Boo-yeah!

Darwins, why no post for so long? you ask. Because it's WRITING TIME. Not post writing time. FinishTheNovel writing time, kids-go-watch-Looney-Tunes writing time, school's-out writing time. This is the point in the project where I realize what I thought would only take about 10K more words is going to take a lot more K than that, based on what's shaping up now. My kids walk in to find me making the same face as Kuzco up there, and they say, "Mooom! You're not writing!" But I am, kids, I am. That is my Writing Face.

Hoping to have something up by this weekend, but I still haven't steeled myself to the 4 am marathon yet. Still, there's progress, and the whole thing would go faster if I were willing to offer you a junky outline scene. But you, my readers, don't want a junky outline scene, and I'm all talk anyway because it's polish or nothing here.

So, time to put away distractions -- Facebook, email, yesterday's newspaper, the back of the cat food can, my son's library book, my daughter's crochet project, the pitcher of iced tea -- and write like the wind, if the wind looks like a dissatisfied llama staring at a screen.

For any new readers (if we even have those anymore) wondering what is going on, here: take and read Stillwater.

Four Questions on Writing

MrsDarwin

Betty Duffy tagged us in this meme last week (her answers part 1 and part 2), but I didn't have the gall to answer it until I'd finally turned out some writing. Now that I've posted an installment of Stillwater -- only four months after the previous one! -- I feel like I can procrastinate with confidence once again.

1. What are you working on?

Stillwater, a novel that started as a National Novel Writing Month project in November 2012. It's a modern reworking of an under-appreciated classic, which source I've not revealed yet because the goal of the project was to see if this story, the most critically maligned offspring of its author, had enough universal appeal to transcend the cultural trappings of its original setting. To that end, I've changed the location and set it in the present, but I've tried to remain true to the essentials of the plot and to the characters as the original author presented them, especially the main character, whom many critics love to hate.
(Note to readers: I think I can commit to ending the story in six more installments, bringing the total number to 50.)

I'm always composing a blog post in my head, but due to time constraints and inertia, very few of them are written and then posted. My spiritual life is always a work in progress, so putting my thoughts and meditations and reflections into written, archival form helps me to give context to my current efforts and failures, which are generally my past efforts and failures made new as I grow, change, mature, and regress.

2. What makes your work different from others' work in the same genre?

I don't write to fit into a genre specifically, but I prefer to write stories that are driven by the moral choices characters make, as opposed to grand spectacles of action or plots that advance through the intricate working-out of magical systems or ethereal poetic scenarios. I am not especially lyrical, and I don't believe (though I've not tried) that I could plot out a mystery. I have a background in theater, and that helps me to approach scenes and stories in terms of motivations and movements: the way that the actions of one character cause another character to change, and the way that physical action often expresses the truth of a scene more clearly than speech.

We are unusual in our blogging, being a husband-and-wife team. Our blog is simply an expression of what interests and compels us at any given moment. It's not a platform for personal promotion; it's not an advertisement for a business; it's not a springboard into the cult of personality. Our readership is not immaterial to us -- far from it; we write mainly to start conversations with friends -- but we don't care if we have ten readers or a thousand as long as those readers are willing to engage with us honestly and intelligently.

I don't write a Catholic "mommy-blog", not because I think that being a mother or a woman or Catholic is unimportant, but come on: I'm on my sixth child. I just do this stuff now. Sometimes it's funny and profound, and other times it's not. Every child and every smile and every poop blowout is unique, but at the end of the day, sometimes I just want to write about something else, because motherhood is not the entirety of my person. And sometimes I do want to write about these things, because they are a vital part of who I am.

3. Why do you write what you do?

Because it interests me, and through writing about what interests me I find other people who share the same interests. I have come to enjoy writing much more than I ever thought I would; I would almost describe myself as a writer now; but in general my writing is subordinate to the personal connections it fosters. Even if no one comments on a post, it comforts me to know that my friends are reflecting with me on the same topics, and weaving chains of ideas from a thread I've tossed out. And then, when we meet up, we've laid the groundwork of conversation.

Writing for the blog, I tend to approach topics from a personal angle. I love reading impartial, objective writing, but historically that has not been my style. I try not to distort my personality in my writing and I try not to write with more anger or snark or hysteria than I need to, and I hope that anyone meeting me in person after reading me can build a friendship on the consistency between word and presence. Every now and then it does give me pause that because I have nine years' worth of easily accessible personal archives, so many people know much more about me than I do about them, but then, that is the nature of writing for a public platform.

4. How does your writing process work?

I was fascinated to read Betty's description of her process because it's very much the opposite of mine. I rarely make notes for future posts, and most of my scintillating insights pass forgotten without ever being recorded. Much of what I write, whether fiction or blog post, is usually pounded out in one sitting. I like to edit and revise, but I often do it immediately after writing. Oddly enough, I find it very difficult to write with pen and paper. I'm a great devotee of the delete key and the ability to instantly change and hone and see changes reflected right away in the structure of a piece. I haven't kept a journal since I was 17, and although I love the concept of the tactile experience of pen and ink and notebooks made from sustainable cardboard and aspirational paper, those things end up unused in a drawer. Maybe if I had a fountain pen with a great nib it would be different...

Since I started writing fiction as part of NaNoWriMo, my writing process is based around several hours of procrastinating while gathering thoughts followed by a few early AM hours of flow. Even the sections I start writing line by painful line in scheduled sessions at reasonable times don't take off until I'm sipping bourbon at 1 AM. We use Scrivener as a writing program, but I severely underutilize all its many fine features because they aren't conducive to the way I plot and characterize a story. One reason that I don't develop my work in written notes is that Darwin and I spend a lot of time hashing out our stories through conversation. Even when I have notes to consult, they're generally records of conversations such as email chains with friends helping me work out details.

***

I agree wholeheartedly with Duffy's Laws:

If I’m writing about a personal problem, dilemma, weakness, mishap, or stupid thing I did or thought–I always wait to publish until the moment has past, I’ve figured myself out, and all the emotions associated with the problem have dissipated. Sometimes it takes days, sometimes a few minutes. 

I never, ever publish under the influence of rage or confusion. Sometimes I let a thing written in the moment stand for publication–but only when I can view it objectively as an editor, even if it doesn’t read objectively. 

If I’m tempted to write about someone else’s problem, dilemma, weakness, mishap or stupid thing they did or said, I overcome the temptation. Failing that, I get permission to write it from the person in question. Failing that, I disguise the person beyond recognition. 

I’ve broken these laws in the past, and it never ends well for anyone.

And my kids are reminding me that most of writing time is stolen from them personally.



Darwin

Though I'd been blogging for a number of years before I went back to writing any fiction, I always thought of "writing" as writing fiction, or some kind of "real" non-fiction like a book or at least a published article. Nonetheless, I'll follow MrsDarwin's lead and answer on both types of writing.

1. What are you working on?

I keep a sort of mental circular file which typically has 3-5 potential posts in it. About half of these ever get written, as the rest age out until I decide they aren't relevant anymore. One of my difficulties having blogged so long is that it's a fairly fleeting medium, and yet although my memory is often very scattered on other things I have a very immediate memory of most things I've written. Thus, I'll often think of a topic, "But I've already written about that." And since I don't like to repeat myself, once I've said my piece on a topic I tend to leave it alone unless some new angle occurs to me. As such, I often find myself thinking that I've run out of things to say and should fold up shop. However, since I've been feeling like this off and on for the last seven out of nine years of blogging, I figure it's a sort of chronic thing and best ignored.

My first novel since I started writing again was a fairly incidental, small-scale piece, though I would like to go back and revise it into finished form at some point, if only because it was a lot of fun to write about the kind of office milieu in which I spend my days. The project that's had me busy with research and outlining for the last year and a half, however, is one that I'd been thinking about on the back burner for a number of years: a large scale historical novel about World War One. It's a period which has increasingly fascinated me over the years, and the more I read about it, the more I become convinced that far too much fiction about the Great War (particularly in English) has become clustered around a couple of rather simplistic tropes. One of the ways I'm seeking to get away from that is by focusing almost exclusively on the continental Great Powers in my story and not having any British or American main characters.

What was meant to be a novel seems to have developed into three volumes. I'm currently nearing the end of a rather shockingly long chapter-by-chapter outline of the first volume. If all goes according to plan I'll start writing actual draft soon here and start publishing chapters on the blog in August, the 100th anniversary of the war. Here's my back cover style summary of the first volume:

The Great War, A Novel

Vol One: Things Fall Apart

In the last six months of 1914, four sets of characters experience the disruption of their peacetime lives as the Great War engulfs Europe.

Henri and Philomene have a quiet family life in a village in northern France. Philomene is looking forward to the end, next year, of Captain Henri’s years as an active reserve officer, while Henri misses the military career he gave up in favor of family life. The outbreak of the war summons Henri back to active duty, then separates them as German troops occupy northern France, leaving both to face new difficulties while desperate for news of each other.

