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Friday, November 13, 2009

The life of a writer, part LXMDVVVII

My friend Marilyn, who went through a few years when she supported herself by writing romance novels, posts a few anecdotes today that highlight the strange demands of genre work:

In the Secret Hours was even worse. It was my one & only book to have an exclusive distribution with Borders Books. I had just begun writing it. It was late May and I allegedly had until Labor Day to write a 255 page novel. But, oops! The publisher called in alarm to say there was some sort of misunderstanding in the contract and my novel had to be turned in by the 4th of July. I had 5 weeks to write an entire novel that I only had a vague storyline for. No outline, just some notes. It was really hell. I thought my fingers were going to fall off from all that marathon typing everyday-long-into-the-night. Not only that, but I seriously had to let the story tell itself. Whatever the fuck came out onto the paper became "the novel." It was a real nightmare for me. And when the reviews came out and were bad, well, what are you going to say? Complain about the fuck up in your deadline? It just makes you look like a cry baby.

Read the whole entry.

technorati: writing, novels

Labels: fiction writing, writers, writing techniques

Sunday, October 04, 2009

Read my short story 'Polar Bear'

Here's a short story, Polar Bear (PDF), which I spent a great deal of time working on several years ago, available for free from the Scribd website. (I'm not too sure just what the purpose of the Scribd website is, but for the moment I'll use it to share some of my writing.)

For those familiar with much of my work, this is not a story about sex and it doesn't really have any sex in it (though there is a cameo by a stripper). It's based on an anecdote told to me by a friend when I lived in Japan twenty years ago. She was a wealthy middle-aged lady who had a rich, depressed friend from college. He was so bored he wanted to kill himself, but she said to him, "Well, what if you just risked your life instead?" And took him hunting polar bears in the Arctic. I tried to imagine what that must have been like.

It's really one of my best short stories, a form which (outside of the realm of erotica) I have trouble with. So I hope you'll enjoy this, offered as a free PDF download.

Labels: fiction writing, Japan, short stories

Thursday, September 17, 2009

What agents want: memorable 'stories or characters that gnaw at me weeks later'

Interesting exchange in an interview with an agent:

Q: What types of books are you looking for that you haven't found yet?

A: Despite the fact I read so much, I rarely find stories or characters that gnaw at me weeks later, and good literature should have that sort of staying power. Writing something memorable requires originality in voice, style and plot, but it also means tapping into the human consciousness and making readers feel something outside themselves. Cultivating that emotional investment simply requires a lot of talent, but real, relatable, and lovable characters are a good start.

That's about the size of it. But what alerted me to this interview was a statement the same agent made a few moments before:

2666 by Roberto Bolaño is a masterpiece -- but I wouldn't necessarily recommend emulating it. It's a novel that wouldn’t seem like it could work on paper -- I'd certainly have my doubts if it were pitched to me -- but it does because the writing is so strong. It is important to point out that even when dealing with higher concepts and more elusive goals, Bolaño's characters are still accessible, and that connection to the reader is the most important element.

technorati: literary agents, publishing, fiction

Labels: 2666, agents, Bolaño, characterization, fiction writing, publishing

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

New story: 'The Truth Hurts'

A few years ago a contact in the erotic writing ... um, it's not really a community, it's not a club, I'm not sure what to call it... Let me start over. An acquaintance of mine, a young woman who was a sex columnist for some time and also an editor of anthologies of erotic stories, sent me a call for submissions. She was doing an anthology of spanking stories, would I like to send something in? Sure, okay; I thought it was a somewhat limiting topic, but I did write a story that I had fun with, and sent it off to her.

She rejected it, saying the mere suggestion of incest made it verboten. Keep in mind no such behavior occurs in the story itself or offstage between the characters (unlike some of the stories already published in my books). The story I sent had just a whiff of intergenerational sexual energy. That was too much for her.

Time passed, and another acquaintance asked me if I had any stories. I sent her a couple and she bought the spanking story the first editor had rejected. And it's for an online publication, and it just went up. So here you go: "The Truth Hurts." (Caution, story contains explicit descriptions of sex.)

