|
Tuesday, February 09, 2010
Journey coming up
I'm about to take my first long vacation in a long time, and my first really long road trip in over 30 years. On Thursday morning I'll be packing up a rental car and heading over the Sierras on my way to Salt Lake City. And from there I'll go anyplace this side of the Mississippi where there's snow. In fact I'll even go as far as Indiana, since it's flat and it still counts as the Midwest.
For ten days I'll be driving around the Plains and the Midwest to find falling snow. Ideally a snow storm or a blizzard. the idea is to research a section of the novel I'm working on, Knock Yourself Out. In part of the book, the main character gets stranded at the O'Hare Hilton by a blizzard and winds up trying to drive across the country back to California. On the way he gets slammed by yet another blizzard.
Since I have precious little experience driving in snow, and no experience driving in the Midwest in the winter, I'll set out to learn. the idea is not to cover the entire Midwest, but pretty much anyplace reasonably flat that's getting slammed by snow. I have only one person I want to visit on the trip, my heretofore online-only friend Alexis, conveniently located at one corner of the area I'll be covering, in Minneapolis. So it won't be a very social trip. But I do hope to find out a lot about snow and the middle part of the country and what it's like out there.
Previous research trip: to Bangalore in 2007 for my novel Mango Rain. technorati: travel, road trips, driving Labels: 2010 road trip, KYO road trip, novel writing
Saturday, January 16, 2010
Outlining your novel using Post-Its
Trying to finish the first long section of the novel I've been working on since around April, I had to resort to the technique of writing scenes or bits of conversation on post-it notes and moving them around. It's nice to have a surface like a mirror, a window, or a whiteboard for this exercise.
Readers may recall a previous post from 2.5 years ago when I showed the results of using the same technique for a different book.
technorati: writing, post-its Labels: novel writing, writing techniques
Saturday, December 05, 2009
Woo, it's December
Lots of friends of mine have websites which were really rocking at one time or another but which have fallen into only occasional use. Others have moved entirely to the semi-walled garden of Facebook, which I refuse to join. I don't want to be one of those people whose blogs languish, so I'll give an update -- whether it's needed or not -- for anybody who checks in here. But before I do, thanks for reading and being even occasionally interested in my words.
First, I've been busy in my day job as a technical writer. We're entering the last stages of a project that started almost a year and a half ago, and as I'm responsible for tracking the deliverables -- excuse me for lapsing into business-speak -- for a team of four writers including myself, I've been spending time tying up all the loose ends. Actually that project will go until freaking April 2010, and then there's a follow-on that has become almost indistinguishable from the current project that will deliver in July. Past that, the future at work is opaque except for version numbers that are higher than the version number of the product we're working on now.
Then I've been spending time every weekend working on my current novel project. I can't even remember whether I've mentioned it much on this blog. Briefly, it's based on several different ideas that go back as far as 1996, before I even started working on the first finished novel I wrote (Make Nice) from 1998 to 2003. I started working on this latest project with a final set of ideas I had about a year ago, and I'm about 58,000 words into it -- about halfway through, or a little less than halfway through. I'm more excited about this project than I have been about a project in a long time, both because of the plot, characters and setting on the one hand, and the fiction techniques I've chosen to use on the other.
Speaking of Make Nice, I'm thinking of self-publishing that too, to give fans an opportunity to buy it and to be able to give some copies to friends. Of course, I haven't sold very many copies at all of my other self-published books, How They Scored and Lesbian Camp Girls, but more than 0, which is how many copies of Make Nice have been sold.
So if you're a reader of my sex story collections Too Beautiful and How I Adore You, you should like How They Scored and Lesbian Camp Girls, even though they're rather different from the sex stories you're familiar with. It's still my writing. Still kind of funny.
That reminds me of something my erstwhile literary agent said when she had taken a first read of my Bangalore book (now titled Mango Rain), which contains one sex scene. Not having read my sex story collections, but only heard about them, she said that when the sex scene in the Bangalore book started there was a noticeable falling-into-place of tone, as if I was suddenly on more familiar and comfortable territory.
