Tag Archives: writing

Bad beginnings; also some good ones

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Here are the 2012 winners of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, which celebrates the worst opening sentences that people can concoct for novels you’ll never want to read.  This is the overall winner:

As he told her that he loved her she gazed into his eyes, wondering, as she noted the infestation of eyelash mites, the tiny deodicids burrowing into his follicles to eat the greasy sebum therein, each female laying up to 25 eggs in a single follicle, causing inflammation, whether the eyes are truly the windows of the soul; and, if so, his soul needed regrouting.

Here’s the winner in the crime category:

She slinked through my door wearing a dress that looked like it had been painted on … not with good paint, like Behr or Sherwin-Williams, but with that watered-down stuff that bubbles up right away if you don’t prime the surface before you slap it on, and – just like that cheap paint – the dress needed two more coats to cover her.

If you prefer shorter badness, you can try the Lyttle Lytton awards, which give you a maximum of 200 characters to be awful.  Here is the 2012 winner:

Agent Jeffrey’s trained eyes rolled carefully around the room, taking in the sights and sounds.

These entries are generally much more subtle in their awfulness than the Bulwer-Lytton ones, which rely on top-heavy metaphors and overly detailed descriptions for their comic effect.  Here’s a fantasy runner-up in the Lyttle Lytton contest that for some reason struck me as hilarious:

Kaldor fondled the hilt of his sword with his lanky fingers and inhaled the sunrise. “I taste the future blood of my enemies,” he relished.

So how about a few good beginnings to wipe that bad taste out of your mouth?  Amazon’s “Click to Look Inside” feature makes it easy to check out the opening of any book.  Beginnings aren’t as crucial to novels as their endings.  Sometimes the writer needs to take his time to set things up.  Here is the matter-of-fact beginning of Great Expectations, whose ending we talked about previously:

My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.

Then there’s the spectacular opening of Lolita, after the hilarious faux foreword, which tells us the story should make all of us “apply ourselves with still greater vigilance and vision to the task of bringing up a better generation in a safer world”:

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth.  Lo. Lee. Ta.

How about Gravity’s Rainbow, whose opening sentence is so central to the novel that it was reproduced on the cover of the original edition:

A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare to it now.

And here are the great opening sentences of Slaughterhouse Five:

All this happened, more or less.  The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.

Makes me want to read all these books all over again.

Pondering the top 100 novels

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Gore Vidal’s recent death led me to the Modern Library’s list of the top 100 English-language novels of the twentieth century.  The list has been around since 1999, but I didn’t realize it was online (as of course it was bound to be).  There are actually two lists–one from the Modern Library board, the other based on votes from readers–and the latter was hilarious hijacked by Ayn Rand and L. Ron Hubbard zealots (also Charles de Lint fans, for some reason).

Vidal isn’t on either list.  I hadn’t expected him to be, although I enjoyed the two or three novels of his that I read.  On the board’s list there is no John Updike, no Thomas Pynchon (although V and Gravity’s Rainbow are on the readers’ list), no Don DeLillo, no John Barth, Eudora Welty, Harper Lee, or John Irving.  Surprisingly, John O’Hara makes the list, as does Thornton Wilder.  I was pleased to see John Cheever represented, although he was primarily a short-story writer.  The board’s science fiction choices are standard: 1984, Brave New World, Slaughterhouse-Five, Lord of the Flies, and A Clockwork Orange.  No Tolkien. Too much D. H. Lawrence and Saul Bellow for my taste.

I’ve read a little over half the novels on the list.  In particular, I seem to have missed a bunch of early twentieth-century American novels that the board thinks highly of — An American Tragedy; Winesburg, Ohio; Sister Carrie; the U.S.A trilogy; the Studs Lonigan trilogy; The Magnificent Ambersons….  Are they worth my time?

The list-making doesn’t amount to much, I suppose, except to get me (and others) to add books to their endless readling lists.  Same for the new list of the top movies of all time.  Is Vertigo really better than Citizen Kane?  Who cares?  Seen ’em both; liked ’em both.  But I’ve never heard of Sunrise, and it’s now in my Netflix queue.  And I guess I’ll give Sherwood Anderson a try, too.

What it’s like to be a young writer

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Yesterday I mentioned the young Harvard writer, Kaavya Viswanathan, who apparently stole material for a YA novel she wrote in the summer after high school.  Here’s what she said in an interview on NBC:

All I can say is that I’ve read both of Megan McCafferty’s books, “Sloppy Firsts” and “Second Helpings” when I was in high school.  I think the first one came out when I was about 14, and I read both those books three or four times each.  I completely see the similarities, I’m not denying that those are there, but I can honestly say that any of those similarities were completely unconscious and unintentional, that while I was reading Megan McCafferty’s books, I must have just internalized her words.  I never, ever intended to deliberately take any of her words.

