Tag Archives: writing

A Spool of Blue Thread

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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.

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

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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

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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

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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:

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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.

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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.

A nice review for “The Portal”

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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.

World-building and storytelling

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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

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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.

Should Charlie Hebdo get an award?

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PEN wants to give Charlie Hebdo its “freedom of expression courage” award.  This has provoked an outcry from many writers. PEN isn’t backing down, saying that they reject the “assassin’s veto”.

My son lives in the Middle East, and he was baffled by the “Je Suis Charlie” thing.  Why isn’t the West protesting the many courageous Muslim bloggers and journalists being persecuted by autocratic governments in the Middle East and elsewhere?  Well, fair enough, I’m happy if they get awards too.  But I’m a part of the West, and free speech is one of the things the West does right.  As a writer, that matters to me.

Nowadays, the “most helpful” review of my novel Senator on Barnes & Noble is a one-star review complaining that it used the Lord’s name in vain multiple times at the beginning, so the anonymous reviewer read no further.  Again, fair enough.  Readers who don’t approve of using the Lord’s name in vain have been warned.  But nowadays I could easily imagine a world where offending religious people like my anonymous reviewer would be illegal (especially in Europe); or, where corporations like Barnes & Noble would decline to sell books that contained certain words or phrases deemed offensive to a religion.  (Does Barnes & Noble sell books that contain imagines of Mohammed?  I have no idea.)

I have this sense that conventional liberalism has lots its way over this issue–or at least, it’s too vexing an issue for liberals to respond to it coherently.  What happens when two core liberal values–diversity and freedom of speech–collide?  When blacks on campus claim they are the victims of hate speech?  When Muslims claim they have been scapegoated for the actions of a few crazy terrorists?  Do we have to parse all of Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons to determine if the magazine is worthy of an award?

Here’s a paragraph from the PEN statement that I like very much:

The rising prevalence of various efforts to delimit speech and narrow the bounds of any permitted speech concern us; we defend free speech above its contents. We do not believe that any of us must endorse the content of Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons in order to affirm the importance of the medium of satire, or to applaud the staff’s bravery in holding fast to those values in the face of life and death threats. There is courage in refusing the very idea of forbidden statements, an urgent brilliance in saying what you have been told not to say in order to make it sayable.

Good for them.