And that's one reason why I'm writing novels which are not all about sex (Lesbian Camp Girls, which is definitely all about sex, and How They Scored, which is only half about sex, notwithstanding). Writing sex stories was too comfortable and familiar.
So, back to the novel writing on the weekend.Labels: novel writing, working
Monday, September 14, 2009
Buy my new book
 You can now buy my novel How They Scored, a book about Silicon Valley, sex, privacy and the internet, and real estate in San Francisco.
This is the book I wrote in 2007 for my erstwhile publisher Cleis Press. We disagreed about the final form of the book and it wound up back in my hands. It's now available as a paperback, for $17.75, or as a download for $4.
Get it, it's funny, sexy, and au courant.Labels: books, novel writing, sex, zeitgeist
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Deep springtime
It's a gorgeous spring morning in San Francisco, chilly, clear and breezy; later today it's supposed to be really windy, and already I can see the tops of the clouds being blown diagonally off their bases.
If I haven't been posting here much, it's mainly because I started writing a new novel last week, and I'm devoting as much spare attention to it as possible. I haven't been posting on any of the other blogs I sometimes post on either. I just don't want to sacrifice my momentum with the novel -- which I conceived of twelve years ago, and made several false starts on within the past five years. Having finally figured out a way to go forward, at least to rewrite the opening so that it makes sense, I want to keep going. So there won't be too much ersatz commentary, attempts at journalism, or arch mockery to consume for at last a few weeks.
Today's also my 53rd birthday, and I give thanks for family and friends who have supported me over many years, in the past, today and in the future.Labels: Knock Yourself Out, novel writing, weather
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Fun with characters
I'm drafting characters for a new novel, the same idea I've been working on since just before New Year's. Here are a few tertiary characters, all of whom are involved in a project called "Famous for Nothing," abbreviated F4Ø: Meliá is the main filmmaker, she is serious about it and has standards, like the filmmaker on the Mlps project who did 30 takes of a scene. She isn't so invested in the F4Ø project per se, as a comment on society or media, as she is in her craft and in using the project as a stepping stone to something greater. But she is as allergic to plot as any of them, in fact she considers plot little short of an imperialist scheme to sedate people. "Narrative is the new opium of the masses," she says but at the same time she has no faith in documentary either, because she also doesn't believe in objectivity, so the F4Ø project is as close as she can come to being purely subjective.
Trahan, her boyfriend (pronounced TRAY-han), is vaguely European. He is a failed grad student in rhetoric. It's him who is the originator of the F4Ø concept; it's his way of articulating, in the laziest way possible, his hostile and nihilistic attitude. The reason he is so resentful is -- he says -- he is the sole survivor of a bus plunge in the Austrian Alps, surviving only after being swept downriver from the crash site and finding shelter in the forest hut of a schizophrenic whom he has to kill and eat to survive the winter -- in fact, the first thing he has to do is kill the guy in self-defense. When it all got sorted out, he was the beneficiary of a huge insurance settlement; he also became rich from a ghost-written memoir published under his name, about his ordeal. So he got the idea that he was some kind of intellectual and tried to become an academic, but in fact the people who were humoring him with the memoir and all finally reached their limit, and he was kicked out of the university with a terminal master's. He exiled himself to America where, he said, you could get people to believe anything. He finances Meliá's filmmaking and the whole F4Ø project with his wealth. The project is his aggressively hostile joke on modern culture and life in general. In the F4Ø project, his character is a bike messenger-jazz poet, which is his attempt to make fun of hipsters.
Carmichael is a would-be comedian and performance artist who has failed to define a character, a shtick or a voice. He is therefore sympathetic to Meliá's distrust of narrative, because it makes him feel better about his inability to arrive at a voice or find something to say; therefore he has taken to acting because he can take refuge in the characters he plays: they have something to say, so he won't have to. In the F4Ø project he plays the role of a hipster, i.e. a foil for Trahan's character.
