Sample Chapters Online!

You can now read the Intro/Prologue and a sample excerpt from my novel at furrag.com. If you're interested, please go take a look. It's eligible for an Ursa Major Award this year, so I'm putting the book online to try to get support for a nomination and, hopefully eventually, a win.

You can also let me know what you think in the comments here! Thanks for reading.

The Best Dead Humorist

If you're not familiar with the works of P.G. Wodehouse, you are missing out. Now, granted, I have a particular affection for British comedy, but based solely on shelf space in Borders, I have to believe that not only is Wodehouse popular here, but is becoming more so over the years. I saw about fifteen of his books in our local Borders today, when a couple years ago there were usually the standard four or five.

Wodehouse writes most often about class comedy, his most famous works being the Bertie Wooster and Jeeves stories. Wooster, who might be ensconced in Webster's next to the definition of "idle rich," is the smartest of his group of young British noble friends, which is not saying very much. Jeeves, his manservant, is much more competent, rescuing him from situations without ever stepping above his station. The interaction between Bertie and Jeeves would be entertaining enough on its own, but Wodehouse also manages to create the most delightfully convoluted and outrageous plots. There was a moment in reading one of his stories where I laughed out loud, but upon being asked what was so funny, I realized that I would have to recite most of the preceding book in order for the person to get the joke. The plot built perfectly to that point, and the payoff was expertly done.

My first exposure to Wodehouse, however, was in the lesser-known "Tales of St. Austin's," a collection of short stories about boys at British boarding schools. They are somewhat less accessible, being filled with cultural references and jargon like "fags" and "have an ice" and "Thucydides," but you can still get a great deal out of them. They also have the distinctive and wonderful Wodehouse voice.

Thanks to Project Gutenberg, you can read many of Wodehouse's works for free online. "Tales of St. Austin's" is included in this crowd, as are a couple of the Jeeves stories. If you have an idle moment, instead of checking out CNN or YouTube, take half an hour and read a Wodehouse story. Whether or not you learn anything about writing humor, you'll at least be vastly entertained.

Bertie Wooster even has some advice for aspiring writers (from "Right Ho, Jeeves"). Look how clearly his voice comes across just in two paragraphs:

I don't know if you have had the same experience, but the snag I always come up against when I'm telling a story is this dashed difficult problem of where to begin it. It's a thing you don't want to go wrong over, because one false step and you're sunk. I mean, if you fool about too long at the start, trying to establish atmosphere, as they call it, and all that sort of rot, you fail to grip and the customers walk out on you.

Get off the mark, on the other hand, like a scalded cat, and your public is at a loss. It simply raises its eyebrows, and can't make out what you're talking about.

Words to live by, and laugh by.

How To Keep Your Resolution

If you're reading this blog, chances are that one of your resolutions for the new year is "write more."

If you're a human being living in the year 2008, chances are you're already behind on your resolution.

So here's a few tips to help you keep your resolution:

* Be more specific. Don't just say "write more." Say, "Finish 'A Time To Remember To Kill'" or "Write the novel about my father-figure hero in the fantasy universe."

* Break your resolution into mini-goals. Mini-goals are much easier to keep than big year-long resolutions. It's easy to say, "I'm going to write a novel this year," and then put it off 'til March, June, November, and then you're reduced to, "I resolve to resolve to write a novel next year." Break down your novel into defining your story, building your world, creating your characters, sketching your plot, outlining the novel, writing the first draft, editing the first draft, sending the edited MS out for critique, incorporating feedback and revision. If you set a small timeframe for each of those, then by April or May you should be well into a first draft, and the goal will be much more attainable. (This is the lesson learned from NaNoWriMo.)

* Track your progress. If you tend to let things slide, keep a spreadsheet or check off writing time on your calendar. Write down every day the number of hours spent writing. Then, when you get a whole week of zeroes, you notice it immediately and can tell yourself to buckle down, instead of having the vague feeling that it's been a while since you touched your outline and maybe you should get to it next week when the kids are back in school and that report at work is done...

* Use technology. Google Docs allows you to store your documents online to access from anywhere. Yahoo and Google and many others have online calendars: send yourself e-mail reminders to do writing.

* Enlist someone's help. Whether a supportive spouse or a writing buddy, have someone you can check in with to help keep you on track with your goal. Another person can not only help remind you to keep going, they become invested in your goal to a certain extent, so that when you meet it, you make them proud as well as making yourself proud.

