Building Stories

I spent part of my winter break at a lovely vacation rental surrounded by family. There were several days of rain, which left us free to guiltlessly sit around reading in front of the fireplace. In anticipation of this, before the trip I'd purchased a copy of BUILDING STORIES, a new graphic novel by Chris Ware.

"This is a present for everyone," I announced. And then I guiltlessly started reading it, because one of the great things about this work is that it can be enjoyed by many readers at the same time.

BUILDING STORIES is packaged in a large box like a board game. Inside are 14 separate printed materials in formats that include hardcover books, pamphlets, and newspapers. These 14 pieces make up the story, and they can be read in any order, which is why this is so perfect for sharing. (Don't forget to read the box, too!)

You can dive in anywhere, but I do recommend the piece that looks like a game board as a starting point because it provides a good overview of all the characters. That's one of the mostly wordless sections where the pictures tell the whole story. Others have plenty of text, both inside speech bubbles and as narrative "voiceover". There's a variety of storytelling and some different visual styles, but all of it is presented with Ware's clean, colorful drawings that simultaneously evoke cartoons and convey detailed human gestures and emotion. You can see samples at NPR Books and in the New York Times review.

Reading these stories in the company of loved ones is also a good idea because this is a depressing work overall, with a central theme of loneliness. Most of the characters are miserable most of the time, though there are moments of exquisite happiness, particularly in the parts focusing on a mother's love for her child. I cried a few times while reading, but I didn't mind. I found this a very honest and realistic portrayal of the different stages of several lives, detailing both the good and the bad of romance, marriage, parenting, and families.

This is a beautiful, touching work that succeeds at addressing the big stuff like death as well as the tiny moments that make up a life. I would have appreciated the story even in a more conventional format, and the presentation adds an extra layer or two to the experience. BUILDING STORIES is well worth reading.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At Jacket Copy, Hector Tobar resolves to tackle bookshelf chaos: "My book collection is in a state of disorder many decades in the making. I have books boxed and shelved in four different places. More than once in the last few years, I've gone to a bookstore to buy a copy of a book I need and which I already own -- but which I can't find, despite driving back and forth across L.A. to the places where my books live."

It's Not the End of the World

The year is just about over, and I didn't accomplish everything I wanted to. I could put a lot of energy into berating myself for this -- and at times I do -- but I'm getting better and better at recognizing what a pointless exercise that is.

I worked pretty hard this year. I produced a lot of good words. Very belatedly, I emerged from my state of denial about this so-called revision I've been working on for almost two years. It turns out I've kept almost nothing from my previous draft and I've been more or less rewriting the manuscript over again, again, because that's what it needs. Now I'm somewhat within sight of the end, and it really is resembling the novel I want it to be.

At the end of last year, I wrote a post much like this one in which I came to grips with what I hadn't yet achieved and rejoiced over what I had. I stand by all that stuff again.

2012 still wasn't the year that everything started happening for my literary career. But you know what? It's not the end of the world.

Enjoy the rest of the year. Be kind to yourself. If you'd already accomplished everything, what would you do next year?

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Kristin Cashore shares the process of writing her most recent novel -- and then rewriting it from scratch: "It was an amazing mental freedom; it allowed for a freshness in my second draft, and a freedom from the swamp of my first draft. I was able to write a second draft while NOT stuck inside that first-draft swamp. I was able to tell the same story all over again, and this time tell it so much better." (Thanks, Lauren!)

Ready Player One

When READY PLAYER ONE by Ernest Cline was published last year, I was intrigued by all the recommendations. The novel revolves around 1980s video games and pop culture, and it takes place mostly inside a virtual world.

I definitely fall into the target audience for this book. I grew up in the 80s playing ColecoVision and Nintendo. On at least one occasion, I held my birthday party at an arcade. Today I devote hours each week to completing quests in Skyrim.

So I'd been planning to read the book eventually, but the reason I got around to it now is that my mother raved about it. This surprised me. In all the afternoons my brother and I spent playing Super Mario Bros., I can't recall Mom ever picking up a controller. If my non-gaming mom liked this game-obsessed book, I had to check it out for myself. I mean, I wasn't going to let her out-geek me!

