Category Archives: The Morgue

Off to a Good Start

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cake, Hello Kitty

(photo: c1.staticflickr.com)

The delicious aspect of reading Chuck Sambuchino’s article in The Write Life article on the worst ways to begin your novel, is that you know these Outrageous Openings have been tried many times. You know that, because the opinions come from literary agents, who every month read hundreds of “first pages,” or maybe only first paragraphs, sentences, or words submitted by hopeful authors. Some of their advice is right up there with one literary agency’s strict warning to writers not to accompany their query letter with baked goods or anything hand-knit. (Your desperation is showing!)

Since, they say, everyone has a book in them, and since nearly everyone who finds out I’m a writer says, “I’ve always wanted to write a book,” there should be a ready audience for this advice.

1. Avoid prologues and lengthy first-chapter descriptions (“scene-setting”) and jump right into the action. (Thankfully, this wasn’t the preference in Dickens’s time, or we would have lost “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . .”) Get right to the plot, they say, characters’ backstory “is in their DNA.” It stays with them.

2. Agent Dan Lazar puts it a different way. He dislikes openers where characters are doing “essentially nothing. Washing dishes and thinking, staring out the window and thinking, tying shoes, thinking.” Perhaps such openers are meant to contrast with the many thrillers in which not much thinking is done.

3. Love this one: “The [adjective] [adjective] sun rose in the [adjective] [adjective] sky, shedding its [adjective] light across the [adjective] [adjective] [adjective] land.” Fail.

4. Similarly, “laundry list” character descriptions. I recently read one so long its parts had to be separated with semi-colons, including this bit: “porcelain skin, white as china; pale green eyes.” If only they’d been Wedgwood blue eyes, we’d have a whole place-setting. As writing coach Lauren Davis says, description should tell who your characters are, not just what they look like.

5. Cliché openers. In crime novels, a really bad hangover. In fantasy, a battle or (apparently this is common) herb-gathering. The battle thing seems to go against the advice to start with action, but this agent says the problem is, “I don’t know any of the characters yet so why should I care about this battle?” In romance, waking to find a stranger in the bed. More ill-conceived action.

Finally, one of the agents reveals what she actually likes in an opener—one that makes her curious about your characters and fills her with questions. You have the rest of the book for the who, where, when, and how.

The Alchemist

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William Fettes Douglas The Alchemist

William Fettes Douglas, “The Alchemist” (photo: wikimedia.org)

You might think Ben Jonson doesn’t have anything to say to modern audiences, and that whatever he did have to say, he said 400 years ago. In the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey’s production of his “satiric masterwork” The Alchemist, the audience finds, as director Bonnie Monte says, “the one thing that hasn’t changed is human nature.” In a talkback after the show, a director who’d put on this rarely-produced play free outdoors in Manhattan in 2008 said it made an almost painfully apt commentary on 21st century greed in the midst of the economic crisis.

Every variation on wanting something for nothing is displayed by the Londoners who visit the den of the Alchemist and his confederates. The marks are blinded by their fantasies, their lust for gold and, while they’re at it, the favors of one particularly comely young widow. We laugh out loud at their ridiculous and sybaritic pretensions, mainly because we recognize them.

For this production, much of the language was updated so modern ears could catch the lightning-fast and witty dialog, and the whole play was cut in about half by eliminating secondary characters and scenes, for modern attention spans (and bladders). It’s still two and a half fast-moving hours. All the acting is excellent, but special mention should be made of the three principal actors Jon Barker (Face), Bruce Cromer (Subtle: the Alchemist), and Aedin Moloney (Dol Common). Brilliant. In Madison through August 31.

Your Brain Has Priorities

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typo, misprint

(photo: David Sim, CC & cropped)

My second novel. 78,000 words. Respectable length, not one that would panic an agent or publisher. (Unless you’re Stephen King or Dona Tartt, forget the 700-page doorstops. ) I’ve read all the advice to new writers: get an editor (I’ve been editing people’s stuff for . . . a long time—skip that step), have it proofread (pfout! I can spot a typo like Annie Oakley nailing the ace of spades). Hit the send button, set the big envelopes on the postage scale, and trundle them out to the mailbox. Done!

Except. Except that every time I look at my perfect manuscript, I find, horrors!, a typo. A word missing. An editing faux pas. Have I blown it? Big time? Nick Stockton’s recent Wired article on why we miss our own mistakes sheds some light on the problem. “Typos suck,” he says. “They are saboteurs, undermining your intent, causing your resume [or the novel you’ve spent two years writing] to land in the ‘pass’ pile.” Spotting other people’s errors, no problem. Like the LinkedIn blurb I saw today for a job-seeker who wrote, “I also have string organizational, self-management and interpersonal skills.”

Our own typos elude us, Stockton says, not “because we’re stupid or careless,” quite the opposite. He quotes psychologist Tom Stafford from the University of Sheffield who says it’s because writing “is a very high level task,” and our brains focus on creating meaning and conveying complex ideas, not dealing with more mundane things. Homonyms and spelling being two. (I’ve noticed my alarming recent tendency to type even the most absurd homonym when I mean something entirely different—the kind of error that makes me howl when I read it in print.) When we read our own stuff, we skip over these mistakes because we know what we mint.