If you have any other ideas, toss 'em into the comments, and let's get writing!

Review: That Old-Time Religion

That Old-Time Religion, by Will Sanborn
6/10, Creative story idea with too many unexplored possibilities.

Disclaimer: Will is a friend of mine, or was before I wrote this review, anyway. All criticism should be taken constructively.

In the anthropomorphic fandom, the ancient Egyptian god Anubis has become quite the popular figure through a combination of traits. I think the cachet attached to the "old god," along with the jackal totem (canids are probably the most popular single animal group in the fandom) and the dark, mysterious black color contributed to his popularity. He shows up a lot in art, but this is the first time I'm aware of him being used in a literary context.

The story of "That Old-Time Religion" is similar to Neil Gaiman's "American Gods": the old gods still walk the earth, less powerful now that their empires have collapsed, and one of them (the same one, actually, in both books) is plotting to unleash some cataclysmic event that will restore their former glory. The main character in "That Old-Time Religion" is Thomas, a rudderless young man who stumbles upon some strange characters in a carnival and gets caught up in the quest to save the world.

Anubis enters the scene a little later in the company of Thoth, fellow old god and sometime lover. They join Thomas's group's quest, during which time Anubis and Thomas grow closer, leading Thomas to explore his openness to a gay relationship. There are a few sexually explicit scenes in the book, both gay and straight (and, well, mixed).

While I liked the relationship component of the story, I think Will could have done a better job tying it in with the quest. When there are two storylines, often one slows to a crawl while the other takes center stage. Either a little more work could have been done to integrate them, or one could have been given clear priority over the other. In the end, neither felt fully developed to me. I thought that the quest could have been fleshed out earlier--it was a lot of "we know something is going on, but we don't know what" until the very end, when everything happened at once--and though the relationship aspect fared better, it still felt more like a stretched-out short story. Once the initial question of whether Thomas could sleep with a guy (or a male old jackal-headed god) was resolved, there were few conflicts.

In fact, I thought the story could've used more conflict in general. All five people in Thomas's party generally get along great (even when the carny walks in on Thomas sleeping with his wife, there's no conflict--"we have an arrangement"). Everyone is very caring and nice, which is a problem I have with my own characters at times. I would like to have seen more tension: there is some angst at Anubis and Thoth and the others losing their old dominion, but you get very little sense of what it meant for them to have those dominions, apart from a short section in which Anubis reminisces, which was a nice touch.

Thomas's big conflict in the story is "can I sleep with and care for this incredibly hot, nice, sweet, older person who likes me a lot and happens to be of the same gender?" So that sort of limits things right there. I thought it would be interesting to see some of Anubis's struggle when the plot is uncovered, that his longing for his glory days might translate into a yearning to join the other side. But he's too nice, and his friendship/relationship with Thomas is never in doubt.

Since this is self-published, it is worthwhile to take a moment to comment on the publication. Will typeset this book himself, with some lovely art by Heather Bruton, and I have to say the production looks very professional. In the text itself, another editing pass might have helped; I caught several misspellings, grammar issues, and so on. It definitely ranks in the upper tier of self-published works I've seen.

Will has a lot of creative ideas, and this story did keep me engaged and reading to the end. In the end, I felt it remained a "fan story"--the ending has that wish-fulfillment quality that is the hallmark of many fan works, and the ideas aren't as much developed in the service of the story as they are garnishes to a "wouldn't it be cool if a regular guy met and fell in love with Anubis" story. I'd like to see Will exercise his imagination a little more, to think about what it would really be like to have "exotics" in society (a facet unexplored save for some token racism), what the old gods would really be up to (though Neil Gaiman and Bill Willingham have set a rather high bar in that territory, there's no reason the rest of us can't have fun with it), and what pitfalls come about from every kind of relationship. This story shows a lot of potential, and I'm looking forward to seeing what Will comes up with next.

New Year, Fresh Start

The vacation really helped. I woke up this morning thinking about the projects I wrote out to accomplish this year and immediately had a pretty good insight into one of them. I did make some resolutions about this year, but you can pretty well guess what they are generically, so I won't bore you with them.