The Wikipedia article about her novel points out other similarities to other books from other writers.  They’re pretty obvious.  I don’t want to litigate this.  It could be that this was all a calculated attempt to craft a novel that would get her into Harvard and make a name for herself.  Her parents had hired some consulting agency to help with the college admissions process, and it sounds like she had a good bit of assistance, from them and others, in writing, packaging, and marketing the novel.  But I’d like to assume it was something entirely different — that this was a girl who was desperate to become a writer, and was just too young to pull it off by herself.

I’d like to think that because it feels awfully familiar to me.  Like a lot of would-be writers, I suspect, I wanted to become a writer from a very early age.  And, again, like a lot of those would-be writers, I had two major problems:

  • I didn’t know how to write.
  • I didn’t have anything to write about.

As a result, I had to live in other people’s imaginations.  And what a wonderful place that was!  I remember when I was about eleven years old reading a science fiction novel that I couldn’t get out of my head.  So I decided to write my own science fiction novel — in pencil, with my own hand-drawn illustrations.  The plot, as I recall it, was pretty much the same as that of the novel I had read, except that I was the hero.  I don’t think I got more than a few pages into the thing before I abandoned it.  It’s much easier to read than to write.

I got better at writing as I got older, but it was always hard to escape other people’s imaginations — they lived more interesting lives, thought more interesting thoughts, and could express themselves in more interesting ways.  I couldn’t compete.  So when I wrote a short story, it would come out sounding like an adolescent imitation of a Graham Greene short story, or an Isaac Asimov short story, or a Ray Bradbury short story.  What I wrote didn’t sound like me, because I didn’t yet have a sound.

So I can imagine an 18-year-old girl from India desperately wanting to write a novel about her life in America, but I can’t imagine her pulling it off.  Not without channeling all the authors she had read who had helped her make sense of her experiences, who had helped form her imagination.  And maybe what she wrote with the help (conscious or unconscious) of those authors was pretty good: it got her parents excited, it got her college admissions consultants excited, it got her an agent and some assistance in fleshing out her ideas, and before long everything spiraled out of control.  She was no longer just a kid dreaming of becoming a writer; she was a professional.  And that’s when her problems started.

That’s what I’d like to think.

Self-plagiarism is one thing; making stuff up is something else entirely

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The last time we encountered Jonah Lehrer, he had been caught committing the odd crime of self-plagiarism.  Things have now taken a turn for the worse. In fact, his meteoric career has crashed and burned, as meteors tend to do, with the revelation that he fabricated Bob Dylan quotes in his book Imagine: How Creativity Works.  This time he ran afoul of the relentless reporting of a journalist and Dylan freak named Michael Moynihan, writing for Tablet magazine.  (Tablet‘s website has apparently also crashed and burned, and I can’t link to the article.)  Here is a report that quotes Moynihan:

I’m something of the Dylan obsessive — piles of live bootlegs, outtakes, books — and I read the first chapter of Imagine with keen interest. But when I looked for sources to a handful of Dylan quotations offered by Lehrer — the chapter is sparsely and erratically footnoted — I came up empty, and in one case found two fragments of quotes, from different years and on different topics, welded together to create something that happily complimented Lehrer’s argument. Other quotes I couldn’t locate at all.

He finally got Lehrer to confess.  The result: his book has been recalled, and he has had to resign from the New Yorker.

I imagine that Lehrer thought he could get away with his fabrications because book publishers don’t do the kind of obsessive fact-checking that the New Yorker is famous for.  But it’s a terrible risk to take, especially when you’re fabricating Bob Dylan quotes for a public with any number of Dylan obsessives in it.  As with the self-plagiarism, it seems to be a case of cutting corners.  At least he came up with what sounds like a sincere apology:

The lies are over now. I understand the gravity of my position. I want to apologize to everyone I have let down, especially my editors and readers. I also owe a sincere apology to Mr. Moynihan. I will do my best to correct the record and ensure that my misquotations and mistakes are fixed.

That’s pretty classy in a world of mealy-mouthed passive-voice pseudo-apologies. The classic in this genre is Newt Gingrich blaming his love of country for his adulteries:

“There’s no question at times of my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked far too hard and things happened in my life that were not appropriate.”

Things happened–lovely.  Anyway, this blog is primarily about fiction, and in fiction you don’t have to apologize for making stuff up.  On the other hand, you do have to apologize for stealing stuff.  Don’t steal stuff. It’s not worth the risk of getting caught, and the more successful you are, the more likely you are to get caught.  Here is the sad story of an overachieving Harvard student who plagiarized passages in a big-time young-adult chick-lit novel she wrote.  Wikipedia tells you much more than you want to know, comparing passages from her novel with similar passages from half a dozen others.  The really sad part of the story is that a few years after the plagiarism controversy her parents died in a plane crash.

