Tag Archives: writing

Should a character’s name mean something?

Posted on by
3

The other day I had to introduce a couple of new characters in my novel and, as usual, this meant I had to pause and figure out what their names should be.  Why is this so hard?

This rule covers some of the basics–don’t confuse your readers with names that are too similar to each other; don’t give a character an ethnic name unless the ethnicity matters…  But there’s a deeper level at which a character’s name may feed into his characterization.  Or not.

Many names have connotations, and a writer needs to be sensitive to them.  “Brittany” says something to readers about a character, and “Edith” says something different. That doesn’t mean you can’t have an Edith who is trailer trash.  But if that’s what you’re up to, you’d better take a little time and explain what you’re doing.

So, the basic question is whether you want the character’s name to carry some of the weight of the characterization.  The more important the character, the less you want to rely on this, I think.  Even Dickens pulled back from his wonderfully evocative names–Havisham, Magwitch, Gradgrind–when it came to his most important or serious characters–Copperfield, Brownlow, Summerson.

Anyway, after ten minutes of pondering the state of my fictional universe, I welcomed Mrs. Fitz and her son Biff into it.  Will they survive my rewrites and second thoughts?  Only time will tell.

Why do authors rewrite?

Posted on by
2

I’m a big fan of rewriting.  But here’s an article from the Boston Globe making the point that rewriting hasn’t always been the standard.  One reason was technology:

In the age of Shakespeare and Milton, paper was an expensive luxury; blotting out a few lines was one thing, but producing draft after draft would have been quite another. Writers didn’t get to revise during the publishing process, either. Printing was slow and messy, and in the rare case a writer got to see a proof of his work—that is, a printed sample of the text, laid out like a book—he had to travel in person to a publishing center like London.

Another was a philosophical opposition to revisiting your original inspiration.  If you believe that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions, you’re not going to approve of a writing method that is deliberately unspontaneous.

The author points to Modernism as the source of our current deification of rewriting:

The Modernists wanted to produce avant-garde literature—literature that was less spontaneous and enthusiastic than it was startling and enigmatic. In an interview with the Paris Review, Hemingway famously described his “principle of the iceberg”: “There is seven-eighths of it under the water for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg.”

This is all pretty straightforward, although I’d point out that there’s solid evidence that Shakespeare did do some rewriting–for example, of King Lear, where the Quarto version is substantially different from that of the First Folio.  And I think the author doesn’t give enough weight to writing-as-a-job vs. writing-to-create-art. If your next meal depends on getting your novel finished, you’re not going to spend months revising its conclusion.

I’m on board, though, with the author’s discussion of the typewriter’s effect on rewriting.  The typewriter didn’t actually make rewriting easier; in a sense, it made the process harder.

Today we equate a keyboard with speed, the fastest way to get words down, but as Sullivan points out this wasn’t always the case. In fact, a typescript offered a chance to slow down. Most Modernist writers, like Hemingway with “The Sun Also Rises,” wrote by hand and then painstakingly typed up the results. That took time, but seeing their writing in such dramatically different forms—handwritten in a notebook, typed on a page, printed as a proof—encouraged them to revise it aggressively.

This was certainly my experience when I wrote my original drafts by hand.

Finally, the author points out that the computer may paradoxically make us less inclined to rewrite:

Today, most of us compose directly on our computers. Instead of generating physical page after physical page, which we can then reread and reorder, we now create a living document that, increasingly, is not printed at all until it becomes a final, published product. While this makes self-editing easier, Sullivan thinks it may paradoxically make wholesale revision, the kind that leads to radically rethinking our work, more difficult.

I think that’s right.  As I approach the end of the first draft of the novel I’m working on, I’m mulling how to approach the rewrite.  Do I start with the existing Word document, and just edit and add and cut and paste until I’m satisfied with the result?  Or do I re-keyboard the whole thing?  The former is certainly easier; just thinking about the latter makes me tired.  But re-keyboarding might cause me to re-imagine the story at a deeper level, and that might ultimately lead to a stronger finished product.

What’s a writer to do?

Rules for writing — Rule 12: End a chapter with a bang, not a whimper

Posted on by
1

My last post, on short sentences, reminded me that I haven’t been adding to my rules for writing, a somewhat randomly numbered series of guidelines that I try to follow, and you probably should too, if you’re writing mainstream novels.