We had a good holiday, going to extremes of nature in Colorado and of "civilization" in Las Vegas. There was skiing and shopping and eating and drinking and family and lots of enjoyment of life. Vegas in particular is a great place to people-watch. Everyone has a story, but it seems like in Vegas we wear our stories much more visibly. Either that, or there are just more people around and so there are more with really interesting stories. Plus, you couldn't ask for a more stimulating setting. Looking for the guy spinning slots for his ten-year-old daughter? The drunk guy on his one vacation of the year yelling at the craps table? The wedding party, the school vacation, the girls who are having a girls' weekend out? Just sit by a bar and watch for an hour or two.

I'm looking forward to a productive 2008--may we all make good on our resolutions, whatever they are.

Dry Spells

Sometimes you just hit one of those times when nothing is calling to be written. I had three days off after Christmas, and I spent them running errands and watching TV. I have several stories waiting to be written, but I haven't been thinking about any of them. So when I sit down to write them, nothing flows.

I think the occasional dry spell is not too bad for you as long as you don't put yourself in the mindset that you have to be writing. It's a bit irritating to have all this time and not be using it, but it's also good to relax and take a break once in a while. I've actually been enjoying the time off from work and from writing, so I think it's been good. And the stories are percolating, it's just been a busy month and I haven't had a real chance to think about them.

What I'm going to do tonight is pull up a couple stories and just force myself to get back into the flow of them, now that my free time is almost over. After all, when I get busy again, I'm going to need some distractions, right?

I Totally Knew Where This Post Was Going

Those of you who've written stories and handed them off to friends are undoubtedly familiar with the feedback: "I figured out where it was going on page..."

It's easy to be annoyed by that, because it's often not phrased in a constructive form (e.g., "you tip your hand too early"). It's more of a boast: I was smart enough to figure out where the plot was going before it was revealed. The flip side is implicit: I'm smarter than the story is, and smarter than you.

That is, of course, not what they mean at all. And you do exactly the same thing when talking about books or movies. The point at which you figure out the story is where it all comes together, where you see the author's intent, and where the path becomes clear. It doesn't make too much of a difference if that's early or late in the story (with certain genre exceptions such as mystery and horror), as long as the story is well told. And indeed, if you hear the above statement, it's still a good review as long as it's followed by, "...but it still kept me hooked."

Really, it's not such a sin to be predictable (the dreaded p-word). We want our stories to be predictable, at least to the extent that the actions of the characters all make sense. But if that's good-p, then there's also bad-p: when the events of the story follow a pattern that's dictated by convention outside the story. Again, for certain genres, it's not a problem (would you object to reading "The Shining" if I told you it's a horror novel where a family slowly gets exposed to more and more terrifying events, until the climax when they face off against the big monster?), but when you're talking about the old "mysterious stranger turns out to be the villain/ancient hero" saw, it'd better be done right or else it'll feel like you're just doing that because all the other stories did.

And I think that is the real key to good-p versus bad-p. If a story follows certain conventions, but the plot and character actions all work well with the story, then it can be predictable to a certain extent, and you should be happy when people tell you they figured it out, unless you're William Tenn and you were deliberately trying to surprise them. If the story follows certain conventions for no other reason than that they're conventions, then it edges into bad-p, and a good critiquer will point that out. You just have to be able to separate the two, and when doing your own critiques, look at that point and see if it's harming the story or not.

Cadences and Rhythm

Short post today, but this deserves more attention and will probably get more later. One of the items in the David Foster Wallace English essay that I thought was really interesting was his admission that he uses incorrect language sometimes because it sounds better. His example was "Where's it at?" for "Where is it?" You can hear the difference between the two if you say them. I think this is also a reason for the prevalence of "ain't." We want a one-syllable negative, and "isn't" is just too bulky sometimes. Imagine Hank Hill saying, "That boy isn't right." (I think, by the way, that this relates to why it's a good idea to read your work aloud while editing--a good topic for another post.)

What favorite incorrect expressions do you have that sound better than their correct counterparts?

Setup, Buildup, Payoff

The "rule of three" is a pretty well-known one. I ran across this article today, talking about it broadly and then in a marketing context. Some of their examples are pretty entertaining (the Laura Kightlinger and Jon Stewart quotes); the whole article is worth reading. The interesting thing, I think, is that the rule applies on so many scales, from sentences all the way up to story structure.

Obviously, you don't want this in all your sentences, but there are places where it fits well. You can use the three-part sentence just for flow:

"Jamie's new car had power steering, a sun roof, and a V-6 engine that got her from her house to the office in ten minutes flat."

