Good Writing

You want good writing? You want a great story? You want a lesson in how to build up your readers' expectations, build tension, give them way more than they thought they were getting?

You want Gene Weingarten. You want the Great Zucchini.

(It's a couple years old, but this is the first time I've seen it.)

Review: The Soul of Baseball

The Soul of Baseball: A Road Trip Through Buck O'Neil's America, by Joe Posnanski
8.5/10, a terrific look back at the Negro Leagues through the eyes of its most enthusiastic ambassador

I grew up a Philadelphia Phillies fan, becoming aware of baseball some twenty years after Jackie Robinson made his historic debut. In the mid-to-late seventies, the Philly press had still only grudgingly accepted African-American ballplayers onto their club: Mike Schmidt was the hero of that team, Greg Luzinski the slugger, Larry Bowa the scrappy shortstop. Garry Maddox, who served just as faithfully in center field for years, was one of the only non-white players on the team, let alone starting.

A kid growing up in a liberal household had no idea that there were differences or attitudes. It was only later that I recall my father telling me how cold the Philly fans and press were to embrace Maddox, compared to the affection they lavished on Schmidt and the others. In my mind, his is the only name I can remember the announcer saying, the name, "GARRRRY LEEEEEEEEEE MADDOX" echoing through the ballpark.

I had no idea the Negro Leagues existed until college, and then it seemed to me that they were a loose, patchwork show, a bunch of guys who weren't allowed to play baseball in the bigs, so they got together just to play, like a grown-up sandlot league. I had never heard, nor heard of, Buck O'Neil.

In the past few years, his name has been all over, from his famous Hall of Fame snub until his death last year. Joe Posnanski, a Kansas City sports columnist, traveled with Buck for a year, admitting that he himself didn't know what the book was going to be about until he started to write it. He found his topic in Buck O'Neil himself, the man more than the collection of his stories.

Not that the stories aren't great. His "Nancy" story is worth all the buildup. But the stories are only pieces of the whole, the experience of the men in the Negro Leagues, including Buck himself, who played as fiercely, as colorfully, and as competitively as their "official" counterparts.

Buck's story, encompassing the stories he tells over the course of the book, is compelling and moving. There are some former players who are consumed by bitterness at the discrimination they suffered, others who have learned to live with it. Buck, magically, seems to be free of it. And that is at the heart of "The Soul of Baseball," the paradox of this man who experienced firsthand the worst in people and chose to see only the best.

Posnanski's writing is skillful and evocative, crisp and colorful as a sportswriter should be. In fact, my main complaint about the book is that he doesn't let enough of himself show. I picked up the book because of Joe's blog, a consistently entertaining and insightful look at sports in general and baseball in particular. The personality of the author is one of the great delights of the blog. But in this book, I understand his dilemma: the book is about Buck, and to color it with himself would be to overshadow Buck. I think he made the right choice, but it wasn't the book I expected to read.

It's still a great read, even if you're not a baseball fan or a Joe Posnanski fan.

The Fight Against Evil

In lieu of my own words, some wise ones from Eleanor Arnason, explaining her aversion to "quest against evil" fantasy novels:

In so far as evil exists, it is people, and they are evil either because they have malfuctioning brains or because they have become corrupted. Evil is not creatures with many legs that remind you of spiders, and it isn't dark lords who loom in the distance. It is the greed heads and power freaks who decided to invade Iraq and destroy a nation to meet their personal needs, whatever those may be.

If fantasy is going to help us understand the world, then it ought to come up with descriptions of evil that help us recognize evil in the real world. Tolkien does this in Saruman, Wormtongue, Boromir, Denethor, the thugs in the Shire and so on. He shows us a wide range of corruption: those who intimidated by evil, those who are tempted, those who utterly corrupted.

I guess what I am saying is, evil is not The Other. It is right here in our neighbors and allies and the leaders we trust.