The story takes place in the 2040s. Things aren't looking so good in the real world, which is plagued with poverty, energy shortages, and war. Fortunately, technology has progressed to the point that everyone has constant access to an immersive virtual world called the OASIS. Compared to reality, the OASIS is a utopia.

When the creator of the OASIS dies, he leaves behind a message that his vast fortune will be awarded to whoever can find the easter egg he's left hidden somewhere within the game. The book's protagonist is a teen boy determined to solve the puzzle, which involves learning everything he can about the creator's 80s childhood and the video games, movies, and music he loved. The obssesive quest for the egg turns into a thrilling and dangerous adventure both inside and out of the OASIS.

READY PLAYER ONE kept me up too late reading for several nights. It's an exciting adventure with great world-building and tons of nostalgia. The story does occasionally suffer from long stretches of exposition and unnecessary repetition, but overall it's a lot of fun. I enjoyed recognizing the 80s references, but there were many I wasn't familiar with, and it's not necessary to know much about video games to appreciate the book, as my mother can attest.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Rob D. Young offers 9 Tricks to Make Your Dialogue More Organic: "Regardless of what's being discussed, it's entirely normal for participants in a conversation to maintain multiple threads of dialogue. They can simultaneously be talking about the meaning of the life, what they had for lunch on Tuesday, and how stressed they are about homework--and none of this is seen as a contradiction."

Submitted

Today I submitted my application to Lit Camp, the juried writing conference I posted about a while back.

I ended up spending quite a bit of time overhauling my first chapter and then going through it again to address the suggestions from my critique group. I finally got the chapter into a state I was happy with, and I ran it by some more people to make sure the changes worked. Thanks so much to everyone who read and gave feedback!

It will be another two months before I find out if I've been selected for the conference, so I'm going to try not to think about it for now. I really don't have the slightest idea what my chances are. It would be very cool to be accepted, but I'm not investing too much in hoping for it.

The good thing about the work I put into improving my first chapter, plus writing up a new description of my novel, is that it needed to be done eventually anyway. My submission package for the conference is similar to what I'll send to agents once I'm ready to start querying. It's nice to know that the opening of my novel has already been scrutinized and made strong. Now I have to make it to the end of the damn thing.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Edan Lepucki at The Millions analyzes literary fiction as a genre: "The reader of literary genre fiction should feel the structure in her body, particularly with short stories. It's a recognizable rhythm, it's a shimmering in one's veins as one moves from opening scene to well-placed background information to the next, more tense scene to that special, oh-so-revealing flashback about the time our protagonist ran over his rubber horse, or the time he knew he was in love with a real horse, or the time he -- oh you see what I mean."

Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

MR. PENUMBRA'S 24-HOUR BOOKSTORE by Robin Sloan is one of those stories that makes me want to live inside it. But in this case, I kind of already do. The book takes place within my experience of the Bay Area and is set "at the intersection of books and technology." It has a friendly, funny style and an awesome cast of characters. And it's joining my list of favorites.

Our protagonist is Clay, a designer recently laid off from a startup "founded by a pair of ex-Googlers who wrote software to design and bake the platonic bagel." (Incidentally, right before the novel's publication, Sloan discovered that someone's actually doing this.) Clay gets a job working the night shift at a quirky bookstore where eccentric customers rush in frantically after midnight asking for volumes from the store's mysterious collection. Clay isn't sure what's going on, and he doesn't know how to find out, because Mr. Penumbra has instructed him never to look inside these books, and they can't be located on Google.

The word "Google" appears in this novel at about the same rate as in my daily conversation, which is to say, frequently, and with as little self-consciousness. This gave me a wonderful dizzy feeling. It's like when I read MICROSERFS right after moving to Silicon Valley, and I got to a description of a particular freeway interchange, and then later that day I drove past that exact cloverleaf.

