Fragment No. 5

Irritation metastasizes so quickly, spreading to every part -- eyes and ears, tongue and skin, and ultimately the heart. Soon you cannot bear to see or hear, speak to or touch, or ultimately feel anything else for the one who caused it.

Hallinan on "The Unfinish Line"

Over at The Blog Cabin, Timothy Hallinan (author of Breathing Water) ponders what to do when you reach the end of a project -- and realize you're nowhere near done. Excerpts:

I am at a juncture in the writing process that I don't read about often -- the point where you've actually written the last words of your novel, you've wrapped up the story and brought home all the characters who are coming home, and you know there are one hundred twelve thousand things wrong with the book. That's something a writer can live with, because it just requires 112,000 fixes. The real killjoy is the doubt, looming like a thick, cold fog, that the whole thing doesn't add up to a weed salad.

What does a writer in this position do?

Read the whole thing. Hallinan gives the only answer there could possibly be ("What this one does is fix the 112,000 things that are wrong") and proceeds to detail exactly how he moves past the unfinished state. I found his reflections immensely heartening, because the first few times I ran into this conundrum it almost cured me of the writing bug. Hallinan's suggestions of keeping a running journal of all the potential speedbumps and methodically going page by page through your finished manuscript are useful. But so is the reminder that this is just something writers will have to deal with. We aren't God. We don't speak stories out of nothing. They take reworking and revision, effort and angst, pain and prodding.

(Picture: CC 2008 by ....Tim)

Black Is Many-Hued

I don’t remember all that much about my elementary-school days. However, I do recall one art class in particular. My teacher held up a color wheel and pointed out the three primaries. Combining these in varying proportions, she explained, yielded the rest of the colors. Red and yellow made orange, yellow and blue formed green, and so on. This fascinated me, but what really blew my six-year-old mind was how she said we got black -- by combining everything. That couldn’t be right, could it? So I did what any doubtful kid would do: I dumped all my Crayolas on the desk and started wildly scribbling with each one on a fresh sheet of paper. A similar sense of unfettered experimentation marks Ted Dekker’s genre-bending novel Black.

Thomas Hunter has gotten himself into a fix. It was bad enough that he borrowed two-hundred grand from the Mob under false pretenses, but the fact that he hasn’t paid it back has made matters even more tense. Fleeing from a posse of contract killers through the backstreets of Denver, Thomas gets clipped on the head by a stray bullet and passes out. When he wakes up, he isn’t in the Rocky Mountain state. Or the USA. Or anywhere on earth, as far as he can tell. Thomas finds himself in a wood black as midnight being attacked by a horde of ferocious bat-like creatures. He soon collapses from blood loss -- and is back in Denver. He quickly learns that he’ll alternate realities every time loses consciousness and that both places are in danger of destruction, one from the bats (dubbed the Shataiki) and the other from a global pandemic (soon to be caused by a virus called the Raison Strain). Only Thomas isn’t sure which location is actually real and if he’s supposed to avert the disasters -- or be their cause.

Let’s admit it up front: Black is a bit of a mess. When it comes to genres, Dekker not only throws in the proverbial kitchen sink, he chucks in the bath tub, the washer and dryer, the dining room table, a chandelier, and some insulation to give things texture. In Black, you can detect a bit of (breath) the higgery-jiggery time-travel paradox of Twelve Monkeys; the viral terrors of The Hot Zone; the mythic strangeness of George MacDonald’s Lilith; the chop-socky fisticuffs from The Matrix; the spiritual allegory of C.S. Lewis’ Narnia series; the bosom-heaving passion of a Regency historical romance; the high-stakes geopolitics informing a Tom Clancy technothriller; and the perspective-bending horror of Silent Hill. Sounds awful, right? It isn’t, though. True, a lot of the novel doesn’t work. (The romantic interludes pretty much always fall flat.) But Dekker goes at it with such gusto that you can’t help reading on to see what combination he’ll try next and cheering him on when he succeeds. Black may not achieve a uniform sheen, but its palette is fun to behold.

