Category: Thoughts about Writing

bookmark_borderUsing the Unreliable Narrator

Posted on by Glenn

I thought it was going to be easy. I thought it would be obvious.

I decided to use an unreliable narrator in my writing exercises blog. I thought the result was interesting, so I worked some more with it and showed it around for critique.

 

A narrator can be unreliable by lying, or by not providing information and lying by omission. When you discover that the central character of a novel is actually the murderer that they’ve been pretending to seek, you’ve fallen for the unreliable narrator.

My choice for an unreliable narrator was a young girl. She’s unreliable because 1) she’s young and may misinterpret what she sees, 2) she’s watching a scene through a window, cannot hear the voices, and she’s making up dialogue for what she sees. At the opening I avoid stating any of this. I assume that by making the dialogue not fit the actions and by following this with a new scene where the girl is called back to reality by her brother and where her brother accuses her of spying on the neighbors (again), that it would be clear.

I didn’t think this would be difficult. I thought all readers would join me rereading the opening and chuckling at how the girl tries to put words in the man and woman’s mouths, how she has to extend the length of the lines when a character keeps talking after she thought they were done, how she has to try to tie together the logic of her dialogue to make sense, how she has to adapt to unexpected actions and visual disproofs of the previous words that she gave the characters.

Instead, I’m only beginning to understand how difficult it can be to break a reader’s suspension of belief, and to shake their acceptance of the truth of the words, even those from an wobbly narrator.

I think it would be different if I proved to the reader that the narrator was not to be fully trusted, before giving them them the reigns via soliloquy or storytelling or first person POV. I think it would be different if I made the story longer than  500+ words and came back to unsynchronized situations and the reader could contrast those with better written, less confusing portions.

Any story, movie, novel, that contains a writer/fantasizer/alternate reality within the “true” reality of the story has to deal with the issue of where and when is the separation between one reality and the other (or they can intentionally blur the edges or confuse the reader; the movie ‘Memento’ is one of my favs; the confusing realities have a definite, partially-protagonist-managed reason why it has to be that way).

But because, in my story, I spent little time in the “true” reality, had no return to another or to the same false one, and had placed the “true” reality after the unreliable section, mine is apparently not easy to identify.

Or so I’m learning, from the variety of difficulties readers are having with my writing.

All the readers (some who know me, and others via an internet forum who don’t know me at all) sensed the discontinuity which generated unease as they read. Some suspected this was leading to a horror ending. Others saw it as a mystery, one that is never solved. Some claimed to like this lack of clarity, saying that the reader should be allowed to come to their own conclusion, their own explanation, their own version of reality. One reviewer, an astute one, wrote extensively about his analysis process and pointed out the moments of confusion and his interpretation of what he thought they represented, saying at the end that he enjoyed the process of peeling back clues and piecing them together. In the end, he didn’t fully get there either.

But, had this not been offered up as a request for review, would they have enjoyed it? Would they have spent the time to puzzle it out? Would they still be happy with the lack of final clarity that many of them failed to achieve?

And what do I want? For this specific piece, am I happy if X percentage of readers don’t fully get it, but enjoy it? Or do I need to find a way to make the “answer” more clear so that more people get it?

 

There is a part of me, now that I am aware that I am trying to break the trust of the reader with my unreliable narrator, that feels guilt for trying to betray that faith. Outside of humor and it’s variations like satire, the author relies on trust to convince, to entertain the reader. With a mystery, or espionage or the like, false representations can be accepted in order to achieve the goals of that type of entertainment. Even with ‘Memento’, the world can be set right again at the end when the logic for the confusing reality is explained. But with my short piece it feels like a joke, and if the reader doesn’t get the joke, I feel guilty, as if I made the joke on them, plus a little incompetent as a writer since I couldn’t lead them where I had planned to go.

btw, at 892 words, I’ve used more words here than I did to write the piece, and at least two of the critiques used more yet.

 

One explanation why this unreliable narrator seemed so obvious to me and to those closest to me is that we know that I am a better writer than the narrator, so even with the first few lines, we know something is up. Still, I would have thought that my local writing group, who has been reading my stuff for more than a year, would know my writing well enough to know. They did, but still couldn’t figure out what exactly I was trying to do, so I suspect there is more yet that I don’t understand.

For those readers who don’t know my writing, I could 1) make the first few lines even more inexplicable, or 2) write much more in the second section, where I go to a reliable 3rd person POV, or 3) start with one paragraph, perhaps a setting description, that is written normally. My concern with the third option is that I don’t want to give away the ‘joke’ too early, that the reader should still need to read to the last lines to ‘get it’.

 

Anyway, I’ve submitted my story again where I hope to find the most potential for new readers, and I’ll see how this revision goes. I’m also slowly trying new local writing groups as well so I may find new audiences there to test the results.