Walter is a young metalworker torn between solidarity with his fellow workers, who are struggling to organize, in a Berlin bicycle factory and the lure of an offer to become a foreman. Called up into the army during the war’s first days, he finds a new solidarity in uniform.

Raised in a convent school for “natural daughters” of gentlemen, Natalie is sent to work as governess to a celebrated surgeon’s family in Kiev. At first welcomed into the family, she becomes the target of the affections of the cavalry officer eldest son. Seeking to escape her predicament, she finds new purpose working as a nurse in a Russian field hospital.

Jozef feels trapped by his mother’s ambitions for him to make a career in the Austro-Hungarian civil service. He expects adventure and independence in joining the cavalry at the outbreak of war.

2. What makes your work different from others' work in the same genre?

There are fairly few couple-written blogs that I'm aware of, so I guess that's a bit of a distinction. Also, the mix of topics we write about is driven very much by our interests rather than sticking to a single theme, and since those vary and have varied over time, I like to flatter myself that the mix of topics here is moderately different from many other blogs.

In regards to the in-progress novel: The non Anglo-centric setting is different from a lot of other WW1 novels. That, however, is mostly a tool to allow me to do what I think a good historical novel should do, which is to take a period as its denizens saw it. Because our view of the Great War has been so heavily influenced by some very good anti-war writers from the 30s and 60s, I think that the war has to a great extent come to be used as a literary trope for futility while the second world war has become the stand in for a "war of good against evil". I think that approach to writing about the war is fundamentally uninteresting because it's not human.

3. Why do you write what you do?

I enjoy discussing the topics I write about, but people who also enjoy talking about them are moderately thin on the ground, so writing to a worldwide audience allows us a reach a sort of critical conversational mass. Also, I think that some contentious topics (religion, politics, etc.) are easier to discuss through the formalism and distance of the written word rather than in person.

In regards to fiction... I'm less sure how to answer that question. At root, I find people interesting, and I find how people have lived in different and difficult times interesting. There's also an element of simply writing (or at least trying to write) the kind of thing that I would like to read.

4. How does your writing process work?

My blogging process is pretty straight forward: I have something or other that occurs to me (or more often bothers me, since a lot of posts originate in some sort of critique or disagreement) and I mentally pick at it for a while. Often I end up discussing it with MrsDarwin and figuring out exactly what my thinking on the matter is. Then I find a free hour (often over lunch at work) and bang out a post. I almost never revise or even proofread my blog posts, which I fear is all too evident.

The main similarity in my fiction-writing process is that discussion is very helpful to me. Luckily we both enjoy talking about each other's work and coming up with plot and character ideas, because otherwise I think MrsDarwin would scream whenever she heard me say, "I was thinking about the novel and..." There's a lot that I figure out by talking it through, and then there are other things that I think of while reading some research or when something else triggers a thought, and I try to note things like that down immediately (either in one of my project notebooks or in one of the GoogleDocs that I keep notes and snippets in) so that I won't forget.

On the previous novel project, I had a very rough idea in my head of the structure and plot, and as I went along I'd put down a quick bullet-pointed list of what would go on in each section or chapter so that I'd know where I was going. With the current project, the complexity of having five mostly separate storylines and including huge amounts of research is such that I knew I needed to be a lot more organized, so I've been writing a very detailed outline. To make it feel different from writing prose, I've been writing it in the present tense, which seems to feel oddly right. But I try to make that as detailed as possible, even including some dialog, so that when I go back to write the actual prose I can be focused on character development and description and won't be having to figure out what will happen in each scene on the fly.

For actually writing prose (or even outline, I'm finding) I need a long period of time to write without interruption. I can't get much of anything done on a short period like a lunch break. So my fiction writing is almost exclusively done at night. The first couple hours I have very slow progress and keep breaking off to read research or check Facebook or generally waste time. Then as it gets later (often not till everyone else is asleep) things finally start to click and I'm able to be very productive.

I'm trying to learn to be better about revision. I may re-write a bit as I go along, but aside from basic proof reading and a tiny bit of phrase polishing, once I've written something I find it hard to imagine it being different than it is, unless I'm able to let it rest for a long time and then come back to it fresh. It reads too much to me like how I meant it to be rather than how it is. Thus if something isn't quite working, I generally have to ditch the whole scene and try to do it over, because I'm not good at crafting my existing prose. This is definitely one of my biggest weaknesses as a writer and it's something that I'm trying to correct.

***

We'd like to tag Literacy-Chic and Brandon, but everyone's invited to play along.

Plotting a Modernized Sense & Sensibility

MrsDarwin's post last week on the modern re-imagining of Sense & Sensibility being written by Joanna Trollope generated some interesting conversation on the blog. It also generated some interesting conversation around the house, as our dissatisfaction with the modernization of the novel's inciting situation created a drive to come up with a better one. As you may recall, Trollope's method of translating the situation in which Mrs. Dashwood and her three daughters find themselves in reduced circumstances (with the late Mr. Dashwood's son by a previous marriage getting the estate and and making an informal promise to his dying father that he will take good care of the current wife and daughters, but the son's wife persuading him not to follow through on the promise) was to posit that the Dashwood girls are not legitimate:

She struggled to explain why the Dashwood sisters and their mother can't inherit the estate when their father dies (in Austen's original, the reason is simple: they're women). To make the disinheritance seem plausible, Ms. Trollope made Elinor and Marianne's parents fun-loving bohemians who never bothered to marry, making their daughters illegitimate heirs.

At the most basic level, this seems problematic in that it's really not that hard for illegitimate heirs to inherit in the modern world, and even in the absence of a will one could file a lawsuit and have a reasonable chance of getting some redress.

However, the deeper problem here is that it misses the point that in the world of 1800 England, marriage was not simply a personal relationship but a business institution. Entailing an estate exclusively to the oldest son may seem arbitrary, but it was a form of succession planning which kept financial and land assets together rather than having them dispersed through many heirs. Any period romance that fails to deal with the partly-business nature of marriage in that period ends up not coming off as realistic. And in this case, the failure to think of the family estate as a financial entity which needs a single clear successor is one of the things that makes Trollope's solution seem off.

We had so much fun going over how to convert the plot to the modern day, we thought it would be a fun exercise to share with you. As such, the remainder of the post is composed of two parts: a set of criteria that a modernization of Sense & Sensibility would have to meet, and a solution which we came up with. Please do pile on both with suggests as to the correct criteria and with your own suggestions as to how to update and set the story. (For convenience, I've kept the names, but of course if we wrote something like this we'd change the title and all the names so that only those who knew S&S well would realize it was an Austen homage.)

What Needs To Be Modernized

1) Mrs. Dashwood and her three daughters (or two if you only want to keep the ones who play significant roles in the plot) find themselves suddenly reduced in circumstances because the primary source of their wealth passes to John Dashwood (the recently dead Mr. Dashwood's son from a first marriage.) The women find themselves with the same social status but with far less income and resources than before. In Austen's time this was because the whole estate would usually pass to one person, and that person was typically the oldest male descendent, and so Mrs. Dashwood's continued income was dependent on the goodwill of her stepson, which was influenced by his wife. To my mind, you need to come up with a reason why the source of income can't be divided or passed to Mr. Dashwood's wife, as would be standard now.

2) Elinor Dashwood meets Edward Ferrar (the brother of John Dashwood's wife) and they are attracted to one another, but for reasons that do not become clear for a while he makes no move to enter into a relationship with her. In the book, it is eventually revealed that this is because he long ago entered into a secret engagement with Lucy Steele. He knows that if he admits to the engagement, he'll be disowned by his mother which will impoverish him, and he's since fallen out of love with her (and realizes that she doesn't really love him) but he's too honorable to break off the engagement with her (because, the nature of marriage at the time having strong financial aspects, Lucy has staked her economic future on this offer), so he's unavailable but can't talk about it. Later, Lucy Steele meets Elinor and tells Elinor her own version of this history which, like most things Lucy does, is rather self-serving. In the end, Lucy confesses the connection to Fanny Dashwood (John Dashwood's wife and Edward's sister) who blows Lucy's cover and gets Edward disinherited. Lucy breaks the engagement after snagging the attention of Edward's younger brother (the new heir) and the disinherited Edward is then free to marry Elinor. In a modern setting, engagements are readily breakable and inheritance isn't such a big deal, so there clearly has to be another reason why Edward can't form a relationship with Elinor despite their attraction, another connection between Edward and Lucy, and some other way of getting out of it.