(Picture: CC 2008 by Paradox 56; Hat Tip: B. Nagel)

Actuality Beats Ingredients

Jim looked at me as if I'd said I like to suck the vitreous humor from the eyeballs of baby walruses. "Wait, I thought you said you were making ice cream."

"I was."

"And what was the flavor again?"

"Avocado."

"For the sake of all that's decent, why?"

"Why what?"

"Why'd you put avocado in? What made you think, ‘Let's see, I've got the milk, sugar and salt, but it needs something else. I know I'll mash up that knobby green vegetable!'"

"Well, the avocado flavor works really well once you mix in sour cream."

"Wait, sour cream?!"

Okay, it was obvious that Jim wasn't going to be won over by the description of my avocado ice cream. I couldn't really blame him; the ingredients did sound odd. It's probably the same sort of reaction the average fiction reader has when he hears about some of the wilder genre permutations. To those who subsist on Grisham and Patterson, who view Kirk and Spock and Frodo and Sam as being right at the edge of accessibility, it seems as though the truly exotic tales are composed of randomly mashed-together tropes. "Steampunk westerns? Mythic thrillers? No thanks. Pass the vanilla."

Of course, such stories don't have to -- pardon the expression -- sound good on paper. We don't have to care about their composite parts. The actuality is the important thing, the way those seemingly discordant elements blend together to form something unique and delightful. Perhaps the only way to woo mainstream readers, to get them to taste and see that such genre reads are good, is to sell not the pieces but the thing itself. "This is a good book, take and read," may ultimately be all the encouragement they need.

(Picture: CC 2007 by The Rocketeer)

Reminder: Genre Wars Deadline Approacheth!

Just a friendly reminder for those of you competing in the 2009 Genre Wars Fiction Writing Contest hosted by The Literary Lab: The deadline for entry is December 1, 2009 at 11:59 p.m. PST. As in just over a week. Click here for contest details.

(Picture: Copyright 2009 by The Literary Lab; used by permission)

Hutchins on Reading Beyond Your Chosen Genre

Over at Tor.com, J.C. Hutchins (author of 7th Son: Descent) offers an apologetic for why SF writers ought to read beyond their chosen genre. Excerpts:

Man, does my heart beat for sci-fi. It's a pity the genre rarely gets its deserved due in the mainstream. I can cite a dozen SF novels released this year that beat the pants off The Lost Symbol and other New York Times bestsellers in both content and craft ... and yet, so many sci-fi and fantasy writers, myself included, scrap like pit bulls for coverage beyond the loyal -- if comparatively much smaller -- SFF-friendly blogosphere. ...

I treasure that passion and loyalty, and you should too: ours is an awesome community. Yet I wonder if we -- as readers and writers -- can learn something from these bestsellers and the genres in which they roll. And I think the best way to learn something is to experience it.

Read beyond the SFF genres? Insanity, I know. But play with me for a bit. I think our community can greatly benefit from exposure to these foreign elements.

Read the whole thing. Hutchins offers three rationales for why he curls up with thrillers and mainstream fiction: Wide exposure precludes cynicism towards a genre's conventions, reminds us that narratives ought to accessible and helps us hone our writing by introducing us to other viewpoint. For myself, I find that last reason the most compelling. Creativity is a promiscuous thing, its fecundity increasing in accordance with exposure. We don't hide ourselves in some high and lonely place, waiting for inspiration to fall like fire from heaven. Instead we find it in immersion, in the mess and mire of interaction with every sort of story.

(Picture: CC 2007 by jamelah)

Winnow

It's nice when one of your secretly held suppositions gets seconded by an external source -- particularly when that source happens to be acclaimed in his field. In last week's review of Grifter's Game, I knocked chronological snobbery, the idea that certain things are worse (or better) because they happen to be old. Such thinking blurs distinctions, keeps up from evaluating an argument or idea or text based on its own merits. If you've read at all beyond your own lifespan, though, you may feel a bit uncomfortable with such time blindness. Sure, we should be fair in our judgments, but why do older books so often seem better than the current crop?