And, I think I need to make at least another couple attempts, in new stories with new characters, to work with the unreliable narrator.

bookmark_borderWriting Review: Divergent, and other YA

Posted on by Glenn

More results from my project of working through some top reading lists. Next up: Divergent, by Veronica Roth.

Blog posts in the category

Divergent comes right after Looking for Alaska, and having speed-read The Hunger Games the weekend before seeing the first movie, and Blink & Caution a year or so back, all good YA genre novels. Blink & Caution is probably the most challenging read because it’s written from two alternating perspectives— those of the two main characters — and one of the voices is written in second person, a POV that some readers find difficult to digest, plus the characters live a marginalized (runaway) life, which I suspect is less appetizing if the setting is not a dystopian future like The Hunger Games or Divergent.

Now that I think about it, there were a few others as well. Cinder: Book One of the Lunar Chronicles which had interesting characters and kept generating mental images of Futurama, The Perks of Being a Wallflower which I couldn’t get interested enough to finish, The Book Thief which looked to be well written but I couldn’t bring myself to read another Nazi/WWII story, Bloodlines, a decently written vampire story with (to me) more interesting characters than I remember Twilight having, though I read that years ago, Crossed (Matched) which was so-so; not offensive but not interesting either, the world feels similar to Cinder but not as entertaining to read, and City of Ashes (The Mortal Instruments, Book 2) which, maybe because it’s a second in a series, I couldn’t get absorbed in it and aborted it after ten pages. The writing/voice is also too simplistic; air-headed in comparison to some of the others and maybe it’s supposed to Y rather than YA.

I think that’s all the YA that I’ve attempted in the past year or so as part of my cross-genre reading list reading. Ten attempted (not counting Twilight; I don’t remember how much I read; I may have stopped and just watched the movie instead), most finished, most decently written, lots of dystopian futures

 

I don’t know that I have a favorite genre to read. I know YA is not one of them; it tends to fall in the looking-to-kill-time reading situations, like when I picked up an Andrew Greeley novel while waiting for my flight to board. Greeley is not YA, but like YA I wanted something inoffensive to kill the hours in the plane. Action is a genre I can enjoy if the author hits it right for me, which I why I’ve read all of Robert Ludlum (hey, for the action, not for the quality of the writing) and a lot of Lee Childs, while Tom Clancy and Clive Cussler do nothing for me. SF is similar; certain authors I seem to always like, others bore me.

Divergent worked for me, in a way similar to reading Ludlum or Heinlein; the characters, setting, and story drew me in and I became so invested that, while still reading, I worried about the ending, hoping that it would be good enough to not leave me disappointed. It achieved a level of enjoyment that no YA has reached. At the opening, the factions as tribes/units/groups seemed typical, but when Tris, the central character, opts, after the choosing (kind of like Harry Potter’s sorting hat scene) to join the wild/protector faction, the internal struggles, the physical challenges, and the self-discovery really pick up. Of course, she learns that she may have special abilities (like any hero/heroine in a dystopian society) and that there are other forces at play within the group and within the society and that she may have a destiny to fulfill. Tris goes from fighting her fellow initiates to fighting for a bigger cause; the escalation/expanded growth testing plot structure. I’m now started on the sequel and it’s possible that this one won’t have the same attraction for me because the central character has become defined, but, we’ll see how it goes. I’d hate to see her role expanded to the point that she becomes a politician/ruler.

Another thought that occurred during the reading; my investment, my desire to get to finish the book before the end of the day, my enjoyment epitomized what genre writing should try to be, should try to accomplish, in my view. Satisfaction, from what has happened, pleasure, from the act of reading, anticipation for the next page. Again, I don’t know how much is due to my connection with the character in those specific discovery/growth situations that can only mostly take place in the first novel. Jason Bourne (not quite the same character and very different storylines between the novels and the movies) was a fun character to read in the first novel of the series and still fun in the second and third. We’ll see how Tris holds up.

 

 

Later edit: The writing didn’t hold up. In the first book I noted an instance of beginner-ish dialogue; two brothers, one inserting “brother” into his sentence, the other referring to “our mother” rather than “Mom”. At the time, it seemed so out-of-place weak that I thought it would turn out to be meaningful; that they weren’t really brothers. Not so, and the second book has many instances of writer-wants-you-to-know dialogue rather than natural dialogue, as well as a plot thread (when Tris has to kill a drug-manipulated friend who will otherwise kill her and afterwords the author milks the killing for guilt/not-telling because she needs it for a later discovery/conflict purpose) that seems an unrealistically long lasting obsession, given all the killing and dying and deception that is constantly going on.