I like that. I've always thought that the corrupted friend was a better villain than the guy who was just "evil" for whatever reason. Even though I do write some fantasy, I don't think I've often, if ever, written a "pure evil" villain. The villains in my stories are, as Eleanor says, the people among us who feel themselves above our moral codes, better than our society, more important than you and me.

Last Day for Voting

Hi all!

Today's the last day for voting in the Ursa Major Awards. If you haven't already, it's important to go vote for your favorite works!

(Especially if, y'know, those works happen to be a certain novel or magazine...)

Busy busy!

Apologies for the lack of posting, if anyone's noticed. I have been traveling the last three weekends, and am trying to wrap up layout on two Sofawolf books for the summer. Hopefully this weekend will see the bulk of that work done. I have a book to review and writing to talk about, so look for more postings soon! And keep an eye on http://yourtablesready.blogspot.com for restaurant reviews and maybe a neat surprise...

Review: A Short History of Nearly Everything

A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson
9/10 because I love history and science and Bill Bryson and this has all of that

One of my favorite books during my childhood was Isaac Asimov's "The Universe," a non-fiction* exploration of how we have looked at the universe from historical times to the present day. It's where I learned about the Cepheid yardstick being wrong, about the redshift discovery of the universe's expansion, and about the steady-state vs. Big Bang controversy. Along comes Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything," a sort of updated and expanded "The Universe," focusing more on Earth than on everything else. Asimov, for instance, spent no time on the evolution of man or the history of Earth except insofar as it related to our understanding of the age of the universe.

* It's interesting, I think, that when we want to say a book is based on fact, we have to specify that it's "non-fiction." I was trying to think of another adjective and could only come up with "fact-based" or "factual," neither of which sounded right. We just assume a "book" is fiction unless told otherwise.

Bryson's "History" (technically, that is the subtitle, footnoted to a picture of the Earth, but I'm too lazy to find a picture of the Earth to put everywhere I want to show the title), conversely, does cover the establishment of our view of the universe, but only to show how we view our place in it. Fully half the book is devoted, lovingly, to the history of the Earth itself and the development of life thereon.

The strength of Bryson's work has always been his stories about people, and in this book, he humanizes the science by focusing on the scientists. He tells us that one of the scientists really responsible for the discovery of the structure of DNA (who was never recognized with the Nobel that Watson and Crick received) was a scientist who jealously guarded her findings because, as a woman, her male colleagues never stopped trying to take advantage of her. We learn about the great international project to map the transit of Venus in 1761, for which scientists were dispatched around the world, including one tragic Frenchman who missed not only the 1761 transit, but the subsequent one in 1769, and whose story just goes downhill from there.

Every chapter is full of these stories, balancing the enormity of the discoveries with the humanity of the discoverers. From Aristotle's greatest insight to Einstein's greatest mistake, from cyanobacteria to antibiotics, Bryson shows us not only the history of our humble home, but our place in it, concluding with a moving chapter on our responsibility to our fellow inhabitants.

Not as consistently entertaining as Bryson's other non-fiction work, but just as engaging and more informative, "A Short History of Nearly Everything" is a great read and a great story, and best of all, we're all characters in it.*

* Not really.

Self-Measurement Through Writing

A couple weeks ago, Kyell was talking about how to measure your improvement as a writer. One of the things he recommends is going back through your old work from time to time, as you should be constantly acquiring better skills to evaluate your work.

This post on BLDGBLOG, which is usually about architecture, talks about measuring your progress through life by reading the same book every few years, or visiting the same building every few years. Oddly, I was just talking about this yesterday, how I remember the Circus Circus casino in Las Vegas as a big, glamorous place. I have a very vivid memory of standing right by the pit, because as a seven-year-old I wasn't allowed to go down in where the slot machines were. But Circus Circus was (and remains) one of the more kid-friendly casinos on the Strip. Returning there a few years ago, it seemed shabby to me, dirty and old, not as glamorous as it had been.

The problem with buildings is that they change while we are changing, so unlike a novel, it's not a fixed mark. Where Geoff of BLDGBLOG recommends going back and reading the same novel every few years, I think writers can go one better. You should go back and re-read when you can*, but you should also go back and examine your own work, to measure your growth as a person (what was important to you then? what were you writing about?) and as a writer (how have you matured? what mistakes did you make then?).

