Category Archives: writing

The Long Creative Life

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Hong Kong (now U.S.) author Xu Xi has published essays, appeared in and published anthologies, and novels, including The Unwalled City: A Novel of Hong Kong. In sum, fifteen books. In an interview, she shared some thoughts about the creative life that would encourage authors, both aspiring and experienced. “Being a writer is also an issue if you’re not published” (or, perhaps, not published where you want to be). And it’s hard to break into U.S. literary journals, short story publishing, “never mind selling novels.”

Xu found that living in New York City, enough people were trying to be an artist of some kind—musician, painter, actor, novelist—that made life easier. They understood her. They understood her day job was just a way to put groceries on the table. This is a heartfelt validation of the importance of “community.” Some of us find it in groups of other writers. Some find it in groups outside the writing community.

Still, Xu had to reach a point where the daily demands on her were not primarily about relationships, family, and work, in order to be free to write beyond herself. She quotes Confucius’s description of the various decades of life, which culminate at the point that you can “follow [your] heart’s desire without overstepping the line.” Alas, the Master said that point comes when you reach an advanced age, which maybe is why we hear about authors (like me!) whose first book is published after age 50. Not that that’s a piece of cake, either.

Xu, who is past 50 herself, says she thinks of writing “as fate, destiny, the thing you were born to do but didn’t know how to go about or weren’t quite ready for when you were younger.” Interestingly, in her day jobs she was considered a quick study, but she finds the process of writing, “incredibly slow.” Nevertheless, she finds pleasure in learning how to improve, which is long-term and yields incremental improvements. It’s fulfilling in a deep, “things are right with the world” sense, which more quickly mastered accomplishments often lack. How many times are authors pitched on “this book,” “this course,” or “this software” that will lead them down an immediate and short path to success?

International artists who write in English, Xu believes, are one way for readers to better understand both the universal aspects of life while appreciating differences in human experience and building empathy with people whose perspectives are different. This comes to the fore in her writer’s guide and anthology, The Art and Craft of Asian Stories.

At some point Xu realized she “could waste an enormous amount of creative time and energy on all kinds of ‘okay’ things, and, as well, produce work that might actually prove more readily publishable.” That choice would mean other work would suffer—work that require a deeper examination of our interior selves to reach for the fundamental, rather than the superficial. Such works don’t demand that you stretch your writing muscles. Xu is willing to do this and thereby is, she believes, writing to the future of the English language.

Xu Xi is the Jenks Chair in Contemporary Letters at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.

You’re Leaving? Story Endings

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The First Line Monday facebook page is a painless education on what works and what doesn’t as the first line/lines in a novel. And, how much people’s opinions about working/not working vary! All writers are advised that the openings of their books, if that not one single line, are critical in finding agents, publishers, and readers. What about the ending? That’s important too in a different way. It’s the author’s last chance to make a point or an impression. Or not.

I’ve written about endings before—endings and ambiguity, book endings that disappoint. Here I’m going to do what the facebook page does and just provide the last lines as a standalone. The big difference is, of course, that by the time you get to the last line, you’ve (most likely) read the rest of the book. So you interpret the words much differently than you would a first line. You have context. Still, some lines work better than others in planting a lasting seed.

Here are a few:

“The automonk carried the empty wicker basket up the beach. Eiko followed.” (Ray Nayler’s wonderful The Mountain Under the Sea). This line conveys a since of “ok, life goes on here,” in its quotidian way, which is a very hopeful place to end. Read the whole book and find out why!

“That’s where we are. Well past the Christiansburg exit. Past Richmond, and still pointed east. Headed for the one big thing I know is not going to swallow me alive.” (Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, Dickens’s David Copperfield adapted to today’s also-not-very-kind-to-children-in-difficult-circumstances world—a fantastic book). The reader knows the “one big thing” is the ocean (and so much more of life) and that Damon believes it “won’t swallow me alive” because he’s protected against drowning, but also because, in other aspects of life, he’s developed the skills and relationships to save himself. A perfect summation of the entire book.

“And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.” (Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Goldfinch). Opinions about this book vary, and this last sentence is a good example of why I think the whole final quasi-philosophical section is just Too Much.