You can use the first two elements to set up something that you pay off with the third:

"Every day before he left for work, John brushed his teeth, ate a Pop-Tart, and wondered why he did the first two things in that order."

Notice how right the flow feels. Try adding one element, or taking one away:

"Jamie's new car had power steering and a V-6 engine that got her from her house to the office in ten minutes flat."

"Every day before he left for work, John brushed his teeth, ate a Pop-Tart, put on his shirt, and wondered why he did the first three things in that order."

At a higher level of story structure, the same patterns work, although they're harder to see. You'll recall old fairy tales in which there are often three brothers, or three sisters, or three tasks (yes, I know the five Chinese brothers story, and the importance of seven as well). The evil queen tries three times to kill Snow White. Red Riding Hood asks the wolf three questions ("Are we gonna sit here all day talkin' about how big I'm gettin'?!"). And if you get into screenwriting, you'll know that all screenplays (well, most) have three acts. As I heard it once: "In act one, you chase your character up a tree. In act two, you throw rocks at him. In act three, he figures out how to get down."

There's something about a sequence of three that we find flows well and makes a story work. Just something to keep in mind as you're doing your writing, outlining, and editing.

Writing for an audience

I'm reading Neal Pollack now (review forthcoming, eventually), because I got his book used for $4 and he's part of that McSweeney's crowd that I always thought were pretty good writers but never managed to capture my interest. Turns out this is no exception. Pollack writes from the point of view of a fictional persona who is an amalgam of every overprivileged, ego-driven white male writer, but he does it so well that unless you know the writers he's lampooning, he just comes off as, well, an overprivileged, ego-driven white male writer who has done so much drugs and alcohol that he is delusional.

The point of this post, I guess, is to go back and revisit something I'd written before about writing to your audience. Pollack has a particular audience in mind here: people who read the New Yorker and Harper's and who follow Gore Vidal and Truman Capote and who enjoy that style of writing, but find it a bit overblown. His parodies are interesting, but I'm left feeling like I've just read the punch line to a joke I didn't know. (Aside: there are several punch lines that have become divorced from their jokes, the most famous being "Twenty bucks, same as in town!" which it took me a little while to uncover on Google because I always wanted to know what the joke was. There's also "Wrecked 'em? It damn near killed 'em!" which was a big hit in my college days and is only funny if you say the first part fast enough to make it sound like one word. From these punch lines, it is possible to dimly intuit the joke, as opposed to the one I first read in King Kaufman's column a couple years ago: "Know it? Hell, lady, I wrote it!" All of these are funnier without their jokes than Neal Pollack's short pieces.)

Asides aside, I wouldn't suggest that Pollack take his brilliant skewering of writers I've never read and open it up to the mainstream. He's got his audience; it just doesn't include me. That's the risk you take when you tailor your writing that finely, and I'm well aware that were "NP" to pick up "Common and Precious," he would likely discard it within a couple chapters ("this book has a 'plot'...how common! how precious! ha ha! neal pollack provides his own amusement where none else can be found!" Yes, I picture him talking about himself in the third person. Yes, that's probably just from his first name being phonetically the same as the allegedly third-person-talking Neil Gaiman.). So I guess we'll continue to revolve in our separate spheres, him with his "book deals" and his fancy friends, and me with my blog, my small press, and all of you.

Doesn't seem fair to him, does it? ;)

Writing and the Holidays

The holidays for me, growing up, were always very much downtime. Sometimes we'd travel to one place or another to see relatives, but for the most part, they were a few days off with a nice family ceremony somewhere in the middle. So I always look forward to the holidays as a time when I can get some writing done in longer stretches than a few hours here and there.

I guess I've become a little more social in my middle age, because this December has just been non-stop. I think this week will slow down a little, and then when the actual holiday kicks in, there may be more time to catch up on some of the writing I've meant to get done.

I really do think the holidays are a rich vein of material for writing, beyond all the schmaltzy stuff that ends up in the theaters around this time of year. The concentrated interaction and stress makes for some great stories. Characters! That's what it's all about, right?

So, does anyone else look forward to the holidays as a time to power through some writing? Or is that when you take a break from it?