3) Marianne's plot line strikes me as not necessarily requiring so much modification as it's entirely personal and thus more universal: the older Colonel Brandon falls in love with Marianne, but she has fallen in love with Mr. Willoughby, who seems young and romantic. She and Willoughby seem so close that everyone assumes they are engaged. However, he suddenly throws her over in a very public way and instead becomes engaged to a very rich woman. It then comes out that Willoughby has, previously, got Colonel Brandon's young ward pregnant and abandoned her. Marianne eventually recovers and married Colonel Brandon. Aside from people not having wards these days, all of this could essentially be used in a modern version, though all sorts of modifications are possible.

The Darwins' Updated S&S

1) We both agree that in order to make the inheritance plotline work, this can't be a personal fortune that's inherited but rather an old family-owned business. Mr. Dashwood must have been the president and majority owner. On Mr. Dashwood's death, ownership of the company passes to various heirs: Mrs. Dashwood, John Dashwood, the daughters. However, the actual dividends/ownership dispersements from the company aren't necessarily huge. Much of the family income during Mr. Dashwood's life derived from the fact that everyone was, in some sense, on the payroll. Mr. Dashwood as president, Mrs. Dashwood and Marianne in some sort of fluff roles (community outreach, artist in residence, some sort of completely unnecessary roles.) Elinor did something actually functional.

On Mr. Dashwood's death, John Dashwood manages to rally a majority of the board behind him and brings in a highly efficient new president (Fanny) who proceeds to clean out all the deadwood. Mrs. Dashwood and Marianne are fired immediately and Elinor falls afoul of some sort of internal power struggle and is fired as well. This means that they are now all without their over-generous salaries and (unless they can find work -- which Mrs. Dashwood and Marianne in particular are not used to) are living on the much smaller income resulting from their ownership shares in the company.

One of the key things I think this achieves is it reproduces the social situation in which the women find themselves: Their income and status within society turns out to have been based on a connection rather than being inherent to themselves. They are conscious of being the same people, with the same history and expectations, but they are now much poorer and less recognized. And yet, not the same as other people at their income level, and without the coping skills that someone at that income level would have.

2) This, to me, is the really tricky one.

MrsDarwin suggested that perhaps Edward is married already, but separated from his wife, and unable to honestly pursue any relationship with Elinor until he's received a divorce and annulment. My objection was that except for a small portion of society, that wouldn't actually be any obstacle, and it's certainly not something that Edward would feel unable to mention.

My approach was more business focused, I wanted to come up with a reason why Edward could not ethically enter into a relationship with Elinor, and also couldn't tell her why. My solution is that Edward is a lawyer. He's been hired by Lucy Steele to investigate a possible legal action against the Dashwood company (intellectual property or something else fairly secrecy related such as that.) Edward has come to think that Lucy's case has no merit, but he's convinced that he'd be accused of a conflict of interest if he started a personal relationship with Elinor while still representing Lucy, while he's afraid that if he dropped Lucy and started a relationship with Elinor, she'd accuse him of violating confidentiality. Further, because of the nature of the case, he would compromise Lucy's case if he told Elinor the nature of his entanglement. So after an initial couple of interviews in which they hit it off (Edward has been sent to discover something or other about the company) Edward is staunchly not returning Elinor calls. At some later point, Lucy could then meet Elinor and let her know about the case in such a way as to make it sound as if Edward believes it has great merit (this would have to be because Lucy hopes to get something out of Elinor and aid her case.) Finally, Lucy could throw over her case in some self serving fashion leaving Elinor and Edward free.

3) As I said, I really think one can do whatever one wants with the Marianne plot thread, as it's far more universal than the other two segments in terms of relationship and economics.


So, in my telling, the novel would become a pair of romances which are frustrated by personal obstacles (in Marianne's case) and by business obstacles (in Elinor's) with a resolution which is allowed by clearing up the business/legal problems. (My theory is that in order to update some of the key motives, the constraints on the characters have to be business constraints rather than personal constraints.)

MrsDarwin's novel would be a more personal narrative incited by business events but not necessarily tied to business thereafter for its complications and resolution.

How would you meet the requirements of these plot points?

The Reader in the Gaps

Neither of us will be participating in National Novel Writing Month this year. MrsDarwin is making slow but constant progress on wrapping up Stillwater, and hopefully you'll be seeing another post there in the not too distant future. (Whether the novel or the baby will be delivered first is now becoming an open question, but rest assured that it will get done.) Meanwhile, I'm working away at outlines and research for the Next Big Project, which will start publishing in August 2014.

However, the impending NaNoWriMo season has had me thinking about my project last summer If You Can Get It, which I do plan to go back and whip into some kind of a publishable form at some point, though that point may be a year or more off.

One of the things that I'd worried was a problem with the novel is that the main character seemed a bit of a woman without qualities. Sure, she cared about her job and staying in shape and she had some nice clothes (and got irritated by her younger sister's mess) but what did she do in her spare time? When I was coming up with the character, I mostly only had this figured out in negative terms: She wasn't a writer or any kind of artist, she wasn't a fan or indeed a big reader. In other words, I had decided that she wasn't like me as I am now or have been I the past in a couple key ways. (reading, writing, genre fan, etc.)

Having established that she wasn't like me in those ways, though, I ran up against the problem that I have very experience being Not Like Me, and so I wasn't sure what she did do in her spare time. This bothered me a lot, especially as a lot of people seemed to like her younger sister better (Katie, after all, did have some obvious interests: video games, cooking, etc.)

One of the things that I want to work on when I revise is making sure that I'm more clear on Kristy's personal and emotional arc, so that remains on the list of things I want to work on. However, at a certain point recently (while reading something else) I started to think that my concerns about knowing what my character does in her spare time might be misplaced.

What I was thinking about is: How is it that we come to see a character in a novel as a fully rounded person? We only see certain aspects of the character, those which the author sees fit to reveal to us. And yet, if it is well done, we see that character as a fully rounded person who exists in the round. I think I'd naturally assumed that this meant that the author needed to know everything about the character, that the character needed to exist in the round in the author's head, and that the author then revealed to us (the readers) what was relevant to the story. But the moment you press upon this assumption a bit and think about it, it become untenable. Of course the author cannot have thought of every detail which might exist. The author provides us with the important details, the aspects of that character which are (in the distilled version of a world which we see in a story) relevant, and if the author does a good job we as the readers fill in the remaining gaps with what we, as readers, assume such a person to be like.

In a sense, this isn't so unlike our experience of real life. We know that the people we interact with have fully rounded lives, but we only interact with them some of the time. The rest we will in with our assumptions.

With fiction, the key is that the bits we see must suggest a plausible whole -- what we're seeing a part of a fully rounded person rather than a plot place-holder which exists only to serve the author's purposes. If the author is successful in giving this impression of seeing the relevant pieces of a fully rounded person, we do the rest of the work ourselves.

Sometimes, we actually do it a bit too well. For instance, as I've been re-reading War & Peace, it's been striking me that I'd ignored a lot of briefly mentioned aspects of characters in order to form an image of the characters which was more like me, or more like the culture that I exist in. I was taking the major elements of Tolstoy's characters and filling them in with something familiar because the broad brushstrokes were something I liked enough that I wanted to identify with the characters and see them as like me.

Such identification can go too far when it makes you misrepresent a character to yourself, rather than seeing what the author is actually portraying, but within bounds it's a very useful tendency for the author. If the author can sketch out characters which the reader identifies with enough to want to fill in the rest with himself, the author has both made the characters come alive to the reader and has also successfully offloaded some of his work on the reader.

Prose Thoughts

I was thinking about prose style last night, and I went back and started re-reading the beginning of my last year NaNo effort, If You Can Get It. I hadn't re-read any of the novel since finishing it. At first, I figured I needed some distance before I could come back and revise successfully. When I've first put words on the page, it's hard for me to imagine them being other than they are. They still sound like I meant them to sound. When I come back after a while, I'm able to see how they fell short of conveying what I meant them to, and revision become possible.

Re-reading the first seven installments, I was kind of shocked at how telegraphic the narrative style was. The first couple in particular were almost more like a script: all dialog with a few visual queues, but not enough description to put you in the place and very little of what the characters are thinking or feeling.

Some of this was a deliberate choice. One of the beginner weaknesses I was trying to fight is the need to describe everything, regardless of relevance. What do people look like, how is the room laid out, what at they wearing, what is the irrelevant stuff that happens between plot point A and plot point B? I recall that one of the rules I was trying to employ throughout was, "Do we need to know this, and if not, leave it out." That may have focused things a bit, but re-reading I think I took it too far and the narrative seems kind of dry and sterile as a result.

I remain divided as to whether to go back to this one and flesh it out into a finished novel at some point. Over the last few months a couple plot ideas fell into place which I think would improve the second half in terms of pacing and plausibility, plus sharpen some character conflicts.

However, in general I'm more interested right now in working up the WW1 novel that I'm hoping to start posting next year. Plus the challenge of writing a historical novel seems like a good place to work out the need for richer narrative description that I was noting.

