This Buzzfeed listicle is kind of funny (and kind of meta for Buzzfeed). Here are a couple of examples that I like:
And:
Clickbait titles for classic novels
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Tag Archives: fiction
In which I run into Edgar Allen Poe
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:
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.
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.
“Senator” on sale for $0.99!
My publisher in its wisdom has reduced the ebook price of my novel Senator to $0.99. Probably trying to get rid of unsold inventory or something. Buy it before they run out! On Amazon or Barnes & Noble.
I’ve finished the first draft of my novel!
So, from my perspective, it’s turned from an idea to a thing. A thing that needs a lot of rewriting and reworking, but it’s real. It exists. I think I’ll take tomorrow off and run in a road race.
A nice review for “The Portal”
On Amazon:
The book is primarily written for the pre-teen or early teenager, I believe anyway, but I really enjoyed it. The characters pre teens in their world, were transferred to another world, in a different time, to a war torn New England where New Portugal and New Canada were going to attack New England. The boy’s, in conversation with army officers, gave ideas to the Army of New England for weapons that could change the outcome of the war. I haven’t enjoyed a simple, nonsexual, non-cussing book in a long time such as this book is. I recommend this to any boy, I’m not sure about girls since there aren’t many girl characters in it. There is a message in it about family, even families who might have issues and personality problems; about loneliness and familial love; about goodness and evil; about prayer in time of despair. It is not a God book, but it has a spiritual bent, especially when the war starts. For the most part, the main characters are all honorable, even those characters who might seem to be dishonorable, especially those who have come in contact with our two hero’s, in both worlds.
I can’t recommend this book enough.
That sounds about right!
I just hope the reader doesn’t try out some of my other novels, which fall pretty clearly in the “cussing” category, as several annoyed commenters have pointed out.
Why does someone with a dirty secret go into politics?
I don’t know much about Dennis Hastert, but his problem sure sounds familiar. Apparently he has a dirty secret in his past, and he spent a lot of money to make sure it stayed secret. It strikes me as a bit odd that someone would choose a political career knowing that he had such a secret lurking in his part. But this is, of course, the way politicians are. A major plot element in my novel Senator involves just such a situation: Senator Jim O’Connor (who has his own problems) finds out about his opponent’s dirty secret. What should he do about it? Should he use the knowledge to destroy his opponent?
What would you do? Well, you’re not a politician, so that doesn’t matter. It’s these moral conundrums that interested me most in writing the novel..
World-building and storytelling
Posting has been light while I’ve tried to meet my goal of finishing the first draft of my novel in six months. I probably won’t make it, but I’ll come close.
This is a sequel to my novel The Portal, and the experience of writing it is interestingly different from my previous effort: writing another novel in The Last P.I series, which turned out to be Where All the Ladders Start. Both novels are science fiction, but Where All the Ladders Start uses a future world (and a set of characters) that I’ve already created. The challenge in writing it was coming up with another mystery plot (or two) for my protagonist to get involved in.
The sequel to The Portal takes place in a parallel (or alternative, or maybe alternate) universe. It’s an adventure story rather than a mystery, so the plot doesn’t have to be as tightly wound as that of Where All the Ladders Start. But I have to do a whole lot of world-building for it, and that offers its own difficulties. There are two things that have been happening in the course of the first draft:
First, I keep coming up with new ideas about the world. Some are just local color to give the novel added depth; others are dictated by the plot (which, as usual, has veered off in unexpected directions as I write). All that stuff needs to be worked into the second draft. This is pretty much business as usual.
Second, and more interesting, there’s material I wanted to work into the novel, but I never seemed to find the right place for it. Now what? Will I have better luck in the second draft? The problem I’m having is the world-building does not always play well with storytelling. For example, at one point in the draft I thought I had reached a good spot in the book where a character could spend a few pages giving some needed background, but my writing group gave the scene a unanimous thumbs-down: it slowed the action too much, I was informed. Ditch the exposition and ramp up the conflict. The best science fiction novels make integrating the description of the fictional world with the action of the plot seem natural; but it’s hard work. At least for me. The challenge of the second draft is going to be making that hard work look effortless.