In the third book we start seeing through a male character’s eyes as well as Tris’ and I found him flat and uninteresting from the first person POV. I speed-read most of the third book just to get to the ending. I wonder whether the author had different beta and proof readers for the first novel, or whether the success of the first generated too much need for sequels, or whether the discovery/growth process of the character was so crucial to the first novel that sequels were doomed to fall short.

This makes me interested in re-reading Ludlum from a dialogue/plot perspective. He was an actor and voice-over man before he started writing, which leads me to wonder whether his dialogue might be decent. It’s been a long time since I read anything of his, and there is a big time gap between the last Ludlum I read and the point when I started analyzing fiction from a writing perspective.

bookmark_borderTechnique, and Rock and Roll

Posted on by Glenn

At some point — somewhere around one or two years ago — I made a conscious effort to focus less on larger elements and to pay attention to how I worked with phrases, sentences, paragraphs; the elements of writing in general as opposed to the elements of a novel or of fiction that you learn in school. My theory was that the larger inspirations could be explored and developed at any time in my writing career, and that if I could spend the time now working on my technique, then I would have that technique available to me later, to better or to properly present the grander aspects of amazing plots or irresistible characters. Over the years I have developed confidence in my fount of raw inspiration and ideas, though the execution and timeliness is sometimes inconsistent.

I was reflecting on this during my walk from the bus stop, balancing the umbrella and grande cappuccino in one hand while finishing my cigarette using the other, thinking about how writing technique compares with musical technique, and I remembered a comment from a recent issue of The New Yorker. When I arrived at the office I looked it up. Sasha Frere-Jones wrote about Annie Clark (of whom I know nothing) and her technical ability, saying:

She … eventually attended Berklee College of Music, in Boston. (Rock musicians often apologize for or qualify the fact that they attended Berklee, possibly because they believe that too much technical skill interferes with the visceral mandate of rock. …)

Berklee is highly regarded, particularly in the jazz music world. The contributions of its alumni is massive. Past students include Gary Burton, Joe Zawinul, Toshiko Akiyoshi, Steve Swallow, Al Di Meola, Quincy Jones, and the Brecker brothers from the time when I was up on such things, plus more recently Diana Krall, Donald Fagen, as well as Mellisa Etheridge and Steve Tyler.

Generally, I’m not intending to write the fiction equivalent of rock music, though I have written rock music (via MIDI) and what I consider to be low-brow fiction, so hopefully the development of my writing technique doesn’t interfere with the visceral elements of my writing, when I need it.

I’m probably too old and have outgrown those visceral qualities anyway. I can write graphic scenes, but I’m not likely to be capable of maintaining a raw edge to an entire story.

Now that I say that, of course, I may have to try.

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My technique has improved, and expanded. I’ve done exercises writing in second person, writing without quotation marks, writing using an unreliable narrator and other approaches. I’ve critiqued, been critiqued, written characters far removed from my personal experience and opposite my own values. I’ve written in a way that one critter read my work aloud to critique, telling me that my writing is like poetry (in spite of the connection between poetry and music—I’ve set poems of Stevie Smith and T.S. Eliot to music—I dislike poetry, finding it too self-absorbed and pretentious, though of course I’ve written some too) and I’ve written intentionally poorly to represent the narration of a child and another time the report of an incompetent bureaucrat. All grist for the mill. And maybe it’s time the mill can look at trying to produce some magical plots or characters.

bookmark_borderGoodreads reading

Posted on by Glenn

I’m still working on my project; reading through various titles of a Goodreads list.

My object is to sample recommendations from various genres with minimal bias or preparation. Since I’m reading only e-books downloaded from the library I don’t see the summary notes on the inside jacket, the glowing reviews, or more about the author. Just a cover, the title, and the author’s name.

Blog posts in the category

Reading e-books is different than reading physical books. With a physical book you automatically have an idea how far you have progressed because you can feel more pages read or more pages yet to read, whereas with an e-book you have to consciously check your progress to see if you’ve made it half way yet. The cover of a physical book, with the title and the author’s name, is much larger so that each time you pick it up you are reminded of what you are reading, but with an e-book, the picture is so small that I pay so little attention that often I don’t remember the cover or the title or the author  after I’m done.

But when the title is Play With Me (With Me In Seattle), by Kristen Proby, and the cover is a hot young couple, the woman’s leg—naked below the hem of her shorts—lifted to the guy’s hip and pinned there by the guy, all eyes closed, wet in the rain, … well, even I can figure out what genre we’re in.

