Tag Archives: writing

The Glass Top-Hat

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NYPD, cops

(photo: Nick Gulotta, Creative Commons license)

Loved this Alexandra Alter article about crime novelist Richard Price and his adoption of a pseudonym, in the hope of producing a quickie novel (and not suffer years over it!). Why not use his skills to dash off a plot-heavy, (shudder) “commercial” novel and reap the proceeds? In fact, he found out he is who he is, and the new book took just as much time and care as ever.

Price, interviewed this week on the PBS New Hour, is the author of the well-crafted and popular novels Freedomland, Lush Life, and Clockers. This pseudonymous endeavor has now emerged as his ninth novel, The Whites, which The New Yorker review by Joyce Carol Oates describes as “a maze of a novel” about a case that haunts NYPD detective Billy Graves. (The ghosts of unsolved cases are a universal occupational hazard for cops, as Price described it for PBS.) The book’s awkward parentage is displayed on the cover as “Richard Price Writing as Harry Brandt.” Even though The Whites came out only about two weeks ago, it’s already a hardcover fiction best-sellers (#5 on the NYT list in it first week).

“You realize you only know one way to write,” Price said during his New York Times interview. In keeping with his stripped-down approach, he did no new research, but instead called upon his extensive experience in ride-alongs with police and their lengthy conversations for his previous novels, as well as in his writing for HBO’s The Wire.

The whole pseudonym exercise was a failure, Price now says. “It seemed like a good idea in the beginning, and now I wish I hadn’t done it.” And, in a line for the ages: “This pen name is like pulling a rabbit out of a glass hat.”

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Nobel Laureates in Literature: Women’s Division

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woman writing

(photo: Mike Licht, Creative Commons License)

In the past 111 years, only 13 women have received Nobel awards for literature. This Infographic lists them (and, if you’re like me, many still slumber in obscurity) and may make us hope that Virginia Woolf was wrong when she said, “For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.”

But when you look at the whole list, many of the men are not well known, either. The male winners the year previous to the first five female winners were, after all: Rudolph Christoph Eucken, George Bernard Shaw (heard of him!), Henri Bergson, Roger Martin du Gard, and Johannes Vilhelm Jensen.

And women still choose to obscure their gender with initials or pseudonyms. Why they/we do it! This handy tool lets you paste your text and assess whether it comes off as more “male” or “female.” I just used it on two short stories—one from a mostly male point of view (judged by the tool as “weakly male”) and one from a female point of view (“weakly female”). Hmm. Creators of the tool say “weakness” suggests the writer “could be European.” Not quite sure how to interpret that!

Easy-to-Read?

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Goodnight Moon, Children's book

(photo: wikipedia.org)

Not just authors, but most of us often have to communicate in writing, whether in reports for the office or papers for school or other purposes. But, how readable are our efforts? What readability standard should we strive for? Shane Snow’s recent Contently article began by saying, “Ernest Hemingway is regarded as one of the world’s greatest writers. After running some nerdy reading level stats, I now respect him even more.”

Leaving aside the “world’s greatest” issue, certainly Hemingway is considered one of the most direct and uncluttered authors of the 20th century. This is an assertion that can be tested using the various scales developed to measure the readability of texts. How does he stack up? Snow ran The Old Man and the Sea through one of the most-used readability tools, the Flesch-Kincaid index, and Hemingway’s classic was pegged at a fourth-grade reading level.

He reports results of similar analyses of a number famous authors’ works–both fiction and nonfiction. Among fiction writers, Hemingway’s effort was at the low end of the scale, only slightly less demanding (in terms of readability) than the writing of Cormac McCarthy. Most demanding was Michael Crichton’s work, which scored at almost grade 9. So even the “most challenging” of the 20 or so fiction authors tested required less than a high school education. That isn’t to say that the content of these works was suitable for children in those grades. Just because the words and sentence structure are simple, the meaning may not be.

Test your own work here: Just cut and paste your text into the window and instantly find out how it scores on six different readability measures. (This piece, which seems pretty straightforward to me, tests out at almost the ninth-grade level.)