*My favorite books for re-reading, over the course of my life, are Susan Cooper's "The Dark Is Rising" series, though currently my favorites are probably the Harry Potter books, because I've been re-reading them every time a new one comes out and they hold up surprisingly well. But "The Dark Is Rising" has been on my bookshelf since 1976-77ish, and I've re-read them every few years. And I did not go see the movie.

I admit I don't spend a lot of time going back and re-reading my own work. Maybe in a couple years I'll revisit "Common and Precious," though I'm already embarrassed at some of the language errors I've come across just doing readings...

Review: Reading Like A Writer

Reading Like A Writer, by Francine Prose
8/10, A useful analysis of writing with excerpts from some of the greats

One of the best parts of "Reading Like A Writer" is the examples she brings in from writers she esteems. In a few cases, I was left scratching my head, but most of the writing really is superb. I'm a firm believer in teaching by example, and so, apparently, is Prose. She picks passages from books and shows us what she loves about them, breaking the book into sections as basic as word choice and sentence structure and moving on to more complicated sections like dialogue and gesture.

I found the word choice and sentence structure sections rather slow. I appreciate the wonder of a well-crafted sentence, but I believe you can get by with those painstakingly constructed sentences at key points in your book: the beginning and the end, most notably (I agonized over the last sentence of "Common and Precious" for a week, and in the end, it's still not as good as I would like it), but also at breaks in the story, chapter beginnings and endings, and at key emotional moments. If you agonize over every sentence in your novel, you will take a decade to write it. For some people, that's fine; my writing is not that good, so I have to rely more heavily on story and character.

She writes about constructing paragraphs, which is a useful if somewhat dry section, and then gets into the meat of the book: story, character, and flow, the things that give a book texture and life. Don't get me wrong: you need the foundation to be able to move on the wallpaper and decor. That doesn't make the foundation any less dry. It was the later parts of the book that inspired me to re-examine my own writing, and to want to read some of the authors she excerpted (most notably Gertrude Stein).

This is a melange of an instructional manual for writers and an homage to great writers. The short excerpts give the reader the feeling that they, too, can do this with just a little extra work. After all, it's laid out so clearly here, and in short, digestible bites. That kind of confidence is invaluable for a writer, and is one of the best points of this book. Once you close the last page, it remains with you.

R.I.P A.C.C.

Safe travels to Sir Arthur C. Clarke, wherever the next stage of his journey takes him.

Sean Murphy over at Wyrdsmiths says it best: "He will be remembered fondly, and re-read often."

On Characters in Fiction

Via Nancy Nall:

"My experience with fiction is very limited — one screenplay, some abortive stories here and there — but the wonderful thing about it is, it’s a conjurer’s trick. You create your characters out of clay, breathe over them and make them live, and then they turn around, kick you in the kneecap, and start doing what they want. You can try to stop them, but doing so will retard your story. Your responsibility, as a writer, is to tell their story, and they will tell you what it is. Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it; it’s the closest your average modern person will ever get to voodoo possession."

Speaking just for myself, this is one of the things that keeps me writing fiction, that makes me cranky when I'm not writing, that gives me a rush when I complete a story. It's that act of creation, of bringing characters to life and watching them grow, that odd feeling that they are almost independent of you (there's a post coming in the future about the concept that writers "channel" their stories rather than creating them, the subject of a discussion with the award-nominated Ryan Campbell this weekend), watching them have triumphs and failures, loves and losses, lessons learned and lessons ignored. It's why, even though "Moby Dick" is a huge, ponderous tome that most people haven't gotten through, or have forgotten large chunks of it if they have, its beginning is one of the most famous in literature, because it introduces a character and a mystery and the tone of the novel all in three words.

And if you don't know them, go look them up. :)

Award Nomination!