Labels: Bad Behavior, fiction writing, heterosexuality, sex, short stories

Saturday, July 18, 2009

Un-touristy San Francisco: the "Southern Waterfront"

To help inspire me for the next chapter of my novel, I spent a couple of hours driving around what is euphemistically known as the southern waterfront -- the stretch of bay from Mission Creek south to Islais Creek, and beyond. I saw:

Piles of rubble in various states. Some were huge chunks of concrete, either squarish or unshaped; some were piles of smaller rubble, often mixed dirt, gravel, and metal. Some of the piles were covered in various ways, from degrading plastic to very substantial-looking material of rectangular rubber or plastic sheets fastened together with plastic ties. In most cases whatever covered the piles was held down by sandbags, and again these were of varying quality, from thin, degrading plastic to heavier woven plastic.

Vacant lots. These were often weed-strewn gravel, formerly the parking lots or operating yards of industrial concerns and now derelict. At this time of year the only living weeds were usually fennel plants. Many of the vacant lots were fairly clean aside from the weeds; at some point they had obviously been entirely cleared. In other cases the lots were apparently in use as storage lots, but these were often in worse shape than the completely vacant lots, in that they had derelict vehicles that would obviously never be moved.

Sometimes these derelict vehicles were cargo trailers, decades old in many cases, that were parked against loading docks. The buildings behind these loading docks were sometimes themselves derelict and sometimes apparently not.

Fences. Chain-link fences, sometimes covered on one side with boards, and again this was done at varying levels of quality, sometimes giving an impression of solidity, sometimes not. This also depended on how the boards were fastened and painted. But in every case, whether the chain-link fences had added wood on or not, they were topped with strands of barbed wire and usually with razor wire added.

Strange-shaped lots. Sometimes the combination of vacant lots and fences combined to make very strangely shaped lots that were separated from another part of the property, seemingly in an arbitrary fashion.

The Islais Creek grain pier was in much, much worse shape than I'd remembered/supposed. For one thing, it had apparently been torn down along the shore so that it would be impossible for anyone to casually walk out on the pier; in order to reach what was left, including the five-story-tall rusty tower that had something to do with suctioning grain or something, you'd have to have a boat. (During the years 1981-84 when I was a delivery truck driver, I remember occasionally seeing a small ship at that terminal, filling up its hold by way of the now rusting tower. The visits of the ships stopped sometime during those years, and the area was abandoned.) What was left was almost entirely impassable and obviously incredibly dangerous: crumbling, rotting wood that was fallen through in more places than not, filled with rusty spikes and nails and jutting rusty metal bars. The notion that the characters in one of my chapters could do anything like I've depicted them doing there -- aside from falling through the pier, which I have depicted -- is ridiculous. But I'll just have to stage the action on some less identifiable property. God knows there are plenty of rotting piers.

Speaking of which: rotting piers in various stages of destruction, all fenced off by the above-described fences. In many cases, bare pilings sticking up out of the bay.

The shore itself was usually lined with chunks of concrete, covered with slime, which is to say a thick brown and green coating of algae. Whether the concrete was dumped legally or illegally in any particular spot is hard to tell. There are some places where the concrete seems to be of uniform shape and to have been arranged in some organized fashion; these would be the legal places. In other places there are simply slabs of wall, roadway, and other debris, often with jutting, slime-covered rebar.

technorati: San Francisco, Islais Creek, East Francisco

Labels: East Francisco, fiction writing, San Francisco

Saturday, August 09, 2008

Mystery vs. thriller vs. farce

The detective story is about solving the problem, getting to the center of the labyrinth and restoring some sort of order. The crime story is about chain reaction, about events and the ripples that move outward from them. The detective story demands greater story coherence; crime stories are more about style and energy. Chandler, who wrote mysteries, made story mistakes, and we forgive him what we wouldn't countenance for a second in Agatha Christie because his style was just so utterly, joyfully, mind-blowingly wonderful. ... Story works best when it just happens on the page. At the same we, as readers, crave shock and event. From the writer's point of view, the big and surprising twist creates a huge amount of energy -- and always, always problems later. Novels, even novellas written to order for Playboy, are written over time and tend not to be seamless. Perhaps this is for the best -- it's another way in which they can reflect the mess of life.

From the Jacket Copy book blog on the LA Times site.