Cormac McCarthy, author of The Road, offers an elegant explanation during a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal:

If you look at the Greek plays, they're really good. And there's just a handful of them. Well, how good would they be if there were 2,500 of them? But that's the future looking back at us. Anything you can think of, there's going to be millions of them. Just the sheer number of things will devalue them. I don't care whether it's art, literature, poetry or drama, whatever. The sheer volume of it will wash it out. I mean, if you had thousands of Greek plays to read, would they be that good? I don't think so.

The key phrase is "that's just the future looking back at us." Perhaps ancient Greece produced thousands of dramas, but the winnowing fan of history has shaken off the chaff. Tastes change, styles come and go, and time has a way of sifting through the silt to get to the gold. Hence the reason why it's difficult to pluck gems off of the Barnes & Noble "new releases" stacks. None of it has been sorted, so to speak. Not that such a process is infallible. I remember a Lit professor deriding Moby Dick as "interminable," and the poetry of Wallace Stevens makes me want to gouge my eyes out with my thumbs. But it's a reason why we ought to add older titles to our reading lists. We don't consider them (or exclude them from frank evaluation) merely because they're old. We consider them because they've survived.

(Picture: CC 2006 by Matthew L Stevens)

Love Is Learning

Next time you drive by an elementary school, glance at the playground for a second. What do you see there? Kids running every which way, scrambling up jungle gyms, slipping down slides, dangling from monkey bars, flying from swings. But you also see more than plain old fun and games. You see learning in action.

Childhood is a time when delight and duty naturally dovetail. Those afternoon games of tag do much more than simply divert. Should you break left or right when the kid who's It is only a half-dozen steps away? That's practical instruction in decision making, opportunity cost and game theory. Not that a kid sees it as such. He just likes sprinting around in circles until Mom pulls up with the minivan. But sometime between then and adulthood, we sever the union between enjoyment and education. Instruction becomes drudgery, discipline, a necessary knuckling-down. Play is what we do to escape it.

Now, most of us begin writing because we love it. We love the well-told tale, the fascinating character, the well-wrought sentence. It's our play. Soon, though, style manuals and publication primers, rejection letters and snippy feedback turn it into drudgery. If we want to get better we have to write five-hundred words a day and participate in NaNoWriMo every year and save our dollars so we can enroll in manifold boot camps.

Now, all these things are fine and truly better than fine. But here's a suggestion: Have a little fun in the meantime. Scribble a fragment. Flesh out a bizarre character. Sketch a setting. Write something out of the ordinary, something unconnected to your serious projects -- something fun. It isn't wasted if you only enjoy it. That love is learning.

(Picture: CC 2009 by crazzie97)

Newsweek on Noir

Over at Newsweek, Malcolm Jones examines the history of noir and how literary icons have recently begun to dip their toes in this blackest of pools:

In 1945, the literary critic Edmund Wilson penned an eye-rolling put-down of detective stories titled "Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?" His question (he was referencing a 1926 Agatha Christie title) was rhetorical, just a snide way of saying that crime fiction was worthless. But if he were around today to pose the same question, he might do so a little more gingerly. Or he might not ask the question at all, because the answer is so glaringly obvious: darn near everybody. ... Would those numbers be enough to make Wilson change his mind about crime writing? Probably not. As far as he was concerned, tripe was tripe. But if Wilson read some of the contemporary authors practicing in the genre he despised, he might not so quickly rush to judgment. ...

It's hard to say where this dystopic view first found root in American letters, but you see it as early as Poe and then again in Melville and Twain. It surfaces again during the Depression, when economic hopelessness cast a long shadow over the work of such writers as Horace McCoy (They Shoot Horses, Don't They?), James M. Cain (The Postman Always Rings Twice), and Edward Anderson (Thieves Like Us). The French were the first to label the genre, in the '40s, but the stories and movies that caught their attention were mostly American, and hopelessness, futility, and, most important, failure were not supposed to be part of the American Dream.