The short sentence I discussed in that post came at the end of a chapter, which, as the Times article rightly pointed out, is a very good place to put a short sentence.  But what’s up with chapters?

Chapters are a nebulous concept.  If you were to ask me “How long should a chapter be?”, my response would be “I dunno.”  I don’t have a rule for that.  Sometimes you have a set piece that demands to be its own chapter, and the length is determined by the length of the set piece, but at other times you have a more or less continuous flow of action, or rapid-fire viewpoint changes, and it’s not at all obvious what function the chapter is playing, other than giving the reader an obvious place to stop reading, turn out the light, and go to sleep.

But you don’t want the reader to stop reading!  You don’t want the reader to go to sleep!

So the obvious thing to do is to end the chapter with something that forces the reader to keep reading into the next chapter.  And then I heard the screams. End of chapter.  What screams?  Who is screaming?  Better turn the page and find out.

This is the cliff-hanger approach to movie serials, and it’s such an obvious narrative ploy that I shouldn’t have to explain it to you.  Except that I keep screwing this up!  Twice so far in the first draft of the novel I’m writing I’ve ended a chapter with my narrator going to sleep.  That’s nuts — it’s an open invitation to the reader to go to sleep too.  If the narrator is safe in bed and nothing is going to happen till morning, there’s no reason to keep reading.  My writing group has had to gently remind me that the narrator shouldn’t go to bed at the end of the chapter — he should get whacked on the head by an unseen adversary, or discover a corpse, or fall into a bottomless ravine.  Or, you know, hear an unidentified person screaming.  And they couldn’t be more correct.

I’ll get this right in the second draft.  But in the meantime, I should print out this blog post and pin it next to my computer.  Let’s not screw up again.

Are five-word sentences the gospel truth?

Posted on by
5

Here’s a bland New York Times op-ed making the somewhat uncontroversial point that short sentences are good.  Particularly after long sentences.  Particularly at the end of paragraphs and chapters and novels.  This doesn’t seem like breaking news.  The author starts off with a pretty good story, though:

I learned an important lesson, somewhat unwittingly, on July 19, 1975, while watching an interview with two of my favorite writers, William F. Buckley Jr. and Tom Wolfe. Mr. Wolfe was making fun of an art critic who had begun an essay with the sentence “Art and ideas are one.”

“Now, I must give him credit for this,” said Mr. Wolfe. “If you ever have a preposterous statement to make … say it in five words or less, because we’re always used to five-word sentences as being the gospel truth.”

If that’s true, maybe I should end everything with a five-word sentence.

It turns out my writing group spent some time considering a six-word sentence I used to end a chapter of the novel I’m writing.  Here’s the sentence:

And then I heard the screams.

Pretty good, huh?  But folks were worried that readers would infer that multiple people were screaming, rather than one person screaming multiple times, which is what I intended.  Well, maybe. So someone suggested:

And then I heard the screaming.

But that didn’t seem to solve the original problem.  And it added an extra syllable to the sentence.  I didn’t like that extra syllable.  So we ended up with:

And then I heard the scream.

That solved the problem of multiple people screaming.  But it was somehow less powerful than the image of the narrator hearing scream after scream.

That’s where we left it.  Staring at the pixels, I’m tempted to make the last word plural once again.  Back where we started.  Maybe I should drop the “And” at the beginning.  That’ll give me the magic five-word sentence.  I could probably spend a lot of time figuring this out.

That’s why writing is fun.

Thoughts on sales ranking; also, a bad review and a good sunflower

Posted on by
Reply

After getting as high as about #46 on the Nook bestseller list, Senator is starting to fade like the Tampa Bay Rays.  Its sudden rise in the rankings got me thinking about how they are calculated. A brief tour of the Internet convinced me that this is a rat-hole from which one may never return.  The algorithms are proprietary and probably change periodically, so it’s all guesswork.

Since I’m dealing with a publisher rather than publishing my books myself, I don’t see the daily sales figures on Amazon and B&N, so there is no easy way for me to see how the ranking tracks these sales numbers.  But lots of self-published writers apparently have nothing better to do, and they are more than happy to opine about who the rankings are calculated.

The consensus, if you care, is that the ranking represents something like a 30-day moving average, with more recent sales weighted more heavily than sales earlier in the cycle. There is probably some residual effect from sales prior to the 30-day period, so a book that sells five copies a year will have a higher ranking than a book that sells one copy. I have no idea if this is anything like the truth, but it seems plausible to me.  And how many sales does a particular ranking represent?  This looks like a reasonable guess.  Of course, that’s for Amazon.  Barnes & Noble would presumably be something like 20% of that.