The prologue surprised me. From a purely line editing-sentence variety-paragraph construction-writing consistency perspective, the romances that I’ve read so far in my quest have been anywhere from awful to poorly written. This one is not. The grammar is good, the sentence variety good, everything flows well. Eventually, though, I start gagging: on the descriptions, “keenly aware of Will’s eyes on me, running up and down my body …”, on the clichés “I’m a charge nurse at Seattle Children’s Hospital in the cancer unit …” and eventually on the plot—arrogant appearing football player tries to convince heroine that he’s a good guy by taking her home when she’s had too much to drink, puts her to bed, doesn’t make a play at her, has her car delivered to her house—became too much for me to take.

I suspect the author has written other things, under another name, that might be more worth reading.

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To catch up on other project results; after watching a recorded appearance that Zsuzsi Gartner made at a university class and her passing reference to “A Game of Thrones, I decided to pull that up in my list. Fantasy/horror is not one of my preferred genres and so I had intentionally avoided the novel until she referred in a joke to the television program.

“Game of Thrones” is also surprisingly well written, at least at the opening. Interesting characters, good, compact descriptions of as the characters appear.

“Yoren had a twisted shoulder and a sour smell, his hair and beard were matted and greasy and full of lice, his clothing old, patched, and seldom washed. His two young recruits smelled even worse, and seemed as stupid as they were cruel.”

But the characters are not very deep (maybe because there are so many of them, but even with as many characters as “War and Peace” has, the author can give us depth in the central ones; Pierre, Natasha, Andrei, Marie), and by the time I got two thirds of the way through my interest in the world, the characters, and the conflict had worn out.

I speed-read the rest just to finish it, then went to Wikipedia to read the summaries of the rest of the series. That’s when I realized that this is not some huge plan like the Harry Potter series, or Wagner’s Ring cycle,  “Game of Thrones” is a soap opera, and should be more accurately compared with Dallas or The OC.

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Two others to note briefly.

The Round House: A Novel by Louise Erdrich was a good read, but it was another Pulitzer winner that got into the collection (which has more than just the Goodreads list). Again, I don’t know anything about these when I start reading but when I get a sense of the writing I usually research the author to see what other people think of them. That’s when I discovered that Erdrich (and Jane Smiley earlier in my list) won prizes.

And The Light Between Oceans: A Novel by M. L. Stedman is, at the moment, unfinished, but it’s also well written. It’s interesting that the author is female and yet I feel that the female character is under-presented, that I, the reader, am lacking in my understanding and sense of closeness and my empathy for her.

The other interesting thing is that my inner editor questioned some things in the first couple thousand words or so. Small things, like the use of passive voice in one sentence early on, and some other similar writing question, but I thought, ah well, this is a published novel, well written, it must have been edited and there must be a reason for these things. But it turns out that the author is a lawyer and this is her first published novel. It’s not another Pulitzer winner that snuck into my list, but the first publication of someone like me. One giant step beyond me, but I admit to some (unwarranted) pride in being able to see some tiny questionable items in a literary first publication.

bookmark_borderWriting a Character Driven Novel

Posted on by Glenn

I’ve completed four novels to date, all connected with some form of writing competition; three NaNoWriMos and one 3DayNovel; a 23,500 word submission which subsequently expanded into a 60,000 word novel.

The one that I’m working on now is the first non-competition generated novel. It’s also the most character-driven and has some of the thickest writing that I’ve done other than in some short stories. Thick meaning dense; the words mean something, the writing style and topics are not light and superficial, the characters, situations, dialogue are not thin throwaways produced simply to titillate or entertain or to get from one plot point to the next. The main character comes from a dark background and she’s trying to adapt to a low or lower-middle class world and is discovering that she has some unusual talents that point her in a direction that she never would have considered. A very genre-esque plot technique and the story definitely is not without genre elements, but I find the character irresistible and I think she’s up for it.

But the process of writing is interesting. The first four chapters, followed by some background-exposing chapters, presented in memoir or reminiscing form to be inserted into the story at unknown points, were fairly easy to write and allowed me to define the character. Then I wrote some early plot-necessary chapters and scenes, followed by some middle section plot-necessary chapters, though I’m missing some sections and I’m not convinced that the order is correct. These grew out of some characters and situations that I established in the early writing, so they seemed to flow well enough, though, I am sensing now that I lost some of the character’s voice, some of her unique and interesting characteristics in these plot scenes, falling back instead on some default hero/heroine personality that is indistinguishable from some of my other central characters, particularly the journalist-investigator of two and a half novels that I wrote over the past two years.

This revision is part of the process that I find interesting. Last week I reached a point where I was no longer comfortable with the writing that I was trying to add. Partly this is because I don’t know exactly how the story ends so I don’t know what I’m working toward, but, I’m drawing close (over 65,000 words) and what I have planned so far lacks the inevitability that I want. If I were to go ahead, dump another 20,000 words, and finish it off, I’d feel as if I had disrespected the quality of the opening, let myself down.

