Well, that took a while, during which posting here was light to nonexistent. The second draft comes out at about 80,000 words, which is about where I expected it to end up.
Much has changed throughout the book, although the basic structure has stayed the same. I’m hoping the final revisions we’ll go fairly quickly.
And I’m closing in on a cover design . . .
Shut up. Really, just shut up.
The plan was to get the sequel to The Portal done in 2015, but 2016 finds me about three-quarters of the way through the second draft. This isn’t like a George R.R. Martin delay, and I don’t have editors and publishers and translators and millions of readers waiting on me. It’s just a personal thing. But still.
What I don’t want to do (and I’m sure Martin doesn’t want to do) is to publish the thing before it’s ready. I can feel the temptation to declare victory and move on. But the list of things I want to tweak in the next draft is growing….
So I’ll get there–maybe by March. Maybe before George R.R. Martin.
I was listening to an interview with the prolific British historical novelist Bernard Cornwell (who, oddly, lives on Cape Cod, not that far from my little South Shore town). In it, he said that he doesn’t plot out his books ahead of time, although he wished he could. He recalled that he recently had to finish his latest novel before catching a plane the next day (presumably because of a deadline), but he had no idea how it was supposed to end. So he got up at three in the morning, the ending came to him, and he finished the book by noon, in time for him to catch his flight.
This is odd, but somehow that’s the way it often works. I have been noodling about a plot problem in my latest novel for a while now. Something hadn’t worked in the first draft, but I didn’t know how to fix it. Earlier this week I reached the point in the second draft where I had to figure this out. I had non-writing stuff to do for a few days, and my next writing session was going to be Saturday at noon. So I sat down on Saturday, mulled things over for a while, and the new plot-line came to me. Right on schedule.
Writing fiction doesn’t always work that way, but life is much more pleasant when it does.
Every one of the main characters in the HBO series “Girls” is so irritating that you want to shake them–or worse. (My wife said she just wanted to stab Hannah Horvath after one episode.) But all the characters feel real to me. And none feels more real than Lena Dunham’s aspiring writer, Hannah Horvath.
Hannah desperately wants to think of herself as a writer, but she hasn’t done anything yet to convince the world (or herself) that that’s what she really is. She “inks” an e-book deal, but the deal falls apart when the publisher drops dead. She gets a job writing advertorial pieces
for a magazine and tries to feel superior to her co-workers, only to find out that they are already more successful than she is. And, finally, she gets accepted to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she has to participate in the dreaded writing group.
The rules for a writing group are apparently universal (and maybe they originated at Iowa). The rest of the group reads your submission, and then each person gets to comment on it in turn. You’re not allowed to respond until everyone has finished. So you have to sit there and listen to a bunch of people criticize something you have put your heart and soul into. In the “Girls” episode at Iowa, a black guy is first up, and everyone raves about his authentic voice and whatnot. When it’s finally Hannah’s turn, they savage her. And she just can’t cope. Of course they don’t understand her piece, and of course she has to explain it to them. But that’s not the way the writing group works. She asks the teacher if she can say five words, but the teacher won’t let her. So she slips in the single word “History,” as if that will explain everything and silence all her critics.
It’s a poignant scene–at least for a writer. My first experience with a writing group was during my senior year at Harvard. It took place in the living room of a professor’s house on Brattle Street in Cambridge. The professor did his best to keep everything low key and civil, but it was pretty traumatic, at least for me. I wrote nothing but science fiction in those days, and I just knew the other students weren’t going to like what I produced. But I was desperate for their approval–for anyone’s approval, really. I was the last one to have my story critiqued, and it was . . . not bad. At least, I don’t remember feeling the necessity to explain myself like Hannah. Whatever criticisms people had, I was able to listen to the them and survive. The story, as I recall, wasn’t terrible, but like everything I wrote in those days, it was all surface; it wasn’t a story about real life. It certainly wasn’t publishable; publication (and becoming a real writer) was years away.
Anyway, I felt for Hannah in that episode–and every episode, even when we want to stab her. She’s a narcissistic jerk, but that just means she’s one of us. It’s tough being a writer.
You can find it here. Notice the exciting Follow button beneath my photo. Click it, and apparently Amazon keeps you updated on my new releases and maybe other cool stuff.