I hope she gets over it.  I hope Lehrer gets over it, although I doubt he will.  From the New Yorker blog posts I read, I’d say the guy knows how to write.  He just lost sight of the rules.

Great Expectations and sad endings

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Here we saw how Hemingway struggled with the ending to A Farewell to Arms. You need to get the ending right.

For some novels, the most important decision will be whether the ending is sad or happy.  You’d think this decision would flow inevitably from the story you’re telling.  In some cases, that’s true.  In a genre private eye novel, the private eye will crack the case.  In a genre romance, girl will get boy.  In mainstream Hollywood movies nowadays, you’re pretty much guaranteed a happy ending; otherwise the movie wouldn’t have gotten made.  But for lots of novels, the ending balances on a knife edge between life and death, marriage and loneliness, joy and despair.  That, in fact, is what keeps the reader reading.  The author gets to make the call.

The ending to Pontiff caused me the most problems in this regard.  Should girl get boy, when boy is a priest?  If so, does that qualify as a happy ending?  In any case, did the ending work–was it true to the story?  Lemme know! (There is another sad aspect of the story that involves the death of a character at the climax, and I really didn’t want to do it.  But my plot gave me no choice.)

King Lear‘s ending is so damn sad that even critics like Samuel Johnson thought it was unbearable. For 300 years, from the Restoration to the mid-nineteenth century, the only version performed was a revision by Nahum Tate in which Cordelia survived and married Edgar. We have seen evidence that Shakespeare revised the play, but the revisions, if anything, made the play’s ending sadder.

The most celebrated case of revising an ending to make it happier was Great Expectations.

Dickens’ original ending was bleak. The narrator, Pip, who has been in love with the unattainable Estella since he first laid eyes on her, meets her on the street many years later:

It was four years more, before I saw herself. I had heard of her as leading a most unhappy life, and as being separated from her husband who had used her with great cruelty, and who had become quite renowned as a compound of pride, brutality, and meanness.

I had heard of the death of her husband (from an accident consequent on ill-treating a horse), and of her being married again to a Shropshire doctor, who, against his interest, had once very manfully interposed, on an occasion when he was in professional attendance on Mr. Drummle, and had witnessed some outrageous treatment of her. I had heard that the Shropshire doctor was not rich, and that they lived on her own personal fortune.

I was in England again — in London, and walking along Piccadilly with little Pip — when a servant came running after me to ask would I step back to a lady in a carriage who wished to speak to me. It was a little pony carriage, which the lady was driving; and the lady and I looked sadly enough on one another.

“I am greatly changed, I know; but I thought you would like to shake hands with Estella, too, Pip. Lift up that pretty child and let me kiss it!” (She supposed the child, I think, to be my child.)

I was very glad afterwards to have had the interview; for, in her face and in her voice, and in her touch, she gave me the assurance, that suffering had been stronger than Miss Havisham’s teaching, and had given her a heart to understand what my heart used to be.

Too sad! One of his friends–maybe Wilkie Collins–complained.  So Dickens tried again.  He has Pip and Estella meet on the grounds of Miss Havisham’s ruined house, where they had first met many years ago:

“We are friends,” said I, rising and bending over her, as she rose from the bench. “And will continue friends apart”. I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.

Too happy!  That’s what lots of critics have complained.  Shaw said: The novel “is too serious a book to be a trivially happy one. Its beginning is unhappy; its middle is unhappy; and the conventional happy ending is an outrage on it.”

Well, I dunno.  A novel can be unhappy throughout, yet achieve its happiness at the end.  Characters grow; characters change.  And there’s no question that the revised ending is better written than the original, which is awfully flat.  Most modern editions include both endings, I think, like a DVD where you can choose the author’s cut.

Dickens himself seemed happy with the revision.  He said: “I have put in as pretty a little piece of writing as I could, and I have no doubt the story will be more acceptable through the alteration.”

You be the judge.  Also, see the David Lean movie, with John Mills as Pip and Jean Simmons as the ethereally beautiful young Estella.

Which is the better title: “Bride of the Slime Monster” or “Locksley Hall”?

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Previously we looked at the titles Revenge of the Fluffy Bunnies and Dover Beach and decided that Revenge of the Fluffy Bunnies won hands-down. In fact, in my opinion Revenge of the Fluffy Bunnies might be the most awesomest title ever.

Let’s consider Bride of the Slime Monster.  There’s no question that this is also an excellent title.  Short, funny, gives you a clear sense of what the book is all about.  Is it as good as Revenge of the Fluffy Bunnies?  I think not, but I recognize that others may feel differently.  The cover is also pretty good.