Hey, Common and Precious got nominated for an award! The Ursa Major Awards celebrate the best in fiction with anthropomorphic themes, and I'm on this year's ballot! It's a small award, but a cool one, so if you helped nominate, thanks! The voting is open to anyone, so now if you'd like to drop in and cast your vote for my novel, that'd be super cool! Also, my journal "New Fables" got nominated for best "fanzine," so while you're there, drop a vote in that category as well if you like. :)

Let me know when you're nominated for something and I'll vote for you too. :)

Clarity in Language

Blogs are supposed to be places where you get unfiltered, undiluted information. Of course, it comes with a bias, and the problem is not that that bias exists, but that it causes people to write--and read--without clarity in order to make a point. For example, this piece from last week's "Right Wing Nut House":

The Republicans, also seeking to get control of the primary process, took away half the delegates from Florida, Michigan, South Carolina, Wyoming, and New Hampshire – also as a result of their violations of primary scheduling rules. They also allowed full participation by all candidates in those primaries.

As a result, while there was some grumbling and even some legal challenges, the primaries went forward on the Republican side with little or no backlash.


It's that last sentence that I want to call out. It's easy to read it, especially if it's one of ten blogs you're looking at to get your morning news, and say "yeah, there was no backlash on the Republican side." But if you examine it more closely...well, grumbling by itself might fall under "little backlash." But "legal challenges"? Isn't that a fairly large backlash? It's not been well-publicized, but still, you could rewrite that sentence factually as: "As a result, while there was some backlash, the primaries went forward on the Republican side with little or no backlash."

Doesn't sound quite as informative, does it? More accurate would be for the author to have written: "As a result, while there was some grumbling and even some legal challenges, the primaries went forward on the Republican side with much less backlash than the Democrats are now experiencing."

I don't mean this to be a political post, or to call out the accuracy of the facts. I just hate unclear writing, especially when it is trying to influence people's attitudes.

Gesture and Detail: An Exercise

I just finished Francine Prose's Reading Like A Writer, which started slow but got really good later on (full review forthcoming). Anyway, she has a chapter each on gestures and details, the upshot of which is that if you're going to write a gesture a person makes into your manuscript, or a detail of a place or person, you should make every effort to make that a unique, distinguishing feature of that person or place.

For example, rather than:

"Is that so?" Joe took a drink of wine.

... think about why Joe would drink wine, what it reveals about him that he drank it at that moment, or in what way he takes the drink that can tell us how he's feeling. Like:

"Is that so?" Joe raised the glass to his lips, his eyes never leaving hers as he sipped.

So my exercise to myself is to try to look around each day and notice one person's gesture and/or one detail about a person or place, something unique and individual, and note it in my notebook. Part of being a writer is being a reader, not just of books but of the world around you.

Should You Give The People What They Want?

No matter what the Kinks say, it's not a good rule for writers unless you're writing on a contract. If you're writing for your own pleasure, or writing stories you want to tell, at least, then mostly you need to keep in mind that you're the one you have to please.

However, it's not a bad idea to keep in mind what your target audience wants. In general, the ideal situation is that what's interesting to you is also going to be interesting to them, so you can happily scribble down all the stuff you like, and they'll be just as satisfied.

There are times, of course, when opinions diverge. They, for instance, want the same characters in the same stories (thinly disguised as requests for sequels); you want to explore new ground. Or maybe you want to write the same characters, but moving on to new problems that make them less the characters your readers liked. There may also be times--and these are the tough ones--where you'll know that a scene doesn't belong in your story from a structural standpoint, but you'll also know that the people who like your work will really like that scene.

Say, for example, you have a character whose dry, cynical wit is what you (and others) love about her. You've got her in this scene at a restaurant and have come up with some absolutely terrific zingers for her to fire at the slovenly waiter about the underdone food. It really shows off her character and will make everyone smile. But alas, the restaurant scene does really nothing else for the purposes of your story.

So what do you do there? If it's something extraneous that you really should cut to move the plot along, but it highlights a part of the character that you like, and your readers will like, do you keep it? Try to work it into the plot a little more? Rework some of the more critical plot scenes to fill the same niche?