Anyway, the sales on Barnes & Noble have started to get Senator some reviews there.  Here is a remarkably bad one that I enjoyed (sort of).  It’s by our friend Anonymous and is titled “Awful”:

Was there a good guy anywhere in this mess? However samples at end were even worse and can now avoid all in future mom

What’s impressive about this is that the writer feels obliged to trash the samples as well as the novel.  Also, what’s up with the word “mom” at the end?  Is the writer trying to insinuate that “Anonymous” is actually my mother?  That’s harsh.

To make myself feel better, here’s a photo of some sunflowers from my garden:

sunflowers

 

Also, the Red Sox just beat the Yankees for the third time in a row, so there’s that.

Bad words from yesteryear

Posted on by
2

Here’s an interesting little post from the American Heritage Dictionary about words that a substantial percentage of its Usage Panel frowned upon in the mid-1960s. They include balding, choreograph, senior citizen, divorce (as an intransitive verb), and upcoming.

Reading these early ballot results has an oddly disorienting effect, standing as a vivid reminder that creeping changes in the English language have been going on constantly throughout our lives, often without our even noticing. All of the usages listed above have become so commonplace that we don’t bother to ballot them anymore, or to include usage notes for them in the dictionary. No doubt many of the usages that are widely condemned today will, in turn, quietly work their way into standard usage, until one day we’ll wonder why anyone ever objected to them.

I would just quibble with two of the words.

Balding has always struck me as an odd word; it sure looks like the present participle of the verb to bald.  But there is no such verb!  I wouldn’t be at all surprised if I have used the word to describe a character–the word is useful!  But I would never do it without a twinge of guilt.

Senior citizen is, I suppose, a phrase in good standing, but it only feels right to me it in certain contexts, like TV news reports, where euphemisms are more or less expected.  You would never use it in fiction to describe a character, except maybe ironically.

I have written before about words and phrases that seem to be in the process of changing, like jive as a synonym for jibe, and “I have a pit in my stomach” for “I have a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach.”  Let me add the transitive use of the verb graduate, as in, “When I graduate college, I’m going to become an English teacher.”  Interestingly, the battle used to be fought over the active vs. passive usage of graduate: “He graduated from college” vs. “He was graduated from college.”  Who exactly is doing the graduating?  That battle appears to have been lost, although you could still say: “The college graduated 300 seniors last Saturday.”

Is the language falling apart, or is it just changing?

An alternative cover

Posted on by
Reply

My publisher changed its mind about “Alternate History“.  The primary reason: Amazon uses “Alternative History” as its category for ebooks and “Alternate History” for books. So here is today’s cover:

9781614174639

 

My friend Kathy (who can’t possibly be old enough to be the parent of a tween) complains that using the word “History” on the cover will turn off kids the age of her son.  This is interesting.  Publishers feel the need to categorize novels, because readers tend to stick to their favorite genres, and it’s much harder to market a novel if it can’t be fit neatly into a genre.  (My first agent gave up on me when I sent him Marlborough Street and he had no idea how to pitch it to publishers.  My current publisher decided it was a “psychic thriller,” which I guess is a thing.)

Kathy also queries why the novel isn’t marketed directly to tweens — don’t they have their own category?  Yes, they do.  But I’m pretty sure adults will enjoy The Portal, and if you market a novel specifically to young adults, you’re not going to get any adults reading it (unless you’re J.K. Rowling).  So, I dunno.  I’d much rather write the stuff than figure out how to market it.

“Pontiff” and Pope Francis; thrillers and reality

Posted on by
2

Life is kinda boring.  That’s why thriller writers are required to amp things up.  There are some vague parallels between Pope John in my novel Pontiff and Pope Francis in the real world.  Both were elected to the papacy at least somewhat for geopolitical reasons–my Pope John because he was an African; Pope Francis because he’s from South America.  In both cases the new papacy seems to some to be a breath of fresh air after the previous pope: liberals get their hopes up, conservatives start fretting.