Touch typing was one of the most useful high school courses I took—that and driver’s ed—and I have always made certain errors, typing “d” when I mean “k,” and vice-versa. Or, when I type “Bethesda,” it takes real effort to stop myself from adding a “y” at the end. What I’ve noticed is that those mechanical errors are now so embedded that I make them even when I’m writing longhand. I go through two or three envelopes to get a birthday card out to any of my Bethesday friends.

And let’s not even start talking about numbers. Hopeless. I almost never enter a whole phone number without transposing something. I am a person for whom speed-dial is a godsend. The only thing that prevents matters from being much worse is that, as Stockton reports, “proofreading requires you to trick your brain into pretending that it’s reading the thing for the first time.” That’s where my vanishing attention span is a big plus.

A Most Charming Tour

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Czech Republic, small town, Europe

(photo: farm3.staticflickr.com)

A weekend break for all you armchair travelers, is this photo essay of the “25 Secret Small Towns in Europe You Must Visit” on the World of Wanderlust website. In the photo at left is Cesky Krumlov in southern Bohemia, Czech Republic. (No McDonalds, the caption writer celebrates or warns, depending).

Other small towns on this charm tour are scattered across Europe and possibly within driving reach if your travels take you to the larger cities in France, Austria, Belgium, Slovenia, Poland, England, Spain, Croatia, Italy, Norway, Switzerland, Malta, or Bosnia & Herzegovina. Or Turkey. Though I’ll bet not too many tourists make it to Ittoqqortoormiit, Greenland, even if they can spell (or pronounce) it. Is Greenland in Europe now?

The caption-writer for this essay ran out of synonyms for charm early on and defaulted to superlatives. “Most charming,” “so picturesque,” “most underrated.” Annency, France, below, is “arguably more charming than any other French town you will find.”

France, small town, Europe

(photo: pixabay, CC)

 

tulips, Holland, Mich., windmill

(rkramer, flickr)

Another non-European entry and representing the U.S.A., oddly, is Leavenworth, Kansas, which does not have much a a reputation as a place for a brief visit—20 years to life is more like it.

World of Wanderlust says Leavenworth is modeled on a Bavarian village, but if what you’re after is finding the Old World in the New, you might want to visit Holland, Michigan—especially at tulip time!

Writers as Storytellers

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front porch, rocking chair, storytelling

(photo: Lars Ploughmann, flickr)

Eric Nelson’s recent Ploughshares article describes the “10 times in life when writers have the upper hand.” Writers who can tell stories out loud and off the page, that is. As Nelson says, “With the right kinds of stories, you can sell anything, including yourself.”

I have a friend who writes monologs, and I’ve come to appreciate the amount of work that goes into shaping this material, polishing it, honing it, and then, hardest of all, making it sound spontaneous, fresh, alive. The impact of his stories on the page versus what happens when he “tells” them is transformative.

In the days before television, storytelling was a much-appreciated front porch gift that we’ve mostly lost track of. Even writers, who should be superb oral story tellers, may limit their audience to the glowing rectangle. We keep our best stories, the personal, true ones, locked up inside.

The organization The Moth (“True Stories Told Live”) sets out to preserve and celebrate oral storytelling, and a book of 50 “brilliant and quietly addictive” stories from its archive has five stars on Amazon. Like my friend’s work, the best stories display honesty, vulnerability–and a little structure. This is not the same storytelling as effectively recounting “Goldilocks and the Three Bears”; these are true stories of the kind familiar to This American Life addicts.

Life situations when Nelson says a good story—or the ability to put one together—comes in handy include childcare (“It’s easier to keep a car full of kids from hitting each other by entertaining them with stories than hoping their iPad batteries hold out”), the classroom—from first grade to adult education, parties, job interviews, dates, the doctor’s office, therapy, on juries, in political campaigns, and at the DMV (where everyone is bored silly “except the writers. They’re too busy working on their stories in their head”).

Nelson refers to a recent article by Neil Gaiman about being asked to appear at The Moth—something out of his comfort zone, and so a good reason to do it, Gaiman says. Something he says about the importance of stories really resonates, given this week’s news events: “And the gulf that exists between us is that when we look at each other we might see faces, skin colour, gender, race or attitudes, but we don’t see the stories. And once we hear them we realise that the things dividing us are often illusions, falsehoods: that the walls between us are no thicker than scenery.”

Tearful Fiction

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snowy owl, Hedwig

(photo: wikimedia.org)

What happens when a book character you’ve come to love dies—or a relationship you’ve treasured comes to naught? Grief, that’s what. The five stages of fictional grief—rereading (“did I get that right?”), dismay, rationalization and hope, anger (throw the book across the room), and never getting over it—are explored in an amusing Bookriot post by Susie Rodarme. Anger is appropriate when characters are killed off randomly, to keep them from cluttering up the plot any longer.