I ran a short story I’m working on through the tests, and it came out at grade 6.1, approximately the difficulty of the work of Stephen King and Stephanie Meyer. In another popular measure—the Flesch-Kincaid “Reading Ease” score—my story had a score of 74.2, similar to the work of Dan Brown (holding my tongue), J.K. Rowling’s 7th Harry Potter book, John Grisham, and James Patterson, but easier than work by Tolstoy and David Foster Wallace. In this particular test, Hemingway and McCarthy are both more “readable” than Goodnight Moon.

The most recent national studies, which are now more than a decade old, suggest the average American reads at about an eighth grade level. Inexperienced or academic writers shoot themselves in the foot when they make their writing too complex in an effort to appear more intelligent. This strategy fails miserably, according to the results of experiments published a decade ago and summarized here.

And, even if people can read at a higher than eighth grade level, do they want to? My theory about the booming popularity of “young adult” fiction is that people like it because it’s easy to read. They don’t want to have to slog through a lot of complicated vocab and syntax. Looks like Hemingway was onto something!

“Come in, Sit down . . .

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cafe at night

(photo: wikimedia commons)

. . . Let me tell you a story.”

Like the author of this recent Gawker post about novels with compelling opening sentences, which includes many relatively recent books, I was inspired by Joe Fassler’s 2013 Atlantic interview with Stephen King, in which King talked about the first lines of his books and why those first words are so important. His all-time favorite opener, from Needful Things: “You’ve been here before.” King says he spends weeks, months—years sometimes—getting them exactly right, so remembers them well: “They were a doorway I went through.”

Analyzing King’s Approach
The opening line of King’s 11/22/63 is “I’ve never been what you’d call a crying man,” and the reader immediately and correctly anticipates a fair amount of crying before the last page is turned. The opening line of It: “The terror that would not end for another 28 years, if it ever did, began so far as I can know or tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.”

Fassler’s interview made me think, “He’s a big success, right? Maybe I can learn something here.”

So I visited my library and pulled all the King books they had on hand—18 different novels. I sat at a table and wrote out the first few sentences of each. (If you’ve never done this, try handwriting passages from a book you admire. For some reason, possibly in sync with research on how people learn, the act of hand-copying a text puts you—well, me, anyway—in the author’s mindframe much more directly and powerfully than reading the same words or typing them out.)

What the First Lines Contain
What I found out by doing this is that the opening sentences of many Stephen King novels have certain characteristics in common. They:

  1. Put the reader in a precise location and time
  2. Identify the protagonist, usually by name
  3. Address the reader directly – “you”
  4. Use simple language and quotidian details, which create an easy tone (nice rhythm, too)
  5. Include something to provoke a vague anxiety
  6. Put the protagonist’s experience in a larger context
  7. In some way invite the reader to “sit and listen to a story.”

Three Examples
Recently I read King’s Mr. Mercedes (2014), which does 2, 4, 5, 6 and to some extent 1—at least he gets the reader into the geographic and temporal ballpark:
“Augie Odenkirk (2) had a 1997 Datsun that still ran well in spite of high mileage (1-ish), but gas was expensive, especially for a man with no job (4, 6), and City Center was on the far side of town (1-ish), so he decided to take the last bus of the night (5).”

And, another example, from The Tommyknockers (1987):
“For want of a nail the kingdom was lost, that’s how the catechism goes when you boil it down (5). In the end, you can boil everything down to something similar—or so Roberta Anderson thought much later on (2, 3). It’s either all an accident . . . or all fate (6). Anderson literally stumbled over her destiny in the small town of Haven, Maine, on June 21, 1988(1, 4). That stumble was the root of the matter; all the rest was nothing but history (7).”

A look back at King’s very first novel, Carrie (1974) shows he used these methods from the start, though his technique has grown in subtlety and creativity over time. Carrie begins:
“News item from the Westover (Me.) weekly Enterprise, August 19, 1966 (1):
“Rain of Stones Reported
“It was reliably reported by several persons that a rain of stones fell from a clear blue sky on Carlin Street in the town of Chamberlain on August 17th (4). The stones fell principally on the home of Mrs. Margaret White, damaging the roof extensively and ruining two gutters and a downspout valued at approximately $25 (4). Mrs. White, a widow, lives with her three-year-old daughter, Carietta (2).
“Mrs. White could not be reached for comment (5).”

