Book Catchup

I feel like I've been cramming books into my eyes nonstop over here, though most days I actually don't get to read as much as I want because I have to devote time to writing, and also to occasionally interacting with my loved ones. But I have been doing a lot of reading, especially during my recent travels. As a result, I have various half-written book-related posts in the pipeline, including more from my START HERE project, which I haven't forgotten about. Those will be coming later in the month.

Today, I'm catching up with a few quick recommendations of books I've read in the past couple of months. If you follow me on Goodreads, you may have already seen these, but I wanted to share them on the blog as well.

→ NOT SO LONG AGO, NOT SO FAR AWAY by Trisha Slay - Erika is a shy, awkward teenager in a small Ohio town in 1977, and her already crummy life has just gotten worse. Her best (and only) friend runs away from home, leaving Erika to deal with the fallout. Her controlling, criticizing mother is treating her more awfully than ever. And the kids at school taunt her through the final days of the school year. But everything changes for Erika when she sees the hit movie of the summer. Star Wars gives Erika a new hope, and all she wants to do is watch it over and over, so she volunteers at the local theater in exchange for unlimited viewings. There she meets the band of rebels who will become her friends, learns that some of the problems she's facing are more complicated than she thought, and also discovers that she has the power to fight back.

Erika and the other characters in this book are wonderful and multi-dimensional. I felt great sympathy for Erika in her struggles and kept rooting for her to recognize her own great qualities. Her emotions often seemed excessive to me, but I think it's an accurate portrayal for an adolescent character. The story has several subplots that work well together, including some romance and a bit of a mystery about what's going on in Erika's town. It always kept me engaged. The book is written for teens but can be enjoyed by anyone.

Trisha was one of my local NaNoWriMo buddies, though she's since moved away. She started this novel during NaNo long ago, and I'm glad that after years of effort on the book, she's released it into the world. Congrats, Trisha!

→ HOW TO GET FILTHY RICH IN RISING ASIA by Mohsin Hamid is a beautifully written work with an intriguing style and structure, though it falls short of fully succeeding as a novel. As the title suggests, HOW TO GET FILTHY RICH IN RISING ASIA pretends to be a self-help guide. It's a good premise, and I enjoyed the clever self-consciousness of the narrator who provides the instructions.

How To Write a Short Story, Apparently

1. Despair that you'll ever be able to write a short story. This phase can last anywhere from a few hours to half a lifetime.

2. Think up a first line you really like the sound of.

3. Let the first line rattle around in your brain looking for a story to attach itself to.

4. After some weeks of this, decide to take a scientific approach. Figure out the last line that logically pairs with your first line.

5. Try to solve the puzzle of how to get from the first line to the last line. Swim a lot of laps during this stage, because ideas grow in water.

6. Gradually, over the course of a month or two, develop the idea of a path between the lines that's shaped kind of like a story, but without any driving motivation.

7. Keep searching for the missing elements of your story. They're there in the water somewhere if you just keep swimming long enough.

8. Come up with an actual plot that makes sense, more or less. Hooray, the hard part is over! All you have to do now is write it.

9. Realize you still have to write it. Despair anew. Procrastinate for a while.

10. Start writing the first draft. Discover that you're out of practice in putting any old words down because you've spent the past years in revision, obsessing over selecting the perfect words.

11. Take pleasure in the fact that short stories are a whole lot shorter than novels. Look at that, you're already halfway done.

12. Complete the first draft. Congratulations, you wrote a short story! Now you can revise forever.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At Page-Turner, Thomas Beller considers the relationship between writers and Twitter: "I had always thought of Twitter as being a good place to work out ideas: a place to mull things over in public, and a way of documenting a thought to make it more likely that I would remember it. But is it like a conversation or is it 'talking it out?' Is it a note to oneself that everyone can see, or is it, like iPhone photos, an attempt to offload the responsibilities of memory onto an apparatus that feels like an extension of ourselves because it is always in our hands? I sometimes wonder if I might ever be accused of stealing my own idea."