Instead, I’m analyzing the novel to date, focusing on the first materials that wrote. I started with a page of general thoughts because I felt I was losing track of miscellaneous ideas, especially since I haven’t written every idea that I’ve had, and what I have written is incomplete and missing some scenes necessary for the plot, such as it stands now. Then another page of worries and things that I felt are missing or underexposed. That led to a list of my character’s key personality traits, which led to a list of type of situations where these traits can be exposed. Then I looked for themes, particularly those within the key backstory chapter, the one that largely defines how she came to be who she is now. This process is a lot like the ones I remember using to write papers in English Lit classes in university, except that the novel is incomplete and, as I discovered, the consistency is missing.

Having the themes drove me back to the situation and personality analysis to see where I can force the themes to carry through, to develop consistency and meaning, and that has led me to the where I am now, editing chapters to bring out her character and reinforce themes. I still don’t know how it’s supposed to end, but hopefully I’m getting closer.

 

bookmark_borderThe Kefuffel over Alice Munro

Posted on by Glenn

Back on September 25, the author and literature instructor David Gilmour was quote as saying in an interview,

I’m not interested in teaching books by women. I’ve never found—Virginia Woolf is the only writer that interests me as a woman writer, so I do teach one short story from Virginia Woolf. But once again, when I was given this job I said I would teach only the people that I truly, truly love. And, unfortunately, none of those happen to be Chinese, or women. Um. Except for Virginia Woolf. And when I try Virginia Woolf, I find she actually doesn’t work. She’s too sophisticated. She’s too sophisticated for even a third-year class. So you’re quite right, and usually at the beginning of the semester someone asks why there aren’t any women writers in the course. I say I don’t love women writers enough to teach them, if you want women writers go down the hall. What I’m good at is guys.

This generated a Twitter attack. Gilmour responded in another interview, saying,

Q: Are you going to reassess the books you assign to students?

A: No, I’m not, because you love what you love. As Woody Allen once said, “The heart goes where it goes.” And the people I love are the people that I love. If someone wants a course on Margaret Atwood or Alice Munro, I could put it on my curriculum, but I won’t teach it as well and as passionately as some of the teachers down the hall. So my job as an instructor is to send them to where they can get the best education about those people, and it’s probably not going to be in my room. You want to learn about Scott Fitzgerald? You want to learn about [Leo] Tolstoy or Chekhov or Philip Roth? I’m your man.

And,

Q: Well, then, who are some of your favourite women writers?

A: At the absolute top of the list, as great a writer as exists, is Virginia Woolf.

Q: Who you do mention.

A: And I love Alice Munro. And that’s about it, in terms of who I really love. But I think that Virginia Woolf is maybe the greatest writer ever. I mean, I put her up with Tolstoy and with Chekhov.

So he’s not passionate about any female writers except Woolf. But he does love Alice Munro.

 

I didn’t really follow any of this until I read an opinion article from Naomi Lakritz,

You know what the most shocking thing is in the whole story about University of Toronto instructor David Gilmour’s refusal to teach women authors to students in his literature classes?

It’s not the omission of those authors; it’s the vitriol and name-calling with which supposedly literate, intelligent people responded to his statements.

and,

Unable to relate much to women writers, Gilmour also doesn’t think much of Canadian writers, saying he hasn’t encountered any Canadian writers that he loves enough to teach. Nor does he care for the work of Chinese writers — as is his prerogative.

followed by,

But this is a free country and nobody has to take Gilmour’s course if they don’t like his approach. It is, after all, an elective. Far more troubling than Gilmour’s literary preferences, which aren’t actually troubling at all, is the prevailing attitude that he must be demonized for his tastes. Why they matter to anyone but himself and to the students who choose to take his class is a mystery. The intolerance with which they have been greeted makes me wonder if the critics think we should be a nation of Stepford readers, all thinking alike, all liking the same things, all dutifully expressing our adulation to whomever is deemed to be the literary lion of the day.

So she defends his right to have an opinion and to choose to teach, in an elective course, only the writers he feels most passionate about.

Of course, the beauty for the trolls is that Alice Munro has won the Nobel prize less than a month later. A perfect storm, in internet time. Just enough time for the kerfuffel to spread, die back and be reborn, still unforgotten. Now the trolls really have food, and they’re out in force poking fun at David Gilmour, suggesting he should reconsider his curriculum.

But wait; he loved Alice Munro to begin with. He’ll likely be happy for her. But that probably doesn’t matter to the trolls.

One person who is not a fan of Munro is Naomi Lakritz, who, in other parts of her article says,

Much of Can-Lit is admittedly pretty dismal, with the exception, in my opinion, of the late Brian Moore.

and elsewhere,

One of the Twitterati tweeted: “How can you idolize Anton Chekhov and not even be ‘interested’ in Alice Munro?” Uh, what’s one got to do with the other? Chekhov’s stories actually have plots, unlike Munro’s, which are just vague sketches of rather boring incidents in the lives of her uninteresting characters.