Diagramming the first sentences of famous novels
For Christmas one of my sons gave me a wonderful present–a poster showing the grammatical diagrams of the opening sentences of some famous novels. What a kid!
Here’s a column about this poster.titled “23 Sentence Diagrams That Show the Brilliance of Famous Novels’ Opening Lines”. It’s nice that Business Insider thinks that grammar and literature are worth a column, but the diagrams show nothing of the sort. Here, for example, is the first line of 1984:
This is a wonderful sentence, but its diagram doesn’t tell you why. Substitute the word “twelve” for the word “thirteen” and you just have bland scene-setting. The “thirteen” jars you–something is different here; something is off. That’s where the brilliance comes in.
Similarly, here is one of my favorites:
What makes this sentence brliiant? It’s the word “screaming,” of course. Substitute the word “plane” or “bird” and the sentence loses everything.
And another favorite, Lolita:
Hey, that isn’t even a sentence! You’ve gotta pretend it has a verb. But anyway, would this sentence work if it read: “Ernie, fixer of my brakes, changer of my oil”? Same diagram, but not quite the same effect. The brilliance comes from the alliteration and the rhythm; it’s closer to poetry than to prose.
Some famous first sentences having nothing much to recommend them except that they begin famous novels. Like:
This is a nice, short, punchy sentence, but there’s nothing special about the three words it contains. It’s memorable because of what comes after it.
Anyway, the poster is great, my kid is great, and the sentences are great. Let’s not oversell the concept, though.
No! Not an unreliable narrator!
In my post about first person narrative, I forgot to mention the sub-genre of unreliable first-person narrators. In my misspent book-reading youth I was quite enamored of such contrivances, even though I’ve never bothered with them in my own writing. An obvious example of an unreliable narrator is Huckleberry Finn, who often doesn’t quite understand the events or people he’s describing, so readers have to intuit what’s really happening.
But that’s pretty straightforward. More interesting, to me at any rate, are narrators who at first seem to be reliable, but whom we gradually realize aren’t, thereby requiring us to reassess the entire story. Just typing that sentence makes me want to re-read Nabokov’s Pnin and Pale Fire, which blew me away when I first read them decades ago.
I watch movies more than I read books nowadays (they’re shorter!), and unreliable narration seems to show up constantly in films and even in TV shows. Mad Men does it all the time. In last week’s episode (the first episode of the last half-season), we suddenly see one of Don’s old flames modeling a chinchilla coat for him. We are never told that this didn’t actually happen–we just have to figure out what’s going on in reality and what’s going on in Don’s somewhat enigmatic imagination.
The one time I really didn’t expect unreliable narration was in Hitchcock’s movie Stage Fright. This is a straightforward Hitchcock thriller, except for an early flashback that (spoiler alert) turns out to be a false version of a murder.
No! Not an unreliable narrator!
IMDB tells us that audiences were baffled and then enraged by this device, and I think I read somewhere that Hitchcock later called it the worst directorial decision he made in his career. It certainly gives you a jolt.
As I said, I don’t do this sort of thing in my writing, but I find myself close to the Huckleberry Finn style of unreliable narration sometimes in The Portal and its sequel, both of which are narrated by a young teenager. Sometimes, to be true to his character, he can’t be allowed to quite understand what’s going on.
I hope this doesn’t enrage my readers.
So that’s what my novel is all about!
When I’m writing a novel, there usually comes a point when I realize what it’s all about. Not the details of the plot–working them out is a constant process–but the reason I’m bothering to write it. It’s a bit odd that I never seem to figure this out before I starting in on the thing, but there you have it.
Anyway, I’m deeply into the first draft of the sequel to my novel The Portal, and I find that I have suddenly reached this point. Which is a considerable relief, actually. Now I’m not just telling a story; I’m telling a story that matters to me.
Richard Bowker 