Tag Archives: fiction

I’m going to figure my plot out next Saturday at noon

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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.

My author page

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My publisher keeps getting more organized.  Recently they launched author “landing” pages for the folks they represent.  Here’s mine.  They’ll include a link to this page at the end of each of my books, to make it easy for readers to check out my other very fine novels.

Now if only I could get more organized . . .

Writers on TV: Hannah Horvath

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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.

Does everyone know I have an Amazon author page?

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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.)

More on e-book price resistance

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Via The Passive Voice, I see the Wall Street Journal reporting on the decline in e-book sales from the major publishers.  This is in the wake of the new contracts they signed with Amazon, which allowed them to continue to set their own prices.

A recent snapshot of e-book prices found that titles in the Kindle bookstore from the five biggest publishers cost, on average, $10.81, while all other 2015 e-books on the site had an average price of $4.95, according to industry researcher Codex Group LLC.

“Since book buyers expect the price of a Kindle e-book to be well under $9, once you get to over $10 consumers start to say, ‘Let me think about that,’” said Codex CEO Peter Hildick-Smith

…

Hachette cited fewer hot titles and the implementation of its Amazon deal as reasons that e-books fell to 24% of its U.S. net trade sales in the first half of 2015, from 29% a year earlier. Declining e-book sales contributed to a 7.8% drop in revenue in the period.

Then there’s this paragraph:

One high-level publishing executive disputed that the Amazon pacts are contributing to the e-book sales decline. “This is a title-driven business,” he said. “If you have a good book, price isn’t an issue.”

This is, of course, insane.  Price is always an issue.  Maybe you’ll pay more for a new Stephen King book, but there is a price at which you won’t bother to buy it.  And how much money are big publishers leaving on the table by not appropriately pricing their backlist?  The novelist James Salter died recently.  I had heard of him but never read anything by him.  I went on Amazon, and all his ebooks were $9.99 or more; recently one showed up on BookBub for $1.99, so I scooped it up.  As the Passive Guy says:

Since Amazon is the biggest bookstore in the world, one which obsessively collects and analyzes data concerning customer behavior, it is much better qualified to set optimum prices to maximize revenues from the sales of ebooks than a bunch of provincial publishers who have never run any sort of store and have virtually nothing in common with a typical reader.

If you give a kid a stick of dynamite, why would you expect anything other than trouble?

Stephen King on being prolific

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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.

Is writing fiction like solving a crossword puzzle?

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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.

E-books and price resistance

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Now that I have a Kindle Paperwhite, I’m paying more attention to my book-buying thought process. Yesterday I was thinking fondly about A Fan’s Notes, and I was prepared to purchase the ebook, but I just couldn’t bring myself to click the button — $9.99 just seemed too high a price for an impulse purchase where there was a good chance I’d be disappointed.  I would certainly have bought it for $4.99, but I wouldn’t have gone much higher.

The big publishers essentially won their battle with Amazon over agency pricing for ebooks.  They get to set the price, and they don’t seem to want to go below $9.99, even for a 47-year-old mid-list book like A Fan’s Notes.  I can’t really say they’re over-charging simply based on my personal level of price resistance.  But:

We’re hearing widespread but totally unofficial reports that big publisher ebook sales are dropping noticeably when their new higher Agency prices are activated.

And:

What appears to be happening, writes Shatzkin, is that higher Agency pricing by publishers may be placing  the majors’ ebooks right out of the market for many potential buyers.

I did pay $11.99 recently for the ebook version of Faith vs. Fact.  But that was at least partially because I’ve gotten a lot of enjoyment over the years from reading Jerry Coyne’s website Why Evolution Is True and wanted to give something back to him.  I find it hard to imagine I’d pay that much otherwise.

Interesting times for traditional publishers.

“A Fan’s Notes” and Frank Gifford

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Frank Gifford had something of a legendary life, and his death reminds me of Frederic Exley’s A Fan’s Notes, published 47 years ago and still ranked #211 in contemporary literature on Amazon.

Here is the novel’s synopsis from Wikipedia:

A Fan’s Notes is a sardonic account of mental illness, alcoholism, insulin shock therapy and electroconvulsive therapy, and the black hole of sports fandom. Its central preoccupation with a failure to measure up to the American dream has earned the novel comparisons to Fitzgerald‘s The Great Gatsby. Beginning with his childhood in Watertown, New York, growing up under a sports-obsessed father and following his college years at the USC, where he first came to know his hero Frank Gifford, Exley recounts years of intermittent stints at psychiatric institutions, his failed marriage to a woman named Patience, successive unfulfilling jobs teaching English literature to high school students, and working for a Manhattan public relations firm under contract to a weapons company, and, by way of Gifford, his obsession with the New York Giants.

Exley’s introspective “fictional memoir”, a tragicomic indictment of 1950s American culture, examines in lucid prose themes of celebrity, masculinity, self-absorption, and addiction, morbidly charting his failures in life against the electrifying successes of his football hero and former classmate. The title comes from Exley’s fear that he is doomed to be a spectator in life as well as in sports.

The novel made so deep an impression on me when I read it that I’m afraid to reread it and risk being disappointed (the way I was disappointed by Pynchon’s V when I re-read it a few years ago).  Today Slate reprinted an article about it from 1997:

First published in 1968, the book has been kept alive by zealous readers who feel compelled to promote it, Amway-style, to everyone they meet. Read a chapter or two and you’ll know why. Written by a self-pitying autodidact for consumption by self-pitying autodidacts, A Fan’s Notes divides the world into two camps: tortured, bewildered misfits (Exleys) and serene, fair-haired conformists (Giffords). In America, Exley implies—indeed, he shouts it—a person is either a suffering poet or a cheerful drone.

In the years after A Fan’s Notes I kept hoping that Exley would come up with something to rival it.  But he never did.  His other two novels/memoirs were pale imitations, and in real life he was, of course, slowly drinking himself to death (he died in 1992 at the age of 63).  Gifford outlasted him by 23 years, but he didn’t quite manage to age with the dignity befitting his glory days as a football hero.  I wonder if Exley’s one great book will ultimately be what we remember about Gifford.