Review: Wizard of the Crow

Wizard of the Crow, by Ngugi wa'Thiong'o
9/10, a terrifically engaging magical fiction story lampooning African dictatorships and modern society

I don't remember where I read about "Wizard of the Crow." Probably in Salon Books or somewhere like that. Anyway, it was slated to come out many months later on Amazon, so I put in a pre-order and forgot about it until the following year, when I got a message telling me it was about to be shipped. I vaguely remembered ordering it and thought, well, I'll trust my past self; he thought I should have it.

It's a bit intimidating, a trade paperback over 700 pages long with fairly small print. And it resembles "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell" in scope, but it's far more engaging and humorous, and just magical enough to be intriguing. It's the only book I've read this year that almost made me miss a train stop. Fortunately, I have had enough plane rides over the last month to get through a lot of reading, including all of this delightful book.

The story, roughly: Kamiti (all accents on names are omitted from this review because I don't know how to render the tildes over vowels), a young man educated in India returning to his home, the fictional country of Aburiria, to find a job, falls in with a young woman named Nyawira. In the course of running from the police, he calls on some of the pranks of his youth to masquerade as a sorcerer named "Wizard of the Crow" so that the police will leave them alone. His masquerade works too well; soon he has a line of people outside his door waiting for the cures the wizard is reputed to dispense.

Aburiria, meanwhile, is in the midst of petitioning the Global Bank for funds to build Marching to Heaven, a modern-day Tower of Babel, as a birthday present for its Ruler. The Ruler assumes various degrees of omnipotence depending on the situation, and his two highest ministers fight for his favor, to the point of having their eyes and ears surgically enlarged (the better to see and hear what goes on in his country). The way in which these two stories intertwine is skillful enough to be engaging, but it's the backdrop that makes this a remarkable book.

Ngugi mixes African folklore and superstition with modern society, so that a man might call his wife on a mobile phone to tell her the latest rumor about the sorcerer in town. The Aburirian people love to tell and retell stories (one of the main characters, a policeman by the name of A.G., recounts much of his narrative from a bar), and the stories grow in a folkloric/magical kind of way. Ngugi sometimes shows the reader the original event and then the stories; sometimes he leads off a section with references to the event and builds backwards to it. Never does he lose sight of his many story threads (probably a dozen characters could be counted as important, with their own plots), nor of the silly, charming, ruthless, and brutal characters he has created.

There is humor both broad and subtle: the ridiculousness of the various cosmetic surgeries of the ministers, and the fact that despite the magic in the book, the "sorcerer" uses very little in his healing ways. There are lessons here about how to live, the power and corrupting influence of money and power, but it's told comically rather than sternly. Kamiti is the one who learns several lessons over the course of the book, its main character who seems to start from a peaceful equilibrium but faces problems and temptations over the course of the story.

If you have a little while to devote to a good read over the holidays, pick up this book. It reminds me somewhat of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but more readable and more enjoyable overall: a great and unexpected surprise.

You Are A Writer, part 252

Guy Kawasaki writes about the effect of stereotypes on performance. Basically, if you're told "part-time writers never make it big," you'll believe that. If you don't think of yourself as a writer, you won't write like one. Frame yourself as a "writer." Believe in your own success. (But do remain somewhat realistic and open to criticism.)

Active Description

Being character-centric as I am, I focus on dialogue a lot. The journal story I'm writing, which technically has very little dialogue in it, is really like a monologue, so that doesn't count. Anyway, it means that when it comes to writing description, I often flounder. How much longer do I need to go on writing all this boring stuff where nothing is happening, nobody is acting, I will often ask myself half a paragraph in.

(Strangely, I have more tolerance reading description, though I do tend to skim.)

Anyway, a trick I have been using lately to get through description is to try to make it more active. Whenever you can, use the description to help move along the story, or introduce it as other things are happening in the story. For instance, instead of:

"She wore a sleek, low-cut green dress. Her shoes were the latest fashion, matching her artificially blue eyes. Over her shoulder, she carried a small handbag bearing a Gucci label."

Why not:

"The clack of heels turned my head. My eyes were drawn immediately to the low-cut neckline in the sheer green dress behind me, before a cleared throat drew my attention to a pair of annoyed eyes, tinted-lens blue. Having conveyed her annoyance, she reached into the small handbag at her side, its designer label too fashionable for me to know, and pulled out a compact. While I stared, she opened it and began a completely unnecessary examination of her face..."

