook release of Dover Beach is going to be delayed so we can publish its sequel, whose title may or may not be Locksley Hall, at the same time.  But it shouldn’t be very long.

My goal is to get the ebooks for Forbidden Sanctuary and Marlborough Street out the door by the end of the year.

Then we’ll have a party.

Lying — sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t

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Dunno why I’ve gotten so interested in lying lately.  But it keeps popping up in the news.  Here we see the ex-Yahoo CEO landing on his feet at some new high tech company.  He was the guy who lied on his resume by claiming an extra minor degree from an obscure college instead of going for broke with a bogus Oxford Ph.D. or something.  And now we see Fareed Zakaria getting himself in hot water by copying text from a New Yorker writer on his blog.

So I went and read Sam Harris’s free book on lying.  But he doesn’t really doesn’t have much of interest to say about the subject.

If you leave religion out of the picture (which, of course, Harris does), you generally have two ways of approaching lying (and other moral issues): the utilitarian way or the Kantian way.   If you go the utilitarian route, you can ask whether a particular lie adds to or subtracts from human happiness.  If you go the Kantian route, you can ask whether there is a categorical imperative not to lie, because that’s the way people should behave.  Harris dismisses Kant rather breezily, so we’re left with a utilitarian discussion, in which he brings up various cases where it might seem that lying would be a good idea, but it turns out not to be.  People lie to grandma about her terminal cancer, and everyone is worse off.  Harris tells a friend that his screenplay sucks, and the friend turns out to be grateful.  That sort of thing.  So, the world is better off if we don’t lie.

But that’s too easy!  Because obviously there are cases where lying works.  The Yahoo CEO lied on his resume, and eventually it tripped him up, but not so much that it ruined his career.  Mitt Romney is setting Olympic and world records for lying, and for all I know it may get him elected president.

One can, of course, make the case that lying is (at least in general) bad for society, even if it helps the individual.  So it comes out behind in the utilitarian equation.  And I’ll buy that–I don’t want Mitt Romney to become president!  But that’s uncontroversial.  The interesting thing, for me as a writer anyway, is the moral dilemma that lying presents to the individual.  In Senator, I present the protagonist as a presumably moral guy who ends up lying throughout the entire novel.  But he feels bad about it–it worries him, not just because he might get caught, but because it’s wrong.  Did it worry the Yahoo CEO?  Does it worry Romney?  Is Romney making utilitarian arguments to himself about the greater good that his lying is supposed to achieve?  Or is this just another business decision for him?

I wish Harris had spent more time looking at issues like that.  But I suppose this is why some people write novels instead of philosophy.

While I’m here, I’d like to recommend Rick Gervais’s weird little movie The Invention of Lying, which treats the issue of lying in an amiably subversive way.