These examples invite the reader in like a cafe’s bright lights as dark is coming on. They say, “Sit down, listen, let me tell you about this.” I wouldn’t describe King’s approach as a “formula,” because his books begin in such different ways, but rather a discipline. Early on, he gives readers a clear sense of “who, what, when, and where,” and the rest of the book provides the “why.”

In My Own Writing

So what did I learn from this exercise? I rewrote the beginning scenes of my two novels with these thoughts in mind, making several tries of it, and was sure to name the books’ protagonists and place them precisely in time and location, use simple language, and forecast the larger context of the action. And I’m happier with the result. We’ll see what comes of it.

If you have some King sitting on your bookshelf and look for these 7 points, I’d be interested to know what you find.

Famous First Lines

  • A list emphasizing the classics, starting with Herman Melville’s “Call me Ishmael.”
  • Writers reveal their favorite first lines in this list.

Let there be . . .

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birthday cake, candles

(photo: pixabay)

This week Orin Hargraves posted an illuminating essay on his Visual Thesaurus blog in tribute to the designation of 2015 as International Year of Light. Light, says Hargraves is “one of the most productive concepts for metaphor in English.”

Metaphors about light relate not just to our dependence on light for seeing (“light of day”; “leave a light on for me”), but, more profoundly, on light as a fount of understanding (“shed light,” “puts a new light on the matter,” “I see, . . .”). By contrast, dark suggests not just not seeing, but also not understanding (“in the dark,” “unenlightened,” “a cloudy perception”). No surprise, then, that the original meaning of “obscure” was “dark, opaque, gloomy.”

I picked up my copy of Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By, then found Hargraves consulted them on this matter, too. The two linguists cluster these and many similar metaphors under the rubric “Understanding is seeing; ideas are light sources; discourse is a light-medium.” Their examples include “What is your outlook on that? I view it differently. Now I’ve got the whole picture. It was a murky discussion.”

The relevant metaphors extend from direct references to light and dark to more indirect ones (“point of view”; “a transparent argument”; “lamp of knowledge”; “it dawned on her”; versus “someone not too bright”; “he’s a dim bulb”) and once you start looking for them, you find them embedded everywhere. In fact, Hargraves says, “there is hardly a noun, verb, or adjective in English with a core meaning arising from light and vision that cannot be used in metaphoric extension to depict knowledge and understanding.” And, to a great extent, the obverse. The full essay is a great read. Enjoy!

A random closing thought, but is it possible that birthday candles are a subconscious but resonant metaphor for the accumulation of understanding gained with each passing year?

 

*Death at the Château Bremont

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wine, wine glass

(photo: wikimedia.org)

By M. L. Longworth–Usually I’m generous in reviewing an author’s first novel, because there’s a lot to learn about how best to guide readers down a fictional path, and even a good story can stumble into the Swamp of Difficulty. (And let’s face it–I, too, want to have a first book in print some day, and it is unlikely to be without flaws, no matter how hard I try!) However, I expect a book that a publisher—in this case, Penguin—has decided to invest in to be guided out of the murky waters in which this mystery novel flounders.

My general concerns are the story’s lack of coherence and convincingly drawn, engaging characters. Their dialog seems to be conducted in American slang. Maybe French people speak that way these days. I hope not. In Fiction Writing 101, students are harangued endlessly about maintaining a consistent point of view and warned against dipping in and out of different characters’ consciousnesses, as Longworth does, often from one paragraph to the next. The result is inescapably messy and confusing.

I’ll confine examples of specific quibbles to one three-page sequence late in the book, in which the author makes three startling mistakes that leave the reader shouting for (or at) the book’s editor, if one there was. In the first, the omniscient narrator announces, “He (Auvieux) had always been frightened of Cosette.” Auvieux and Cosette are two principal characters, why are we being told this important information so late in the game, and why hasn’t it been shown throughout in Auvieux’s behavior? With appropriate signals from Auvieux, the detective would have deduced his fear by now (never mind that we don’t find out whether there is any real basis for it), so that it can be served up to the reader as the character’s insight, not a bald assertion by the narrator.