(Not sure what he's referring to when he mentions "novellas written for Playboy." Do they publish serial novellas?)

This is like something Cris and I were discussing earlier this year. I wrote in my notes for my current novel:

Thrillers and farces, she said, work by ratcheting up tension, and by setting up a precarious situation and then setting everyone loose. Everyone has a goal, usually conflicting, and as they all try to fulfill their goals, things get more and more chaotic whether it's a thriller or a farce. People feel compelled to thrust themselves into a situation, thus destabilizing both the new situation and making it impossible for them to return to their previous state. She used the word "pressure" to describe this effect: the characters' character traits create "internal pressure" that compels them to do these things. Add the other characters and the setting and you have the ingredients of a farce, or a thriller if the characters' goals are sinister enough.
Situation comedy, she went on, works a different way: by setting up what she called traps for the characters. She referred to a film we saw part of on TV, "The 40 Year Old Virgin," in which the characters suffer a series of situational setbacks -- for example, when Steve Carrel and Catherine Keener first try to have sex, her teenage daughter bursts in on them. ... She also said something that was very pithy, if slightly unrelated: In a mystery, the story is resolved when the crime is solved. In a thriller, the mystery may be solved without a resolution to the story.

technorati: narrative, writing technique, novel writing

Labels: fiction writing, narrative, novel writing, writing techniques

Saturday, December 08, 2007

Almost at the end

I had a productive day writing today, reaching -- but not finishing -- the last scene of the book. Even when I do finish it, I still have to go back and write a good three or four thousand word chapter outlining a crucial part of the narrator's backstory.

So tomorrow I will do my best to write the ending, and then make some notes and get started on that last piece. Gettin' there!

Labels: fiction writing

Friday, October 26, 2007

Writing about where you're not

He often makes final revisions to his books on the veranda of his French home, with only oak forests, vineyards and sunflower fields to distract him. It's difficult to imagine a place farther from the pulsating streets of Bangkok.

"The distance forces the imagination to work," Mr. Burdett said. "It becomes an imaginative exercise rather than a factual research exercise. It's a good mental trick to play if you can."

--from a profile of author John Burdett,
whose mystery thrillers are set in Thailand but who owns a "villa" in France.

I guess that helps explain why it's easier for me, and perhaps most people, to write about an experience long after it's happened. For example, when I was in Japan teaching English, I found myself writing copiously about San Francisco. After I got back to SF, I found myself setting stories in Japan.

technorati: writers, John Burdett, writing

Labels: fiction writing, writing techniques

Sunday, October 14, 2007

Another progress report

I slogged through another weekend of working on my novel. I wasn't very inspired this weekend so I only managed about 4600 words for the two days, instead of the six or seven thousand I wish I had. At this rate it's going to be a little bit tight with the deadline, but on the other hand, I think the whole plot thing has settled into a groove. I hope.

Labels: fiction writing, novel writing

Sunday, October 07, 2007

A weekend to concentrate

After returning to the city, I had a whole weekend in which to work on my book, and I happily wrote over 6000 words. Today I wrote about one of the strangest and most ironic sexual experiences of my life: The time when I went to bed with my girlfriend Stephanie and one of her co-workers from the Lusty Lady. I already wrote about this experience in a short autobiographical essay published in Best Sex Writing 2006, but in that essay I left out the most ironic part of the experience because it didn't reflect on the main point of the essay, which was about Stephanie. So I'm writing about it again in a work of fiction, but the description of the event is actually more complete, because I include the ironic part of the evening.

But I'll leave it at that, to whet the appetite of anyone who might be reading this.

Labels: fiction writing, sex

Sunday, September 30, 2007

Novel 3,557, Bookshelves 2

I cut short my writing days yesterday and today so I could come home and work with Cris to put together some bookshelves we'd ordered a few weeks ago. They've been sitting in our living room in boxes for a couple weeks and this weekend was finally the time we were going to put them together. The first one took 6 hours, from 4:30 to 10:30 last night. The second one took 2.5 hours this afternoon starting about 4:00. We would have put the third and last one together then, but one of the pieces was damaged, and I have to go on the phone tomorrow morning and try to get them to ship another piece. Not looking forward to the phone call.