What Keeps You Reading

When I'm simply reading, I read with the consuming desire to know what happens to the characters and what it all means. This desire is undiminished by the knowledge that the people and events I'm reading about don't actually exist. Indeed, there's a sense in which I think it is stronger, knowing that I'm reading fiction, in that I have a certain faith when reading a novel that it will all mean something in the end. (If I get to the end and find that it doesn't, I'm usually angry.) The fiction writer filters through and chooses what events to portray based on the meaningful version of the world being portrayed. And thus, if the writer is good, every thing which is described in the novel has a reason for being there. Not just "that's what happened next" but an actual reason. A reason why we need to know about this.

This has been striking me in a paralyzing kind of way at the moment, because I've been reading a lot of diaries and memoirs. A diary is also a filtered version of reality. The diarist writes down what is important to her that happened that day. But a diary doesn't tend to have an overarching story.

Right now I'm reading Florence Farmborough's With the armies of the tsar: A nurse at the Russian front, 1914-18, the diary of an English woman who was working as a governess in Russia when the Great War broke out and spent the war working as a nurse in a front line field hospital, before having to escape back to England after the Russian Revolution transitioned into a civil war. It's fascinating reading. But one of the things that has had me thinking a lot is: How would this be different if it were a novel? Here's another page long anecdote I which Florence deals with a badly injured soldier who dies of wounds while she nurses him. It's different from the scores of other times Florence writes about dealing with such a situation, but in another sense it's "yet another time Florence helps a dying soldier". In a novel, would you skip a lot of the medical detail and every-day suffering because it would be repetitive? And yet, what's what Florence is dealing with every day. The incidents she deals with may be repetitive in a certain sense, but it's the sheer repetition of difficult situations which gradually changes her over the course of the war.

Sometimes it seems like very dramatic event is "part of the story". Other times it seems that if this was a novel you would cut out most of the events but come up with a clear idea of how Florence's essential changes progress because of the few events you portrayed.

Maybe both are acceptable ways of writing a novel if done right. There's a sense in which, reading a diary first published forty years ago about events which took place a hundred years ago, I'm reading it as fiction. I don't know they people involved any more than I know fictional characters. And yet, it seems to me that there must be some way in which I, as a reader, interact with the book differently than I would with a novel which relayed the same events. I make certain allowances or give it leeway because I know that the author didn't know what "the story" was as she wrote it. Her author's filter was at the day level, not the overall story level. So what keeps me reading, knowing this is a journal, is probably different from what would keep me reading if it were a novel.

As a reader it's easy to pass over the question of "should this incident have been included", but since I'm reading a diary as if it were a novel (and trying to do research related to writing a novel) the question seems to come to the fore.

The Ethics of Historical Fiction

If you asked someone to describe the personalities and lives of Mozart and Salieri, you'd probably get an answer that had a lot more to do with the movie Amadeus, based on Peter Shaffer's play, than with history.



Obviously, Salieri is long past being hurt by anyone's opinion of him, but though I like the movie very much I can't help feeling a bit odd about the ethics of producing such a work. On the one hand, the movie simply wouldn't work with made-up composers. It works precisely because it's about a real person who is synonymous with youthful brilliance, and because it's full of Mozart's music. And yet, I can't help feeling as if there's some sort of ethical issue with an author intentionally giving his readers a false vision of real people or events.

Of course, any fiction is "not true" in some sense, definitionally. And an author who is writing about real historical characters or events will necessarily fictionalize: Combine people, arrange meetings that didn't take place, make up details that aren't known. None of these bother me in the least.

I think what it is that bothers me is when an author takes a historical person or event and intentionally represents it differently than it was in order to write some other story or convey some other point -- using the established cultural meaning of a real person or event to lend color to his fiction.

Amadeus makes a pretty good example in that some of the changes to history are pretty blatant. For instance, in the movie, the motivation for Salieri's hatred of Mozart is that he as a youth made a vow to God that he would commit to a lifetime of celibacy if God would give him musical genius in return. He thinks he's got a fairly good return on his bargain until Mozart shows up: He's a popular composer and he has a beautiful young opera singer as a student who he covets but doesn't touch. Then Mozart arrives and is clearly more brilliant than Salieri, and sleeps with the opera singer to boot. Except that, in history Salieri was married and had a number of children, plus that opera singer was rumored to be his mistress. Nor is this change in Salieri's character peripheral to the plot of the movie -- it provides the key motivation for Salieri's plan to destroy Mozart, and for Salieri's own apparent loss of faith and descent into madness. The made up personal history for Salieri fuels a made up rivalry: There's very little evidence that Salieri disliked Mozart, much less that he was seeking to destroy him.

Even as I express this, I imagine the reader replying: So what? Everyone knows it's fiction. What's wrong with making things up?

In cases where we're talking about obvious fiction (say, Agamemnon and Napoleon in Time Bandits or Abraham Lincoln in Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter) this strikes me as true. But in a lot of cases, fiction isn't "just" fiction. Rightly or wrongly, Amadeus represents a lot of what many people know of Mozart's life. Gone With the Wind formed a lot of people's impressions of the old South and the Civil War. Downton Abbey, even though everyone knows its a high class soap opera, still informs people's ideas of what the English class system was like.

Historical fiction has a fair amount of power. We often remember characters from books and movies better than we do anything we read in a history book. As such, it strikes me a problematic when historical events are treated as cultural short hand for some big idea rather than being portrayed in human terms.

I was also reminded of this recently when I came across a review/interview with Mark Helprin about his novel, A Soldier of the Great War:

Mark Helprin does not let too much of the outside world into his fiction -- certainly not impersonal facts. "Research kills a book. It makes a book like a historical romance," he said in a telephone interview from his home in Seattle. "An Italian who fought in the First World War or was a historian of the period" who reads his novel, "A Soldier of the Great War," "would probably become apoplectic," Mr. Helprin said.

I had a highly mixed reaction to A Soldier of the Great War when I originally read it some years back, and as time has passed my negative impressions have persisted more than my positive ones, and I think most of the reason had to do with what struck me as the basic historical dishonesty of the story. Helprin wanted to write a novel about various moral and aesthetic ideas, and he used a highly impressionistic (and thus simplistic and inaccurate) version of the Great War as a background for it. This example, perhaps, especially bothers me because it seems to me that with the Great War in particular the legend has in many ways consumed the reality. It's become such a cultural short hand that a work which portrays it accurately would run the risk of being laughed off the stage for being "inaccurate".

And that, I the end, strikes me as the danger with knowingly inaccurate historical fiction, it runs the risk of obscuring from us the real human events and dramas that people experienced in the past. And when we don't know what really happened in the past, in a certain sense, we no longer know who we are or how we got here.

How I Write

It would be more than a little presumptuous of me to claim to be any authority on writing based on one and a half NaNoWriMo drafts, but since my 3:30 am bedtime has left me rather unfunctional today, I thought I'd talk a bit about how I how I write my installments.

The first issue I deal with is plot. In Stillwater, I'm trying to stay essentially faithful to my source, but that faithfulness is to mood and character, and not to every particular incident. So I draw on my theater experience and dig for objectives and motivations: What does each character want? How does he or she achieve that? How do these objectives clash? How do they come together? All drama is change, so how are the characters different at the end of the scene? I consider the details of my source, and look for the best way to alter them so to fit the particular story I'm telling without warping their original significance.

When I start to write, first I focus on telling the story, then I start layering on details that convey mood or character. If a line doesn't push the plot forward, illuminate character, or convey mood, pacing, or setting, I cut it out. I've had to kill several of my darlings that way, but sometimes I find that a detail or observation that was irrelevant and clunky in one segment fits perfectly into another.  Sometimes I know that I need to fit a particular line or quote in, and I need to craft the scene to let that bit flow seamlessly from what's already happened.

For me, the dramatic arc of a scene is crucial, and since I'm writing in small installments, I have to make sure that not only the story as a whole but each segment has its own rise and fall. Sometimes, as with part 30, the dinner with Rene, I have to keep writing until I reach a certain closing point, no matter how long it takes to post; sometimes, as with part 31, I find that I'm simply not going to get as far as I wanted to without killing myself, and I need to focus on a smaller incident instead of pushing through to a bigger scene. Either way, I have to find the dramatic timing of the section so that it stands as a complete incident within the context of the larger story.

I try to make the strongest character choices possible. Is it more significant if Melly mutters a line or whispers it? What if Alys turns away when she says this? On stage, distance creates tension and often an actor conveys more truth through physical action and gesture than through dialogue. I don't have those visual cues on the page, so I try to find details to convey the subtext as efficiently and elegantly as possible. The setting of the scene can often help with this: is it intimate? Is it cavernous? Cozy? Uncomfortable? Familiar or not? Does the setting reflect the character of the scene? How different will a scene between Melly and Malcolm be if I set in in the car, a place of tension, rather than on the stairs, a place of intimacy?