But that’s about where the comparisons run out of steam.  In real life, Pope Francis has said some things that have gotten liberal hearts a-flutter, but on closer inspection they don’t represent any kind of real change in policy or dogma, just a slight change in emphasis, maybe just a rhetorical device.  His recent remarks on gays are an example. It’s nice that he doesn’t want to judge gays; on the other hand, his remarks didn’t hint at changing the Church’s stance on the sinfulness of homosexual behavior, as traditional Catholics (almost gleefully) point out. A change in rhetoric is interesting (and may conceivably affect someone’s life for the better), but it doesn’t make for a thriller.

Anyway, here’s the big speech I give to the new Pope John about change in the Church.  He has been asking a bunch of cardinals what they think is the biggest challenge facing the Church–they mention obedience, money, the decline in vocations.  Then his secretary of state, Cardinal Valli, asks him what he thinks.  We see the scene through the eyes of Cardinal Riccielli, who is head of the Vatican Bank.  (It was the scandal around the Vatican Bank that Pope Francis was addressing in his remarks on gays.  The Vatican Bank is one area where life is as interesting as fiction.)

What would Valli say when his turn came? Riccielli expected that others were wondering the same thing. Many of them looked to Valli for guidance, for a sense of how to deal with their new leader. But Valli was saying nothing. Finally the pope asked him directly. “Cardinal Valli, surely you have some thoughts on the challenges facing the Church. Would you share them with us?”

And Valli slowly shook his head in response. “Holiness, what I think is of utterly no importance. All that matters is what you think. I ask you to share your thoughts with us.”

The room was silent. Would the pope think Valli was being impertinent? The pope continued to smile, staring at Valli with his large brown eyes, and finally he nodded, almost imperceptibly. “Of course, your Eminence,” he said, so softly this time that Riccielli had to lean forward to hear. “I am not a philosopher, though. I am not a theologian. Some would even say that I am not an especially worldly man. I have spent too much time fighting minor battles in a faraway land. So I am not prepared to make any grand pronouncements. I do want to listen, and learn.

“But I will say this. I believe that the Church’s problem is not that its members are insufficiently obedient to its teachings, but that the Church is insufficiently responsive to the needs of its members. We are in many respects a powerful and effective body, but too many people no longer listen to us; for too many people, we no longer matter. And if we do matter, it is because they believe we are an obstacle to the fulfillment of their humanity and the true expression of their faith.

“I believe this has happened because the Church has become too focused on matters that are not central to the truths we espouse: the reality of Our Lord’s death and resurrection, and our witness to it in this world.

“I have had to counsel a young priest in tears as he petitioned to be laicized. He loved the Church, loved his vocation, but the burden of celibacy was just too great. He was sinning, and he did not want to sin. We have seen far too much of this lately.

“I have talked to young mothers terrified that they would become pregnant again and be forced to bear children they could not afford to feed.

“I have visited AIDS clinics and listened as doctors told me how many of those ravaged people I saw would have remained healthy if the Church had eased its prohibition against the use of condoms.

“We cannot be blind to the very real consequences of our actions and pronouncements. And we must try to find a way back into the hearts of our people. That is what I think I must do as pope.”

Silence again. The uncomfortable silence, Riccielli realized, of people whose worst nightmares have just come true. Krajcek looked as if he were about to have a stroke. Valli stared at his hands and said nothing in response. Did he regret asking the question? No, they needed to hear this, even if most of them disagreed profoundly.

It was left to Rattner to break the silence—Rattner, the sallow, outspoken Austrian, whose resignation from his congregation had been tendered and accepted, and who therefore had nothing to lose. “The Church is not involved in a popularity contest, your Holiness,” he observed. “We have a sacred obligation to protect the Deposit of Faith, and not to bend with every wind that blows.”

Krajcek revived enough to add, “The Church’s positions on contraception, abortion, clerical celibacy—they are long settled. If they cause some people pain—well, perhaps that is because God’s law is not always easy, and people today are always looking for the easy way out.”

Pope John shrugged. “As I said, I am making no grand pronouncements. I wish only to share some of my thoughts. I don’t ask for your agreement, I ask only that you hear me out, and keep an open mind.”

Keep an open mind. Did the pope think this was merely an abstract theological discussion? Riccielli wondered. Didn’t he realize that his every utterance in this room would be dissected and interpreted like a passage from Revelation, that they would go flying to the far corners of Christendom, repeated and amplified and distorted? In his soft-spoken way he had all but declared war on most of these men, challenging their most basic beliefs, their views of themselves and their Church. They were not likely to keep an open mind.