We saw a manifestation of these stages on social media when Downton Abbey’s Matthew Crawley came to his untimely end. “I can’t believe it!” “Nooooooo.” “I’m not watching any more!” “Maybe he’s not reaaally dead?” For readers of paranormal fiction, there’s always a chance . . .

Tess of the D’Urbervilles was a real weepy for me. I read it several times and, once I knew the ending, began getting weepy from page one (delicious!). Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing (review here) is the most recent book that prompted those “why did she have to die?” feelings, and true regret that left me down for days.

The comments on Rodarme’s post are interesting. Must be a youngish crowd, since most of their literary tear-blotting experiences are associated with Harry Potter, and repeatedly cited is the death of Hedwig, a character introduced this way: “Harry now carried a large cage that held a beautiful snowy owl, fast asleep with her head under her wing.” I’m guessing many of those who say they grieved long and hard over Hedwig, subconsciously at least, recognize her death symbolized Harry’s loss of innocence, and that’s what they regret, as well.

Spread the Love

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W.H.Auden, brownstone, Brooklyn

W. H. Auden’s Brooklyn home (photo: farm4.staticflickr.com)

Wired’s Mr. Know-It-All—a favorite feature of the magazine—provides answers to the ethical and practical challenges of the digital age. A question this month concerns friends who get “hundreds of likes” for every photo they post and whether there is really any point in adding one’s own tiny click, as it’s unlikely to be noticed in that cricket-storm of positive feedback. Hmmm.

Mr. Know-It-All dives into literature for his response by quoting a poem by W.H. Auden (1907-1973). Auden, contemplating the stars crowding the sky, recorded their sublime indifference to humans, which might lead one to think in the scheme of things, why bother with that “like”? Except that he continues to Auden’s next verse, which says the caring imbalance between yourself and the firmament is inevitable, and if caring cannot be equal, then let “the more loving one” be you. “Brilliant, right?” says Mr. Know-It-All. “The guy really understood Instagram.” So, pound that “like” button into stardust.

And why rampant “liking” doesn’t apply to news outlets and ads on Facebook!

Keep Your Edge – 33 ways

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notebook, list, diary

(photo: c1.staticflickr.com)

These lists of how to stay creative keep coming around, and they’re always worth a glance. Staying fresh in our own world is important, no matter what world that is. “Make lists, carry a notebook everywhere, write your ideas down”—those suggestions are all of a piece, and I do that. Of course, later the urgent items I scribbled don’t always make sense.

“Go somewhere new, listen to new music, watch foreign films”—those suggestions are different ways of saying “Break out of your routine.” I could do that by following suggestion #31—“Clean your workspace,” which, if I did would probably turn up some of those mystery notes. #29, “Stop trying to be someone else’s perfect,” reminds me of the Steve Jobs admonition pasted above my computer: “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.”

Don’t quite know what to think of “be otherworldly.” That’s the kind of obscure directive I might write myself. For this weekend, just “Do more of what makes you happy!” (#25).

Robin Williams

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stars, heavens, night sky

(photo: c2.staticflickr.com)

Still not recovered from the too-soon loss of Philip Seymour Hoffman, now this.

Scientists unraveling the neural links between mental illness and creative genius may one day have more answers to today’s painful questions.

Knowing anguish comes with the territory, though, apparently doesn’t lessen it, nor reduce the need for the ultimate, last escape.

Not for Hemingway, not for Plath, not for Williams, not for so many.

Michael Connelly and Life Change

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Michael Connelly, Mickey Haller, Lincoln LawyerA big fan of Michael Connelly—and his fictional crew, Harry Bosch and “Lincoln Lawyer” Mickey Haller—I was eager to study his selection of “ Books that Changed My Life” on Audible.com. Connelly is one of more than 50 authors from whom Audible has gathered this information—everyone from Philippa Gregory to James Patterson to another of my favorites, Alan Furst. The authors were asked to name the smallish number of books, generally two to four, that fit the life-changing rubric.

Connelly’s picks are Neely Tucker’s first novel, The Ways of the Dead, because of the way that, despite the fast-moving Washington D.C.-based story, Tucker “always takes the time for wry observation of the humanity of the streets.” Washington Post review here. He also singled out Alafair Burke’s All Day and a Night (New York Journal of Books review here). For both of these choices, one of Connelly’s main criteria was how well the authors conveyed a sense of their cities, for example, saying Tucker “knows the turf inside and out.” Much like Bosch and Haller know Los Angeles, I’d say.

His third selection is Michael Koryta’s Those Who Wish Me Dead (NPR review here)—“full of surprises,” Connelly says. The funny thing about these three choices is that they were all published last June. Either Connelly has an attention span similar to mine, or June was a epochal month for him. At least, he seems to have a different definition of “life-changing” than Audible’s mavens intended.

As it happens, Koryta is another author asked for life-changers, and his picks are Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (“rhythm and word choice”), King’s The Shining (“a clinic in suspense”), and Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, with its “peerless prose,” which in the audio version is narrated by Brad Pitt. The three novels are All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing (my *****review), and Cities of the Plains.

As a postscript, I note the perennial difficulty of finding a review of the one book written by a woman, an issue that helped launch a great organization, Sisters in Crime.