Listen Up!

So many friends tell me they don’t have time to read any more that I’m surprised more of them haven’t taken up audio books. While it’s true the old-fashioned klunky tapes or CD’s were a bit of a pain—and expensive, too—I’ve listened well over a hundred audio books on an MP3 player and now an iPod. One book a month is my Audible.com subscription plan, and that’s about what I can “read,” Audibly.

Apparently lots of people read in the car, and that’s OK for longer trips, but short trips around town with a lot of stops wouldn’t work for me. I like at least a half-hour, uninterrupted. Longer, if possible. So I read while mowing the lawn (electric mower), weeding the garden, making dinner, anything that doesn’t require my full concentration. My mind picks what to focus most on–another reason listening and driving might not be the best idea. Listening while cooking goes a long way to explain some of the meals around here.

On the Reading . . . section of this website you can scroll down to mini-reviews of the 10 books I’ve listened to so far this year. Thrillers are good. If you don’t catch every word, it isn’t a tragedy, and the excitement of getting to the next chapter keeps you on task. If you stop mowing and go do something else, like return emails, you might actually have to turn the book off.

I’ve also listened to some classics I knew I’d never read: Crime and Punishment (endless); The Brothers Karamazov (the mind wanders); Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (the first audio book I ever listened to—scary). These experiences suggest a book like Dr. Zhivago with a lot of long foreign names (two to three per character, at that) would not be a good choice.

What’s most impressive is the quality of the narrations. They add immeasurably. Sometimes when I recommend a book, I mention that I listened to it, and can’t be sure whether it would be quite as wonderful an experience if read. The humor comes through better, for one thing. Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is a perfect example.

In the marketplace, audiobooks are on the rise. Producers released more than 13,000 titles (some classics, some new) in 2012, compared to only 4,600 three years earlier. Libraries are getting on the bandwagon, too. Patrons of the member libraries of Digital Library NJ and eLibraryNewJersey, for example, can borrow audio books just like regular books. They expire after a set number of days, and the collection is large. And free. Libraries all over the country are doing this.

I buy my audiobooks and own them “forever.” Some I’ve listened to multiple times. Amazon-owned Audible.com (my supplier) has the greatest market penetration and is adding nearly 1,000 titles a month to its already deep collection. The technology options are expanding, but I’m dubious about some of them. You can read a while on your Kindle (when you have time to sit) and pick up where you left off with the book’s audio version (when you don’t). This sounds confusing to me. I would be hearing one set of voices in my head and suddenly they’re all different. You can have the e-version read to you as you read—which would be super-annoying, since most people who have read this far can read faster than the book would be narrated. It would be like taking a walk with someone who moves at half your pace. And, new audiobook creation tools akin to the self-publishing  tools for print are designed to help authors affordably create their own audiobooks. Let’s hope the tools turn them into stellar actors at the same time! The early days of desktop publishing provide a cautionary example.

No time to read? Listen up!

Giving Voice

Yesterday’s writing workshop was on the narrative voice—who emerges from the page when you write something longer than a tweet? (On Twitter everyone sounds almost identically manic.) Or longer than a Facebook post? When your writing—a letter, a story, a blog entry, a news release—demands more than a “Nuff said,” when enough isn’t said until you’ve delivered your readers something that will grab their attention, steal their hearts, pique their curiosity about the world and the mysteries of human behavior.

You write conversation—dialog—in the disparate voices of individual characters; narration creates your voice. Narration tells readers when and where events takes place, it provides the carefully chosen details that bring characters to life. Narration turns the world into words.

Each of us, if we stood on a mountaintop gazing out at the countryside spread below, would choose different words to describe it—once past “Awesome!”, that is—we would put the words together in our own unique way, with reference to our own particular past experiences and our own expectations for the future. Think how you might describe the scene above if you were standing on that peak preparing to descend into the valley to wed your sweetheart, then think how differently you’d describe it if you’d climbed up there to scatter your lover’s ashes.

This difference is the basis for maybe my favorite of John Gardner’s challenging writing exercises: “Describe a building as seen by a man whose son has just been killed in a war.” The diabolical aspect of this is that you’re not to mention the son, war, death, or the man. No cop-outs of referring to him as a father. But Gardner goes on: “Then describe the same building, in the same weather and at the same time of day, as seen by a happy lover.” Again, you’re instructed not to mention love or the loved one. By applying those strictures, he guarantees you do not default to easy or hackneyed prose and the descriptions that result are inevitably in the writer’s own voice, not a second-hand one.