“There’s nothing as exciting as a fresh new start when the page is blank and the future is all for the making!” (Janice Hallett’s clever The Appeal). The last words are from Izzy, the clueless instigator of a lot of bad stuff, and the exclamation point represents her perfectly.

“He is far from England now, far from these islands, from the waters salt and fresh. He has vanished; he is the slippery stones underfoot, he is the last faint ripple in the wake of himself. He feels for an opening, blinded, looking for a door: tracking the light along the wall.” (Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror & the Light, third in her trilogy about Tudor England’s Thomas Cromwell). I frankly don’t know how she wrote this; I would have been weeping all over my typewriter, but to have to write the moment of Cromwell’s death after so many intimate pages, I think this, with its poetic tone, really works.

“Kate found her seat. Never looked back.” (Cara Black’s Three Hours in Paris). This ending certainly fits, because through the whole of this WWII thriller, Kate doesn’t seem to think about consequences.

Do you have some favorite endings? Ones you thought really worked well?

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Loving the Long Creative Life

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Hong Kong (now U.S.) author Xu Xi has published essays, appeared in and published anthologies, and novels, including The Unwalled City: A Novel of Hong Kong. In sum, fifteen books. In an interview, she shared some thoughts about the creative life that would encourage authors, both aspiring and experienced. “Being a writer is also an issue if you’re not published” (or, perhaps, not published where you want to be). And it’s hard to break into U.S. literary journals, short story publishing, “never mind selling novels.”

Xu found that living in New York City, enough people were trying to be an artist of some kind—musician, painter, actor, novelist—that made life easier. They understood her. They understood her day job was just a way to put groceries on the table. This is a heartfelt validation of the importance of “community.” Some of us find it in groups of other writers. Some find it in groups outside the writing community.

Still, Xu had to reach a point where the daily demands on her were not primarily about relationships, family, and work, in order to be free to write beyond herself. She quotes Confucius’s description of the various decades of life, which culminate at the point that you can “follow [your] heart’s desire without overstepping the line.” Alas, the Master said that point comes when you reach an advanced age, which maybe is why we hear about authors (like me!) whose first book is published after age 50. Not that that’s a piece of cake, either.

Xu, who is past 50 herself says she thinks of writing “as fate, destiny, the thing you were born to do but didn’t know how to go about or weren’t quite ready for when you were younger.” Interestingly, in her day jobs she was considered a quick study, but she finds the process of writing, “incredibly slow.” Nevertheless, she finds pleasure in learning how to improve, which is long-term and yields incremental improvements. It’s fulfilling in a deep, “things are right with the world” sense, which more quickly mastered accomplishments often lack. How many times are authors pitched on “this book,” “this course,” or “this software” that will lead them down an immediate and short path to success?

International artists who write in English, Xu believes, are one way for readers to better understand both the universal aspects of life while appreciating differences in human experience and building empathy with people whose perspectives are different. This comes to the fore in her writer’s guide and anthology, The Art and Craft of Asian Stories.

At some point Xu realized she “could waste an enormous amount of creative time and energy on all kinds of ‘okay’ things, and, as well, produce work that might actually prove more readily publishable.” That choice would mean other work would suffer—work that require a deeper examination of our interior selves to reach for the fundamental, rather than the superficial. Such works don’t demand that you stretch your writing muscles. Xu is willing to do this and thereby is, she believes, writing to the future of the English language.

Xu Xi is the Jenks Chair in Contemporary Letters at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Hear That Thunder? Writing Tips

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As author Benjamin Percy relates in Thrill Me, his book of essays on the writing craft, his childhood books were portals for escape. “Suck me into the tornado, beam me through an intergalactic transporter, drag me down the rabbit hole,” he says. Although he’s studied the tenets of literary fiction, he strongly believes the “What happens next?” engine more typical of genre fiction is what propels readers through most novels. Thrill them.

This is one of those books, like Donald Maass’s The Emotional Craft of Fiction, that you can benefit from rereading at different stages of a writing project. Insights glossed over earlier will suddenly make sense as your new work evolves. Here are just a few of Percy’s thoughts that particularly resonated with me this time around.