Shar is a young dyke who is studying to become a tattoo artist and also works as a stripper. Because she's a dyke, Trahan finds it funny to make her play the girlfriend of Carmichael's character, and she imbues the part with every stereotype of straight girl she can muster. Of course, this isn't far from the role she plays when stripping, and for that reason she insists on being paid, whereas the others do their parts for nothing. Labels: characterization, hipsters, novel writing
Wednesday, February 04, 2009
More celebrity memoirs the solution to publishing's problems
She says she wants to flog "celebrity-driven" books, bringing in "'really smart' writers to help shape those public figures' lives into books." As for the literary part of being a literary agent: I'm trying not to do too much literary stuff -- which is not to say I'm not taking smart things, but there's a certain type of pretentious novel that I just hate, that I'd spent most of my career trying to write away from... I want to represent books that will actually reach people. Like celebrity memoirs. More at my Open Salon blogtechnorati: books, writers, publishing Labels: books, novel writing, publishing, writers
Friday, January 23, 2009
Interview with Yiyun Li -- the personal and political
 Yesterday I interviewed author Yiyun Li, whose new novel The Vagrants is the best literary novel I've read in a long time. Get used to me mentioning it, because it's one of those books you feel everyone who appreciates great writing should read.
One of the questions I addressed in the interview has to do with her intention in depicting the lives of people living in a provincial Chinese town in 1979, a few years after the close of the Cultural Revolution. She depicts those lives as very grim, filled with brutality and violence. Some of the details on the smaller scale strike one as particularly heartless, as when she talks about a family where the parents, disappointed after having six female children, don't even bother to give names to the youngest three, who are referred to as Little Fourth, Fifth and Sixth. Other details, about the way the government treats political prisoners, are violent in a more physical way -- for example, they stage a "denunciation ceremony" for a political prisoner, and cut her vocal cords before the rally so she can't shout any counter-revolutionary slogans in front of a crowd.
Given this cruel picture, I asked the author if she intended the book to be an indictment of Chinese society, and she answered very forcefully: I don't have any intention for the novel to be an indictment of anything. That is a big NO. NO. NO. The situation may seem Chinese and specific to this era, but if you look at history, horrible things happen all the time. Brutality and violence happen all the time. On all scales. I can't shy away from that if I am writing a book.... My story happens to be set in China, and the characters happen to be Chinese. But if you read, say, Toni Morrison's novels, would you say she is depicting an unfairly negative picture of America? I replied, "Certainly negative, but I would not say unfairly so." But there's more to say. Most Americans are secure enough in their views of their country that they don't object to negative, yet fair, criticism. I don't think China is yet secure enough in its reputation to feel the same way. You'll remember how sensitive they were last year to criticism of their human rights record, and how they took pains to ensure that the picture of China -- during the Olympics, at least -- was a positive one.
Regardless of her intention, I wouldn't be surprised if some people see Li's book as an indictment of Chinese society. But she went on to say: I think that is a very narrow way of looking at literature... a very soviet, socialist view of how literature should represent certain things. I feel that as a writer the only people I feel responsible to are my characters. And I would need to treat them very fairly. Of course, that's the right approach for any artist to take. But what strikes me is that, as far as the content of her book is concerned, she feels her first allegiance is not to either the country of her birth or her adopted one -- one she had to struggle to stay in, as I mentioned yesterday -- but to her book's characters.