(For those keeping track, I’m about halfway through the second draft of the sequel to The Portal. I was hoping to get it out this year, but I have a feeling it’s going to leak into 2016.)
I was attending a memorial service at Mount Auburn Cemetery the other day, and I was asked to say a few words about my wonderful cousin Bob, who died recently from the effects of Alzheimer’s. I said my piece and took my seat.
And then I remembered a beautiful anecdote that summed up Bob perfectly. Three years ago he had sent me a lovely email remembering my father (who died many years ago) on my father’s birthday. Fighting the wreckage of his mind, Bob still managed to send me a thoughtful email (complete with a Dickens reference). When I recalled this I wanted to jump up from my seat and say, “Wait a minute! I’m not done yet!” But I had missed my chance.
This is a somewhat morbid example of l’esprit de l’escalier — the wit of the staircase — where you think of the perfect rejoinder to an argument at a dinner party only as you are on the way out.
This happened to me before, after I spoke at my mother’s funeral. In the last months of her life something happened to her brain, and she had a perpetual low-grade random fear. It was heartbreaking. A couple of weeks later I was driving to work and listening to a tape of John Gielgud declaiming Shakespeare. And suddenly I heard him recite the famous song from Cymbeline, which starts like this:
Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,Nor the furious winter’s rages;Thou thy worldly task hast done,Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages:Golden lads and girls all must,As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.
It’s not exactly Christian theology, but it spoke to me. I almost crashed my car on Route 128 when I heard it. That’s what I should have said to my mother as I said goodbye to her. Fear no more.
Oh well.
Because I’m in the mood, here is Brahms’ German Requiem. This piece will always remind me of sitting with Cousin Bob and his wife Lesley in a darkened room in a Vermont hospice, listening to this great music as Bob’s father’s life ebbed away. Here is the English text of part one:
Blessed are they that mourn,
for they shall be comforted.
They who sow in tears,
shall reap in joy.
Go forth and cry,
bearing precious seed,
and come with joy
bearing their sheaves
Every once in a while my ePublisher sends out an email giving their thoughts on the state of ebook publishing. The latest one is pretty interesting. In a section titled “Reality Sets In” they talk about the glut of ebooks on the market:
With the filters removed, the market is flooding with dreck. It’s hard to get an exact number, but there are about 4 million ebooks on the market right now with nearly 100,000 new titles added each month. Shockingly, most will never sell a single copy. Of the remainder, only about 2% will sell at any meaningful quantity.
Unfortunately for many, self-publishing was sold as the easy path to notoriety and fortune; simply publish your story and readers will send you mountains of cash! But many found out the hard way that the only thing more demanding than publishers are readers and their unbridled reviews. A few discovered success, while the masses simply found a harsh dose of reality; this business is tough.
With time, this realization will thin the ranks as the hopeful become discouraged and opt for other pursuits.
They point out one way that Amazon (and other vendors) could help thin the ranks:
The available inventory of ebooks needs to be purged. At some point, natural selection will reign and the purge will happen.
We’ve already seen the first waves in the subscription services, and, at some point, resellers will also tire of being loaded down with dreck and will perhaps begin charging to maintain books in their system. Imagine the income Amazon could draw down if they charged $1 per month per title? Once one eRetailer does it, the others will follow. Then, all books that never sold a sustainable number of copies will leave the system and things will normalizefor a while.
It never made much sense to me that Amazon (and other vendors) would just store everyone’s ebooks on their servers for free. Sure, storage is cheap, but it costs Amazon something to store millions of books, from most of which they will never see a penny in revenue. I would certainly pay a storage fee if it would help get rid of the dreck.
My ePublisher’s advice to writers has been constant for a while: quality matters. So does productivity. Series are better than individual titles. Long, complex narratives don’t do as well as simpler narratives. Attention spans aren’t what they used to be. Readers have lots of other ways to entertain themselves–often on the same device on which they’re doing their reading. So get back to work.
Which I will now try to do.
Stephen King has always struck me as being a humane and generous writer. In today’s New York Times he has a piece entitled “Can a Novelist Be Too Productive?” He points out:
No one in his or her right mind would argue that quantity guarantees quality, but to suggest that quantity never produces quality strikes me as snobbish, inane and demonstrably untrue.