Read the whole thing. Newcomers to noir will find helpful Jones' history of the genre and analysis of what makes it effective. ("In noir, you've got to care. ... It's not the mechanics that make noir work. It's the emotional core of the story that has to ring true.") And that emotion, of course, is despair at watching a protagonist inexorably plummet to his doom. Seems like a recipe for despondent nihilism, doesn't it? Only it doesn't have to be. No matter your personal philosophy, you can probably agree that humanity's natural state isn't utopic, that everyone has character flaws, that such flaws can lead to very bad things, and that all of this is worth tackling in our writing. If you find yourself nodding, then think about opening up noir's toolbox. It's got everything you need inside.

(Picture: CC 2007 by dipster1; Hat Tip: The Violent World of Parker)

Game Is Simultaneously Outdated, Enduring

Chronological snobbery cuts both ways. Although the term is usually applied to those who dismiss arguments simply because they're old, it could also describe people who eschew new things because they happen to be, well, new. You see this equally in literature as well as logic. There's the one camp endlessly surfing Amazon for new releases, yearning to catch the Next Big Thing right from the get go, while the other sniffs at anything published after, say, the nineteenth century and views the Internet as a not-quite-necessary evil. Such a tendency to judge things based on their age is why books like Grifter's Game (an early effort by crime-writing veteran Lawrence Block) are so important: They're complex enough to force careful evaluation.

Joe Marlin has known a lot of women in his twenty-eight years, with very profitable results. Whether his marks happens to be idealistic young heiresses or needy (and wealthy) widows, Joe always finds a way to kiss them, bilk them and run, often with only the clothes on his back. While fleeing a failed seduction, he picks a bag at random from the luggage at the train station, figuring he can pawn it for a little dough. But among the shoes, slacks and shirts inside, he finds something else -- sixty cubic inches of pure heroin. Dazed by the discovery, Joe retreats to the beach for a little sun and surf, and that's where he meets Mrs. Mona Brassard, a blonde bombshell with a figure so lethal it ought to be registered with the police. One thing leads to another, and soon Joe and Mona are sharing a bed. It's a mutually enjoyable time, but there's one hitch: Mona wants to know why Joe has her husband's suitcase.

Game was originally published in 1961, and even proponents of classic crime stories have to admit that much of it hasn't aged well. References to bellhops, boardwalks and telephone switchboard operators date the novel, and wry jabs at yesterday's innovations fall flat when viewed in the light of the present."The car moved like a retarded child," grouses Joe during a drive. "It was further encumbered with automatic transmission, which keeps you from shifting gears at the proper time, and power steering, which is an invention designed to drive anyone out of his mind." But even with such anachronisms, the novel defies easy dismissal. Why? Well, Game features a conclusion as cold as a knife between the ribs and so black it makes you remember why they call it noir. It wouldn't be exaggerating to call it genre-defining. Indeed, it isn't the antiquated references that stick with you when you reach the final page, but a profound sense of dread and poignancy, one that may very well linger long after the titles on today's bestseller lists have slid into obscurity.

(Picture: CC 2009 by patricia.mg)

Fragment No. 4

Dr. Stephen Rossi loved giving bad news to his patients. Pinpricked lobes on a cranial MRI, unexpected shadows ghosting a pulmonary x-ray, the irregular hops of an ECG -- these were his daily bread, his source of true delight. He exulted in reciting to the afflicted the precise number of silent strokes, the extent of the metastasis, the severity of the atrial fibrillation, every relevant piece of data and quite a few that were not. He left the shock and the denials and the tears for his nurses. He had to attend to important matters.

Dastardly Dialect

I hail originally from Kentucky, land of hills and horses, bluegrass and bourbon. Growing up, I earned pocket change by learning how to handle a pitchfork and worked with people who preferred dip or chew over a smoke any day. I get the cult of UK basketball, the difference between barbecuing and grilling (the former involves beef only if you're from Texas), and why Appalachian ghost stories are so good. Also, I understand Kentucky voices, their lilt and twang. They're voices I sometimes find myself profoundly missing in south Florida, a place full of people whose speech primarily rides South American and European cadences. But though I love the voices of my birthplace, I never ever want to see them in my reading.