When a scene involves a lot of characters, plot, and idea, I find it helps me organize my ideas to write a rough draft to get everything in place before I go back and craft it to make everything hang together. As an example, here's my first rough script for the dinner with Rene, containing lines I think should be spoken by particular characters to build my scene:

Show, don't tell

I never took a writing class, but even I'm familiar with the advice given to novice authors: "Show, don't tell." It guards, I believe, against a certain didacticism and lazy instinct to merely describe events instead of examining them through the lens of human action. This is a fair caution. And yet, it has its limitations: sometimes it seems the pendulum swings the other way -- writers feel obligated to describe every scene and conversation in tedious detail, whether or not those details contribute to the plot, mood, or character development. If art is reality distilled, this is reality stilled: bogged down in such petty effluvia as to lose all focus, direction, or purpose.

I received an email today with an essay by Fr. Robert Barron (it doesn't seem to be available on the web yet) about evangelizing through beauty:

In his masterpiece Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh implicitly lays out a program of evangelization that has particular relevance to our time. “Brideshead” refers, of course, to a great manor house owned by a fabulously wealthy Catholic family in the England of the 1920’s. In the complex semiotic schema of Waugh’s novel, the mansion functions as a symbol of the Catholic Church, which St. Paul had referred to as the “bride of Christ.” To Brideshead comes, at the invitation of his friend Sebastian, Charles Ryder, an Oxford student, devotee of the fine arts and casual agnostic. Charles is overwhelmed by the sheer majesty of Brideshead’s architecture and the sumptuousness of its artistic program, which includes magnificent painting and sculpture, as well as a fountain of Bernini-like delicacy, and a chapel that was a riot of baroque decoration. Living within the walls of the manse, Charles mused, was to receive an entire artistic education. The beauty of the place would entrance Charles for the rest of his life, drawing him back again and again.  

 In the course of his many visits, Charles came, of course, to know the inhabitants of the house, Sebastian’s strange and beguiling family. Especially through Sebastian’s mother, the aristocratic and devoutly Catholic Lady Marchmain, he became familiar with the moral demands of the Catholic Church, especially as they pertained to Sebastian’s increasing problem with alcohol. For many years, Charles joined Sebastian in his friend’s rebellion against these strictures, but in time, he came to appreciate their importance, indeed their indispensability.  Finally, at the very close of the story, we learn that Charles, the erstwhile agnostic, had come to embrace the coherent philosophical system of Catholicism and to worship the Eucharistic Lord who was enshrined in the beautiful chapel at Brideshead. Many years after entering that chapel as a mere aesthete, he knelt down in it as a believer. 

Father Barron makes many good points here, but he's mistaken in one thing: the chapel at Brideshead is not beautiful, not to Charles Ryder's trained eye. It is not "a riot of baroque decoration"; it had been renovated some twenty-odd years before Charles sees it in the Arts and Crafts style, and though Charles is hesitant to say so to his hosts, he finds it hideous. The chapel is a symbol, throughout the book, of how the falsity of poor art can stand between an aesthetic soul and God.

"You're an artist, Ryder (says Brideshead), what do you think of it aesthetically?"
"I think it's beautiful," said Cordelia with tears in her eyes.
"But is it Good Art?
"Well, I don't know what you mean," I said warily. "I think it's a remarkable example of its period. Probably in eighty years it will be greatly admired."
"But surely it can't be good twenty years ago and good in eighty years and not be good now?"
"Well, it may be good now. All I mean is that I don't happen to like it much."

Charles does learn to see God despite ugliness: at the end of the book he kneels in the chapel, before "a beaten copper lamp of deplorable design".

The on-going conversation about the engagement of Catholicism and the arts has been active lately with the advent of movies such as Here Be Dragons, For Greater Glory, and The Passion of the Christ. (I would assume that Protestants are having their own conversations about movies in the Fireproof vein.) It's telling all these movies were embraced by various stripes of Catholic media, as is presenting Catholicism in a non-hostile light were the only thing necessary to make a movie good art. Also telling is the fact that of the recent spate of "Catholic" movies, only The Passion of the Christ received anything approaching critical acclaim. The critics can always be wrong, of course, but they're also a useful standard, trained as they are to look for a certain baseline level of quality: is the movie consistent? does the plot make sense? is the acting good? does the director understand cinematic structure? is the screenplay coherent?

As Catholics, we also have standards for judging, not just art, not just movies, not just novels, not just entertainment, but every product of man's hands: Is it good? Is it true? Is it beautiful? Catholic art is much more than just slipping an explanation of dogma or a favorable portrayal of a priest into a work -- it's high quality, honest, and evocative whether or not religion is explicitly mentioned. Since God is Truth and Beauty and Goodness, what is good and true and beautiful must point to Him and participate in His life. Conversely, art that relies on wedging Catholic imagery or teachings into formulaic or unrealistic portrayals of reality doesn't do itself any favors. Not everyone who says, "Lord, Lord," will enter the kingdom of heaven.

I read a Catholic novel the other day, and I'm sorry to say that it was one of the more poorly written pieces I've had the misfortune to read lately -- though as I tend not to be a consumer of pop fiction perhaps my quality level is misaligned with the general taste. It told and it showed, neither to best advantage. The premise was unbelievable, the characters were by turns too period and too anachronistic, the plot needed several kinds of tightening and crafting, and the writing shifted between being didactic, obvious, repetitive, and plain boring.  And yet it was praised by several Catholic reviewers whose taste in fiction and ability to evaluate literature I will ever after hold suspect.

Catholicism is more than an Old Boys Club or mutual affirmation society. Catholic reviewers shouldn't be afraid to insist, in charity, on quality from Catholic artists -- that's part of the role of a reviewer. Of course, it does not make one a bad person or a bad Catholic to be unable to construct a paragraph -- but it does make one a bad writer. Good writing, like all good art, raises all those who encounter it, regardless of education, and evangelizes those who love beauty without realizing that Beauty is God.

The Business of America

Every so often one hears the quote "The business of American is business." The quote turns out to come from Calvin Coolidge, in an address that he gave to the American Society of Newspaper Editor in 1925.

The context is a discussion as to whether one should be disturbed that newspapers and magazines are commercial ventures, whether a commercial press is a tainted press. The extended quotation below is interesting not only in underlining Coolidge's view of business (which while arguably a bit over-optimistic in regards to human nature is also not as materialistic as some uses of the quote would suggest) but also as an example of how public rhetoric has changed over the last 90 years. Cal was clearly a more plain spoken rhetorician than famous famous speakers of the 19th century (contrast this with a speech by Abraham Lincoln or William Jennings Bryan) but the standard of rhetoric even from a "plain speaker" in the 1920s was clearly very different from today.

Some people feel concerned about the commercialism of the press. They note that great newspapers are great business enterprises earning large profits and controlled by men of wealth. So they fear that in such control the press may tend to support the private interests of those who own the papers, rather than the general interest of the whole people. It seems to me, however, that the real test is not whether the newspapers are controlled by men of wealth, but whether they are sincerely trying to serve the public interests. There will be little occasion for worry about who owns a newspaper, so long as its attitudes on public questions are such as to promote the general welfare. A press which is actuated by the purpose of genuine usefulness to the public interest can never be too strong financially, so long as its strength is used for the support of popular government.

There does not seem to be cause for alarm in the dual relationship of the press to the public, whereby it is on one side a purveyor of information and opinion and on the other side a purely business enterprise. Rather, it is probable that a press which maintains an intimate touch with the business currents of the nation, is likely to be more reliable than it would be if it were a stranger to these influences. After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world. I am strongly of opinion that the great majority of people will always find these are moving impulses of our life. The opposite view was oracularly and poetically set forth in those lines of Goldsmith which everybody repeats, but few really believe:

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.

Excellent poetry, but not a good working philosophy. Goldsmith would have been right, if, in fact, the accumulation of wealth meant the decay of men. It is rare indeed that the men who are accumulating wealth decay. It is only when they cease production, when accumulation stops, that an irreparable decay begins. Wealth is the product of industry, ambition, character and untiring effort. In all experience, the accumulation of wealth means the multiplication of schools, the increase of knowledge, the dissemination of intelligence, the encouragement of science, the broadening of outlook, the expansion of liberties, the widening of culture. Of course, the accumulation of wealth can not be justified as the chief end of existence. But we are compelled to recognize it as a means to well nigh every desirable achievement. So long as wealth is made the means and not the end, we need not greatly fear it. And there never was a time when wealth was so generally regarded as a means, or so little regarded as an end, as today. Just a little time ago we read in your newspapers that two leaders of American business, whose efforts at accumulation had been most astonishingly successful, had given fifty or sixty million dollars as endowments to educational works. That was real news. It was characteristic of our American experience with men of large resources. They use their power to serve, not themselves and their own families, but the public. I feel sure that the coming generations, which will benefit by those endowments, will not be easily convinced that they have suffered greatly because of these particular accumulations of wealth.