I admire that very much, and I found much else to admire in the book itself, as I state in the interview. technorati: writers, Yiyun Li, China Labels: books, narrative, novel writing, novelists, writers
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, June 14, 2008
Writing report
I spent the day working on my Bangalore novel. By my count this is something like the fourth draft. As most writers know, writing is like playing the accordian: sometimes you're expanding what you have, sometimes you're contracting, or cutting. The idea is to write as much as you need to in order to fully express your theme and let your characters develop, then cut it down to essentials, and then give it more space in case something else new and beautiful pops up, then cut again. Do this until it's as good as you can possibly make it. I failed to make it as good as I possibly could, and gave it to my agent last year and she gave it right back, telling me to try again. This is trying again. It's difficult, though, because another thing that happens in the course of a long project like this is that you gain and lose enthusiasm as time goes on, and that too is a pendulum that swings back and forth. And now is a time when enthusiasm for the story and the characters is somewhat lacking. But you keep on, because writing is not just pure inspiration but also craft. And you learn that lesson over and over again. technorati: writing, novel writing Labels: Bangalore novel project, novel writing
Saturday, April 26, 2008
From my notes
Here are the notes I wrote today as I try to figure out how to rewrite my Bangalore novel. There's 150 pages of this stuff, going babck to November 2004 when I started the book.I looked a little bit at my notes from late 2005, when I was trying to figure out what to do with the half a book I had written to that point. I realize now I have gone about this all wrong. I tried writing a novel off the top of my head, and while that got me a great start, it did not stand me in a good stead for the second two-thirds of the book. On the other hand, "Knock Yourself Out," which I already have a few thousand words for, does not have a good start, but a tortured, slow, feeling, which is the way I write when I'm doing nothing more than feeling my way. I supposedly know what KYO is all about, in terms of most of the plot and the theme. I started "Bangalored" (the fourth title the book has had, by the way, after "The Moony Trail of Starry Shine," "Dear Prudence," and "Mango Rain") with a notion, a flavor, a voice -- but no idea what the book was really about. I really must work to integrate the two.
On the third hand, I started "Make Nice" with much less of an idea of either. I just had the two characters of Bobby and Gene. But that was perhaps the best way to start, with a strong character who could simply live.
Perhaps that's the real lesson I have to learn from this experience -- start with characters, not a plot, a setting, a theme, or a feeling. Or if you start with those things, don't go any farther until you really know who the characters are.
Anyway, I have to make something of this damn thing, for the third or fourth time. (Actually the last completed draft was draft 6, for some reason.) I have to remind myself that I'm further along than I was a month ago -- even if I'm little farther along than I was three years ago, judging by the degree to which I really know the characters.
I'm going to try to start notes without looking at any previous notes. I know these have gotten repetitive this month, but I feel like I have to constantly refresh and reinforce my conception of the characters, their development, and how the plot reflects that. (In real life, people -- characters -- react to events. In novels, the author must secretly shape events to help the characters develop. But not too much, or it won't be believable.)
... thinking ...
Perhaps one of the fulcrums is Doug's state of mind at the moment he arrives in Bangalore. He is carrying three, no four, loads of psychic baggage:- His history with Betsy and with Stella
- His former career and fame as a journalist, and his career as a professor and how that career ended
- His intentions to save his career and write a book about Bangalore and the depredations of globalization
- His intentions to have a closer relationship with Stella as a way of somehow salvaging his self-regard as a man, having fucked up his relationships in general with women and having just fucked up his career as an academic
I think most of those have been clear up to now except the last one. I haven't understood what he wants, much less fleshed out notes on it, much less written it into the novel. That's why he seems so passive and listless and indeed unrelated to Stella.
Good! Let's unpack that, as theoreticians say. There are actually several parts to it -- his relationships with women, how they have affected his family, and how they have affected his career.