You get all the description from the first example (mostly), but instead of the character standing still while you take a snapshot, you already have a sense of her character and the interaction with the main character. This is the kind of description I try to write when I can. Clearly, you can't do this all the time; there are moments when you just need a paragraph to describe the room your character's just stepped into, or the completely bizarre alien creature he's just met, but whenever you can, try to include reactions and interactions, not just appearances.

At the very least, I will enjoy reading your stuff more. :)

Continuing Studies

I'll be taking the "Fiction for Experienced Writers" class in Stanford's Continuing Studies program in the winter term. It promises to be pretty interesting. If you don't want to click the link above, here's the summary: "Focusing intently on issues of structure, characterization, and point of view, we will direct our energies toward the creation of polished, seamless narratives and the further development of our own individual styles. In addition to reading and constructively commenting on one another's work, we will continue to read published fiction from authors who both exemplify and challenge traditional concepts of storytelling. Finally, we will attempt to demystify—as much as possible—the process of bringing our work to the outside world, and students will actively explore places in the literary market where their work (as well as that of their classmates) might find placement."

So needless to say, I'm looking forward to it. Some friends of mine are taking Carl Yorke's "Writing For The Movies" class, which examines movie structure and is a terrific class even for novelists. Movies follow a pretty standard structure which is also a good one to keep in mind as a basic story structure for your prose. Carl knows his storytelling inside and out, and is not just a good teacher, he's a great guy besides (though he'll deny that). If you're interested in movies at all, or in story structure, I can't recommend his classes highly enough.

Anyone else taking another Stanford CS class this winter? Anyone else taking one of the two above?

Review: Le Renard et L'Enfant

Le Renard et L'Enfant (The Fox and the Child), by Florence Reynaud from the film by Luc Jacquet
6/10, a children's book of an adventure between a young girl and a wild vixen

The movie "Le Renard et L'Enfant" is being advertised all over Paris. Distributed by Disney, written by Luc Jacquet (who wrote "March of the Penguins" and seems to be challenging Jean-Jacques Annaud ("The Bear," "Two Brothers") in the "French directors who make animal films" category, which one would think is not particularly hotly contested), it's the story of a young girl who lives near a forest and meets a fox and forms some kind of friendship. That much, you can get from the posters.

I don't usually go for novelizations, but French is my second language (third chronologically, second in proficiency) and I figured I wouldn't know the difference. So I'm not going to comment much on language usage, focusing a little more on the story. Which is pretty good overall. The heroine is a "willful" girl who loves walking in the forest and just wants to be friends with the animals she meets. She is especially entranced by a fox she glimpses, and after living the friendship strongly in her mind, she accustoms the fox to her presence with ham treats and gentle behavior.

Throughout the story, the fox behaves pretty much as a wild animal would. There's one rather unbelievable scene where a pack of wolves corners the fox, but the rest of the girl's adventures and misadventures come from her trusting the fox too far and either being rewarded or being let down. The climax of the book comes when she tries to bring the fox into her life, instead of always going to its life. It follows her to her bedroom, but once shut in, it starts to panic. That's when the girl realizes that this is really a wild animal, and not a friend.

There's not much impact in the book to the loss of that friendship. One can imagine a story in which the girl is forever mistrustful of people, always looking for that element of wildness in them that precludes true friendship. But in the end, it is revealed that she is telling this story to her son, who is now the age she was then, in the hopes that he will learn about animals as she did without having to go through the same ordeals.

This is no masterpiece, but if you read French and like foxes, it's an entertaining enough read, and the message it sends is worthwhile. I wish half the people who write to me at my fox ecology site would understand the distinction between wild animals and pets as well as this movie/book does.

Review: Consider The Lobster

Consider The Lobster, by David Foster Wallace
8/10, intelligent, funny observations on a wide range of topics of today's life

I really liked Wallace's "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," and "Consider The Lobster" is a similar series of essays, with, it turns out, similar strengths and pitfalls.

In this book, Wallace looks at the Adult Video News awards, sports autobiographies, English usage, 9/11, talk radio, John Updike, John McCain, and, of course, lobsters. None of the essays are as laboriously academic and thick as his TV essay from ASFTINDA; on the other hand, none of them are as laugh-out-loud funny as the title essay or the State Fair one. Wallace is at his best when combining his considerable intellect with his also-considerable frank self-deprecation. The funniest part of this book, for me, was a footnote in which he confesses the problems he has with figuring out how to politely end a conversation, and the troubles it's caused him. That insecure, over-analytical person was the highlight of ASFTINDA (the titular essay), but in "Consider the Lobster," he mostly appears more subtly, in the labeling of certain sections of essays as "INTERJECTION: OPINION" or "INTERJECTION THAT IS MORE OBJECTIVE THAN MIGHT AT FIRST GLANCE BE EXPECTED," for example.