Stories: What Happens or How You Get There?

I've been reading (well, re-reading after nearly twenty years, which is a lot like reading for the first time) Anthony Trollope's Barsetshire novels. A week ago I wrapped up The Warden, a genial little social commentary/satire which is notable in that genre for the fact that every major character is acting in good faith and is, at least moderately likable. It's also very short, so if you have the desire to get a feel for Anthony Trollope's literary charms, it's not a bad place to start. I've now moved on to Barchester Towers, in which a larger tempest is troubling the teapot of the imaginary cathedral town of Barchester.

What struck me, however, is a bit which deals with different ways of telling a story. Trollope has just spent a chapter laying out the possibility that young (and pretty) widow Eleanor Bold will end up marrying one of two rather self-interested suitors (both of whom had just learned that her late husband left her a lot of money.) After reveling laying out the dangers before Eleanor, Trollope then turns to the reader and says:

But let the gentle-hearted reader be under no apprehension whatsoever. It is not destined that Eleanor shall marry Mr. Slope or Bertie Stanhope. And here perhaps it may be allowed to the novelist to explain his views on a very important point in the art of telling tales. He ventures to reprobate that system which goes so far to violate all proper confidence between the author and his readers by maintaining nearly to the end of the third volume a mystery as to the fate of their favourite personage. Nay, more, and worse than this, is too frequently done. Have not often the profoundest efforts of genius been used to baffle the aspirations of the reader, to raise false hopes and false fears, and to give rise to expectations which are never to be realized? Are not promises all but made of delightful horrors, in lieu of which the writer produces nothing but most commonplace realities in his final chapter? And is there not a species of deceit in this to which the honesty of the present age should lend no countenance?

And what can be the worth of that solicitude which a peep into the third volume can utterly dissipate? What the value of those literary charms which are absolutely destroyed by their enjoyment? When we have once learnt what was that picture before which was hung Mrs. Ratcliffe's solemn curtain, we feel no further interest about either the frame or the veil. They are to us merely a receptacle for old bones, an inappropriate coffin, which we would wish to have decently buried out of our sight.

And then how grievous a thing it is to have the pleasure of your novel destroyed by the ill-considered triumph of a previous reader. "Oh, you needn't be alarmed for Augusta; of course she accepts Gustavus in the end." "How very ill-natured you are, Susan," says Kitty with tears in her eyes: "I don't care a bit about it now." Dear Kitty, if you will read my book, you may defy the ill-nature of your sister. There shall be no secret that she can tell you. Nay, take the third volume if you please—learn from the last pages all the results of our troubled story, and the story shall have lost none of its interest, if indeed there be any interest in it to lose.

Our doctrine is that the author and the reader should move along together in full confidence with each other. Let the personages of the drama undergo ever so complete a comedy of errors among themselves, but let the spectator never mistake the Syracusan for the Ephesian; otherwise he is one of the dupes, and the part of a dupe is never dignified.

I would not for the value of this chapter have it believed by a single reader that my Eleanor could bring herself to marry Mr. Slope, or that she should be sacrificed to a Bertie Stanhope. But among the good folk of Barchester many believed both the one and the other.
(Barchester Towers, Chapter 15, Anthony Trollope

Having moved on several chapters past this point, I have to say I think Trollope pulls off what he promises. Through some odd working of the Paradox of Suspense, despite the fact that he has now told us quite baldly that Eleanor will not marry either the oily preacher Mr. Slope or the young spendthrift Bertie Stanhope, the progress of the Eleanor plotline becomes no less riveting. Partly this is because of the nature of the conflict involved: Eleanor isn't actually attracted to either man, but people who are enlisted in the various factions of the book's main struggle work themselves up a great deal worrying that she might be. So while we may know that she won't actually marry either, the question of how the whole conflict will play out remains very much up in the air.

However, I'm inclined to take the dictum rather further than that. Perhaps I'm more than usually immune to "spoilers" (I am usually quite happy to read reviews that give the plot away and don't find my eventual enjoyment lessened, except in the case of fairly surface level "who done it" kind of stories) but I do think that most of the time the interest in a story is much more in how one gets there than where one gets. And indeed, even if I know where a story is going, I tend to still experience a strong feeling of suspense while reading it: even when I'm re-reading a book and thus know not only how it will end but how it will get there.

Nonetheless, outright telling the reader how some plot point will end up, as Trollope does here, is unusual (though don't be concerned, the eels don't get Buttercup either.) Should it be? Can most stories not withstand "spoilers"? Or would "would people still be interested in reading if they knew how this revolved?" be a good self-test for authors in determining whether they're writing something of sufficient interest?

What we did on our summer vacation

We spent the weekend in the wilds of Wisconsin, where the internet access is sparse and the milk is fresh. The occasion was the  2012 Gerasene Writers' Conference, sponsored by The Korrectiv. The alchohol consumption was prodigious, the under-18 population was positively anti-Malthusian, and the highlight of the weekend was the world-premiere reading of Matthew Lickona's Surfing with Mel, a short story in script form about Mel Gibson's (further) descent into madness as he tries to get a film project about the Maccabees off the ground. (Here's the germ of the project, though the workshopped story had a different focus and was powers of ten more profane.)

Also, people told me what was wrong with the beginning of my novel, and Darwin blew things away out on the back 40.

And while we were packing, we found the key to turn Eleanor's expander, stashed deep under the seats of the car. Vacation: truly a time of renewal.

First Sentence Impressions

In my idle time, I've set upon the daunting task of revising my novel. The section that cries out most for rewriting is the very beginning, which was thrown together slapdash to meet the NaNoWriMo wordcounts before I discovered the muse of bourbon. My problems begin with the very first sentence:

In the summer of my twenty-second year, fresh from college with an elegant diploma in one hand and no job offers in the other, it was decided that I should become the companion to my Great-Aunt Emma. 

I feel a great mortification upon contemplating this line, not because my conception of the character become far less passive as the story progressed, but because the grammar doesn't match up. Who was "fresh from college?" It? How could I have made such a bizarre error?

One thing that has become clear to me, in retrospect, is that perhaps it was inadvisable for someone who'd never written fiction to jump in for the first time by writing a novel in thirty days. It's too late to change that now, but I'm trying to educate myself by reading up on the craft of writing fiction. One thing everyone seems to agree upon is that a first sentence should serve several purposes: to pull the reader into the story; to set the tone; to capture the attention of the editor or agent or whoever is going to buy your manuscript.

Here are a few first sentences of works I've pulled off my bookshelf.

Alexey Fyodorovitch Karamazov was the third son of Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov,a land owner well know in our district in his own day, and still remembered among us owing to his gloomy and tragic death, which happened thirteen years ago, and which I shall describe in its proper place. -- The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky 

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderly again. -- Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier 

"They made a silly mistake, though," the Professor of History said, and his smile, as Dixon watched, gradually sank beneath the surface of his features at the memory. -- Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis (a much funnier novel than the first sentence suggests) 

When I reached "C" Company lines, which were at the top of the hill, I paused and looked back at the camp, just coming into full view below me through the grey mist of early morning. -- Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh. 

So. -- Beowulf, translated by Seamus Heaney

Two things strike me about this list. First, that many of these lines are (naturally) meant to be directly followed by other sentences, so that the first sentence need not stand on its own as a summation of the story. Second, that much of the literature on my shelf is at least fifty years old. For contrast, here are three opening sentences from novels I enjoyed, all published last year.

I have never much liked Shakespeare. -- The Tragedy of Arthur, by Arthur Phillips. 

It was the last night of 1937. -- Rules of Civility, by Amor Towles 

Today I'm five. -- Room, by Emma Donoghue

These are short, but informative: Arthur is chatty and informal; the narrator of Rules of Civility is reserved and is writing about her past; the child who narrates Room speaks in the present tense.

I have struggled in recent evenings with my first sentence. What information do I want to convey? What tone do I want to set? Since the narrative is in the first person, what do I want the reader to know about her at the outset?

The character had grown more assertive as I wrote, so I wanted to change the passive voice of the original. I liked the structure of the sentence (and so did Darwin). The first part carried crucial information about the character -- she's a recent graduate with no imminent job prospects -- so what needed to be rewritten was the second half. Oddly enough, though I found that while writing the draft I did better work when I typed, the best way for me to revise this sentence was to write by hand over and over again.

In the summer of my twenty-second year, fresh from college with an elegant diploma in one hand and no job offers in the other, I was elected to become companion to my Great-Aunt Emma. (still too passive) 

In the summer of my twenty-second year, fresh from college with an elegant diploma in one hand and no job offers in the other, I turned my back to the career path and became caregiver to my Great-Aunt Emma.  

...I detoured from the accepted career path... 

...I rejected the career path...  