In many ways, MR. PENUMBRA'S 24-HOUR BOOKSTORE is MICROSERFS for 2012, with a literary twist. The characters represent the new generation of geeks. They live in San Francisco rather than Silicon Valley, though a job at Apple is still the holy grail. They think as comfortably about design as code. At one point Clay hacks together some 3-D graphics in Ruby, describes his creation, and says, "If this sounds impressive to you, you're over thirty." Guilty as charged.

Of course eventually Clay opens one of Mr. Penumbra's strange books, and this starts him off on a wild quest to discover the secrets of a peculiar literary society. Along the way he falls in love with a brilliant Googler and visits the Google campus, which is just a bit more Googley than in real life. (He has to use the visitor line at the cafeteria, because employees' food is personalized to improve their brain function.)

This is the most book-loving book I've read in a long time, which is impressive for a story that keeps bringing up Google and Ruby and the internet. If you love books, if you're exhilarated rather than dismayed by the implications of technology interacting with books, and especially if you're excited about a book that mentions both source code and shelf talkers, this is the book for you. Consider buying the hardcover. It glows in the dark.

You can find out more at Robin Sloan's web site, including interviews and the short story that evolved into the novel.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Chuck Wendig offers an entertaining step-by-step explanation of how he writes a novel: "For me a novel is essentially a lesson in drunk driving (DO NOT DRINK AND DRIVE THIS IS A METAPHOR): it's me starting at the beginning and then revving the engine and speeding sloppily and swerving dramatically toward what I've conceived to be the ending."

Drive-By Post

November got away from me, and now December is already whizzing by. It's the time to start looking back at the past year and ahead to the next one. The view in both directions is making me panic a little.

In the past month, I made some more progress on my regular revision, and I've also been working through the feedback from my critique group on my first chapter. I gave a friend feedback on her own manuscript, plus read some books that I'll be writing about here soon. And there was that whole Thanksgiving thing, which was lovely.

All of this means I have nothing of real content to post today, but I wanted to let my loyal readers know that I'm still plugging away. Hope all your December endeavors are going well.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At the Guardian Books Blog, Lee Rourke argues in favor of novels without neat conclusions: "We have no real way of predicting our future. So why do our novels have to tie all this stuff together, into a neatly packaged bundle of ready-made answers?" (Thanks, Henri!)

Ali Smith's Like

The novel LIKE by Ali Smith starts out as the story of a single mother barely holding together a life for herself and her seven-year-old daughter in a caravan (trailer) park in Scotland. It ends up somewhere rather different.

I loved the first half of this book. The mother and daughter are both fascinating characters, and their interactions are full of great details. I especially enjoyed the scenes in the daughter's point of view, which wonderfully capture what a child does and doesn't notice in the world around her.

The first half drops many intriguing hints about the mother's past, and as the story goes on, the reader starts to figure some things out and grow even more intrigued about the things that haven't yet been explained. The second half provides some insight into the mother's life before the daughter, but it left so much of the mystery unaddressed that I was unsatisfied and also puzzled, wondering if I missed something.

Overall, I did like LIKE. But I was disappointed by the way the story set up big secrets, seemed poised to provide illumination, and then failed to deliver. This is definitely a case where there's a disconnect between what the writer wanted a book to do and what I wanted from it as a reader. Still, the novel is beautifully written, and Smith is highly skilled at creating characters, so I'm looking forward to reading more of her work.

Thanks to Sally for recommending, lending, and then discussing this book. It's a good one to discuss after reading, and our conversation did help to satisfy some of what I was missing at the end of the story.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Geraldine Brooks confesses her book-organizing system in People Of The Bookshelf: "It's impossible for me to place one book alongside another without thinking about the authors, and how they would feel about their spine-side companion. I arrange my shelves as I would seat guests at a dinner party." (Thanks, The Millions!)

Why I Love My Critique Group

My critique group is awesome. The three of us have been together for a decade (!), supporting each other through myriad changes in our writing and personal lives. Over the years, the focus and format of our group has evolved. We now meet once a month by video chat, mostly to talk about what we've been writing and reading. Our critique function is only activated occasionally, when someone needs it.