Still, Wallace is either the smartest funny writer, or the funniest smart writer, working today. It's just that the humor in "Consider The Lobster" is somewhat restrained. He still has his signature footnotes sprinkled throughout the text, and discusses a large number of subjects with what is, when you think about it, a rather astonishing level of authority and knowledge. The Adult Video News award essay, which leads off the book, is one that you would expect to be full of humorous situations. Instead, there are some chuckles, but most of the situations just leave you shaking your head, either in disbelief or in sympathy (there should be a shorter word here denoting sympathy for people who are unaware that they are tragic figures). It is, perhaps intentionally, similar to the effect Wallace describes of watching too many adult films, in which the intimacy taken out of context and made public just becomes uncomfortable more than titillating (in fact--this would be a footnote if it were one of his essays--Wallace describes several times the odd sensation of meeting people whose genitals you have seen close up on a TV screen).

I loved the essay on English usage, and this blog's readership might be more disposed to agree with me than the general public would. I find it hard to believe, just from my own experience, that most people would be interested in the origins and philosophical differences between the prescriptive and descriptive camps of dictionary-writing and style guides. I thought it was cool. When I took a Linguistics class in my freshman year of college, I came home and told my father that any form of language that accurately conveyed the intended meaning of the speaker was correct because it was accomplishing its purpose. He and his English degree scorned that concept ("is that what I'm spending all this money for you to learn?") without really clarifying his argument. I've since drifted to a sort of middle ground, which is more or less where Wallace finds himself as well.

Sometimes, as with the Updike essay and the lobster essay, Wallace just writes too much about a simple question or premise. His digressions are usually interesting if you're the sort of person who just wants to know things about everything, as he obviously is. If you are, then you'll enjoy this book. If you're not, you should try to find some of his writing online (like this excellent essay on Roger Federer, not in CTL), and just pick and choose his essays rather than buying a whole book that's going to be hit or miss for you. And if you are looking for an introduction to his writing, start with "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again." "Consider The Lobster" is more of the same, only slightly less so.

"Common and Precious" on Amazon!

Hey, all! My book is now on Amazon! Even if you already bought it (thank you!), it'd really help if you'd go and review it--doesn't have to be in-depth, but every little bit of feedback helps. Also tagging it to show up in certain searches would be helpful if you have time and want to play around with it. Anything to get more eyes on it.

Thanks! And hey, if you're looking for a good Christmas gift for someone who loves to read ... :)

Endings

So here we are, the last day of November, the last day of my post-a-day experiment. I think it's gone pretty well overall. At least, there weren't more than a couple days when I had to reach to post something.

I think it's fitting for this last post that I talk about endings. I keep referring to this being one of my big hobbyhorses, expressing surprise that I haven't posted about it. I do remember writing a whole article about it for Sofawolf some years ago, so let's see what I can remember off the cuff.

Endings are often the weakest point in a book, and they are perhaps the second most critical part (the beginning is the most critical; if you don't pull the reader in, they never get to the ending). The ending of your book or story is the final impression the reader is left with, so it has to be good for them to remember it fondly. So many books and stories I read just stop when the plot ends, or when the author runs out of ideas, and though all the story elements may have been wrapped up, the reader is left with a distinctly incomplete feeling. Not good. Almost as bad are the endings where everything is wrapped up in a neat package. Unless it's a fairy tale, those endings leave the reader feeling that the story was unrealistic.

So what is a good ending? For me, it comes back to character (gee, there's a surprise, huh?). If your character has completed his or her arc, then there's a good chance your ending will be just fine. "Completing an arc," of course, means that the character has answered the question posed by your story. It may be an abstract question, or a mystery; it may be something internal (how can I reconcile my inner desires with my obligations?). At the end, the question should be answered, and the world and the character should be in equilibrium.

In my story "Spook," in Shadows In Snow, the story ends when the character has solved his problem--which is short of a resolution to the events of the plot. But at that point, the events of the plot no longer matter, because what was driving the story was the character.