Pondering the Passage of Time

My novel takes place over generations, with storylines spaced thirty years apart. If you've been following my revision adventures for a while, you'll know that I wrote the first two drafts in the order the chapters appear, with the stories interlocked, but for the last big rewrite, I took it one storyline at a time. For various reasons, I worked on the chronologically last story first, then moved backwards through the generations.

Now that I'm making another pass through the manuscript, I'm considering the stories in the more logical direction of earliest to latest. One of the most important things I'm doing is fixing up places where the text of later storylines is inconsistent with what now occurs in the characters' past. There aren't a huge number of these issues because I did have so much planned out in advance and made a million notes to handle the complex structure, but some errors did get introduced. For the most part, these problems are simple to fix with minor edits.

Something I did not anticipate, though, was that I was going to make some pretty major personality changes, even beyond what I planned, to the earliest narrator and his wife. These are great changes and strengthen that storyline (and therefore the whole novel) in a big way. But now I'm looking at the second storyline, which I wrote with a very clear idea of those characters as the sixty-something parents of the middle narrator, and it doesn't quite match up.

It's subtle, though. I'm not finding it unbelievable that these are the same people thirty years on. For one thing, their portrayals are colored by the perspective of their adult son, who has strong feelings about his mother and father and the way he was raised. And their roles in the middle storyline are limited to their interactions with the narrator, which are very different from the interactions they have with each other in the earliest story. So it makes sense that they don't come off quite the same way, and I'm trying to keep that in mind as I tweak the things they do and say for more consistency with their earlier selves.

But the question I keep running into, which is becoming more of a philosophical issue than a writing problem, is just how much the passage of thirty years of adulthood changes a person. I'm sure the answer is that it varies by individual and circumstance, and also that some aspects of anyone's personality are more fixed than other parts. My experience of people (both observing and being one) is that we mostly don't think of ourselves as changing very much past a certain age, though the people we know may not always agree with that self-assessment.

To bring this back to my revision: As I go along, I'm getting more confident about reconciling the different-age versions of my characters, but this has been a tricky thing to deal with. Fortunately, some of the age transitions are from babies or young children to adults, and with these I have less concern about keeping the personalities consistent. In fact, with the kids it's almost the opposite: I worry that some of the childhood behavior lines up too neatly with the adult lives and may be corny.

Add this all to the long list of reasons this is a ridiculously complicated novel to be writing. I can only hope that in thirty years I'm going to look back and laugh about it.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Kathy Crowley of Beyond the Margins shares what she learned in a writing class about Secrets and Lies: "For each piece of the secret, a different version of things can be imagined. And having these pieces spread among characters allows them to figure out different things at different times, making it easier for the writer to maintain tension throughout."

Life After Life

In LIFE AFTER LIFE by Kate Atkinson, a woman lives her life over and over, trying to evade an untimely death. It's an intriguing premise, and I adored the execution.

The novel opens as a baby is born during a snowstorm in 1910 England. The umbilical cord is wrapped around her neck, and she dies. The story begins again. This time, the doctor has made it through the storm to attend the delivery, and he cuts the cord, saving the baby's life. The little girl, Ursula, goes on to have a childhood, but then she dies in an accident. The story begins again.

As Ursula's lives continue, she acquires some awareness of the paths previously taken, and she tries to change circumstances to prevent her own death. She isn't always successful, and the book develops a darkly humorous attitude toward her predicament. Despite the often grim subject matter, this is a very funny novel. Ursula's array of relatives and friends include some amusingly infuriating characters, and the narration is full of biting commentary on their antics.

The book's historical content is fascinating and detailed. Ursula witnesses and falls victim to several major historical events of the first half of the twentieth century. Atkinson has clearly done her research on the Spanish influenza epidemic, World War II, and especially the London Blitz. I recommend LIFE AFTER LIFE to fans of historical fiction, those who like non-standard narratives, and really any interested reader.

(Note that another novel with the same title was also released this spring, so if you decide to pick up this book, make sure you get the right one.)