The firearm Auvieux carries is described first as a hunting rifle then as a shotgun—an amazing continuity break for an author of murder mysteries. In this same passage, Auvieux has led the detective to a remote cabin at night. Although the detective has never been there before, he says, “We will [go around and]. . . sneak up on the north side of the cabanon, since that side doesn’t have a window.” Huh? How the heck does he know that?

The author, who apparently is charming in person, has produced a number of subsequent mysteries in this series. They have the advantage of a colorful setting—the Aix-en-Provence region of France, where she lives—and her sprightly writing style, but this first one does not make me eager to read another.

On her website, Longworth admits she doesn’t read mysteries very often, and it shows. Also she takes a swipe at the genre (and here I admit to being perhaps a little thin-skinned, as my parenthetical editorializing indicates), saying, “I was too shy to begin writing [real!] fiction, so I thought that if I wrote ‘genre’ fiction [the easy stuff!] I would have some boundaries to work with. Every mystery has the same framework: someone dies, there is a murderer, and the hero/heroine looks for that killer.” Creatively and persuasively, one hopes.

Looking for Something Good to Read?

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reading

(photo: Nico Cavallotto, Creative Commons)

The stack of books I’m excited to read in 2015 is already pretty high, and to make room, sorted the books of 2014—keep, donate, donate, keep, keep. Handling them again and in writing last week’s post on the 11 very best, I couldn’t help thinking how many more really good ones there were! All 22 **** books of the past year.

Mysteries & Thrillers

  • Sandrine’s Case by Thomas H. Cook – originally I gave this 3 stars, but when I couldn’t stop thinking about it, slapped on a fourth
  • The Golden Hour by Todd Moss—believable political thriller, awesome first novel
  • Standing in Another Man’s Grave by Ian Rankin—an always-satisfying outing with Edinburgh’s Inspector John Rebus
  • Mystery Girl by David Gordon—a wacky Hollywood tale with oddball characters and LOL dialog
  • The Cottoncrest Curse by Michael H. Rubin—I met Rubin, so bought his book about late-1800s murders on a Louisiana plantation. So glad I did!
  • Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger—won all the big mystery world prizes in 2013
  • Spycraft by Robert Wallace, H. Keith Melton, and Henry Robert Schlesinger—non-fiction, describing the technologies of espionage (and avoiding recent scandals entirely)
  • The Reversal by Michael Connelly—Harry Bosch AND Mickey Haller
  • The Cold, Cold Ground by Adrian McKinty—really makes his Belfast-during-the-Troubles setting work for him

Other Fiction

 Biography, History, Politics

Great Places

  • The White Rock by Hugh Thomson—adventurers still discovering lost Inca outposts
  • The Danube by Nick Thorpe—from the Black Sea to the river’s origins in Germany
  • The New York Nobody Knows by William B. Helmreich—this sociologist walked more than 6000 miles of NYC streets and talked to everybody

 Stephen King

book, imagination

(Cinzia A. Rizzo, flickr.com, CC license)

Comfortable Ambiguity

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keyhole, shoes, Cristian Iohan Ștefănescu

(photo: Cristian Iohan Ștefănescu, Creative Commons license)

A novel should leave “a little room for the reader to interpret, to bring in his or her own perceptions and conceptions,” says Celeste Ng in a recent Glimmer Train essay. Ng’s novel, Everything I Never Told You is one of NPR’s “Great Reads” for 2014 and has been selected by the Amazon editors as the #1 book of the year. Ng’s essay suggests we can look through the keyhole, we can see the pink velvet shoes, but we may never know everything about them, so we fill in the rest of the story to our own pasts, preconceptions, and predilections.

In her “literary thriller,” Ng artfully leaves room for interpretation of the events leading to the disappearance of a family’s daughter. A familiar premise, but “If we know this story, we haven’t seen it yet in American fiction, not until now,” says Alexander Chee in the New York Times, as she turns “the nest of familial resentments into at least four smaller, prickly mysteries full of the secrets the family members won’t share.”