In my own writing, whenever a passage comes too easily, I realize it’s not wholly mine. It originated in one or a dozen movies or television shows—bad ones, probably—and I have to go back and hack my own path through the situation, in my own way. Dialog is especially prone to unconscious borrowing.

Voice is why, in my writing group, we really don’t need to put our names on our work any more. Each of us has a voice so distinctive, we’d recognize who wrote the page in front of us, even if it arrived in an envelope posted from Mars. It seems each of us is truly learning to turn worlds into words, to create “his world and no other,” as Raymond Carver said.

Exploring Further

“Sharpening the Quill,” a series of writing workshops by Lauren B. Davis

The Art of Fiction – John Gardner, the classic “Notes on Craft for Young Writers.”

“On Writing” – Raymond Carver

New York Times essay, “Once Upon a Time, There Was a Person Who Said, ‘Once Upon a Time,’ – Steve Almond. The significance of narration in literature and life and its fragmentation in the media age. Well worth reading.

The Sufferer in the Mirror

Memoir-writers would appear to have it easy. After all, whom do they know best, in theory, but themselves? The key to this question is “in theory.” Hollywood and sports stars can sail by with superficial “and then this bad thing happened, but I learned a lot” memoirs, because they are, well, stars, and in some misguided sense, we already feel we know them. The rest of us have to dig way deeper.

Aspiring memoirists may be encouraged to expose their most “gut-wrenching secrets” right up front. Chapter one. Even page one. But parading a set of difficult experiences—drug addiction, infidelity, abuse—across the literary stage like cardboard scenery is not sufficient. We’ve all read that. Seen the movie. More than once. The writer’s unique persona and individual reaction to these stock situations are what makes a new version of this play worth mounting. It may take a few—even quite a few—pages to create the character for whom these traumatic experiences have meaning. Writers who merely put their emotional debris on display treat readers like voyeurs. Less experienced writers, encouraged to reveal their darkest moments, may not have the self-understanding that is as much a part of the story as the drug-addled sex in the seedy hotel room.

Author and writing teacher Susan Shapiro in her recent essay, “Make Me Worry You’re Not O.K.,” supports the idea of immediately sharing emotional traumas, of hooking readers early in order to make readers care. Another memoir teacher and literary agent—Brooke Warner—responded to Shapiro with her own essay, “Memoir Is Not the Trauma Olympics.” Warner counters that “real misery memoir works when you drip in the painful stuff little by little.”

Following these two essays, journalism teacher Katie Roiphe wrote “This Is How Your Write a Memoir” for Slate. Her common-sense advice ends with the observation that “expressing yourself is not enough.” Just because an event is true, doesn’t mean it can be written about without the care and attention to salient detail of any other literary endeavor. In other words, it’s hard work after all.

In their words: The recent essays by Susan Shapiro, Brooke Warner, and Katie Roiphe.

Immutability and the Endings of Stories

I’ve heard Peter Straub say the ending of one of his supernatural thrillers caused so much reader clamor to know what happened to one of the characters, he capitulated and added another chapter. Having just read his Mr. X, I think he must have meant that particular book, and the short final chapter that’s tacked on addresses but doesn’t answer the question his readers posed.

Two of my recent reads—Mr. X and Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin—share the same mystery—who is the narrator? As we read along, who is telling us this story? In the end, Atwood answers the question, which the reader has perhaps suspected, but Straub raises it in that brief final chapter, calling into question everything that has gone before. If such a fundamental and seemingly straightforward narrative issue can be uncertain, how many of our other assumptions about “what’s going on” in a book are up for grabs?

It’s a testament to the writer’s ability to make us care about a story’s characters that sometimes we wrestle with these assumptions long after the last page, the last scene. No matter how many times I’ve seen West Side Story, I still hope unreasonably that Chino won’t appear with his gun. Reading Anna Karenina provokes the same reaction. Or Hamlet. But it is not to be. (One question resolved, anyway.)

At the last moment, Charles Dickens changed the ending of Great Expectations, one of his best-known and most-read novels, with a scene that offered a happier prospect, but one probably less true to everything that went before. He made the change on the advice of Edward Bulwer-Lytton—a popular 19th c. author, best-known today, alas, for opening his novel Paul Clifford with “It was a dark and stormy night,” and the eponymous annual contest “to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels.”

What story’s ending would you change, if you could? What else would have to change to make your ending possible? And do you soon find yourself in a hopeless tangle of unintended consequences like poor Jake Epping trying to change events in Stephen King’s 11/22/63?