On the novel writing front, I did get 3,557 words in, which is about 2000 less than I would have preferred. I should get a lot done on the next two weekends, since Cris will be out of town, so I'm not too worried about my progress. I'm finally well into the meat of the book -- which may seem a strange thing to say after 40,000 words, but sometimes it takes a while. As for the shape of the book, I'm not sure what form it will finally take. It might turn into a 320 page monster. I sure am enjoying writing all the sex scenes, though.

Labels: fiction writing, novel writing

Monday, September 03, 2007

Progress report

Despite getting an eye infection, not being able to work at all yesterday, and having to work on my book at home today while dealing with the electrician, I managed to go over the 25,000 word mark, keeping my weekly average over 5000 words per week. Maybe it's a little early to make predictions based on the first five weeks, but at that rate I should finish the first draft by Thanksgiving and have the next six weeks for reworking. That's the basic plan.

The next challenge will be drawing out the material to book length. Ten more chapters of five or six thousand words each still sounds like an awful lot, especially since most of them will take place in a single setting (which I have spent the first four chapters getting the characters to). But for now, it's fun.

technorati: writing, novel writing

Labels: fiction writing, novel writing

Thursday, August 02, 2007

You sit there

It is my considered opinion that one reason you are not writing is that you are allowing yourself to read in the time set aside to write. You ought to set aside three hours every morning in which you write or do nothing else; no reading, no talking, no cooking, no nothing, but you sit there. If you write all right and if you don't all right, but you do not read; whether you start something different every day and finish nothing makes no difference; you sit there. It's the only way, I'm telling you. If inspiration comes you are there to receive it, you are not reading. And don't write letters during that time. If you won't write, don't do anything else. And get in a room by yourself. If there are two rooms in that house, get in the one where nobody else is.
-- Flannery O'Connor
in a letter to Cecil Dawkins dated 12 November 1960,
in "The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor"

This is a rule I have been breaking lately, to good effect. I want to get in my mind a certain voice and I am stealing it from someone else. I know there is really no chance I will end up sounding like that other famous writer. I merely want to be charged by his energy.

But as for the advice to just sit there, that's good advice. And I would even say: Tell yourself that you're just going to sit there. Your mind will get bored pretty quickly and start singing like a 10-year-old in the principal's office.

Or if not -- the technique I most often use is to make notes on what I want to write, asking myself questions about the characters and the action. Sometimes all it takes is half a page of this, done in a separate Notes file, before I realize I actually do know how to get myself going.

But what struck me about O'Connor's advice was how close she is to describing meditation: you just sit there.

technorati: Flannery O'Connor, writing, writing techniques, meditation

Labels: fiction writing, tools, writing techniques

Tuesday, June 12, 2007

Characters who grow in the dark

I'm reading, for the first time, Graham Greene's "Our Man in Havana." It's about an obscure expat in pre-Castro Havana who is recruited, against his will, as an agent by British intelligence. He finds he is expected to recruit sub-agents and to send London reports about them. He has no intention of acting as a secret agent at all, but since he does need money, he makes up a bunch of agents and then files reports for their fictional expenses. Then London sends him a female agent to act as his secretary, and things start to get difficult for our Mr. Wormold. There follows a fascinating passage in which Greene compares the imagination of the penny-ante con artist-cum-agent, Wormold, with that of the novelist:

The more Beatrice asked Wormold about (Raul Dominguez), the more his character developed, and the more anxious she became to contact him. Sometimes Wormold felt a twinge of jealousy towards Raul and he tried to blacken the picture. "He gets through a bottle of whisky a day," he said.

"It's his escape from loneliness and memory," Beatrice said. "Don't you ever want to escape?"

"I suppose we all do sometimes."

"I know what that kind of loneliness is like," she said with sympathy. "Does he drink all day?"

"No. The worst hour is two in the morning. When he wakes then, he can't sleep for thinking, so he drinks instead." It astonished Wormold how quickly he could reply to any questions about his characters; they seemed to live on the threshold of consciousness -- he had only to turn a light on and there they were, frozen in some characteristic action. Soon after Beatrice arrived Raul had a birthday and she suggested they should give him a case of champagne.