While a story will have a big goal—solve the puzzle, catch the killer, marry the prince, win the battle—it also needs lower-order goals, at the scene or chapter level, to keep the plot moving. (I’d add here that, sometimes, the protagonist’s goal is subconscious. Maybe Mary believes her goal is to gain the prestige of the job promotion and new title, but what she’s really yearning for is recognition in her father’s eyes.) Working toward a lower-order goal—baking a cake, fixing a carburetor, shopping for a dress, staying out of the path of a hurricane—maintains a story’s momentum and can steer you through what otherwise might be a too-long scene of dialog, the dread BOGSAT: Bunch of Guys Sitting Around Talking. Deadly. Frowned upon.

Another well-used (because it’s effective) device to keep the readers focused on what happens next is the “ticking clock.” It needn’t be as literal as a real clock counting down the seconds until the bomb goes off, but it will be some kind of critical deadline (apt word, that). In James Wolff’s new spy novel, The Man in the Corduroy Suit, the protagonist has two weeks to find out whether a former MI5 employee was actually a spy. To keep the investigation secret, he can’t make any obvious moves, so it’s slow work. He’s just getting started when the deadline is changed to one week. The metaphorical ticking clock can be an important impending visit, a wedding that shouldn’t come off, the start of the school year, the fate of a kidnapped child—anything with outsized importance in the mind of the protagonist.

It’s a long and rocky fictional path to relieving the tension caused by the ticking clock, and at times it may seem like a toss-up whether the protagonist will actually succeed. Once one obstacle along the path is resolved or one question is answered, the writer must keep ʼem coming. As Percy says, “a good story is a turnstile of mysteries.” It may seem the protagonist can never—or rarely—catch a break along that rocky path. And there’s that thunder rumbling in the distance, that clock ticking.

My next novel is set in Rome and has two principal narrators. Genie Clarke is an American travel writer who has inadvertently made herself the target of a group of gangsters, and Leo Angelini is a Polizia di Stato detective trying to protect her. One ticking clock is the ultimatum the head of the gangsters has given his men: “Get her.” Could there be a romance between Genie and Leo? This possibility has its own ticking clock: Genie’s imminent return to the States. Let’s hope this book gets published so you can find out what happens next!

Try Thrill Me for yourself and see what insights you can pull out for your WIP.

(The Amazon links to books above are affiliate links. I receive a small compensation for the recommendation if you click through on them and make a purchase. The product cost is the same to you whether you use an affiliate link or not.)

Writers as Fisherfolk

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It’s stretching a metaphor to call writers fisherfolk, but in for a penny . . . If you can stick with me here, I’d say we cast our nets through research. What I like best about the research I do for my short stories and novels is that it gives me ideas, it lets me connect my story to reality, and readers respond because the story seems so “real” to them. Even if a bit of background work gives me only a single word, it will be the mot juste. Our net-casting—our research—happens at several levels—trolling for ideas, diving into the facts, and weighing the catch.

Trolling for Ideas – When readers ask, “Where do you get your ideas?” and a writer says “everywhere,” they mean that every news story, magazine article, museum exhibit, and anecdote goes into that great filing cabinet wastebasket in the brain and comes out, maybe, someday, in some form or another. Very likely, it won’t be identical, it may not even be recognizable, but it will be “inspired by.”

An example: In my novel, Architect of Courage, the protagonist learns a heinous crime was not the fault of the person he blames, and a police detective wisely advises him to let it go. “This will be hard to wrap your mind around. It changes things,” the detective says, adding, “Time and again I see people who can’t give up their theories about who’s to blame for a crime. They hang on for dear life.” This idea came from reading an FBI agent’s blog about the British family of a young woman murdered in Perugia, Italy, a crime for which American Amanda Knox was wrongfully convicted. Despite numerous and lengthy legal proceedings and much evidence exonerating Knox, the dead woman’s parents steadfastly believed in her guilt. The psychology of this case, if not the factual situation, bore directly on my thriller.