I don’t know what Alice Munro thinks of Naomi Lakritz’s thoughts. She probably doesn’t know of her, given that Munro’s daughter was the one who told her that she had won the prize so I don’t think she concerns herself with such things. I do think David Gilmour is probably happy for Alice Munro for winning the Nobel, though also unhappy about the refueling of the internet trolls.

And I’m happy for her too, for what that’s worth. Congratulation, Alice Munro, for recognition of a life time achievement. Well deserved.

 

bookmark_borderTiresome critiqing

Posted on by Glenn

Many of us fiction-writing types belong to one or more critiquing exchanges. Stephen King has his wife and a writing friend that review his works. Writing classes or workshops are, in whole or in part, made up of reviewing and critiquing the efforts of the participants. I belong to a local writing group and loosely to a couple online groups (one forum, one email).

Right now I’m finding critiquing difficult. Over the past year or so I’ve absorbed a substantial amount of grammatical, line by line and paragraph by paragraph editing information. Some of this is via critiques of my submissions, especially by a particular  member of my local group. Some is via reading high quality writing (The New Yorker, Pulitzer, Man Booker and other contest finalists). Some is from “It Was The Best Of Sentences, It Was The Worst Of Sentences”, a reference book which I leave in my bathroom so I can read a chapter now and then. The chapters are short.

And some is the result of keeping these sources in mind while writing and revising my own writing. Of practicing what I’m trying to absorb. Of trying to turn the bits of information into habits.

I think this has pushed the quality of my writing up significantly, at least on the small scale. My inner editor has developed a clarity of understanding and an improved ability to sense issues or potential for improvement (though not the ability to label and explain them easily; since I’m not in school I didn’t bother learning the names or terminology). I’ve developed a better eye for small errors like tense changes or the incorrect use of commas. I’ve developed an ear for issues like awkward, choppy, or repetitive sentence structure. And I have a feel for slightly larger issues like lack of flow due to missing transitions or dialogue that lacks action. The largest scale items; plot, character, setting I don’t pay much attention to when I critique for three reasons: most of what is presented to me is chapters of novels and I don’t know what’s going on in the other chapters, and, much (too much) of the writing is in genres that I have little interest in; fantasy, historical fantasy, paranormal, and, when the writing quality is poor, the character, plot, and setting usually comes across poorly.

My standards have increased. Now I find it tiresome to review submission after submission that is well beneath these standards. I’d never release any writing of my own for review that has so many transparent problems. Sure, there are always things like these that we don’t see until someone else points them out to us, but to have so many indicates an obliviousness or a disregard, either of which make the writing unappealing to me to read.

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In musical terms this is like a group or performer that plays out of tune, or consistently stumbles in difficult technical passages, or is unable to maintain a steady tempo/rhythm, or is sloppy with balance or with group entrances. The simpler or less sophisticated the music — less technical challenges, less complicated harmonic or textural or rhythmic elements — the less some of these matter. Madonna can get away with always singing flat for example, plus many of these rough edges can be polished off via recording technology wizardry, if you get that far.
Here’s an example of a critique request:

“I’m less interested in grammar/spelling/punctuation, and more interested in comments about the characters and the plot. Does the story work for you? Would you read on?”

This could mean:

  1.  The author prioritizes character/plot because that’s why people read fiction
  2. The author prioritizes character/plot because the other elements can be polished later if the character/plot are worth spending time on. There’s no point editing something that isn’t worth finishing, right?
  3. The author finds critiques that discuss grammar/spelling/punctuation boring
  4. The author pays little attention to grammar/spelling/punctuation because they don’t understand and don’t want to
  5. The author really likes their characters/plot and is looking for praise
  6. The author has had too many critiques in the past that wasted focus on grammar/spelling/punctuation and not enough on characters or plot, for their tastes
  7. The author is just starting out and is remembering the classes on character and plot (the class on setting is often forgotten; it’s usually only characters and plot)
  8. Grammar/spelling/punctuation is for editors, writing is for writers

I’m not saying that these beliefs are crap, just that I can’t help you a lot because 95% of what I read in my local group or the online groups doesn’t have characters or settings or situations that interest me. The genres of the submissions from the local group are forced on me, but even in the online writing groups, where I can pick and choose, I rarely find a story that is interesting to read. And those that are are usually ones that are well written; they have decent grammar and punctuation and spelling, as well as flow, variety, description and interesting setting, characters, and plot. Writers who state that they are focusing on character and plot only almost never get there for me. Maybe because they don’t know how to create interesting elements, and if they do, they don’t know how to round them out, and if they do, they don’t know how to present them, how to write about them.