"He won't touch it," Wormold said. He didn't know why. "He suffers from acidity. If he drinks champagne he comes out in spots. Now the professor on the other hand won't drink anything else."

"An expensive taste."

"A depraved taste." Wormold said that without taking any thought. "He prefers Spanish champagne." Sometimes he was scared at the way these people grew in the dark without his knowledge. What was Teresa doing down there, out of sight? He didn't care to think. Her unabashed description of what life was like with her two lovers sometimes shocked him. But the immediate problem was Raul. There were moments when Wormold thought that it might have been easier if he had recruited real agents.

Wormold always thought best in his bath. He was aware one morning, when he was concentrating hard, of indignant noises. A fist beat on the door a number of times, somebody stamped on the stairs, but a creative moment had arrived and he paid no attention to the world beyond the steam. Raul had been dismissed by the Cubana air line for drunkenness. He was desperate; he was without a job; there had been an unpleasant interview between him and Captain Segura, who threatened....

"Are you all right?" Beatrice called from outside. "Are you dying? Shall I break down the door?"

Raul, "the professor," and Teresa are, of course, merely figments of Wormold's imagination. But they fix his attention, they concern him, and -- most wonderful of all -- they "grow in the dark without his knowledge" until he is asked about them, and immediately a character sketch comes to mind.

This passage shows the similarity between any kind of professional bullshitting -- whether one is, say, a comedian or actor who improvises, a con artist (think of Ratso Rizzo's request for money to cover "management expenses"), a parent, a salesman -- and the creative writer.

One of the ironic touches is that Wormold, whose real line of work is selling vacuum cleaners, is a terrible salesman. He just isn't interested enough. But the need for money, and the growing need to keep from being caught in his subterfuge, focuses his imagination as selling never did.

Labels: fiction writing, Greene, novel writing

Thursday, June 07, 2007

How Simenon wrote over 200 novels

In the Summer issue of Bookforum, Luc Sante discusses several novels of Georges Simenon that have been re-released. Of the "phenomenally prolific" Simenon, who wrote over 200 novels, he writes:

Famously, two days before starting a novel, he would consult a map of the place where the book was to be set, search through his collections of telephone books for names of characters, and establish the cast -- ages, backgrounds, family ties -- on the back of a manila envelope. Then he was ready, as he told a Paris Review interviewer in 1955:
On the eve of the first day I know what will happen in the first chapter. Then, day after day, chapter after chapter, I find what comes later. After I have started a novel I write a chapter each day, without ever missing a day. Because it is a strain, I have to keep pace with the novel... All the day I am one of my characters. I feel what he feels.... And it's almost unbearable after five or six days. That is one of the reasons my novels are so short; after eleven days I can't -- it's impossible. I have to -- it's physical. I am too tired.

In this 1997 obituary, Simenon is further quoted:

I write a chapter a day. It's the character who commands, not me. I know the end only when I finish. But during the time I'm writing I concentrate, concentrate on my characters. Only the characters matter.

Labels: fiction writing, novelists, writers

Saturday, March 17, 2007

Novelists need large stoves

I was struck by this post by Alex Chee listing his various projects and ideas for novels. In passing he remarks that one of his ideas "has been on a slow simmer for 17 years." As someone with many possible projects for novels in various stages of cooking, I know just what he's talking about. While the project I'm working on now, a novel about an American office girl who gets sent to Bangalore to open up a customer call center, was started on the spur of the moment (and was intended to be finished within a year, though I've been working for almost two and a half years on it now), I have many other ideas and intentions for projects which are also "on a slow simmer."

Some of them I fully intend to do, like a novel about working in the software industry called Knock Yourself Out. Others are ideas which seem really attractive but which I doubt I have the means to do well, like a psychological mystery set in Japan or a series of novellas about a baseball pitcher (I have all the titles for the novellas, and even an epigram, but that's all).

Sometimes I think about all the projects I have in queue and the number of years I have left to live. I'm almost 51 years old, so if I manage to write a novel every four years or so that means I only have time to do four or five more in my life. Therefore I ought to choose my projects wisely, because I can't get time back.

technorati: Alex Chee, writing novels, novelists

Labels: fiction writing, novel writing, novelists