There’s a difference between the deliberate ambiguity Ng advocates—“a space, however small, for the reader to fit into the piece”—and simple confusion. The challenge is to walk the tightrope between answering every question and leaving out important information about character, motivation, or even plot that the reader needs in order to arrive at a reasonable conclusion. As a writer of mystery and thriller stories myself, I am constantly aware of that tightrope and the expectations of readers in this genre.

Discomfort with ambiguity leads to such devices as the flash-forward epilogue “that tells you exactly where everyone ends up and what everything means.” This was my one quibble with the otherwise lovely novel All the Light We Cannot See. Movies do this, too. In general, I find this trick disappointing, because by the time I reach the end of a book or compelling movie, I have a rich array of ideas about the potential future lives of the characters, and the novelist/moviemaker can pick only one of these.

Rorschach

(photo: wikimedia.org)

Preoccupation with, you could say, “closure,” may not be simply a response to ambiguity per se, Ng proposes, “but to ambiguity done badly.” If ambiguity results from the writer’s own indecision, she says, then it often doesn’t work. If the writer is relying on readers to sort out the evidence and arrive at a conclusion, “the reader senses that crucial pieces are missing and ends up confused.” When the writer knows how the situation resolves, but simply chooses not to say, like Henry James’s Turn of the Screw, “a modest monument to the bold pursuit of ambiguity,” said poet Brad Leithauser. The ambiguity in that novel has sparked 116 years of speculation, a level of interest that likely wouldn’t have occurred, had James made it perfectly clear whether the governess was delusional.

In the batch of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine stories I reviewed 12/12/14 was one by Joyce Carol Oates (“Equatorial”) in which the timid wife of a much-married man grows to believe he’s trying to kill her. Evidence mounts that he might want to be rid of her. He seems, a time or two, to try. But then he injures himself and the imbalance in physical strength between them tips slightly in her direction. She takes a risk to further even the odds. The story ends as the two sides of this interpersonal equation teeter on the brink. Will he succeed, or will she? The ending is classically ambiguous, and Oates has given sufficient information for readers to plausibly choose either ending.

Everything I Never Told You ends without telling exactly what happens to its characters outside the bounds of the book, and readers ask Ng about them. At first such questions made her worry she’d left out some key bit of information, but then she realized that readers believe they know the characters and are firmly convinced about what happens to them. What they wanted from Ng was “to confirm what ‘really’ happened—because they wanted to be right!—but all of them were already positive that they knew.”

It is these readers’ “intense and comfortable certainty” that shows she left sufficient ambiguity for readers to take hold and give the story their own meaning. “The story is truly finished—and meaning is made—not when the author adds the last period, but when the reader enters the story and fills that little ambiguous space, completing the circuit, letting the power flow through.”

See how she does it!

Concrete Images: Emotional Impact

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wasp

(photo: Serena Epstein, Creative Commons)

Author John Thornton Williams, writing a recent Glimmer Train essay about his strategy for connecting readers with characters, touches on “one of the most important accomplishments of fiction” and one of the trickiest. Certainly writers receive plenty of advice not to come right out and say, “Mary was angry that Bethany was flirting with Ben” or “Dan felt sad when his dog died.” First of all, those feelings are pure obvious, given the situation, and second, naming a feeling doesn’t make the reader feel it.

An alternative, which Williams terms “a lengthy expository digression into the psyche of a character, perhaps accompanied by physical cues,” like “his stomach was in a knot, his throat was on fire,” he says, “generally proves detrimental to how I experience the story at hand.” It distracts him from the narrative, rather than immersing him in it. Or, as Donald Maass says, in Writing 21st Century Fiction, “when you supply everything readers are supposed to feel, they may wind up feeling little at all.”

Williams makes a third choice, especially for a story’s crisis moments, when emotions run highest and, often, at cross-purposes. He calls this approach “indirection of image.” To accomplish this, he takes into account how his characters would see a situation, based on their emotional state. “Something as simple as a car parked on the street surely looks different to a lottery winner than to someone who just got evicted,” he says.