Diving into the Facts – Writing page after page and chapter after chapter requires a different, much more focused type of research. Maps, reference books, photo research, the Internet—all keep the writer out of blooper territory. Are there one-way streets in Brussels? Which way do they run? How long does it take to get from the Hotel Sofitel to the American Embassy by cab? What does the hotel neighborhood look like? My architect protagonist is mostly in Manhattan, but he travels to Brussels and Tarifa, Spain, too. I was amused and flattered when a friend contacted me asking for Brussels travel tips. I’ve never been there. The setting just seemed so real to him. (Success!) The facts I uncovered, in turn, led to new ideas and situations that fostered the story’s development.

Weighing the Catch– So, the author has written “The End.” Is it? Probably not. Now that the story is down on paper and the dilemmas of the plot and characters are solved, what more is there to do? It’s time for the big picture. Beta readers help (think “audience research”). In Architect of Courage, I also needed a more specific review of the way police work. Yes, I watch tv, but on the off-chance its depictions of policing aren’t 100% accurate, I sought help. I spent an afternoon with a former NYPD detective and terrorism expert going over every paragraph and every line of dialog that involved law enforcement. “Would a detective say something like this?,” “Is this how it’s done?,” “Does this make sense to you?” Blooper-patrol again, though my questions weren’t just about what do cops do, I was hoping for—and received—insights into how they think.

Your Further Research:
I like Benjamin Sobieck’s The Writer’s Guide to Weapons. It provides “just enough” information.

Need a foreign word? Try the Word Reference website—lots of idioms associated with a word, and online forums with native speakers where you can ask questions. Especially helpful with slang. Many languages.

If you’ve read Architect of Courage and wonder where something or other came from, feel free to ask! And if you haven’t read it, you can order it here. (affiliate link)

Popcorn Weekend: Living and Turn Every Page

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Two recent films that couldn’t be more different arrive at the same place. In both, men near the ends of their careers are determined to do the work necessary to leave behind something of importance. They prove that being a beautiful person is not age-related!

Living is a feature film, with a screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro, directed by Oliver Hermanus (trailer). Rodney Williams, London bureaucrat in a do-nothing department, is portrayed by Bill Nighy. If you’re a Nighy fan like me, that’s all you need to know to want to see this film, but there are plenty of other reasons to do so. Given a fatal diagnosis, Williams is inspired to do something with his life, to leave behind something meaningful.

The film is more charming than sad, and pretty frustrating with its apt demonstration of how resistant to change bureaucracies are! Even so, it’s possible to make a positive difference in at least some people’s lives. Watch for the dinner scene in which Williams’s daughter-in-law desperately tries to signal her husband to confront his father about what she considers his questionable behavior.

The story closely follows that of a 1952 Japanese film, Ikuru, and you can see how its emphasis on conformity would work well in that culture.

Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating: 96%; audiences 86%.

Turn Every Page is a documentary that any historian or author or editor is bound to love (trailer). Subtitled The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb, it tells the story of the half-century of collaboration between author Robert Caro—The Power Broker(now in its 17th printing) and the LBJ biographies, starting with The Path to Power—and his renowned editor, Robert Gottlieb. They were young men when they started; they’re elderly now, and this film about them is fascinating from beginning to end.

The film was made by Gottlieb’s daughter, Lizzie, and she never puts a foot wrong. She brings in other voices, she takes a trip to Texas, she uses maps of New York City to show how Robert Moses’s massive public works projects shaped New York, and when she showed some of the famous books Gottlieb has edited, I sat there saying, “I read that. Read that. Yep. Another one.” In a classroom discussion of The Power Broker, a teacher says we can’t know whether New York would be a better place without Moses’s projects, but it definitely would be a different place.

After dwelling on Moses’s kind of power, Caro undertook a study of political power at the national level and chose Lyndon Baines Johnson as his exemplar. Because when doing his research he “turns every page,” he uncovered information about this period that was previously unknown, about which lesser writers might say, “We’ll never know whether . . .” Now, for better or worse, we do.

Caro takes a novelist’s interest in the impact the exercise of power had on people—from those in the way of one of Moses’s new expressways to the people who supported Johnson’s political wheeling and dealing. In one of the documentary’s more amusing moments, he and Gottlieb, preparing for a grueling day of editing, must scour the Knopf offices to come up with—a pencil.Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating: 96%; audiences 100%!

No Dull Sentences!

