Category Archives: Writing

My second draft is starting to feel like an alternative universe

Posted on by
1

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.

What makes a plot “arthritic”?

Posted on by
Reply

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.

 

How did I become so darn creative?

Posted on by
Reply

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

Posted on by
1

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.

 

Second draft: Did I write THAT?

Posted on by
2

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.

“Just the facts, ma’am”: the private eye and religion

Posted on by
1

I just read Jerry Coyne’s Faith vs. Fact about the incompatibility of religion and science. The arguments will be familiar to anyone who frequents Coyne’s website Why Evolution Is True. The book is a full-throated endorsement of science (broadly construed) as the only way we have of finding out what is true.  That “broadly construed” is important to Coyne’s case; it’s not just “scientists” who do science, in his formulation; a plumber does science when he makes a hypothesis about why a pipe is leaking, tests the hypothesis, and either confirms or rejects it.  That’s the way we achieve truths about plumbing and, Coyne suggests, about anything.  Religion (or listening to Beethoven, or reading Shakespeare) can’t tell you why a pipe is leaking, or how the universe began, or what causes malaria.

It also doesn’t help you solve crimes.  My novel Where All the Ladders Start is, among other things, about the private eye as scientist.  Our hero, Walter Sands, is investigating the disappearance of a cult leader.  There are conventional explanations–the guy was murdered, or kidnapped, or just took off on his own.  But there is also a religious explanation advanced by many cult members: God loved the guy so much that He assumed him into heaven.  Walter is not impressed by the religious explanation, however.  He is relentlessly practical: private eyes aren’t interested in miracles; they’re interested in people — in means, motive, and opportunity.  So he does what private investigators do: he searches for facts, and eventually he uncovers the non-miraculous truth.

That’s all well and good, but there’s a bit of a twist at the end (in a private eye novel, there’s always a twist at the end).  Walter uncovers the truth, but he can’t escape religion’s clutches.  Because, he is told, in everything he has done, he has actually been following God’s plan.  And he finds himself unable to dispute this, because, really, how can he?  How can anyone?  If God has a plan, a private eye is not going to uncover it.

(For those not of a certain age, “Just the facts, ma’am” is a catchphrase associated with no-nonsense Sergeant Joe Friday of the 50’s (and 60’s and 70’s) TV show Dragnet.  Snopes tells us, though, that the character never says exactly that.)

I thought my novel was going to Oakland, but instead it ended up in Auckland

Posted on by
1

We were discussing the conclusion of my novel in my writing group. The novel had taken a bit of an unexpected direction.  Well, more than a bit.  How had it ended up in a woodshed in the wilds of a parallel-universe Scotland?  Where did that come from?  Jeff said: “It’s like that guy who got on a plane thinking it was going to Oakland, but instead he ended up in Auckland.”

That really happened, and the Internet will never forget.  And now I won’t, either.

Chekhov’s hunting rifle; Chekhov’s ornamental sword

Posted on by
Reply

We’ve talked about “Chekhov’s gun“–the rule in storytelling that when you show a gun early in a story, you have to use it before the end.  You’ve established expectations that need to be fulfilled.  We’ve also noticed its use in movies like Birdman.  Here are a couple more examples I’ve encountered recently.

Israel Horovitz is a well-known playwright who recently turned his play My Old Lady into a movie with Maggie Smith, Kevin Kline, and Kristin Scott Thomas. Kline plays a bitter sad-sack who has been left a French apartment by his father, only to discover that it is inhabited by its elderly former owner and her daughter (Smith and Thomas).  Under a quirky French law, Kline not only can’t sell the apartment, he has to pay Smith a kind of reverse mortgage every month.  Drama, heartbreak, revelation, and resolution ensue. There is much talk of death and suicide.  And there is a hunting rifle, which Kline plays with early on in the movie. We wait patiently for the hunting rifle to make its next appearance. We are not disappointed.

The movie is not bad but not great.  Horovitz obviously knows how to construct a story.  But as is often the case, a good play doesn’t always make a compelling movie. Like many adaptations, this one felt claustrophobic and talky to me, and the basic situation and relationships among the characters felt contrived.  The ultimate hunting rifle scene is well-handled, though — it took place off-camera, so we don’t know what happened at first. Will this be a tragedy, or a comedy?

The other movie is Stolen Moments, a ridiculously bad silent movie that Rudolf Valentino made just before he became a star.  I could write about it in my intermittent series of post about writers in the movies, because Valentino plays “a Brazilian writer of novels in English,” according to the intertitles.  But really, it’s not worth it.  The storytelling is about as primitive as it can be, and that includes the use of Chekhov’s sword.  Valentino’s butler goes takes the sword down from the wall and goes after him in an unmotivated drunken rage.  Valentino easily disarms him and sends him packing.  And then puts the sword on the table, where it sits patiently awaiting the final, confused climax, when, of course, it will be used to better effect.

In which I run into Edgar Allen Poe

Posted on by
4

I was walking from the Boston Common over to Jacob Wirth’s after my road race when I ran into this guy with his pet raven at twilight:

2015-06-11 20.18.44
Poe was born in Boston in Boston in 1809, although he went to Virginia soon afterwards.

Poe’s reputation has risen since his death and stays high. In addition to being a writer of fiction and poetry, he was also a good literary critic.  Here is Wikipedia summing up Poe’s opinion of our old friend Heny Wadsworth Longfellow:

A favorite target of Poe’s criticism was Boston’s then-acclaimed poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who was often defended by his literary friends in what was later called “The Longfellow War”. Poe accused Longfellow of “the heresy of the didactic”, writing poetry that was preachy, derivative, and thematically plagiarized. Poe correctly predicted that Longfellow’s reputation and style of poetry would decline, concluding that “We grant him high qualities, but deny him the Future”.

“We grant him high qualities, but deny him the Future” — is that prescient or what?

Here’s more about the Poe statue.

The road race, you ask?  Don’t ask.  Here’s a photo of the pack going into Kenmore Square.

2015-06-11 19.35.25

Notice that my part of the pack isn’t exactly “running”. The folks heading in the other direction, back from Kenmore Square toward the Common–they’re running. Sheesh.