Reacclimating

I was on vacation last week. I had lots of wonderful time with my family, especially my adorable nephew. (For photos of my adorable nephew, plus descriptions of two unusual dramatic events that I was witness to, read my brother's post about our family getaway.) I accomplished none of the writing-related tasks I thought I might have time for, didn't solve the plot problems I intended to mull over, and only got reading done on the airplane. It was truly a vacation from my regular life, and it was great.

Now I'm back and trying to wrap my brain around my novel again. Yesterday was slow going. First I put off facing my manuscript as long as possible by deciding that I had to take care of housework. Then I spent too long organizing some notes, fretted at length over one of those plot problems and finally decided it wasn't as big a deal as I thought, and eventually wrangled a small amount of text into shape.

Today is better. I'm rediscovering my enthusiasm for my story, and I'm excited about the improvements I'm making to this particularly troublesome section. I feel confident that I'll continue progressing at a pace I feel good about, and this draft is going to get done.

It was nice to get a break. It was nice to return. I can't ask for more than that!

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Jennifer Weiner weighs in on the debate over likable characters: "Currently, the most gauche thing a modern-day writer can do is write a protagonist who is--oh, the horror--likable. Why is likable worse than, say, boring, or predictable, or hackneyed or obscure? When did beloved become a bad thing? And, now that likable has become the latest code employed by literary authors to tell their best-selling brethren that their work sucks, is there any hope for the few, the shamed, the creators and consumers of likable female protagonists?"

Notes From the Editing Mines

I've been reading through my manuscript, fixing the parts that make me cringe, changing things that don't quite make sense or no longer serve any purpose, and generally giving everything a good shine. It's going well. This is an important step, and I'm not rushing it, but it's also not taking forever.

Miscellaneous observations from the last couple of weeks:

→ I discovered that in one chapter, there are two separate scenes in which the narrator has a sandwich in from of him and doesn't eat it. This must be that symbolism my high school English teachers were always talking about.

→ It is possible to spend quite some time agonizing over where to put a paragraph break.

→ I thought I knew every twist and turn of my story, but I reached a part where I was puzzled as to what was about to happen. That was cool.

→ Though I'm generally able to write a coherent sentence, I'm amazed by how often that skill appears to have failed me. I continue to find some real doozies of tortured syntax. There are even some awkward sentences that I remember groaning at and fixing before, and yet they remain. I think they were so awful, they grew back.

→ I don't know how anyone else is going to react to this novel, but I'm over here laughing and tearing up and getting chills and feeling sympathy and pity and outrage. So that's something.

→ I'm not done. I will tell you when I'm done.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Sarah Johnson of the Historical Novel Society compiles statistics on which centuries are the most popular in today's historical fiction: "The 20th century strongly dominates, with the 19th century in second place. The 'Dark Ages' are pretty dark. Historical novels set in the early medieval period aren't very common, at least until you get up to the 11th century (with 1066, and all that)." (Thanks, Foreword Literary!)

It's All Happening

I snuck off on a trip last week, and I have another one coming up shortly, and that's all before I go to Squaw Valley in early July for the workshop I got into. Thanks to everyone who offered congratulations. I'm still very excited about it.

I'm working hard on giving my novel those finishing touches it needs, making it better and shorter and more coherent. At the workshop, I'll get a chance to meet with a professional who may be interested in reading my manuscript and potentially working with me. I also hope to start querying agents this summer.

Short story thoughts are rattling around in my head, because I want to write something new to bring to the workshop. Plus I'm in the middle of reading four books right now. And I'm behind on Mad Men, and I need a haircut, and I probably haven't answered your email.

Life is busy. Life is good. More details as events unfold.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Gemma Cooper at The Bent Agency explains some common problems she finds when editing: "During action scenes, it's easy to get caught up writing movement and dialogue and forget the noise. What I mean about this, is when explosions are going on and your main character is running away, you need to remember to show this to the reader. Have the main character shouting their dialogue in broken sentences. They would be panting if running, and always when you are stressed, you don't bother with niceties in dialogue or even finish what you are saying."

News Is Good News

Back in the fall, I blogged about polishing up the first chapter of my novel so I could submit it to a brand new juried writing conference. Eventually I heard back that I had a spot on the waiting list, which was better than a rejection but didn't result in getting to attend.