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Award-winning novelist William Gay, who died just over a decade ago, was heralded as a new voice in Southern fiction from the time his first novel, The Long Home, was published in 1999. When I read a reviewer’s comment that Gay was “incapable of writing a dull sentence,” he sounded like someone to find out more about.

In an interview published in 2013, he talked about being considered an heir to Faulkner, O’Connor, and Wolfe, and said that his favorite Faulkner novel is As I Lay Dying, because in it Faulkner writes about ordinary people. That’s a hallmark of Gay’s own writing, and draws on a long career that included house-painting and hanging drywall to support his family by day, writing out stories by night. Understandably, given that schedule, his first book wasn’t published until he was in his late fifties. But he had been on that path since seventh grade, when a teacher noticed his incessant reading and gave Gay a copy of Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel, as long as he’d talk to him about it afterwards. It became one of his favorite books.

Younger people would ask him whether they should write what they want to write, even though it might be a hard road to get it published, or should they turn to genre writing (which is no picnic to get published, either, I’d add). His advice was always that they should write what they wanted to write. I think that’s what lets you, as a writer, put your heart into it and gives you the fortitude to stay with it over time through revisions, more revisions, critiques, and seeking publication.

Many book marketing folks say authors should have their ideal reader, or audience, in mind. Gay disagrees. He believes that, if you do, “the work is going to be more bland, with the rough corners knocked off.” It makes a story more generic and he said he’s always tried to avoid being generic. Much of Gay’s work is dark and violent, coming-of-age stories set in the 1940s and 50s, in which a young person must confront evil. (Stephen King, who knows something about evil, said Gay’s darkest, most Southern Gothic book, Twilight,was his “best read” in 2008.NOT the vampires.)

Gay went on a publish several more well regarded novels and a short-story collection with the juicy title, I Hate to See the Evening Sun Go Down (2002). His story, “The Paperhanger” was anthologized in Best American Mystery Stories 2001.

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AI: Wild Hopes, Desperate Fears, and Plot Ideas

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Generative artificial intelligence taking over what we thought were uniquely human activities offers of-the-minute plot lines for mystery and crime writers. We’re accustomed to robot reporters covering high school sports and company earnings reports, but ChatGPT and its kin producing the Great American Novel-To-Be? What about AI creating art, video, and audio that mimics specific human voices? Whole new realms of possible crimes open up. A recent Washington Post article calls this an era of “wild hopes and desperate fears.” If the genie isn’t already out of the bottle, it’s certainly punched through the top.

“The capacity for a technology to be used both for good and ill is not unique to generative AI,” the Post article says. Other types of AI tools have downsides too. One that immediately raised skeptical questions is the idea of deploying AI in policing. A recent Guardian article by Jo Callaghan starts by describing the questions such a move would raise. While it makes sense to continue the long-standing practice of sending a robot to check out suspicious packages, San Francisco’s board of supervisors has planned to arm robots with lethal explosives, before pushback caused them to take a step back, maybe only temporarily.

Public confidence in the police has declined sharply in recent years, not just in the United States, but in England and Wales too, Callaghan reports. Meanwhile, it’s a job that “requires hundreds of judgments to be made each day, often under conditions of extreme pressure and uncertainty.” These decisions are informed by a lot of factors unrelated to the situation confronting the officer: past experience, recent trauma, temperament, attitudes and prejudices absorbed from the rest of society. Could AI, presumably relieved of all those extraneous factors, do better? Operate more fairly and efficiently? Maybe, maybe not.

“Narrow AI,” Callaghan explained, can perform specific tasks, like identifying the bomb in that abandoned backpack; “general purpose AI” makes more complicated judgments and decisions, even the kinds public safety personnel must make. The deep learning that enables general purpose AI results from feeding the system huge amounts of data. For example, having been fed millions of photographs of human faces, facial recognition AI can pick out suspects. We see this and other examples of AI creeping into novels and TV cop shows, where, for example, GPS data are used not only to develop “heat maps” of where crimes are likely, but also to predict specific suspects’ likely location or where to look for a missing person. You can see why some authors prefer to set their stories before 1970. The technology is a lot to keep up with.

Callaghan concludes, “Instead of debating what AI will or will not be able to do in the future, we should be asking what we want from our criminal and justice system, and how AI could help us to achieve it.” These are questions crime writers wrestle with too.