In the summer of my twenty-second year, glowing with academic success if not with career enlightenment, I forsook that path to become caregiver to my Great-Aunt Emma. (at this point I was growing weary of the path image, which wasn't going anywhere) 

In the summer of my twenty-second year, fresh from college with an elegant diploma in one hand and no job offers in the other, I laid down any career ambitions and took on the role of caregiver to my Great-Aunt Emma. (closer, but too wordy)

Finally I found a formulation I liked well enough, which propelled me into what I would consider not a revision, but a new first draft.

In the summer of my twenty-second year, fresh from college with an elegant diploma in one hand and no job offers in the other, I laid aside career ambitions to become caregiver to my Great-Aunt Emma. Perhaps “ambitions” is too strong a word — I was neither lazy nor incapable, but I suffered no delusions that studying literature had prepared me for much other than the tired trifecta of writing, teaching, and applying to grad school. These held no interest for me. For that matter, neither did geriatrics, but the fact remained that Great-Aunt Emma could no longer live unaccompanied, and I was the most eligible companion by virtue of being the least employed member of the family. 

I was also Emma’s namesake, which was a veritable sign that my stewardship had been preordained. Various relatives made this point to me at the packing party my parents were throwing on the eve of their early retirement to Florida. My older sister Stacy was particularly pleased.  

“I’m glad Mom and Dad didn’t name me Emma,” she said, as she sat in the living room and stuffed newspaper into boxes. “You were always her favorite anyway, maybe because you liked being around all those stupid books. Any time I tried to touch one of them, I thought she’d kill me.” 

“Perhaps she likes me because I don’t call her books stupid.” 

Reading Fees and the Plight of Literary Magazines

Speaking of fiction writing, John Farrell has an interesting post up over on his blog at Forbes.com about how increasing numbers of high profile literary magazines are looking at charging reading fees in order to review unsolicited manuscripts. I can certainly see why this would drive writers up the wall -- and goodness knows unpublished fiction authors are not the most flush-with-capital group of people in the world. But John outlines a real problem that magazines face as fewer people subscribe to print magazines and yet authors find it easier than ever to flood their manuscripts into the surviving literary mags via online submission.

Two Quotes for Your Evening

I apologize if things have been low on substantive posts and high on links and quotes around here of late. Perhaps it's the late summer atmosphere getting into the brain, or maybe I'm just dry at the moment.

I "read" this just the other day (heard it on my morning commute) and it struck me as an example of when telling rather than showing is actually far more evocative. I'm a sucker for the truly well written generalization, though as Austen pastiches quickly teach one, there is nothing worse than one done badly.

Certainly the tense nerves of men of action -- less notorious than those of imaginative men -- are not to be minimized. This was true of my father, who, like many persons who believe primarily in the will -- although his own will was in no way remarkable -- his in his heart a hatred of constituted authority. He did his best to conceal this antipathy, because the one thing he hated, more than constituted authority itself, was to hear constituted authority questioned by another but himself. This is perhaps an endemic trait in all who love power, and my father had an absolute passion for power, although he was never in a position to wield it on a notable scale. In his own house, only he himself was allowed to criticize -- to use a favorite phrase of his -- 'the powers that be'. In private, he would, for example, curse the Army Council (then only recently come into existence); in the presence of others, even those 'in the Service' with whom he was on the best of terms, he would defend to the last ditch official policy of which in his heart he disapproved.
Anthony Powell, The Kindly Ones

They loyalties we hold are complex things. Often we're willing to criticize ourselves that which hearing the same criticism from nearly anyone else will cause us to defend. And then the description itself is simply so delightful. In one paragraph one feels one knows Nick's father rather well. Perhaps he is someone in your family, or at work. No scene has been played out, nothing has been shown, and yet this description is both specific and general enough to flesh out a character to a degree that a great deal of less deft dialogue and descriptive narration would have still failed to do.

This other was brought to my mind by a line of argument I came across lately. It is an example of why I like No Exit so much, and find so much truth in it, despite the fact that my own view of the world is so nearly opposite to that of Sartre.

Garcin: Listen! Each man has an aim in life, a leading motive; that's so, isn't it? Well, I didn't give a damn for wealth, or for love. I aimed at being a real man. A tough, as they say. I staked everything on the same horse.... Can one possibly be a coward when one's deliberately courted danger at every turn? And can one judge a life by a single action?

Inez: Why not? For thirty years you dreamt you were a hero, and condoned a thousand petty lapses -- because a hero, of course, can do no wrong. An easy method, obviously. Then a day came when you were up against it, the red light of real danger -- and you took the train to Mexico.

Garcin: I "dreamt," you say. It was no dream. When I chose the hardest path, I made my choice deliberately. A man is what he will himself to be.

Inez: Prove it. Prove it was no dream. It's what one does, and nothing else, that shows the stuff one's made of.

Garcin: I died too soon. I wasn't allowed time to -- to do my deeds.

Inez: One always dies too soon -- or too late. And yet one's whole life is complete at that moment, with a line drawn neatly under it, ready for the summing up. You are -- your life, and nothing else.

Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit

This planning of great virtues while excusing small virtues is so typical of how we justify each individual sin -- all the sins of the "good person". The description is so incisive I find myself feeling as if Screwtape must have said the same thing at some point.

Writing vs. Creating

When we moved into this house, the shelves in the library were filled with books that the children of the previous owner hadn't wanted to divvy up amongst themselves. There were a few gems tucked away, but most of them were, as Darwin put it, "novels that were Very Important the year they were published", or biographies of minor cultural figures and second-tier authors. We kept a great deal of them on the principle of hating to get rid of books, but now the tedium of contemplating the sheer bloat of mediocre prose evokes a deep lethargy upon me.

I spent the other evening skimming a biography of a woman who won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1929. I'd never heard of her or her novel; you haven't either. At the time it was considered a shocking and sensual novel about a black woman and her sensual, shocking life, written by a white plantation mistress. Perhaps it was a step forward for civil rights in 1929, but the snippets of her writing in the biography made my teeth ache. One more book to be culled from the shelves.

People tend to think that writing is a vastly creative act that confers a certain immortality on the author's thought, but the truth is that most books published are read by a few people and then quickly forgotten. (Or, in the case of Dan Brown's novels, read by many people and then quickly forgotten.) This is attested to by the myriad forgotten tomes here, their few insights had been gleaned in one quick deflowering years ago. And what of all those authors who poured so much ink and effort into getting their baby into print? What did they neglect in order to write these dusty books?

Betty Duffy, who has more literary power in her pencil eraser than Ms. Pulitzer 1929 had in her collected works, writes:

And I thought, heck--why wait to get pregnant for this reward? I'm going to enroll in the Master's Program now!

I downloaded the application materials. I talked to friends who are enrolled in the program. I had my husband's approval. All systems were go.

Then I got pregnant. It's funny how this works on me. Maybe other women don't feel this way about having babies--but I called Pedge on my way home from my last community class in which I'd been a lackluster participant, and asked why it is that I've lost interest, once again, in these projects I've built up in my mind. Is it that I'm chicken? I'm afraid of failure, and having babies is away of excusing myself from trying? Am I just morning sick? Do I harbor some deep-seated anti-feminist notion that I don't deserve further education? Why do these things that were so important and exciting to me just a month ago, suddenly feel so trivial?

Pedge put into words for me what I had begun to sense, but felt sort of stupid saying, since at the time I was only a few weeks along: "You really are a different person than you were two weeks ago. You're now a mother of six. It's completely unknown territory to you and it makes perfect sense that you would want to move other things out of the way so that you have room to become the person you are going to be."

And it doesn't mean I'll never go get that MFA, or nurture anything other than children--but for now there really is nothing else I want to do but allow myself to mother this child.

My congratulations to Betty, who in raising her six children is engaged in one of the most essential and enduring occupations in this world.

Left Out

I'm heading in to the last lap of War and Peace, in which we see how things turned out for everyone. One person for whom things do not turn out terribly well is Sonia, seen through the lens of her cousins' guilt here:

From the time of his marriage Sonya had lived in his house. Before that, Nicholas had told his wife all that had passed between himself and Sonya, blaming himself and commending her. He had asked Princess Mary to be gentle and kind to his cousin. She thoroughly realized the wrong he had done Sonya, felt herself to blame toward her, and imagined that her wealth had influenced Nicholas' choice. She could not find fault with Sonya in any way and tried to be fond of her, but often felt ill-will toward her which she could not overcome.

Once she had a talk with her friend Natasha about Sonya and about her own injustice toward her.

"You know," said Natasha, "you have read the Gospels a great deal—there is a passage in them that just fits Sonya."

"What?" asked Countess Mary, surprised.