The group gave me incredibly useful feedback on the second draft of THE EXTENT OF THE DAMAGE, working through the manuscript a few chapters at a time over the course of several months (we were meeting weekly then). When I someday reach the end of this draft (I will get there, I will!), the big test will be how the two other group members react to it.

I can guarantee they'll have plenty of conflicting opinions. We met this week to discuss my revised first chapter because I wanted to get their feedback before I submit it to Lit Camp. We spent a good portion of the meeting laughing over how often the two of them had opposite reactions to the contents of the chapter.

Getting their differing perspectives was hugely valuable. Readers aren't all the same, and it helps to get as many opinions as possible. With only two people in the group besides myself, I'm working with a very small sample size, so it's just as well that they don't always agree. (Incidentally, I have more critique partners outside this group who will also review the full draft when it's completed.) The debate during the meeting allowed me to get a better idea of why they felt as they did and figure out how best to respond with changes.

I can't overstate the importance of having other people read your work before you send it out. It's impossible to judge your own writing as if you don't already know what you meant to say and what all the backstory is that explains why the characters are doing what they do.

For example, I worked for ages on my opening paragraphs until every word was perfect. The reaction from my critique group (in this case, the two of them were in agreement) demonstrated that I'd still written a very confusing collection of sentences that left the reader unclear about what was going on. Furthermore, our discussion of the opening made me realize that for some reason I'd fixated on conveying something that doesn't even really matter. I can adjust the opening to omit this, and it will be much clearer and more effective. Despite all my attention to these paragraphs, I couldn't get to that realization without the help of people outside my own brain.

It's not an easy thing to hear criticism of your writing, and I'm a little overwhelmed thinking about the work that still remains on this chapter (not to mention the whole novel, eventually). But I'm glad I have a critique group I can rely on to react to my work honestly.

For more of my thoughts about requesting and responding to critique, check out this article I wrote a couple of years ago.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ On the Amwriting blog, Jason Black explains how readers are like Sherlock Holmes: "They miss nothing. Every detail matters. If you're a criminal, the very notion of trying to sneak something past Mr. Holmes should make you nervous. If you're a writer building the very world into which your Holmesian reader will stroll, you should also be nervous."

Human Foibles

1. The best cure for an intense aversion to the idea of ever writing anything again? Start writing.

2. Warning: This treatment may not be effective on a Friday afternoon.

3. I finished the overhaul of my first chapter that I was so absorbed with last week. I've sent it off to my critique group, and we'll see if they agree that it's looking good.

4. Returning to my revision where I left off wasn't as easy to get sucked into. But this week was kind of distracting.

5. If I were doing NaNoWriMo, I'd probably be really behind. Except that if I were doing NaNo, that in itself would keep me from falling behind.

6. It's Friday afternoon.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Christopher Gronlund endured a really terrible movie to bring us Better Writing Through Birdemic: "Somewhere into the opening credits, which drag on and on and on and on, it hit me: people can learn some writing lessons from watching this movie mocked by the RiffTrax crew (or by watching old episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000). The things they make fun of are the things writers shouldn't do."

Cloud Atlas, the Book and the Movie

The most striking thing about David Mitchell's CLOUD ATLAS is that it doesn't behave the way a story is supposed to. Normally when you read a novel, within a few pages you start to get a sense of what the story is. You understand why you're following the main character, and you can probably guess at the general sort of arc the story will take. If this information isn't apparent within a few pages, you'll certainly have a handle on it within a few chapters.

CLOUD ATLAS isn't like that. I was a quarter through the book and still unclear who these characters were and why I was reading about them. But this experience wasn't frustrating, because the problem wasn't a fault with the writing but rather a deliberately mysterious structure that Mitchell was building and playing with. I found this book fascinating, fun, and only rarely boring (the first 25 pages in particular are a bit of a difficult slog but well worth pushing through).

If you're willing to dive into CLOUD ATLAS based on that description alone, and you've managed to avoid learning anything else about the book, I suggest that you stop reading this review now and give the book a try. I enjoyed my relatively uncontaminated reading experience.

On the other hand, if you're not likely to pick up the book without some idea of what you're getting into, read on for an explanation that will still leave you with plenty of surprises.