My second draft is starting to feel like an alternative universe

Posted on August 3, 2015 by Richard Bowker

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”

Posted on August 2, 2015 by Richard Bowker

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”?

Posted on July 26, 2015 by Richard Bowker

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 July 20, 2015 by Richard Bowker

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

Wake up early
Exercise frequently
Stick to a strict schedule
Keep your day job
Learn to work anywhere, anytime
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 July 19, 2015 by Richard Bowker

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 July 11, 2015 by Richard Bowker

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.

A Spool of Blue Thread

Posted on July 5, 2015 by Richard Bowker

Anne Tyler is a writer who faded from my attention over the years, but you know . . . she’s very good, even though, like most novelists, she seems to write the same book over and over again. Here is the beginning of the Washington Post review, which captures what I felt:

The characters in “A Spool of Blue Thread” look like the same Baltimore family members we’ve socialized with for 50 years in Anne Tyler’s fiction. In fact, everything about her new novel — from its needlepointed title to its arthritic plot — sounds worn-out.

So how can it be so wonderful? The funky meals, the wacky professions, the distracted mothers and the lost children — they’re all here. But complaining that Tyler’s novels are redundant is like whining that Shakespeare’s sonnets are always 14 lines long. Somehow, what’s familiar seems transcended in these pages, infused with freshness and surprise — evidence, once again, that Tyler remains among the best chroniclers of family life this country has ever produced.

(I should say, though, that my lovely wife begs to differ and believes that, at age 75, Tyler has forgotten how to be funny.)

BookBub sends me an email every day with blurbs about all the thrillers and mysteries and bestsellers they have on sale. And they all sound the same. Like so:

After a US colonel is murdered in Istanbul, Special Agent Vin Cooper suspects a serial killer is at large — but the truth is even more terrifying…

Or:

When a young professor is horribly murdered, coroner Sara Linton uncovers the work of a twisted mind — one that is all too ready to kill again. And her past could hold the key to catching him…

Or:

Special Agent Jack Randall is determined to catch the elusive shooter responsible for killing a prominent lawyer. But to find the murderer, he’ll have to delve into his own haunted past…

Some of these books are surely great, with quirky characters and clever plots and great writing. But somehow I never end up buying any of them. But now I have to go back and read all the Anne Tyler novels that I missed. I need fewer special agents with haunted pasts and more quirky Baltimore families.

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

Posted on June 28, 2015 by Richard Bowker

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 June 27, 2015 by Richard Bowker

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.

Would you write honest reviews in return for free books?

Posted on June 21, 2015 by Richard Bowker

A friend of mine mentioned to me today how much she liked my novel Senator, which she had just finished. So I thanked her and asked her if she’d written a customer review. The question seemed to baffle her. She had never considered writing a review. Why would she do that? But of course, now that I asked her…

We’ll see if she gets around to it.

In the ebook world, nothing is more important for sales than customer reviews. But they’re extraordinarily hard to get, in my experience. And it’s not just my books–I’ve come across lots of books by fairly well-known authors that have just a handful of reviews.

My publisher has a marketing arm called eBook Discovery that just launched a Read and Review Club to try to address this. If you sign up, you can download certain books for free every couple of weeks, in return for leaving an honest review at Amazon or other eRetailer. There’s some additional logistics involved, but that’s the basic idea. I have no idea if this will work, but it doesn’t seem implausible. I think the key will be to get a sufficient variety of books from authors they don’t publish, so that readers will stay interested. Why not click the link and give it a try?

By the way, I believe them when they say they want honest reviews–if you hate the book, say so. They are of the opinion that it’s the number of reviews that matters, not how positive the reviews are. I’m not quite sure I believe this, but that’s what they say.