"'To him that hath shall be given, and from him that hath not shall be taken away.' You remember? She is one that hath not; why, I don't know. Perhaps she lacks egotism, I don't know, but from her is taken away, and everything has been taken away. Sometimes I am dreadfully sorry for her. Formerly I very much wanted Nicholas to marry her, but I always had a sort of presentiment that it would not come off. She is a sterile flower, you know—like some strawberry blossoms. Sometimes I am sorry for her, and sometimes I think she doesn't feel it as you or I would."

Though Countess Mary told Natasha that those words in the Gospel must be understood differently, yet looking at Sonya she agreed with Natasha's explanation. It really seemed that Sonya did not feel her position trying, and had grown quite reconciled to her lot as a sterile flower. She seemed to be fond not so much of individuals as of the family as a whole. Like a cat, she had attached herself not to the people but to the home. She waited on the old countess, petted and spoiled the children, was always ready to render the small services for which she had a gift, and all this was unconsciously accepted from her with insufficient gratitude.

What seems particularly sad here is that Sonia is so left out, by circumstances not her fault, that this is all she gets -- a few paragraphs near the end. There's a whole life sketched briefly here. And yet, it wouldn't be correct to say that a whole other novel could be written about Sonia, who is here written off so briefly by her relatives, because part of the injustice is that Sonia has been denied a story. She wouldn't be an interesting main character, because circumstances (having been the poor cousin that Nikolai fell in love with young, yet could not think of because it was only possible for him to marry someone with money) have given her a life in which not much happens. Condemned by circumstance to be a side character.

The Hunting of the Snark

A while back, I'd downloaded the free sample chapters of Bill Bryson's new book At Home: A Short History of Private Life to my Kindle app and found it quite delightful, the sort of light non-fiction brimming which the author's curiosity which is infectiously fun to read at odd moments -- yet shrunk from buying the full Kindle version because paying $10 for an ebook just rubs me the wrong way somehow. So I made my way down to the library to look for a copy. There I found that some fifty people had already done likewise and placed reservations on the book -- so rather than join the throng I picked up another of Bryson's books which happened to be in. I'd never ready anything by Bryson prior to stumbling on At Home, but the premise of The Lost Continent seemed appealing: Having lived and worked in Europe the author decides to take a road trip through small town America and write about the interesting (and odd) things he finds there.

Yet somehow the infectious curiosity which had made At Home so enjoyable to read was wholly absent here and replaced with that particularly modern mode: snark.

Now, Bryson is clearly a good writer, and he draws the reader along in an engaging way. Yet somehow the snarky tone breeds a certain frustration in a book-length work, as opposed to that child of the snark, a blog post. As the author's unremitting put downs, however creative, of everything he finds build up in chapter after chapter you want to shake the author by the shoulders and say to him, "All right, we get it. This was a lousy idea. But you're no longer a sulky kid sitting in the back of the family station wagon. You're an adult driving the car. How about if you turn around, drive to a big, cosmopolitan city, and write about something you like? Stop being professionally miserable and get a move on!"

Though really, my beef with snark is not that it's negative. It's that it's shallow. Snark, including Bryon's here, is usually of the, "Would you beeeeelieve this shit? I get into this town, which is not even a one horse town. It's a half horse town. The horse was cut in half by a semi on the main road a couple weeks ago and people haven't yet finished exclaiming, 'Would you look at that, now!' to each other and moved on to actually getting out of their chairs and moving the animal. And like all other half horse towns in Iowa, half the establishments are owned by someone named Vern. I'm not talking about Vern's Fusion Bistro or Vern's Art House Theatre, either. No, it's always Vern's Grocery. Vern's Hardware. Vern's Christian Bookstore. Vern's Tavern. So I went into Vern's Motel and asked the lady behind the counter, with her hornrimmed glasses and beehive hairdo, if there was a room available."

Now, this is in fact fun to write. I had fun parodying it just now. Snark is fun. That's why throughout the world people dash off blog posts full of snark on their lunch break for the delectation of other people on their lunch breaks who can in turn leave snarky comments, or post lolcats, or link to it on Facebook with the universal modern question, "Have you seen this? WTF?"

But I'm not at all sure it works to write a work longer than the average blogpost in snark-ese. Especially since a book lacks a comment box in which the reader can participate by making original contributions such as "LMAO". Indeed, after the first twenty pages or so, during which I kept thinking, "But he'll get down to real writing shortly, right?" I found myself reading further mainly in order to see if someone would eventually dose out a comeuppance to the author. But thus far, no.

I don't know if I'll finish it or not, but I'm disappointed.

Your humble correspondent

Lookit me, posting on my own blog!

Believe me when I say I've missed you. I have composed numerous rants and half-posts in my fertile little brain, only to find that my current internet connection doesn't always deign to let me log in and post. And time is of the essence --I'm not exactly living the single mother lifestyle, since I have my dad and brother to help me out in the house during the week when Darwin is in Columbus, but there are many duties that now fall to my lot which consume a great deal of time and energy. Blah, blah, blah --who isn't overwhelmed? I keep reminding myself that statistically, I'm one of the most fortunate people in the world, in history. Most of my daily inconveniences are of the petty variety. I prayed that I could realize that there were worse fates than having one's son spill lemonade all over himself and the floor right before a road trip, and lo and behold, it turned out to be the feast day of St. Issac Jogues.

Since my email isn't always doing it for me, I've tried to turn to more traditional forms of correspondence --to whit, the letter. However, I've, run into the singular problem that no one sells stationery in Ohio. I seem to recall that in Texas you could walk into Target or Staples or any store of that I'll and find yourself in the midst of plenty of lovely writing paper and fine writing implements, delightful to the senses. In Ohio I've found no stationery so far, but everyone wants to sell me journals, scads of them. From which I can only deduce that the good citizens of Ohio want to write, but only about themselves? I'm making another foray tomorrow, to a Barnes and Noble in an expensive part of Columbus. Eons ago, when I worked at a Barnes and Noble in L.A., we used to be heavily stocked with stationery. If I strike out there, I'll just resort to snitching my dad's printer paper, I guess.

I used to be a great letter writer back in the day. By "great" I mean "prolific", not "talented". Darwin and I used to send each other tomes of agonized love, rich with all the cliches of the genre. I believe I fancied myself a great stylist. Upon sorting out our closet preparatory to the move, I found a box (a shoe box!) full of this old correspondence. As I paged through his letters and mine, I felt a sensation akin to that of the unfortunates subjected to the Total Perspective Vortex. Passages that once seemed so eloquent and incendiary now paraded with all the grace of a herd of hormonal elephants . The most engaging bits were the parts I tossed off as stupid filler: minutiae about family life or the weather or work. The most fascinating letter of all was one Darwin sent me from Greece, simply describing the place and his travels there. And I burned with shame to recall that at the time I'd sulked because I thought he didn't write enough about ME.

I've got a long way to go before I can even compete in the humility stakes with the big dogs like St. Isaac Jogues, but I guess it's a consolation that at least I still have a whole hand to write with. As I keep telling myself, things could definitely be worse.

Dr. Johnson, Call Your Office

Harvard economist Greg Mankiw wrote a column for the NY Times about how increasing taxes on those who make over $250,000/year may result in those people deciding to work less, and raised rather more anger in the process than he might otherwise have done by using himself as an example. UC Berkley economist Brad Delong fires back with a blog post in which he declares, among other things, that if people are primarily motivated to write news paper columns by thoughts of money, then they won't write good columns and without good columns the republic will be no more:

Greg says that it's worth it for him to write columns if they generate $2000 in net bequeathed wealth in 2040 but not if they generate $1,000. But that shouldn't be why anybody writes columns. Indeed, if people write columns not because they are driven to inform and educate their readers but rather because it is a way to make money to leave to their children--well, then those columns will be written not to inform but to entertain, and so they will be worthless as sources of information and education (rather than as sheer entertainment) to their readers.

I do not think society can survive if the voices writing on political-economic issues in our public sphere are doing so not to inform but merely to entertain. I think that society can only survive if those who write columns are driven by a geas to make Americans better-educated citizens but rather to leave more wealth to your children. We ought to write columns not because we think our children will need extra money in thirty years, but because we think our fellow-citizens need better information now.

Of course, Samuel Johnson disagreed, and said rather more pithily that none but a blockhead ever wrote except for money. Johnson doubtless knew what he was talking about, having lived by writing for much of his life, and suffered grinding poverty at times which DeLong can at best only imagine. When Johnson was granted a royal pension such that he no longer had to write for a living, he pretty much stopped writing. More pity for us, for who could not desire that Johnson had left us more of his writing.

Yet for all that DeLong's writing ideals sound much more high flown than Johnson's, I think what he says about the relative quality of writing for pay versus writing out of a selfless desire to inform is pretty clearly false. Good writing is good writing, regardless of the motive that led to it, and mediocre writing is mediocre no matter how idealistic the writer. If one doubts this one need merely consider how many people still read Johnson 250 years later -- and contrast that with the likelihood that anyone will read DeLong 250 years hence.