And he points out that some writers (himself included) are just meant to be prolific–they can’t help themselves:
As a young man, my head was like a crowded movie theater where someone has just yelled “Fire!” and everyone scrambles for the exits at once. I had a thousand ideas but only 10 fingers and one typewriter. There were days — I’m not kidding about this, or exaggerating — when I thought all the clamoring voices in my mind would drive me insane. Back then, in my 20s and early 30s, I thought often of the John Keats poem that begins, “When I have fears that I may cease to be / Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain …”
But he never quite answers the question in his title (the title, of course, may not be his). This comes to mind as I read Elin Hilderbrand’s novel The Rumor. She is no dummy: She went to Johns Hopkins and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She has created her own wildly popular genre–the Nantucket beach novel. But clearly her publisher wants her to write a book, maybe two books, a year. Could her novels be better if she took more time writing them, if she aimed higher? Is she being too productive? Beats me, but I think maybe so. The Rumor seems OK, but it is very slight.
On a related topic, I have so little time to read that I tend to avoid prolific novelists, because I fear that they are sacrificing quality for quantity. But, of course, I could be wrong. Here is Shakespeare’s output for 1599, as chronicled in the wonderful book A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599:: Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and Hamlet. I don’t think any of us would have wanted Shakespeare to slow down in 1599.
My lovely wife is a big Elin Hilderbrand fan. She writers novels of life and love on Nantucket — lately two a year, a summer one with a beach cover and a Christmas one with a homey cover of a Nantucket house with Crhstmas decorations. My wife talked me into reading Hilderbrand’s latest, The Rumor. The cover is typical:
And here’s a typical paragraph. The action takes place just after 40-something Grace has started her affair with the hunky landscape architect:
Grace served a cold roast chicken, a fresh head of butter lettuce, a crock of herbed farmer’s cheese, and fat, rosy radishes pulled from the garden. She cut thick slices of bread from a seeded multigrain loaf with a nice chewy crust, then she went back into the fridge and pulled out sweet butter, a jar of baby gherkins, a stick of summer sausage, and some whole-grain mustard.
This is not a paragraph a man wants to read, although the hunky landscape architect finds the meal absolutely delightful.
Anyway, the novel is perfectly okay-if-you-like-that-sort-of-thing, and Hilderbrand seems to be a perfectly extraordinary human being, who writes two novels a year while raising three kids and battling breast cancer.
Plus, she has an app. I didn’t know that was a thing, but her publisher, Hachette, seems to think this is a good idea. It doesn’t seem to be updated a lot — it doesn’t list The Rumor among her novels, for example, and the Recipes section is pretty thin for someone who writes paragraphs like the one I quoted (and she doesn’t seem to know how to spell the word kernel). But, you know, it’s an app.
I want one.
That’s the thesis of this New York Times op-ed — the last, we are told, in its “Drafts” series about the craft of writing. Not a great ending for the series. It’s not that there aren’t parallels between the two activities. It’s that the parallels are trivial. Sometimes it’s hard to get started solving a crossword puzzle. Hey, same for novels!
The equivalent blank period in novel writing can, unfortunately, last months or even years, but the principles at work are just the same. There will be stretches in which the only characters you’re able to summon arrive faceless or, worse, voiceless. There will be whole seasons in which every plot idea you come up with collapses the moment it appears on your screen. These are the times when you’d start Googling law school application deadlines if it weren’t for the memory of that Saturday puzzle: Even a granite wall, studied with sufficient patience, reveals its cracks.
Well, okay. The principle at work is: both activities can be hard, especially when you’re getting started. This is news? What the author doesn’t discuss is the crucial difference between puzzles and novels: puzzles, by definition, have a single correct solution. Novels? Not so much. And that’s why novels are a bit harder than the Saturday Times puzzle.
Fairly deep into the second draft of my novel, I have decided to make a fundamental change in a major character’s back story. Was this the correct solution to my narrative problem? Has the novel gained more than it’s lost? I have no idea. And I can’t look in tomorrow’s Times to find out. Because I’m the only one who can say whether the solution is correct. And I may never be totally sure.
Richard Bowker 