Now, what are we to make of Locksley Hall?  I think it’s pretty clearly an awful title, except maybe for a Regency romance, with a cover showing an auburn-tressed young maiden running from an English country estate, her half-uncovered bosoms heaving with strong emotion.  While “Dover Beach” has the benefit of being the title of a somewhat familiar poem, nobody nowadays reads the 1842 poem “Locksley Hall” by Alfred Tennyson.  It’s too long, too hard to follow, and it’s got just this one memorable line: “In the spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.”  So memorable, in fact, that it has been totally decoupled from the poem in which it occurs.

So what kind of an idiot would title a science fiction novel Locksley Hall?  That kind of idiot would be me!  That’s what I named the long-unawaited sequel to Dover Beach.  If you think you have read this sequel, you are quite probably deluded.  But before too terribly long it will be an ebook you can put on your eshelf next to your dog-eared ecopy of the original novel.  Yay!

My original error, it seems, was in buying into my editor’s idea that naming a post-nuclear-war private-eye novel after a nineteenth-century poem was a good one.  So I decided that I should do the same thing for the sequel.  But when Bantam examined the box office receipts for Dover Beach, it decided that the market for post-nuclear-war private-eye novels named after a nineteenth-century poem wasn’t as strong at they had imagined it to be and, in spite of great reviews, they didn’t want to publish its already-completed sequel.  Boo!

Which isn’t to say that Locksley Hall is a bad title, in the sense that it is tightly integrated with the novel’s themes, in just the way that Dover Beach is. The poem “Locksley Hall” (that’s its author over there on the right) is all over the map.  In outline it is a standard romantic poem about lost love.  But it takes weird digressions into sexism, racism, and weirdest of all, science fiction.

Here is the SF-y passage, which seems to come out of nowhere:

For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;

Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight dropping down with costly bales;

Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain’d a ghastly dew
From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue;

Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm,
With the standards of the peoples plunging thro’ the thunder-storm;

Till the war-drum throbb’d no longer, and the battle-flags were furl’d
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.

There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,
And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.

My novel, it turns out, is about the attempt to form a better government as New England is recovers from the “ghastly dew” that rained upon it.  Some people are still dreaming of a parliament of man, a federation of the world, and other are thinking: You’ve got to be shitting me.  Look how well the old government worked out for us!

And in the middle of it all, Walter Sands stumbles onto his second case, and he has to figure out which side a private eye should be on.

The Sandman rides shotgun and quotes Titus Andronicus

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Here is another excerpt from Dover Beach.  It’s early in the story, and our narrator is accompanying two of his friends on a trip to New Hampshire to do some business.  It’s nighttime, and it’s snowing out, and they’re far from what’s left of “civilization.”  Not a good combination in the world of this novel.

Our narrator, we are beginning to discover, has an odd literary bent.

*************

The road barely existed anymore. Hunched over the wheel, Mickey stared out through the snow and swerved constantly to miss the rocks and potholes and assorted debris. A broken axle up here would not be a good idea.

Bobby was nervous. When he’s nervous, he talks too much. “So she says, ‘Oh, it’s so hod to pot with all this. It’s been in the family for generations, you know. We godded it all through the Frenzy and now things are settling down, but what am I to do? One must eat, mustn’t one?’

” ‘Oh, certainly one must,’ I says. Jesus, they all make you feel like they’re doin’ you a favor, handing over their firstborn or something. But I’m not the one that’s starving. You know what I’m saying? Jesus, this snow’s a bitch.” Bobby leaned forward and peered out at an abandoned house. He doesn’t see very well. “I hate bein’ outside the city. I mean, the city is dangerous, but at least you know what’s goin’ on. There are rules, sort of. Who the fuck knows what’s goin’ on up here?”

Bobby sat in the middle, between Mickey and me. A shotgun rested between my legs. I held its smooth barrel in my right hand. The van’s heater was turned up full blast, and it felt great. I wished Bobby weren’t so nervous. He was making me nervous too.

We were off the highway now, passing by cold white fields and scrawny trees and rocks. Bobby was right: we didn’t belong here. Still, something stirred inside me—wisps of memories that were better left unremembered. “How much further, Mickey?” I asked.

“Not far,” he said. Mickey was about as talkative as Gwen.

Bobby drummed his fingers on his thighs. “This guy is so fuckin’ weird, Wally, you won’t believe it. It’s being stuck up here in the boonies, if you ask me. You got no human interaction, you know what I’m sayin’?”

“He has you. And O’Malley’s people.”

“O’Malley’s people. Shit. Talking to one of them’s like talking to a tree. This guy is so weird. Christ, I wish I could see something.”

Mickey was going even slower now. Eventually there was a light in the distance. “That’s it,” he said. We aimed for the light, and came to a stop in front of a large gate. The light shone down at us from behind the gate like a beacon from heaven. A dog was barking. I don’t like dogs.

“Get out with your hands up,” an amplified voice ordered. It sounded like God.

I looked at Bobby. “So fuckin’ weird,” he said, shaking his head. He motioned to me to get out. I left the shotgun behind and climbed down into the snow with my hands over my head. Bobby and Mickey did the same.