My answer, and it varies by situation, is that I try to get that scene to be more integrated into the plot. Failing that, I'm inclined to leave it. It adds color to the story, and if it's got enough entertainment value, people won't mind that it doesn't move things along. You're making the story fun to read and fun to write, and in the end, that's what matters.

When you can do all that AND make it integral to the plot AND have a significant message AND do it in a fresh new way ... well, that's what we're working towards, isn't it?

Truth = Beauty

I love Wondermark. Especially this one. Authors, take heed!

O Say, Coen You See

One of the interesting things about the Coen Brothers' movies is the variety of reaction they elicit from their fans. People who claim to be fans of Coppola generally have the same set of favorite movies (perhaps re-ordering them a bit). Spielberg fans don't say they love "Schindler's List" but hated "E.T." But ask a dozen Coen Brothers fans what their best movie is, and you'll get six different answers. Not only that, you'll inevitably get someone in the list who hated someone else's favorite.

Lance Mannion, for example, in a very interesting post on their movies, writes, "The Hudsucker Proxy is a failure, and The Man Who Wasn't There is a bad movie."

The Hudsucker Proxy might be my favorite Coen Brothers movie, or The Big Lebowski might be, though I like O Brother Where Art Thou and No Country For Old Men. Lance loves The Big Lebowski and O Brother. He also likes Intolerable Cruelty, which I've mostly heard panned (haven't seen it), and Raising Arizona, which is the Coen Brothers movie most people seem to agree on as "good" (and, oddly, I don't have much affection for).

He doesn't mention The Ladykillers, wisely. That might be the one most people agree on as "bad."

I liked The Man Who Wasn't There, personally, except for the odd space alien subplot. I thought Billy Bob Thornton was pretty effective, and the movie itself strangely touching. And I have a co-worker who hated The Big Lebowski. So who knows?

The interesting thing about all this is that I think Lance is right when he says they are cartoons, but the effect of that is that the characters become templates (tying into my last posting about characters) and we can project easily onto them. The Coens tell stories and create characters that people read a lot of themselves into, that they take very personally. They're exaggerated enough that we can take their exaggerated traits and apply them to ourselves, or people we know. So people will say, "I can appreciate that No Country For Old Men was a good film, but I hated it."

I don't know whether there's a conclusion to all this. Certainly the cartoonish aspects of the Coens' characters is one of the main appeals of their movies (the others being the writing and the stunning way they immerse each movie in its own world). They've forged a successful career out of creating specifically unreal characters. Whether that's something you want to do is your call, but you should remember at least that most memorable characters have some exaggeration or cartoonishness about them.

I think you should be decisive

The lovely Nancy Nall writes about hedging your bets. She's talking about journalism, but everyone does it. "I think the way to go is..." "I'm no expert, but..." In our workshop group, we've gotten eleven stories submitted so far, and six could be said to be science fiction, or at least magical realism. And yet, when people comment on them, we hear over and over, "I'm not a science fiction reader, but..." or "I'm not familiar with science fiction, but..." All this even though the piece was submitted to the workshop specifically to get their opinion! Just tell me what you think and let me judge whether it fits into the conventions of SF or not.

Nancy's point is a good one. There are cases in which you have to qualify your opinion. I promise you that they are far fewer than you think they are. Be decisive. As my eleventh-grade English teacher said, "Who cares about being careful? We just want to be right!"

[I don't know if he actually said that, but doesn't it sound better to say he did? And what's the harm?]

What is a story?

At WonderCon this weekend, I had someone asking me when there'd be a sequel to "Common and Precious," and it got me thinking about this.

Our screenwriting teacher has a saying that no character in a movie represents a person. Every character represents a message, or a belief system: a way to live. Even in biographies, most characters are tailored to show a message of some kind through the story of their lives.

So a story, being the movement of characters through a plot, is actually a debate between different beliefs or responses to a problem. The resolution of the story is the success (or failure!) of one of the belief systems to resolve the problem.