His example recalls a favorite exercise from John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction: “Describe a building as seen by a man whose son has just been killed in a war. Do not mention the son, war, death, or the old man doing the seeing; then describe the same building, in the same weather and at the same time of day, as seen by a happy lover. Do not mention love or the loved one.” This exercise is many times harder than it might appear, and it’s perfect practice for the “indirection of image” approach Williams recommends.

Indirection of image, he says, “is a way to take abstract emotions and project them onto something concrete.” This actually expresses our lived experience. How many times has a car or a piece of furniture or a particular shirt become more significant in our minds because of its symbolic association with a whole range of emotions, beyond what we can tease out and easily express? Our childhood home. The ghastly color of its bathroom tile. The relentless ticking of the mantelpiece clock. A dead wasp.

By giving readers space to project their own emotions into the situation, by leaving a little ambiguity, readers can experience the emotion on a level that connects with their own experience, Williams says. They can, in other words, get inside the character. Here’s a link to one of his stories.

Joyce Carol Oates: Being a Writer

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Joyce Carol Oates, On BoxingJoyce Carol Oates isn’t a person bitten by the writing bug early in life. She wanted to be a teacher. And, it’s as a teacher that Princeton University celebrated her last Friday, with 10 of her former students—all multiply published writers today—returning to talk about their experiences in her classes and workshops and with her personally. She began teaching at Princeton in 1978 and, in 2015, will retire from full-time teaching but continue to teach a course each fall in the Creative Writing program.

While the former students lauded her accessibility and careful attention to their work, Oates also has found time to create more than 100 books, including fiction, essays, plays, poetry, and a memoir. In this list is her “unlikely bestseller,” On Boxing. One of her former students, Jonathan Ames, commented that in his day, the only photograph in Oates’s office was one of her with Mike Tyson. This got a laugh from the 100 or so people in the audience observing Oates’s birdlike frame.

Boxing might seem an activity far removed the daily life of a literary academic, but all writers are boxers, one might say, whose opponents are the words they are trying to batter into place in meaningful sentences that express ideas, display characters, and tell unforgettable stories. While this or that writer is applauded as “brave” for spilling raw emotions messily onto the page, Oates’s former students called her truly “courageous” —and here the boxing metaphor emerged explicitly— for never “pulling her punches.” And she taught them not to, either.

Numerous comments about her guidance related to how she prepares her students to be writers, including, as Jonathan Safran Foer said, maintaining the energy to produce a completed work. Many students—equally talented and ambitious as the published writers present—at some point just stop writing, he said. Oates makes her students excited about the process, in the hope that they won’t stop, because from draft to draft, although incremental improvements may—probably are—achieved, they become smaller and smaller. As Whitney Terrell said, “Half the game is just hanging in.” And the work is hard. Moderator Edmund White called his conversations with Oates “one Sisyphus talking to another.”

Another gift she gave students, they said, was permission to identify themselves as “writers.” Being a writer is not necessarily an identity people are comfortable claiming for themselves. In France, White said, no one ever says “I am a poet.” “I write poems” might be OK, but external validation is needed for writers to assert their status in the creative world. Christopher Beha said that Oates made him feel like a character himself —a persona—apart from his ordinary sense of self.

The students further praised her for finding something in every piece of student writing that she loved. She would point out the particular strengths of a piece of writing, then focus the seminar participants—much as editors of a magazine might, which was a frequent class discussion device—on how to make it better. “You let me hand in all those dirty stories,” Ames said, “and you never just x’d that stuff out.” To which Oates replied, “There wouldn’t have been much left. Your name, maybe.”

Over her years of teaching, she’s observed changes in her students. Most prominently, at Princeton today, the student body is so diverse, coming from many different countries and backgrounds. Students have traveled more, visiting countries that decades ago most wouldn’t even have heard of and encountering different cultures that inevitably affect their work. They also read different books, and Oates emphasized the importance of the earliest books one reads—before college, even before high school. Today’s childhoods typically include Harry Potter and more films. Her favorite reads were Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, which she first devoured at age eight or ten. Fantastical. Penetrating. Funny. Inciting curiosity. Qualities we were told she brought to her decades of teaching.

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