Q. | What are his relationships with women like as a young man? | A. | He is attractive and intelligent, and growing up in the 60s and 70s (he was 25 in 1977) he had lots of sex with lots of women. As a creature of his time, he only learned a little about feminist attitudes toward sex second-hand, i.e. from the women he was fucking or working with (often the same people); he learned how to continue to get sex in that period without really adopting any enlightened attitudes toward women and sex. When Stella was born (1978), he had a sentimental conversion to feminism, because he wanted her to be liberated, but he didn't really change what were by then pretty hidebound attitudes. Perhaps most importantly, when it came to settling down with Betsy as a family, he never even considered it. They weren't living together in the US when they were fucking and Betsy became pregnant; when Betsy returned to the US to give birth to Stella, he didn't come back with her. He stayed in Central America, only coming back to New York from time to time. Maybe he would see Betsy and Stella twice a year, at the most, though he did send child support with regularity. Thus they never married, never lived together in the US. | Q. | When it came time for Doug to return to the US (1984), did they consider living together as a family then? | A. | No, because he had a job offer at Cornell (which has a well-known journalism school) and Betsy was ensconced at a TV station in Chicago. | Q. | Was there ever a time when Doug "left" them? | A. | No. That doesn't mean Betsy didn't feel vaguely abandoned. | Q. | What were Betsy's attitudes? | A. | By becoming a war correspondent and then a TV reporter, she was rebelling against her family's Midwestern expectations; she bolstered her ambition with simple 70s feminist principles that a woman doesn't need a man, etc. But because she was a child of the Midwestern middle class, she had deep-seated feelings about family and home, and she finds reasons to resent Doug that fit into her feminist principles (he was childish, didn't take responsibility, was selfish) but which have their foundation in an unconscious feeling that he should be home with her and her child. She will only admit to feelings that fit in with the ideology, so Stella grows up sensing Betsy's resentment of Doug without understanding it. | Q. | What are Doug's attitudes toward Betsy and Stella? | A. | When Betsy gets pregnant, he really is selfish -- he assumes that anyone with sufficient ambition would not let a pregnancy stand in the way of her career and that she'll get an abortion and their relationship will be exactly the same as it was before she got pregnant. But when she decides she wants to bear the child, he shrugs: he thinks of it as her decision and something that no longer has anything to do with him. (I remember this clearly from the mid-70s, even though I was a bit younger. Since any decisions about what happens to a pregnancy were supposed, by the feminism of the day, to be entirely up to the woman, a man who gets a woman pregnant was absolved of responsibility -- an unintended consequence of feminism and one that has caused some refinement of the dictum "My body, my choice.") | Q. | But still, she is resentful. | A. | Yes, for reasons she doesn't quite understand: her unconscious belief, which she can't square with her ideological analysis, that the father of a child should be part of the child's family. | Q. | How does this affect Doug? | A. | He is annoyed at her expectations, however unconsciously she holds them. Because he understands exactly how she feels -- he knows, without admitting it to himself (much less ever discussing it with her) that she feels he should be close by and support her in some greater way than he ever does. | Q. | Don't they ever talk about it? | A. | No doubt they argue about it when Stella is a child, but they never resolve it. | Q. | So how does that affect the way Doug views Stella? | A. | It creates some guilt, and causes him to compensate for the way he treated Betsy by treating Stella extremely well. In fact, Stella gets a hundred times more time and attention from Doug than Betsy ever did, because Stella lives with Doug during the summers from 1985-1992 (she is ages 7-14, he is ages 34-41). | Q. | All right, what about his time as a professor (1985-2007, ages 34-56)? What are his attitudes toward women then? | A. | On campus, all the girls are feminists, except for the cheerleader types. And a good number of the faculty (though not so much in the J school -- I suppose I could check that, but it's not a fact I really need to know) are women. So when he starts at the university, he has to re-work his attitudes, at least on the surface. He becomes supportive of equality for women professionally. This is also reinforced by his having a daughter. | Q. | What about his sexual attitudes? | A. | These are also influenced by the campus attitude, which at that time is pretty unfettered. The girls, all embracing sexual freedom, are fucking right and left. Of course, it's also the time of the sex wars, the Take Back the Night marches, and the time when, if you were a real feminist, you'd be a lesbian (at least Until Graduation) and there's a lot of suspicion of men. Therefore, the students who fuck their professors fall into a few types, all very much minorities: the fucked-up ones who use sex to prove to themselves they're attractive, the cynical ones who consider it a quid pro quo to get grades, and the intelligent, independent but naive ones who use it to experiment with what they think are adult relationships. Stella herself fits into this category when she has an affair with a professor. So when we get right down to it, the students who fuck Doug are much like his own daughter. | Q. | That seems like something to examine much more closely. | A. | Yeah.... yikes. I had already had that idea but it was more an intuition, I never thought it through to quite that extent. |
technorati: writing novels, notes, characters Labels: Bangalore novel project, characterization, novel writing, writing techniques
Monday, March 17, 2008
Treading water
Not much to report on lately. I haven't gotten any writing done and I don't feel like it. It's a symptom of the ambivalent mood I'm in that what ideas I do get have nothing to do with the two books I'm supposed to be working on; instead, I find myself thinking about the crypto-mystery I thought of a few years ago. So I'm really getting nothing done, just keeping the house and my job and Cris and everything else taken care of. Sorry I've been so dull this year.
