Why would a novelist Ask Amy about how to handle criticism?

Posted on July 31, 2013 by Richard Bowker

A first-time novelist writes in to Ask Amy with this problem: a friend does not like the way the novelist portrayed a character who is loosely based on her. The friend has responded with a scathing, personal online review, saying the novelist needs counseling. The novelist whines to Amy:

How can I convey to her that while this fictional character shares many of her attributes, it is not her?

The novelist published her book using a pseudonym because she was afraid of negative feedback. Amy says:

Negative feedback is one of many risks you take as a writer and until you can truly claim ownership of your work (no matter what name you use), you will be on the run — creatively, anyway.

Amy, that wise woman, is right, as usual. This is a war a writer cannot win, so it’s not even worth trying. At an extreme, here is how the conversation will go:

Ex-friend: “That awful character in your novel — it’s based on me. Admit it.”

Befuddled writer: “How can the character be based on you? It’s not even human! It’s a telepathic slug from the planet Remulon!”

Ex-friend: “Sure, you changed a couple of the details. But everyone can tell it’s me.”

Ultimately, of course, the writer has to choose which matters more: his art or his personal relationships. And that brings us to this great quote from William Faulkner:

The writer’s only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much that he can’t get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is worth any number of old ladies.

Sorry, Mom!

I really don’t care what Harry Bosch had for dinner

Posted on July 28, 2013 by Richard Bowker

I like to listen to Harry Bosch novels on my endless commute. They don’t require deep thinking, and the narrators are really good. One problem with audio books, though, is you can’t skim. And there are lots of times in a Harry Bosch novel where I really want to skim.

I won’t bother discussing the endless descriptions of Bosch listening to CDs of jazz performances. These are by definition boring. Instead I want to talk about the endless descriptions of the restaurants he goes to and what he orders and what toppings he has on his pizza and how much macaroni and cheese is left over after dinner with his daughter and ARGGH! Make it stop!

There is, I’m sure, a rationale for this obsession with Harry Bosch and food. Presumably Connelly wants to show us how cops live in present-day LA. Here are their hangouts. Here’s where they eat when they go to court or the shooting range or the forensics lab. And here’s the kind of food a typical cop likes to eat. But I don’t care. Just tell the story.

I have a personal rule for writing that says I don’t put in anything that I’m unlikely to read in someone else’s novel. Five hundred words about a sunset? No thank you. How well a certain Merlot goes with steak tips? Spare me. Nothing about women’s shoes. And, of course, nothing about jazz. Never, ever, anything about jazz.

Just a quick visit to a parallel universe — what could possibly go wrong?

Posted on July 27, 2013 by Richard Bowker

Creativity is an odd thing. Best not to think to deeply about it.

My e-book folks are working on the cover for Portal, and they asked me to come up with a tag line for it. A tag line summarizes a book in about twenty words or less, in a way that will make the casual reader want to buy the thing. Tag lines are hard. I don’t do tag lines. My brain was an utter blank for a week, so I started writing an email to them saying we’ll have to do without one.

And then creativity happened.

But that would be too easy: Dan Brown’s “I could kill you now, Mr. Bond” problem

Posted on July 14, 2013 by Richard Bowker

The Heat is a hilarious movie that doesn’t bother much with plausibility. Towards the end Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy track down the bad guys to a warehouse, kill a few of them, but then get captured by the #2 bad guy. He could simply shoot them, of course, but he decides to tie them up and torture them first. Oh, no! The torture is about to begin when he is called upstairs to a meeting with the #1 bad guy. So Sandra and Melissa get to exchange some snappy dialog, figure out how to untie themselves, and carry on with the plot.

This is a standard action movie sequence. The hero doesn’t get killed as the climax approaches; he gets tied up. My friend Craig Gardner calls this the “I could kill you now, Mr. Bond” moment. The evil mastermind has Bond in his clutches, but his hubris makes him say something like: “I could kill you now, Mr. Bond. But that would be too easy. Instead, I will let you watch as I carry out my plan for world domination. And then you will die a slow, horrible death.”

The evil mastermind’s hubris always leads to his downfall in these movies, of course. And in the meantime we get to see the hero extricate himself from a difficult situation just in the nick of time to save the world.