Of course, this doesn't mean your characters don't have to be believable. It just means that in addition to being believable characters, they have to be consistent ("on message" in business-speak) throughout the story, or they have to have a reason to change. They have to be believable so that the reader believes that their solution to the problem at hand is a valid one. Otherwise, as Slartibartfast would say, "that's where it all falls apart."

So when I write a story with some characters I enjoy, I don't automatically write a sequel. Sometimes I do, if I feel that the story didn't really resolve. More often, the reason to write another story with the same characters is that you're trying to illuminate another kind of problem, and the character's approach to the problem matches a character you've already written. Which is why I am gratified to have people demand sequels of stories with the same characters, but I'm always unsure how to respond to it. It's not that I don't *like* the characters. It's more that I just don't have anything more to write about them. There has to be a story; I can't just do a "what's next."

Now, all of the above is very clinical. And certainly, I don't sit down to write a story and think, "Hm. This is an interesting problem. I wonder which belief systems I can use to illuminate my preferred solution, and how to create characters out of them." But, to paraphrase my screenwriting teacher again, those concepts are at the foundation of any good writing, and although very few people actually work from the concepts out to the story, they are the underpinnings you need to be aware of when you are constructing your story.

Which is why, when someone wants to know what happens to the characters next, they are actually looking at the characters in somewhat the wrong way. The character has nothing to do without a problem to solve. And that is also why I find myself really interested in secondary characters, to the point of giving them their own stories on occasion. Their problems have not only not been solved, they've often not even been explored. I'd much rather do a story on them than another story with characters whose story has played out.

(And in fact, I am working--slowly--on a Night and Bright story, which a couple people have also requested. I like them too--not their belief systems, but the wrapper around them. They're fun to write. And that, more than anything I just spent half an hour typing, is what determines whether another story gets written. :)

Critiquing

One of the benefits of participating in so many workshops has been getting practice at critiquing. I've always been good at criticizing others, but not necessarily in a way that they can take as positive. So it's good to practice shaping your criticisms in a way that will not be taken as "you stink" and will also give the recipient a direction in which to focus his or her editing.

The latest round of stories I read for our fiction workshop were really good, and so they were easy to critique. In all the cases, there were only one or two things that stood out as being rough, so I had no trouble saying "great job, try to polish it here and here." One of the things I saw is something I tend to do a lot myself, perhaps worthy of another post sometime, and that's just writing something that sounds good without thinking about exactly what it means. There are a few phrases that are not quite cliches, but are familiar enough that they spring to mind when you're just trying to get the next words out, like "he tried to figure out where it had all gone wrong," or "for whatever reason..."

I also had to write critiques for the latest round of New Fables rejections, and those were pretty hard, because in some cases the stories were pretty good, just not what I was looking for. So I had to explain what I was looking for and then point out that the author might not want to change the story in that direction. But that's their choice; it's my magazine and I have a pretty clear idea of what kind of story I want for it, even if it is occasionally frustratingly difficult to communicate that to others. Anyway, in at least two or three of the cases, the author responded and indicated that the feedback was helpful, so I feel good about taking the time to do that.

Yet another reason to go out and join a workshop, if you're not in one now! Practice critiquing; it makes you a better writer as well as a better reader.

Financial Advice for Writers

John Scalzi of SFWA writes about writers managing their finances (h/t Wyrdsmiths). My favorite paragraph:

2. Don’t quit your day job.

Lots of wanna-be writers wax rhapsodic about how great it would be to ditch the day job and just spend all their time clickety-clack typing away. These folks are idiots. Look, people: someone is paying you money and giving you benefits, both of which can support your writing career, and all you have to do is show up, do work that an unsupervised monkey could do, and pretend to care. What a scam! You’re sticking it to The Man, dude, because you’re taking that paycheck and turning it into art. And you know how The Man hates that. You’re supposed to be buying a big-screen TV with that paycheck! Instead, you’re subverting the dominant paradigm better than an entire battalion of college socialists. Well done, you. Well done, indeed.