Here's something: Courtesy Perry, a "trailer" for a film about Wonder Valley, the remote desert spot where several friends live and which has in the last 15 years become an art colony, its first step to utter destruction, but for the moment, it's still nice.Labels: novel writing
Thursday, March 06, 2008
Robbe-Grillet's legacy
Last month's passing of French avant-garde novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet has occasioned little comment, but today Salon threw dirt on the grave with a piece entitled The Man Who Ruined the Novel. I found the article extremely unconvincing. I don't claim to know much about Robbe-Grillet's work, though I have read a few of his novels, and I found them sort of inspiring, not discouraging. Like Kathy Acker, he mixed explicit sex with a disdain for narrative and a sense of weird freedom. "Project for a Revolution in New York" gave me permission to break rules.
You know whose work I found really discouraging? Toni Morrison. After reading "Song of Solomon" I almost despaired of ever being a writer, thinking "Christ, I could never do anything like this."
Not that my stuff is anything like Robbe-Grillet. But I sure responded to it better than that Salon writer. technorati: novelists, novels, books, Robbe-Grillet Labels: novel writing, novelists
Sunday, February 03, 2008
More on those Hollywood novelists
A few days ago I blogged the LA Times story about idle Hollywood scriptwriters getting a chance to write that novel they've been meaning to. Novelist and writing teacher Alexander Chee -- whose early work I published in Frighten the Horses -- noticed the same story and says to the "rookie" novelists, "As a literary writer, I just want to tell my newly-arrived television and film siblings, with confidence, people don't want baggy receptacles of story. The biggest mistake, time and again, that I see student writers (or professional ones) make is to think that in a novel 'there's so much time.' There isn't."
In any case, the writers strike might be on the verge of being settled, hopefully long before those scriptwriters made much progress on their novels.Labels: novel writing
Monday, January 28, 2008
Out-of-work screenwriters prepare to flood market with that novel they've been meaning to write
Sunday's LA Times had this story: idled by the protracted screenwriters strike, Hollywood scribes are using the downtime to "write in the morning and picket in the afternoon." It quotes them as saying: - "The process (of screenwriting) is less than satisfying... You get tired and burned out, and I always wanted to write novels anyway."
and - "Scripts are all about economy and forward momentum, whereas novels can be big, baggy receptacles for a story. When I go back to screenwriting, I feel like I've been put back in my cage."
and - "The Writers Guild is gonna kill me for saying this, but a script is nothing more than a blueprint for a film... It's a road map and can't stand on its own; it needs others to make it a movie. Books are more holistic. They're less about plot and more about character, emotions, nuance. It's refreshing to just write about people for a change."
As someone who's been trying to get a literary novel published for years, I cringe at the notion that the market is about to be flooded with tight, competent, professional dreck by people who are paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to think up the next big thing. Just what I needed.Labels: films, novel writing, publishing
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Creating characters
Here's an essay by the critic James Woods (courtesy Alexander Chee) that raises interesting questions about what a fully realized character is in fiction. I was particularly drawn to a passage where Woods quotes the novelist Iris Murdoch, and I went looking for the essay he quoted from.