No one seemed inclined to offer further challenges, however. Were they too shocked? Or too frightened of what he might say next? Rufio offered some pious babble in an attempt to improve the mood, but he didn’t get much response. Finally the pope thanked everyone profusely and brought the meeting to a close.

And this is the setup for the thrillery stuff that follows.

First Rowling, then Shakespeare… who’s next?

Posted on by
1

The Times today has an article about the possibility that Shakespeare wrote a passage in an edition of The Spanish Tragedy, an early Elizabethan play by Thomas Kyd.  The original computer analysis (by Brian Vickers) was very similar to that used to suggest that J. K. Rowling was the author of The Cuckoo’s Calling, which we talked about here.  Big Think describes what Vickers did:

Sir Brian has employed software called Pl@giarism–a free program developed by Maastricht University to catch law students cheating on their written work–to search a database of the 58 different plays performed in London between 1580 and 1595. But Sir Brian isn’t looking to catch anyone cheating. Rather, he is looking for examples of so-called “self-plagiarism.” The Pl@giarism software identifies every occasion that a sequence of three words appears in Shakespeare’s known works, and then looks for repetitions of these sequences in an unattributed text. Some of these word sequences are common, everyday collocations such as “by the way” or “Yes, my lord.”

Excluding those phrases, Sir Brian focuses on word sequences that are unique to Shakespeare. For instance, the word sequence “eyebrows jutty over” appears only twice in all of Elizabethan drama. One instance is in Shakespeare’s Henry V, written in approximately 1599. The only other instance is found in the fourth edition of Thomas Kyd’s “The Spanish Tragedy,” published in 1602. This version contains additions to five scenes, totaling 320 lines. In these short passages, Sir Brian found 46 collocation matches that are completely unique to Shakespeare’s poems and plays written before 1596. That evidence is hard to argue with.

What got the Times’ attention was another paper that focuses on Shakespeare’s handwriting and how that helps explain oddities in the passage:

In a terse four-page paper, to be published in the September issue of the journal Notes and Queries, Douglas Bruster argues that various idiosyncratic features of the Additional Passages — including some awkward lines that have struck some doubters as distinctly sub-Shakespearean — may be explained as print shop misreadings of Shakespeare’s penmanship.

“What we’ve got here isn’t bad writing, but bad handwriting,” Mr. Bruster said in a telephone interview.

What I couldn’t find in a cursory Google search was the actual passage in question.  It’s easy enough, though, to find the standard sample of Shakespeare’s messy handwriting–the passage from the manuscript of the play Sir Thomas More that is generally agreed to be by Shakespeare:

Next time, should J. K. Rowling disguise her writing style?

Posted on by
1

Here’s an interesting interview on Science Friday with Patrick Juola, the guy who’s computerized analysis helped identify J. K. Rowling as the author of the mystery The Cuckoo’s Calling.  He gives much more detail about exactly what kind of analysis he did over at Language Log.  Essentially, he compared the novel to works by Rowling, P.D. James, Ruth Rendell, and Val McDermid on four linguistic variables: distribution of word lengths, use of the 100 most common English words, and two other tests based on authorial vocabulary.

So, the final score? The results look “mixed,” but pointing strongly to Rowlng. There were certainly a couple of likely losers: nothing at all pointed to Rendell as a possible author, and only one test, and an unreliable one at that, suggested James. McDermid could be a reasonable candidate author, but the word length distribution seemed almost entirely uncharacteristic of her. The only person consistently suggested by every analysis was Rowling, who showed up as the winner or the runner-up in each instance.

One of the comments to Juola’s Language Log post suggests that a determined author can defeat analyses like these.  This is referred to as “adversarial stylometry.”  There are two basic approaches: obfuscation, where you try to simply hide your own style, and imitation, where you try to copy someone else’s style.  (A third approach is machine translation, where you translate an original passage using machine translation services.)  I doubt that any of this is worth Rowling’s time, but you might consider it if, say, you’re a whistleblower who wants to remain anonymous.

Of course, all of this analysis is overshadowed by the Onion’s shocking revelation that J.K. Rowling’s books were really written by Newt Gingrich:

“Assuming a fake identity really gave me a lot of freedom to build out the world of Hogwarts and flesh out the characters without drawing unwanted attention to myself or having the novels associated in any way with my political career,” Gingrich said in a statement, confirming reports he wrote the first four books in the fantasy series while still in office, but wrote the remainder before his 2012 presidential run.

Why do people rely on anything besides the Onion for their news?