The gate swung open, and two figures appeared out of a shack. One stayed behind and trained a shotgun on us. The other moved forward. He had a revolver in one hand, a Doberman on a leash in the other; the Doberman was about the size of the van. The figure was wearing a knitted cap and a homemade sheepskin coat. He was about twelve.

He searched us. The Doberman growled when it was my turn. Good doggie. I kept my hands up. The boy found my Smith and Wesson and pocketed it. He found the shotgun in the van and gave it, and the Doberman, to the figure waiting by the gate.

The boy returned to us. “Okay,” he said. We all got into the van. The boy kept the revolver trained on Mickey, who drove slowly through the open gate. We passed the other figure, standing by the shack and restraining the Doberman. It was a girl, maybe a little younger than the boy. The Doberman kept barking. The gate clanged shut behind us. I felt as if I had crossed a border.

Here is a survival skill I have learned. Generally, when you come upon an isolated farm surrounded by barbed wire, with searchlights and Dobermans and shotguns in evidence, it is a good idea to move on. Quickly. Not tonight, however.

“So how do you like this snow?” Bobby asked the boy.

The boy didn’t reply.

“I don’t think there was this much snow in the old days,” Bobby went on. “Of course, they say that about a lot of things. But I think maybe they’re right about the snow. A lot more snow than there used to be.”

Bobby was nervous. I wished he would shut up.

The land extended flat and unbroken on both sides until it disappeared in the darkness. The road along which we were traveling was plowed and newly paved. We were headed for a sprawling house that blazed with light about a half mile in front of us. Several smaller buildings were scattered like seedlings around it. There was a large barn and a silo off to one side, and in the distance a windmill loomed like a creature from a fairytale.

“Stop,” the boy said when we had reached the house.

Mickey pulled up by the front porch.

Another figure stood by the door, holding another shotgun. The boy got out and waved, and the figure motioned for us to come in.

“Here goes,” Bobby muttered. We got out and crunched across the snow to the open door.

“Wipe your feet,” the figure commanded.

We wiped our feet and walked inside.

“Come with me.” The figure took off her cap—it was a girl with a misshapen face. We followed her while our senses reeled. Warmth: the house was warmer than the van, warmer than the Ritz; a month’s supply of logs blazed in a fireplace. Light: electric lights, shining out from chandeliers and sconces, reflecting off mirrors and polished mahogany furniture. Smells: the sharp sweet scent of burning birch, the rich aroma of something sweet being baked. Apple pie? Strudel?

Somewhere close by a piano was playing, children were laughing. I felt as if I had stepped into a storybook.

The deformed girl led us into a long dark room lit only by a coal fire. The room had a vaulted ceiling, tapestries on the wall, a Persian carpet on the floor. At the far end of an oak table sat a man with a gray beard and deep-set, glittering eyes. He was wearing a flowing white robe. Maybe I hadn’t stepped into a storybook; maybe I had stepped into the Bible. Maybe he was God.

“You may return to your post, Lavinia,” the man said in a deep, God-like voice.

The girl silently left the room. The man’s gaze turned to us: three travelers from a distant land, bearing gifts.

Not much to look at. Bobby is the only fat man I know—but it isn’t a healthy fat, a storybook fat. And his eyes are clouded, and his teeth are rotten. Mickey is short and has a shriveled arm. And I—well, I am reasonably normal, which means reasonably scrawny, reasonably scarred by life. I don’t think I look like a private eye.

“Please sit,” the man said.

We sat.

“I trust your drive was uneventful.”

“Wasn’t bad, Mr. Fitch,” Bobby said. “But the snow didn’t help matters much.”

“Ah, yes, the snow.” Mr. Fitch paused. “‘When blood is nipp’d and ways be foul.'” He fell silent then, as if he had exhausted his supply of sociability, or forgotten the next line. He looked as if he didn’t have much need for sociability. He sat straight and stiff as a pine tree, his hands folded on the table in front of him. His skin was leathery, his mouth hard. He scared me.

“We brought some very good merchandise,” Bobby said. “You’d be surprised at how much is still out there, if you know the right people.”

Mr. Fitch nodded, unsurprised. “I’ll take a look.”

“Want us to bring it right in here?”

Mr. Fitch unfolded a hand and gestured at the empty table.

Bobby stood up. “Great. Come on, boys.”

Mickey and I followed him back out to the van. Lavinia kept a careful watch on us from the front porch. “What’d I tell you about that guy, huh?” Bobby asked as Mickey opened the doors and jumped inside. “He’s got maybe thirty kids and half a dozen wives and he goes around lookin’ like the goddamn Lord of the Universe. Watch that stuff, Mickey, okay? It’s fucking fragile.”