It's here: The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited, from the Yale Review of 1959. I will quote a little more than Woods did: Art is not an expression of personality, it is a question rather of the continual expelling of oneself from the matter in hand. Anyone who has attempted to write a novel will have discovered this difficulty in the special form which it takes when one is dealing with fictitious characters. Is one going to be able to present any character other than oneself who is more than a conventional puppet? How soon one discovers that, however much one is in the ordinary sense "interested in other people," this interest has left one far short of possessing the knowledge required to create a real character who is not oneself. It is impossible, it seems to me, not to see one's failure here as a sort of spiritual failure. This is instructive for me as I begin another draft of my India book specifically to strengthen the main character. technorati: novel writing, Iris Murdoch, characterization, Alexander Chee, James Woods, literary criticism Labels: characterization, novel writing
Saturday, January 26, 2008
Two new novels set in Las Vegas
Two new novels are set in, and largely about, Las Vegas: The Delivery Man by Joe McGinniss Jr., and Beautiful Children by Charles Bock. Both are first novels.
The story of how the first one was published has some interesting and -- for writers -- comic bits: When McGinniss was looking for people to give his manuscript a read, among the first people he contacted was (Bret Easton) Ellis. "I groaned," says Ellis of receiving McGinniss' first e-mail asking for help. "Of course, you have to understand, I feel completely indebted to his father. There was no way I was going to say no to his request."
Ellis sent McGinniss back to the drawing board. "It needed to be tightened up," he says. "I felt there were a lot of missed opportunities... There was a lot of editorializing. He had the same setting [of the published novel], the same cast of characters, the same complicated relationships, but the story needed to be more precise."
"I was very naive," McGinniss says. "I'd just assumed you crank it out and if it reads well, it's a novel -- it's done, you're set. At the time I sent it to him, inside I thought, I think I'm pretty close." For the next two years he made multiple revisions and did some more Vegas research... The confusing thing for novelists at the beginning of their careers is that you're aware some people do get manuscripts published without extensive, multiple revisions; while they may not "crank it out," they basically lay it down, do some polishing, and they really are done. T. Coraghessan Boyle is one of these; I heard him interviewed on a local radio station while I was writing my own first novel, Make Nice (which also happens to be set partly in Las Vegas). I phoned up the show and asked the author about his revision process. He said: This is going to drive a lot of people crazy, but I don't do any subsequent drafts. I do substantial rewriting as I go along in the first draft, and when I get to the end of the book, it's essentially done. Of course there's editing and so on, but what's in my computer is basically it. Many more writers do the multiple-revisions thing. My friend Katia went through seven or eight drafts of her first novel Crashing America and she's into the fourth or fifth draft of her next book. Soon I'll be commencing the fourth draft of Bangalored, my second book -- though like McGinniss Jr. when I sent it to my agent last year I thought, It's pretty close. technorati: Las Vegas, books, novels Labels: book deals, books, Las Vegas, novel writing, novelists
Friday, January 25, 2008
Here comes the rain again
It's been raining for a few days. Since I hardly have to be out in it, I find it rather nice. The biggest venture was to a restaurant on Mission St. where my friend Namita had invited people for her birthday. She and I have a bit of history together, which she began referring to and then stopped herself and said confidentially, "I'd better watch what I say, there are people here from different parts of my life and they don't know everything about me." Nor do I, but I do like that we had Stephanie in common.
One thing the rain has done is make me a little bit bleary creatively. I was on such a roll with my just completed book that it's a little hard to walk into my writing room and think about anything else. I'll start the way I started working my self up to writing that book: by reading.Labels: novel writing, weather
Sunday, January 13, 2008
Right, that's done
This just in: The NYT raises the possibility that Gawker is over. Me, I stopped reading it sometime in 2005. And I stopped reading Wonkette after the original editor left it. Blogs are not about the subjects they cover or their material. They're about voice. A consistent voice.