Not that I don't want Kentuckians in books or Southerners in general or Midwesterners, Northeasterners, Indians, Australians, Russians and Indonesians. Add them all to the narrative stew if you'd like. But please don't try to replicate the way they talk on the page. No matter the tongue, the result is generally always the same: It trips the reader up, makes him feel as though he has to translate on the fly, breaks the story's flow. Anne Lamott plainly states that if you must attempt to ape specific speech patterns, "be positive that you do it well, because otherwise it is a lot of work to read ... It makes our necks feel funny. We are, as you know, a tense people, and we have a lot of problems of our own without you adding to them." Perhaps my desire to see such a technique completely eradicated says something about my general stress level, but that's a topic for another essay.

So what techniques does this leave to the writer who likes characters with varying accents? Quite a few, actually. Word choice, use of similes and sentence length vary significantly from region to region. (For example, you won't likely here someone in Seattle say that a particularly nice day was "fine as frog's hair.") Those just learning a language will likely fall into some standard grammatical errors, although you have to be careful not to cater to stereotype. One of my favorites to read is extended description of an individual's voice, the pinching of particular consonants, rounding or flattening certain vowels. It's difficult to do well, but those working with English accents can turn to the International Dialects of English Archive, an audio database with vocal samples from every continent. Log on, take a listen and get to describing.

(Picture: CC 2008 by Brent and MariLynn)

Whipple and Jacobsen on First Drafts

Natalie Whipple of Between Fact & Fiction provides a series of tips about penning those first drafts. Excerpts:

3. Let It Fester
Ideas are great, but they're such little things when they first come. One character. A setting. Perhaps a premise. Whatever it may be, it's not enough to create a full on story, that's for sure.

If you were me, you'd do more nothing while it grew in your brain. You'd let the characters start talking to you about their lives and world and what they want most. Then, when your MC finally delivered the first line, you'd start writing. ...

4. Research
More likely than not, you will have to research something to write your book. Even in fantasy, it's important to create a verisimilitude -- it has to feel real. ... Besides, research is an amazing way to grow those baby Ideas too. There have been many occasions where by reading boring stuff (like the history of aluminum [dead serious]) I've had HUGE epiphanies about my stories. ...

5. Write The Freaking Book
A lot of writers have absolutely no problem with Tips 1-4, but then they sit down to write and glaze over.

"I have to...what? Put words on paper/screen?" Panic sets in. Once upon a time starts to look like the most brilliant opening line on the planet. ...

It's scary. You are investing so much time, and it may never pay off. I think that fear is one of the major reasons people get stuck on the first draft ...

Read the whole thing. Oh, first drafts, how I hate thee! Let me count the ways. You cause me to question my skill, talent, drive, apprehension of basic grammar and spelling, originality of thought, depth of comprehension and fundamental sanity. Unfortunately, they're just a part of the craft. Natalie's suggestions about how to muscle through the awful things -- "If you don't invest the time, it will never pay off in growth or cash" -- help, though.

So does a post by Writing, Clear and Simple's Roy Jacobsen on the makeup of one's creative DNA. Arguing that there are basically two types of writers (those who love jotting down the free-for-all of their first thoughts and those who enjoy editing them down to size), Jacobsen concludes, "Whichever type of writer you happen to be, there's no point in beating yourself up because you find either writing or editing to be a thing of dread. Take advantage of and revel in what you're good at, what you enjoy; learn to work through the things that are harder for you, using trickery if necessary."