Dan Brown’s Inferno is an action novel that features a standard evil mastermind with plenty of hubris. Stripped of its endless lessons about art and literature and history and geography, it’s a James Bond novel. Except that Brown makes a lot of odd plotting decisions that, for me at least, screw up this basic plot structure completely and fundamentally ruin the novel. Spoiler alert: don’t read on if you are going to care about this plot:

First and foremost, the entire plot is predicated on the evil mastermind’s hubris, not just the climactic scene where he decides to keep the hero alive. Nothing that happens in the book has to happen, except that this guy decides to leave some clever clues behind, mainly because he can. He could simply have carried out his evil plan without telling anyone.
Second, and almost as bad, all the hero’s running around trying to stop the evil plan doesn’t amount to anything whatsoever because the evil plan has already successfully taken place by the time the novel starts. We just don’t find out until page 400 or so. So the action is doubly pointless. Robert Langdon has raced around Florence and Venice and Istanbul for absolutely no reason.
Next, the evil mastermind is dead by the time the plot starts. So there is no opportunity for a climactic confrontation, and his explanations for what he is doing all take place in flashback.
Finally–and I find this deeply weird–Brown seems to agree with the evil mastermind. Well, Brown seems to be saying, his methods may not have been the best, but his analysis of the overpopulation problem was accurate, and obviously something more needs to be done . . . He never allows any of the good guys to offer a convincing rebuttal to that analysis, although surely one exists (I could do a better job than the good guys, frankly).

So we spend the novel rooting for Langdon to succeed, but ultimately we find out that he couldn’t have succeeded, and we probably wouldn’t have wanted him to succeed. What a letdown.

Know what Dan Brown needs?! The interrobang!!!!

Posted on July 13, 2013 by Richard Bowker

The interrobang is almost a real thing, and Dan Brown is successful enough to demand that his publisher give him a font that includes one, like so:

His breathless, italics-laden style is what the interrobang was designed for. Here are some random examples from Inferno:

What the hell do they think I did? Why is my own government hunting me?!

Here he needs interrobangs in consecutive sentences:

Has the speech been canceled?! The city is in near shutdown due to the weather . . . has it kept Zobrist from coming tonight?!

This example is in Italian, although the translation apparently doesn’t require one:

“Lei è Robert Langdon, vero?!” You’re Robert Langdon, aren’t you?”

Here Brown reverses the order of the punctuation marks, for some reason that is too subtle for me to make out. Perhaps we need a banginterro for this usage:

He turned to the woman. “How do we get up there!?”

Somewhere I learned the rule that a writer should avoid exclamation points: your prose should convey the excitement, not your punctuation. But Dan Brown doesn’t need such lessons; he needs the interrobang.

By the way, let’s not confuse the punctuation mark with this local band that I’ve actually heard play (and some of whose members have hung out at my house). Or this other band with almost the same name. With so many great names for bands floating around the universe, why is this happening?

What’s the best book you couldn’t finish?

Posted on July 10, 2013 by Richard Bowker

Goodreads has a list of the top five books that people couldn’t finish:

Hmm. I’ve already posted about my inability to finish Atlas Shrugged. Its popularity makes me realize there is a limit to my ability to understand human nature. I re-read Moby Dick a couple of years ago; I finished it, but I have to admit it was a struggle — too much stuff about whaling! Ulysses is not a book you’re going to get through without a large commitment of time and effort; plus, you’re going to need some help. But it surely repays the effort. I have no idea why anyone would have any difficulty finishing Lord of the Rings or Catch-22.

I suppose the most important book I haven’t been able to finish is Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (if you consider that a single novel). I forced myself to read Swann’s Way a few years ago, but I hated every minute of it. I also couldn’t make it through anything by Thomas Mann except Death in Venice; I only finished that one because it was so short.

There are plenty of lesser novels that I haven’t finished, and I get more impatient as I grow older. I did manage to finish Dan Brown’s Inferno, though, and I’ll blog about that when I gather up my courage.

Summit will now cost you money

Posted on July 2, 2013 by Richard Bowker

I told you to download Summit from Amazon when it was free, but you didn’t listen to me. You never listen to me. Now you have to pay $2.84 for it. Why $2.84? I don’t know. But it’s worth it! Probably worth even $2.99, now that I think about it.

The purpose of making the book free was to generate some nice reviews, and I got some! Here’s a sampling:

This is a well written, well -rounded, exciting book. I loved it and will be looking for all books by Mr Richard Bowker. I do NOT give five stars often or lightly, but I am impressed Summit. So if you like thrillers, this is a great one to read. And Mr Bowker, if you ever need a beta reader, I would be thrilled to do it.