After that, I didn't blog about the fact that I submitted the same materials to another, more established conference. I decided I'd just keep that to myself unless anything came of it.

Well, guess what? I got in! In July, I'll be attending the week-long Squaw Valley Writers Workshop, and I am thrilled.

At the conference, I'll get to participate in a daily workshop of about a dozen students, having my work critiqued and critiquing the work of others. Every day our group will be led by a different staff member from the large roster of professional writers, editors, and agents. In addition, there will be lectures, panel discussions, and other opportunities to work with the rest of the attendees. My brain is filling up just reading over the information I've received so far!

I'm sure I'll have plenty more to blog about this as the conference approaches. And now I have extra confidence and motivation as I continue with the final-for-now pass through my novel.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Abigail Grace Murdy sums up recent discussions about unlikable characters by women writers: "Women face a deeply double pressure to please, to be likable--to be made of sugar, spice, and everything nice. In the world of fiction, that pressure falls on their characters." (Thanks, Conversational Reading!)

The Aversive Clause

Reading a book written by a friend is a nerve-racking proposition. I was afraid to start THE AVERSIVE CLAUSE, a short story collection by B.C. Edwards, because I've known the author since high school. (As a result, I know all manner of embarrassing things about him, and vice versa. None of those will be revealed here.) I didn't want to find myself in the position of disliking the work of a person I'm fond of.

I had no reason to worry. From the first page of the first story, "Tumblers," I was taken in by the writing. Get a load of these sentences: "He wasn't always a driver, the man dressed as our driver said. Just this afternoon he was dressed as a man discovering his wife sleeping with another man on a fainting couch." How great is that?

So now I face the other problem with reading a book by someone I know: I have to convincingly explain that these are truly fabulous stories, independent of my friendship with the author. Fortunately, I can point out that other people think so, too.

Some of the stories in this collection are of this world, and others are set in worlds where things are a little different. In "Goldfish," a nineteen-year-old boy is drunk at a party and thinking about the girl who's always been good to him, and then the story circles around in a horribly clever way. "Aggie With The Hat On" features a slacker who discovers there's a more together version of himself living in the same town. In "Sweetness," a zombie-type illness begins with a constant sweet taste at the back of the throat.

Several of the stories have settings that are apocalyptic or on their way there, but one is the simple reality of a guy attending a family reunion with his boyfriend for the first time. In other words, there are lot of things happening in this collection, and if you don't like one of the stories, the next one will be completely different. I hope you'll give it a try.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At The Millions, Nichole Bernier reports on The Point of the Paperback: "A look at a paperback's redesign tells you a thing or two about the publisher's mindset: namely, whether or not the house believes the book has reached its intended audience, and whether there's another audience yet to reach. Beyond that, it's anyone’s Rorschach. Hardcovers with muted illustrations morph into pop art, and vice versa. Geometric-patterned book covers are redesigned with nature imagery; nature imagery in hardcover becomes photography of women and children in the paperback."

Shortening

There's a secret ingredient to my current editing pass that I didn't mention in my post last week. Right now, my manuscript is problematically too long, and my goal is to get it down to acceptably too long. I wasn't sure if I'd actually be able to accomplish that this time through, but so far it's going very well.

I'm not removing anything you'd notice -- not taking out any scenes or altering the plot. Occasionally I'll find a chunk of dialogue or a whole paragraph that can go because the information is repeated elsewhere or is no longer relevant. But mostly I'm tightening sentences and conversations to say the same thing with fewer words.

I wanted to offer a set of tips on how to do this, but I'm finding it hard to formulate guidelines that are generally applicable. If this advice would be useful to any of you, speak up, and I'll work on coming up with something.

Rather than a tutorial, I thought I'd provide a before-and-after example. I've picked out a short excerpt that I trimmed by twenty percent. Perhaps it will suggest some strategies.

This isn't an especially interesting piece of text on its own, but it serves its role in the story. It's a conversation between a husband and wife in which they are both thinking about things they aren't sharing. As further context: they've recently moved to California, and it's 1963.