(Picture: CC 2009 by juicyrai; Hat Tip: Nathan Bransford - Literary Agent)

Searching for the Seams

I hefted the English textbook in my hand and decided it had to weigh at least ten pounds. How did I make it through high school with a straight spine after lugging a load of these on my back all day? I opened it at random, noting the occasional passage underlined in pencil, a smattering of dog-eared pages. The book contained a mixture of venerable and unknown authors and seemed, as such, an attempt to placate both those who preached the canon's continuing relevance and those in the more inclusive camp. I smiled at how the politics of academia flew right over the heads of all we bored students. What else had I missed all those years before? I flipped to the intro (which I'd never before bothered to read), and a paragraph under the condescending header "Guidelines for the Receptive Reader" stopped me in my tracks:

Read a story more than once: A story is not like a note with a message that we take in before we crumple up the paper and throw it away. The "message" of a story is in the way it takes shape, the way it creates its own reality. The stories in this book offer rewards for the reader who lingers over them, who goes back to them for a closer look.

I clapped the cover shut, struck by the obvious insight: We don't re-read books. I mean, the populace at large rarely ever returns to the first page. On eBay, you can find an entire category of used reading material designated at "Read Once Gently." Only recently have I myself started going back a second and a third and a fourth time, stocking The Middle Shelf with favorites that can stand up to such scrutiny. And stand up they have. Friends and family may wonder why I'm "reading that again," but the editors of my textbook understood. Oft-read titles reward you.

How? Well, not through novelty. Surprise is the first thing to go out the window. But as time goes on and you have another go at a particular volume, you start to notice something interesting: You're able to see the seams. You can perceive foreshadowing, pinpoint symbol and metaphor, grasp nuance of language. You begin to think like the author does, and once-obscure passages start coming clear. Not only is it an invaluable experience for a writer, it's a darn lot of fun for readers. Wordsworth might have bellowed "quit your books" and charged that "we murder to dissect." But I've spent many a joy-charged evening with my nose in a worn paperback, searching for the seams.

(Picture: CC 2008 by Greencolander)

The Means Are Not the Thing

The means of telling a story are not the story itself. This is something we genre writers can forget in our desire to honor and subvert the conventions of our favorite kinds of narratives. It's also the reason why Hollywood can throw entire special-effects departments at a script and still not end up putting an interesting tale on the screen. Since we're coming off of Halloween, let's consider two horror films as examples of this aphorism, both featuring the genre's requisite grue but with entirely different end results.

In Final Destination 2 -- the only installment of the long-running franchise I've had the misfortune of seeing -- an unexpected premonition saves a group of photogenic strangers from a fatal pileup on the interstate. But Death (note the capital) doesn't like being cheated, so it stalks the unlucky survivors like some malevolent providence, killing them off in increasingly inventive ways with everyday objects. That's the warp and the woof of the thing, and it spends the lion's share of its running time executing almost interchangeable bystanders with PVC pipes, escape ladders, sheet glass, barbed wire and barbeque grills, all displayed in loving detail.

The Swedish vampire film Let the Right One In takes a different tack. True, the story of lonely, bullied, twelve-year-old Oskar who befriends a young vampiress named Eli has plenty of cringe-inducing material. Throats are opened. Necks are snapped. A pack of enraged felines swarms a newly created denizen of the night. But the camera rarely lingers on such horrors. Indeed, it usually cuts away before you can count to five. Instead, the film focuses on the ephemera of relationships, on a piece of paper upon which Oskar and his father have scratched out a game of tic-tac-toe or the twisting of Eli's pale fingers as she fusses over a Rubik's cube.

The difference in the two approaches is striking. Where Final Destination 2 feels almost pornographic, Let the Right One In never allows the horror tropes to come unmoored from its characters. The visceral stuff exists solely to advance the narrative (which is mostly concerned with love and loneliness), and that's why its presence is limited to a pinch rather than a pound. (Notably, the bloody climax occurs almost entirely off-screen.) It's something we all should remember. Spaceships and swords or criminals and cobwebs can help us identify with a particular set of people or take us along for an exciting ride or allow us to ponder engaging ideas. But they never can be the story itself.

(Picture: CC 2009 by superconnected)