I did most of the lugging. Mickey couldn’t help much because of his arm, and Bobby preferred talking to lifting. After a few trips back and forth we had covered the table with our stuff, and Bobby started his sales pitch. “Look at this china, Mr. Fitch. Rose Medallion. Service for six, plus assorted other pieces—almost perfect condition. See this portrait? Look at the signature: John Singer Sargent. He was famous. Ever see his murals in the Boston Public Library? That tea set is sterling silver. And you said you liked books, right? A complete set of Dickens—leather bindings, acid-free paper. I don’t think anyone ever opened them. Isn’t that something?”

Mr. Fitch examined everything while Bobby rattled on. He unwrapped every piece of china and stared at it. He took the painting out into the hall to study it in better light. I noticed he was wearing hiking boots under his biblical robe. Bobby was sweating. Mickey and I stood by the fire and waited.

“All right,” Mr. Fitch said eventually. “Come with me.” He strode outside and signaled to Lavinia, who fell in step behind us. We crossed to a long, narrow structure off to one side of the main house. He took out a key and opened the padlocked door, then went inside and flipped on an electric light. We followed him in.

It was a storage building—shelf after shelf of cartons jammed against the walls, a narrow aisle down the middle. Amazingly, the place was heated. We stood awkwardly in the aisle while Lavinia waited outside, her shotgun cradled in her arms.

“PC?” Mr. Fitch asked.

“Right,” Bobby said.

Mr. Fitch reached up and took down a small box. He opened it. The object inside was covered with bubbly plastic stuff. He unwrapped it.

It was not as beautiful as the china, but Bobby was not interested in beauty. He took it from Mr. Fitch and hefted it approvingly. It was a hard drive, I knew.  Not that I cared.  “How many?” he asked.

“I’ll give you twenty-five.”

“Are you crazy? I need fifty, or no deal.”

Mr. Fitch shrugged. “I haven’t got fifty.”

“Well, what else do you have? Got any ammo?”

Mr. Fitch stiffened. “I don’t deal in weaponry.”

“Okay, okay. How ‘bout software? And printers. How about them?”

Mr. Fitch and Bobby started dickering. I was impressed by how forceful Bobby was, considering that his entire future was on the line, and a girl stood ten feet away holding a shotgun she was clearly prepared to use. He obviously knew what he was doing, at any rate, because after a few tough minutes they had struck a deal, and I found myself lugging the precious equipment out to the van.

“Nice work,” I said to Bobby when he came to inspect.

“Thanks. He’s weird, but he’s a Yankee, and that means you can do business with him. Jesus, I could use a drink. Let’s go inside.”

I followed him back into the house, carefully wiping my feet before I entered.

Our merchandise had been cleared from the table. One of the Rose Medallion plates was piled high with pieces of cake. A solidly built woman with gray hair was pouring cups of tea, using the sterling silver tea set. I sat down next to Mickey, who was eyeing the cake with considerable interest.

“Can I get you anything else?” the woman asked when the tea had been poured.

Bobby cleared his throat. “I was wondering if there might be anything stronger than tea in the house. To celebrate our new business relationship, you understand.”

The woman looked at Mr. Fitch. He paused a moment, then banged his fist on the table. “‘What?'” he thundered. “Dost thou think because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?'”

She smiled and left the room. In a moment she returned with a green bottle, which Bobby gazed at with something approaching religious ecstasy. She poured an inch of the amber liquid into a glass and gave it to Bobby, then did the same for Mr. Fitch. She offered the bottle to Mickey and me next, but we refused. We were tea people.

Bobby toasted Mr. Fitch. “Here’s to many more nights like this,” he said.

Mr. Fitch nodded his agreement.

The cake was delicious. Bobby drank half his whiskey. “You must come to Boston and let me return your hospitality,” he said.

Mr. Fitch’s face darkened. He set his glass down. “I will not go to Boston, Mr. Gallagher. I lost a child there once. Killed by the brigands who inhabit that place.”

“Well, it’s really a lot better than it used to be,” Bobby said, a little uneasily.

“‘Dost thou not perceive that it is a wilderness of tigers?'” Mr. Fitch roared. “Tigers must prey, and Boston offers no prey but me and mine.”

Tigers? Bobby scratched his head, for once at a loss for words. I reached for another piece of cake. “‘How happy are thou, then,'” I remarked, “‘from these devourers to be banished.'”

Mr. Fitch stared at me. “You know Titus Andronicus?”

I raised an eyebrow. “Doesn’t everyone?”

He smiled and drank his whiskey. “Maybe this world has a future after all,” he murmured.

Bobby looked at me as if I had just caused the blind to see and the dumb to speak.

Mickey poured himself another cup of tea.

Hemingway tries to get the words right

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Apropos of these post about revising and rewriting, it turns out the Simon & Schuster has released a new edition of A Farewell to Arms that includes all Hemingway’s alternate endings.  He claimed that he wrote the ending 39 times before he was satisfied.  The basic issue, he famously said, was “getting the words right.” Turns out that the actual number of endings was probably more like 47.