And:

The author has a way of bringing you right into the story; the characters are believable and flawed. The sprinkle of romance is fun and the Mr Bowker’s knowledge of classical music and the ability to identify the problems of a classical music prodigy are amazing.
Above all the plot twists and turns were extremely suspenseful.
I also appreciated the author not painting the Russians as all evil and U.S. as all good.
I wish Bill Sullivan had a better ending, but such is life. More importantly, Fulton and Valentina (more than) survive.
A great read, thanks !

I wish Sullivan had a better ending, too! And:

Richard Bowker manages to give lots of credibility to the subject of psychics. What is there not to agree in the end? Psychics do exist, even if their lives are depicted more in the dark forces type of books than in a thriller.
Deep thoughtful take on American and Russian ideals, the perceptions and beliefs ingrained in their nationals to infuse a patriotic love, which makes us explore our own psyche and rattles perhaps our own confidence in our righteousness. The same political corruption and power greed exists at all levels, in all countries- and is perfectly delineated in the pages of this book. It is difficult not to love the heroes, and the insertion of a love story makes the read even more enjoyable for female readership. I did enjoy this book till the (perfect) end.

And, as a reminder,here’s the exciting new cover:

Dan Brown’s Inferno: Round 1

Posted on June 29, 2013 by Richard Bowker

I have finally gotten up my nerve and started reading a Dan Brown novel. I’m 40 pages into Inferno, and I haven’t thrown the book across the room yet. So that’s good.

On the plus side, Brown clearly knows how to write a plot-driven thriller. The action is standard superhero stuff, involving amnesia and a nameless villain and a shadowy organization known only as The Consortium, but it’s not so ridiculous that I don’t want to find out what’s going on. And his style is OK: he still has to tell us the exact size of Brunelleschi’s Dome in Florence, but the “index-card” writing isn’t as blatant as in the sample chapter I read of one of his earlier books.

On the minus side, the one thing I know something about so far, Brown didn’t get right. And that makes me wary about Brown’s mastery of detail. He has his Harvard professor hero, Robert Langton, wake up in a hospital with amnesia. The doctor asks him where he thinks he is. The last thing he can remember is walking across the Harvard campus, so he guesses: “Massachusetts General Hospital?” There are two things wrong with that answer. First, if you’re from around here, you’d simply say “Mass General.” No one says “Massachusetts General Hospital.” Second, he’d know if he had a medical problem at Harvard he’d end up at Mount Auburn Hospital, just down the road in Cambridge. But of course that’s a much less interesting answer than the world-famous hospital a few miles further away.

And then there is the doctor. OK, she’s beautiful, and also lissome (which is a dopey word), and she drops everything to save Langton’s life when the spiky-haired female assassin (who was probably also lissome) starts shooting the place up. That’s pretty standard. But does she also have to have an IQ of 208? Did she also have to play Puck in Midsummer Night’s Dream at the age of five? Realism clearly isn’t what Brown is after here (although he index-cards a couple of real child prodigies that Langton happens to know about). At that point you have to decide you’re just going to go with the flow. Or you throw the book across the room.

Future perfect

Posted on June 23, 2013 by Richard Bowker

The deeper I get into the novel I’m working on, the more irrelevant my outline, and my earlier chapters, seem to become. I’m now closing in on the halfway point, and I’m in a chapter that I had no clue would need to be written when I began the book.

I am a big fan of rewriting, and I long to go back and set myself straight about how the beginning of the novel really needs to work. But that’s stupid–in another 20,000 words I might have a totally new set of changes to make. So I litter my text with bracketed editorial notes reminding me about what has to change in the next draft. Today I realized that I had neglected to give one of my characters a last name–it hadn’t seemed necessary way back when I introduced him, but his role in the novel keeps growing. So my note says: [Scott will have been given a last name when he is introduced.]

If I have my grammatical terms correct, the verb tense I am using in these notes is the future perfect. And that seems about right. Someday my novel will be perfect; just not yet.

Farewell to Portal

Posted on June 11, 2013 by Richard Bowker

Thanks to everyone who followed along with (or who is following along with) Portal. The next step is to turn it into an ebook; that’s in process. As usual, the biggest issue is what to do about the cover. If anyone has any suggestions, I’d be happy to hear them.

Portal was my attempt to write a Young Adult novel, but I think I got a bit carried away. The novel ended up longer, and the issues I covered were deeper, than I had intended. I have no idea if modern-day young adults would have the patience for it. Still, I enjoyed inhabiting its worlds for a while, and I enjoyed writing from Larry’s point of view. Let me know what you think.

Here’s Chapter 1, if you’re just stopping by and have no idea what I’m talking about.