To make your ending aesthetically beautiful as well as satisfying, you'll want to incorporate the imagery and themes common to your book. One of my favorite endings is from Richard Adams's lovely "Watership Down." It begins with the simple sentence: "The primroses were over." The image of a bloom of flowers dying heralds summer, a dry and difficult time, a time of maturing. The theme of seasons plays out through the book, as the rabbits go through summer (travel), fall (finding their new warren, where food is plentiful), and winter (war). And when finally the book ends and the story is over, it ends with the following sentence: "... where the primroses were just beginning to bloom."

Make your ending harken back to the beginning, to the way you hooked the reader into your story. Gently release him or her with the knowledge that the story is over, it's wrapped up. You may come back for more, but for now, things are quiet and settled. We'll let you know if anything else happens.

That way, you leave them with a happy (or at least satisfied) feeling. And they'll remember that the next time they go to pick up one of your stories, or one of your books. They may not know they remember it, but they will.

And with that, I will close out November. I'll be back in December, of course, but I won't have Internet access for a couple days, so this timing works out well. Hope you've enjoyed NaBloMo! Thanks for reading, and I'll see you next week. :)

Review: The Dive From Clausen's Pier

The Dive From Clausen's Pier, by Ann Packer
9/10, a rich, beautiful story about a woman figuring out her life

"Figuring out her life." That's a lousy way to summarize the trials and tribulations of Carrie Bell, the heroine of "The Dive From Clausen's Pier." We read the first chapter, a prologue of sorts, in our "Tension, Conflict, and the Unknown" seminar earlier this year, and when I asked our teacher for recommended books that handle tension well, this was one she recommended.

Packer certainly does know how to build tension. The first chapter nearly begins with Carrie saying "That year, the year everything changed..." but doesn't tell us why until later, dropping other clues throughout until by the time her fiance Mike takes his fateful dive off the pier, we know something bad will happen. Things haven't been good between her and Mike; like the lake, their love is at a low ebb. Carrie hasn't had the strength to break things off, but she knows she will have to before they go much further.

This is a persistent trait of hers, to put off decisions until forced by a crisis. In the wake of Mike's accident (a broken neck), she is trapped into the obligation she was planning to flee, now made more onerous by Mike's disability. The first part of the book moves slowly, detailing how that one accident and her reactions to it unravel other parts of her life: her relationship with Mike's parents, her friendship with her best friend Jamie, her friendships with the other members of their group.

It's the second part of the book, after Carrie makes an initial decision about what path to take, where things pick up. Even though she's made a decision, it isn't final, and the path not taken still plucks at her even as she finds happiness in the course she chose. Tension between the two escalates until the end of the book, when she reaches a final decision, and a final peace of sorts.

For people who love good characters, this book is a rich Godiva chocolate assortment of them. I said once that characters become real from what they do, and memorable from how they do it. Packer's characters are fully, achingly real, in such a normal setting that for them to be memorable would almost be a betrayal of the world. But they are all memorable in small ways, mannerisms like those we know in our own friends. I often felt frustrated with Carrie ignoring what seemed to me to be obvious choices, but had to realize that that is who she is; in her place, I would have acted differently (and it would not have been nearly as interesting a story).

The writing itself is marvelous, too. Carrie's hobby is clothing and sewing, and Packer makes us aware of what everyone is wearing, to the point that I started to look around in my own life and notice clothes. This loving detail extends to the characters themselves. One of the lasting effects of this book, and the reason for its high score, is because after reading it, I feel less able to ignore the stories in all the people I meet and pass every day.

That sounds either terribly pretentious ("I can now see the hidden depths in everyone") or ignorant ("I didn't realize other people had depth!"), but I can't think of a better way to say it. I think we all know that everyone we meet has a story just like we do, but most of the time we don't think about it. It takes too much time and effort to think about what the woman who rushes onto the train every morning to get a double seat went through as a child, or why the guy with the laptop open in the coffee shop is just staring blankly out the window. But a book like this, so rich in characters and their stories, makes you reach out from your own story and touch other people's, if only to wonder what they might be, if only for a moment.

And by the time Carrie has finished this chapter of her own story, you understand that although this is an ending, there will be more to come. She has reached as much of an equilibrium as any of us ever do. If it is not a completely satisfying ending, it is at least a very real one, and maybe the two are mutually exclusive, after all. If you love characters, if you love drama, if you love the small town and big city and all the people in them, you will love this book.