Here’s the first page of the manuscript, which is stored, with the rest of Hemingway’s papers, at the JFK Library in Dorchester, MA, about ten miles away from where I am sitting.

Endings are hard because they are so important. They don’t need to sum up what the novel was all about, but they control what readers are going to be feeling when they put the book down.

For close readers of Hemingway the endings are a fascinating glimpse into how the novel could have concluded on a different note, sometimes more blunt and sometimes more optimistic. And since modern authors tend to produce their work on computers, the new edition also serves as an artifact of a bygone craft, with handwritten notes and long passages crossed out, giving readers a sense of an author’s process.

One of the endings was suggested by Fitzgerald.  Speaking of Fitzgerald, has anyone written a better ending than the one he wrote for The Great Gatsby?

And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…. And one fine morning —
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Rules for writing — Rule 3: Rewrite

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This is another in my random series of rules for writing, designed for for those among us who aren’t geniuses and therefore don’t get to make our own rules.  This means you.  And me.

Let’s distinguish rewriting from revising.  Revising is when you tinker with stuff you’ve already written.  That’s fun!  Rewriting is when you throw away what you’ve written and start over again.  Start a new computer file.  Go through the whole story or novel again, typing it from scratch.  That can be intimidating.  It can be overwhelming.  It can feel like a complete waste of time, when you encounter paragraph after paragraph that, as far as you can tell, doesn’t need to change.  Why bother?  There are more novels to be written.  The Red Sox are on TV.

In my post about outlining, I stole an image from E. L. Doctorow of writing as a car journey in the darkness, with only your headlights to guide you as you make your way towards your destination.  What happens when you reach that destination?  Do you really want to start the journey all over again?

Well, yes, you do.  If you’re like me, you accumulate notes during your journey — should have made a left turn here, should have driven a little faster in this stretch, should have taken a shortcut to totally eliminate that stretch. Some of these notes may be the basis for revisions, but often they call for much more.  Generally, for me, they accumulate to the point that I need to start from the beginning.

The most obvious example of this was when I figured out that I had come up with the wrong murderer in Senator.  That required rejiggering the whole novel.  Everything needed to be recalibrated, from the opening sentence to the ending.  I’m currently rereading my novel Dover Beach, and I recall one ultimate plot twist that I figured out only when I had finished the first draft.  Without the twist, something basic about the book was out of whack.  The twist occurs at the very end, but I needed to prepare for it throughout the plot.  I can no longer tell exactly where I made the changes, but I figure that’s a good thing — everything in the final product needs to be seamless.

Rewriting is less fun than revision, because it’s more work.  But I find it deeply satisfying.  And it goes much faster than the first draft, which is what causes me to sweat blood.  I have never done more than three drafts — but maybe my work would be better if I had!  At some point I’m content to take the latest draft and revise it.  And revise it, and revise it.

And still I can look at it later and see where the thing has still fallen short.  Here is the famous quotation from Paul Valéry:

A poem is never finished, only abandoned.

This applies to novels, as well, except you have a hundred thousand words to tinker with instead of a hundred.  You can tinker forever, so at some point you have to stop.  But if you stop too soon, you’re not doing your story, or yourself, justice.

In which the narrator of Dover Beach comes up with a title for the book — and it isn’t “Dover Beach”

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Here is our first exciting excerpt from Dover Beach, and it’s apropos of this discussion of titles.

It’s early in the novel.  The narrator, Walter Sands, has a strange desire to become a private eye — strange, because he lives in a world that has been devastated by some kind of catastrophe.  At this point, we’re not quite sure what that catastrophe was, but it’s beginning to look like some kind of limited nuclear war.  Walter has a job offer to become a hired gun for a black-market operation, but prefers to pursue his  dream–no longer entirely a dream, however, since he has gotten his first case.  A man has come to him believing he is the cloned offspring of a scientist from MIT, back before the catastrophe.  He wants to track down his “father” and find out why someone is trying to murder him.

Walter is a bookish sort, we are learning, and so he feels the need to come up with a name for his case.  The name, it turns out, is based on an old mystery–Trent’s Last Case.  You probably haven’t heard of it.  But you can download it for free thanks to the nice folks at Project Gutenberg.  (There’s an obscure movie version starring Orson Welles that I have never seen.)  Walter likes the first line of the novel.  So do I; so much so that I made it the epigraph for Dover Beach:

Between what matters and what seems to matter, how should the world we know judge wisely?

Not that Walter knows it just yet, but this is whatDover Beachturns out to be all about.

Anyway, here he is, back from a trip to the wilds of New Hampshire with his black-market friend Bobby, where they traded scavenged antiques for computer parts.  He lives with his girlfriend Gwen and a couple of other people, holding onto each other in the darkness of their fallen world.  He helps Gwen sleep, but he is unable to sleep much himself.