If you’re a brilliantly creative writer or hit your target perfectly maybe you can find a publisher/editor/reader base that can ignore your failings. I think the Roberts Heinlein and Ludlum fall into that category. If you’re as good at marketing yourself as Madonna, maybe you have enough to sell anyway.

Or if you’re never intending to do more than the equivalent of singing at your local pub at amateur night, then it’s not going to matter if you’re out of tune or play every song at the same tempo. If you only want to write erotica that your friends will enjoy and praise you for, then good for you. But right now I’m tired of listening to sloppy, un-rehearsed, un-practiced performances that are one step above karaoke. Or reviewing the equivalent in fiction writing.

 

bookmark_borderWriting in italics

Posted on by Glenn

I’ve heard some discussion about the use of italics, and today I ran across an example of what I think it a good use of italics in my current reading. This excerpt is from A Wanted Man: A Jack Reacher Novel by Lee Child.

McQueen waited. Reacher looped around the trunk. He paused, gestured, right-handed, open palm: Go ahead. After you. A precaution, not politeness.

A precaution, because Reacher wants McQueen to go toward the building first. He knows that McQueen has a gun but McQueen doesn’t know yet that Reacher knows. Reacher wants the man with a gun in front rather than behind him.

The italicized text is meant to stand out, to be obvious that it is not normal text. Child wants to be very clear what Reacher is trying to communicate visually so that he can contrast it in the normal text and tell us that Reacher is not doing this out of ordinary politeness.

So Child is using italics as a separate level of communication; different from dialogue, different from Reacher’s thoughts (Reacher novels are always first person, past tense), special compared with other physical actions, and in this case as superficial communication and as a lie, since Reacher is not doing this for the usual reason of politeness.

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The discussion about the use of italics was initiated by a writer of, I suspect, limited reading experience, who criticized another writer for not italicizing the inner thoughts of his characters. He was very adamant about this, saying that he found the submission very hard to read because of this omission. (I’ve had similar reactions to cases of extremely poor grammar and no control over tenses, but that’s another story) I’ve heard this type of complaint before and find it hard to understand, but I suspect my lack of comprehension is due to not limiting myself to specific genres or writers. In other words, I think that there are specific genres and writers who always italicize the inner thoughts of characters but I don’t limit myself enough to believe that the rule is the norm. I can only vaguely guess that it was in some science fiction, perhaps some issues of Asimov’s, where I’ve even seen this rule used.

Interestingly enough — perhaps not to anyone but myself — the last use of italics for inner thoughts that I remember is “Fifty Shades of Grey”, that atrocity of writing that shouldn’t have made it past Wattpad. I know of writers who have adopted Dan Brown as their personal whipping boy, the writer whom they lash out at because his writing makes them cringe, and I may adopt Fifty Shades as mine. But I didn’t have a problem with her use of italics, other than the fact that it was always the same sort of things that came out of her italicized thoughts; “Holy shit.” “Crap.” Mental ejaculations.

And of course anything is possible if you have a reason for it and it works. Before the Reacher story I read a novel where the author did not use quotation marks for dialogue and I didn’t have an issue with it. Writing without quotation marks and in first person requires extra care to be clear when the main character is quoting and when he is thinking, but it’s definitely doable. It has the potential to make the story more intimate, to instill a dream-like quality, but another author who used that writing style said that she felt as if her characters were always mumbling.

If you can write clearly without quotation marks around dialogue, I don’t see why you can’t write without using italics for inner thoughts. And, personally, I’d rather follow the lead of Lee Child over the author of Fifty Shades, though I have a rather large list of authors I’d put ahead of Lee Child too.

 

bookmark_borderCritiques

Posted on by Glenn

It’s amazingly hard to accept and to do critiques.

When I was a music major I always had a teacher; someone that knew a lot more than I did, someone who had years more experience than I did, someone that I trusted. After years of work with the instructors, with the directors, I developed a sense of rightness, of understanding, an ability to see the gaps between was is and what should or could be, and, a sense of how to work at closing that gap.

Essentially, this enables you to teach others. It also helps you to critique yourself, to critique others (including the rest of the ensemble that you might be rehearsing with), and over time you also learn to take comments in context, though, with music usually all you hear from non-musicians is how good you sounded or how much they enjoyed listening to you.

Writing has been quite a different process. I had a little time with an experienced editor/writer but I got scared off by the amount I had paid for the setup, and was afraid that it was going to continue at this rate. So I’m relying mostly on critiques and reviews, from other writers who are learning as well. The blind leading the blind, to quote the editor that I worked with. Fortunately the local group that I joined has one member with extensive editing and writing experience, primarily in literary genres, so his detailed crits have been very useful. The others have varied backgrounds and I take what they offer within the context of where they’re coming from and still get useful thoughts.