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Zoom Cat-astrophes!

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The wisdom of a piece of advice in Stephen King’s very useful (and actionable) book, On Writing, has come home to rest in my lap. Purring. Someplace amidst his good advice, he says, “Put the cat out.” In other words, avoid distractions. (No, this is not Save the Cat, that’s another thing altogether!).

Twice lately, I’ve had reason to bow to King. My mystery reading group was reviewing this month’s selection, when my Siamese, William, got his head stuck in a desk-top box of tissues and waved it wildly in front of the Zoom camera. So much for a focused discussion. (Video of an earlier, similar episode attached. Who says cats aren’t willing to conduct repeat experiments?)

Last month, I was the interviewee on a Zoom call about writing, my writing process, and my mystery/thriller Architect of Courage. Kim Ha of the Pennington public library did the interviewing. While a whole checkerboard of Zoomers watched, I had to get up, call my husband, and have him take William away, because he was playing noisily with a plastic bag. Wouldn’t stop, no matter how hard I glared. Talk about wanting to appear “professional”! You can see the interview in this YouTube video if you’re interesting in writing, etc., etc. The thoughtful Kim cut out William’s star turn, however. (I’m hoping that wasn’t the best part!)

So, meanwhile, put the cat out!

More Ways to Annoy Your Reader

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In the litany of authorial sins that readers object to, are quirks that require readers to reread or rereread a passage to figure it out. So said the hundreds of readers who responded to a recent Washington Post query, written up here (paywall).

One cause for having to reread a passage can be the abandonment of quotation marks—Cormac McCarthy is an author who omits them (though, I admit, I don’t mind rereading him).

Hilary Mantel had the opposite quirk. She kept the quotation marks but eliminated everything like “Cromwell said” or “said the Cardinal.” Some dialog passages needed several readings to be sure I had the words coming from the correct character’s mouth. Most confusing in Wolf Hall, but better in the later books.

Another annoying source of confusion are gratuitously complicated timelines. The structure of a book should make it easier, not harder, to follow. Even Sulari Gentil’s clever The Woman in the Library (my review) baffled me at times. In a plot like nesting dolls, you have to stay alert to a change in point of view. Is it the author writing or the author she’s writing about or . . . . ???

On to the complaints about characters, starting with “unrealistically clever children or talking animals.” No, please.

A big one we should have evolved past by now is sexy descriptions of women in non-sexy situations. I read a lot of cringy stuff focusing on a woman’s appearance, especially her figure, top and bottom. Need I mention such descriptions are almost always written by men? Turn the tables and write about male characters in such a salacious way, you see how awful it is. (See this column by Alexandra Petri, “If male authors described men in literature the way they describe women.” Or this essay by Prasanna Sawant, “The Bizarre Ways Some Male Authors Describe Women.”) I don’t believe the male authors are even aware they’re doing it. Appearance is what they notice about women in real life, so that’s what they put on paper, whereas the male characters just show up.

Readers also object to “disabled characters who exist only to provide treacly inspiration.” That holds for any character who is meant to demonstrate a point, like the protagonist’s open-mindedness: “Look, he has a Black friend, a gay friend, a loyal dog!” Authors need to give those friends and mutts something to do.

Then the readers got down to nitpicking. Somebody will object to almost anything, it seems: overused phrases like “his smile didn’t reach his eyes,” “she exhaled the breath she didn’t realize she was holding” (I encounter that one a lot). Even individual words would prompt readers’ to get out their blue pencils: burgeoning, preternatural, inevitable, lugubrious. In the comments on the article, one reader objected to “spelling based on sound, not a dictionary. Just read one novel that referred to riggers (not rigors) and emmersed (instead of immersed). I was stunned to read the author’s note in which she complimented her editor.” I, on the other hand, was pleased and surprised to see that such creatures still exist.

Post writer Ron Charles, who compiled these complaints, predicts that “somewhere some cynical, market-driven AI scientist is working on a novel-writing program that can accommodate all these complaints.” I hope not. Words written by a real person—blind spots and annoying habits and grammar lapses and all—are preferable to a formula any day.

Read Part 1 of this article here.

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