***********

Gwen was waiting for me in the front parlor when I arrived. She was wearing her patched blue robe and a couple pairs of woolen socks. “How did it go?” she asked.

“Oh, fine.”

“No problems?”

I shook my head. “I think I’ll have a glass of cider.” We went out to the kitchen. With Gwen, I was never sure if my lies were successful. I always had the feeling that she understood everything, and that sometimes she just decided to let me get away with one.

She poured us each some cider, and we sat at the table. I told her all about the farm and Lavinia and Mr. Fitch and the electric lights and the tapestries on the wall. And then I remembered something. “I brought you a present.” I reached into my pocket and took out a piece of cake I had grabbed from the Rose Medallion plate.

“Oh, Walter. Thank you.”

“It was either this or a hard disk, and I figured you had more use for cake.”

She smiled and ate the cake.

“Bobby wants me to go to work for him full-time,” I said.

I waited for a response, but none came. She looked at me and sipped her cider.

“I told him to forget it. I’m a private eye now. No time for stuff like that. ”

She nodded, “You must feel good about getting that case.”

“Yeah. Well.” No sense going into it. She knew how good I felt. I finished my cider and stood up. “You should get some sleep,” I said.

Gwen stood up too. She took the lamp in one hand, and my hand in the other, and we went upstairs. We paused as we passed Linc’s bedroom. He was breathing heavily; he muttered something unintelligible in his sleep. Gwen’s hand squeezed mine. We went into our bedroom.

She set the lamp on the night table and pulled the bedcovers down. I took off my shoes. We got into bed, and she put out the lamp.

The darkness was total. We pulled up the covers. I put my arm around Gwen, and she snuggled into the crook of my shoulder. “Do you feel like it?” I asked.

“I guess not,” she said.

“Okay.”

We were silent for a while. The darkness became less total. I could make out the looming bulk of the dresser, the elegant curves of the escritoire, the useless outline of the useless radiator.

“I’m glad you’re safe,” Gwen said.

“So am I,” I said. Glad to see the dresser and the escritoire for another day. Glad to see her. Across the hall, Linc snorted and groaned.

“Someday,” I murmured, “sleep will come easy.”

“And dreams will come true,” Gwen replied.

“Someday.”

We didn’t say anything then. I stroked her hair, and we breathed together, and eventually her breathing became deep and regular. I listened to it for a long while, and then carefully pulled my arm from beneath her head. She settled herself onto the pillow, still asleep. I got out of bed, groped for the lamp, found it, and made my way out into the hall. I was an old hand at this. I lit the lamp in the darkness and walked slowly up the creaking stairs to the third floor. The lamp threw spooky shadows against the walls. I wasn’t afraid of spooks, though; there was too much else to be afraid of in this world. At the top of the stairs, I turned right. More shadows, more spooks, beckoning to me in the dim light, writhing in their lust for life, for freedom. The room reeked of the past, overpowered me with the musty odor of lives lived, of genius spent. It was an odor as exciting as any perfume. I entered the room.

Too many books, Bobby had said. An accusation.

Guilty. I stared at them:

Confess, Fletch

The Dreadful Lemon Sky

The Good-bye Look

Ten Little Indians

The Case of the Amorous Aunt

Green with mildew, brown and brittle with age, dying but not dead yet. Not dead yet.

It occurred to me that I needed a title. What good was a case without a title? Confess, Clone. The Case of the Confused Clone. I was new at this.

The Godwulf Manuscript

God Save the Child

Early Autumn

In those books Spenser was still alive. Still working out at the health club, drinking beer, listening to the Red Sox. Ah, would that it were not fiction. That way madness lies, as Mr. Fitch would say. But maybe you had to be mad to stay alive nowadays. God Save the Clone. Early Winter. No, try again.

Farewell, My Lovely

The Maltese Falcon

Penance for Jerry Kennedy

The Big Sleep

Trent‘s Last Case

Trent’s Last Case. An old, old British mystery with a couple of twists at the end. I took it off the shelf and glanced through it. Private eyes were nowhere to be found, although I liked the first sentence.

Sands’s First Case. The possessive sounded ugly.

Sandman. That was Linc’s nickname for me. I didn’t like it. The Sandman went around putting people to sleep, and I—I only did that for Gwen.

I smiled.

The Sandman’s First Case.

It would have to do, until I came up with something better.

I rummaged through a rotting carton of textbooks until I found one on cellular biology. I took it out, sat in my old, overstuffed armchair, and read by lamplight until dawn. Then I tiptoed back downstairs and got back into the warm bed beside Gwen.

I shut my eyes and snuggled up to Gwen, and after a while sleep came for the Sandman—short and troubled as always, but enough to let him make it through another day.