But it can be painful to receive the reviews. You want them (or at least I do) to point out anything that they see as a weakness or might have room for improvement. Telling you what they like or find strong is good too, but I want to get better so I want to know where I’ve missed the mark or where there is a potential opportunity to improve. And that can hurt. It’s your baby, you’ve sweated over it, revised it, carved it, shaped it into something that you like, that you’re proud of, and to have it poked apart, torn apart, to be shown the weaknesses, the errors, to have your characters that you love be called thin or unrealistic can hurt. Exposing yourself to peer critique, especially when you haven’t developed the central confidence of an experienced writing student, like the experienced music student that I was, is risky. One member of my local group is pretty obvious when he’s frustrated by the group’s critiques; he’ll cross his arms, purse his lips, and lean back in his chair, swaying to and fro until it’s his turn for rebuttal.

I also participate in an on line forum, which is not nearly as useful or consistent. The writing there can vary from beginner high school writers to MFA students, and the critiques vary just as much. Most are not overly useful, but again, there’s always the possibility that something might come out of it.

When I crit I try to say encouraging things, but I also spend a lot of time pointing out the biggest things that stick out to me. A lot of the submissions have poor grammar but I don’t want to spend a huge amount of time fixing those things. I’ll point out egregious mistakes but I tend to focus on flow, rhythm, awkward sentences, missing background that’s keeping me from feeling engaged. Something to do with my music background, I’m sure.

The reactions to the crits varies too. Recently I did a critique of a submission because no one else had done a critique so I thought I would be nice and make the effort. I wandered a bit; it wasn’t my best job of reviewing, but I said that as a reader I was getting pretty annoyed by two characters saying ‘dude’ every other line. And I pointed out that the descriptive sections had no flow, no rhythm. The sentence structure was square and repetitive; bland and boring. Plus there were a few awful misuses of commas. But, I said your story is going somewhere, and I’d like to see you submit something short to an editor and have it thoroughly reviewed so that you can learn from it and build a staring point for improving your technique.

In truth, the story wasn’t very interesting and I stopped reading because the poor writing, poor grammar and stilted dialogue was too much for me. It was a relatively long submission.

The response was interesting. He defended his overuse of ‘dude’ because he writes the way people talk. He didn’t see the point of any of the other things that I said, and, he’s published two books (ah, Wattpad counts, I guess) and he didn’t understand why I even bothered doing the critique.

Last I looked, mine was the only critique given.

 

 

 

bookmark_borderTranslating = Editing?

Posted on by Glenn

I don’t understand any language other than English. But I have read some translations: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Flaubert mostly, and others. Last year I met an author whose first language is French but he writes in English.  I asked why he doesn’t translate his works himself, and he replied that writing fiction is one thing, translating is another. But he’ll happily argue with his translator.

I also read a book on writing fiction which showed two different translations of an excerpt from Chekov. The order of sentences was different, the impression from the material was different. The two translators had different perspectives, yet still conveyed the same basic information.

This leads me to a critique of one of my works-in-progress. A much more experienced writer opted to re-write one paragraph to show me a tighter, clearer way of writing the same scene.

Except it wasn’t my scene any longer. The characters are the same, the setting’s the same, the same basic things happen, but it’s not my scene. The other version is tighter, uses fewer words, flows better, uses a lot of my original words, but it’ not quite my scene any more.

I’m aware that the process of imagining the scene is one thing, the process of writing it is another. It’s similar to translating. The scene exists; it needs to be presented in the best manner possible, but different people will interpret the same scene in a different flavor, placing different values, perhaps even ordering the presentation of elements (people, background, objects) in a different sequence. Subject and verb order might be different in one language from the other, and there may not be direct equivalent words for the way in which something is stated. Guessing at what is the best presentation of the key elements of a scene has got to be a crucial skill for a translator; at least of written words; a live translator has less time to evaluate.

And I feel as if I’m in a similar situation when I try to get a situation down in words. I sense the essence of what I’m after, and by writing bit of it down I start to develop it. There may be grammatical errors and awkward sentences, but if someone else takes what I’ve written and rewrites it, they take it in a different direction than I had intended, if only slightly so, and the larger the chunk of writing that they revise, say a paragraph  instead of just one sentence, the more off target they can be.

I’m assuming that this is frequently the issue between an author and their editor. In fact, the person who suggested the revision of my work has worked as an editor. On the other hand, I’ve also worked with another professional editor who was less direct and only pointed out sections and described what he felt they lacked or how they could be improved (other than specific grammatic errors or other specifics) in general terms.