I've been spending more time lately filing posts on SF Metroblog, becoming its most consistent poster, though I'm not sure anyone really cares or is reading. I was cheered, however, when a local more famous blogger told me she thought that SF Metroblog did get attention; she was even surprised its writers aren't paid, but that might be because she just got a paid blogging gig. Anyway, I'm posting more there than here, these days, mostly because it's possible to do one or two good posts a day about San Francisco topics but hard to find time to surf around and post the stuff I really like to post about.
However, this is priceless. Some geek wandered the floor at the Consumer Electronics Show -- with a TV B Gone. Now that's anti-entertainment.
In personal news, today I have officially, and for about the fourth time, declared work on my novel How They Scored done, printed it out, and tomorrow I'm mailing it to my publisher. Which means they should be sending my agent a check within a month or so.
Barring any protests from How They Scored's publisher, I'll now go back to work on my India book, which is now titled "Bangalored". technorati: How They Scored, novel writing, blogging Labels: Bangalore novel project, blogging, Gawker, How They Scored, novel writing
Saturday, December 29, 2007
Novel idea: the sacraficial lambs of Presbyterian College
From time to time I point out that since reporters these days are not unattuned to the irony of our world, any aspiring novelist can, by reading the newspaper carefully, get plenty of ideas for novels out of the daily news. Behold this story: Have Team, Will Travel, Losing Badly.
You don't have to care about basketball to get the gist. Tiny colleges, like the one that is the focus of the story, have declared themselves members of "Division I" of the NCAA, and thus eligible to play top-ranked university teams. Of course they get clobbered every time, so what's the point? Money. Visiting teams share in ticket revenues, so when the Presbyterian College Blue Hose appear at Duke, Clemson, North Carolina or other powerhouses, they get some of the ticket revenue. And it doesn't matter if they draw or not, since those big college have lots of season ticket holders.
So! How'd you like to play for the Blue Hose? I wonder what the recruiter tells prospective players: "You'll play with the best... the guys on the opposing teams!" I wonder what the coach's angle is. Does he get a cut of the $650,000 the team -- whose schedule has 5 home games and 25 road games!! -- takes home from those bashings? One day, Coach Gregg Nibert said, he hopes the Blue Hose will be able to go punch for punch on the court, at least with teams in the smaller Division I conferences like the Big South, which Presbyterian will join next year.
But for now, he is content to barnstorm, collecting $25,000 to $60,000 per appearance at Madison Square Garden-sized college arenas. After a season of predictable poundings, he will come home with about $650,000 for Presbyterian's coffers. And yet this is not a scandal. This is regarded as great for the school! Incroyable! technorati: novel writing, writing ideas Labels: novel writing, writers ideas
Saturday, December 15, 2007
The last day
I meant to finish the first draft of my current novel project last weekend, but I stopped a couple of pages short. I didn't want to rush into it, and -- typical -- I had to be somewhere in the early evening, so I cut my writing day short.
Then I thought I would be able to grab a few hours during the week, ideally on Monday, and finish. It was only a few pages. But instead I got utterly hammered at work. In my 12 years in the high tech industry, I don't think I've ever been as snowed under as I was this week. In fact, I'm seriously considering going in to work on Sunday just to get a head start on the next week.
I rarely write about my day job as a technical writer at a large software company. It's something I've been doing for several years one way or another, but I've only been a true technical writer since the fall of 2004 -- three years and then some. I have been able to handle pretty much everything that's been thrown at me, but this week my relative inexperience meant that I had too much to do at the very end of the project -- a project which I've thought was done about six times now. It's not all my fault, but there's more I could have done to alleviate the crush that happened this month.
Another motherfucking learning experience.
Meanwhile, I read a little piece of this book I'm working on for the first time last night to a few people at a dinner. It was a very interesting experience. When you're reading out loud you can instantly tell which sentences are well constructed and which sound awkward -- which is why they tell you to always, always read your stuff out loud before considering it finished. It made me remember how, in my past experiences at LitCrawl (2006, 2005) I closely edited the piece I was about to read with a mind to how it would sound read out loud. I didn't have the opportunity to do that last night, and it was good to be reminded of how important it is.
So on to the last few pages of this book, which I will subsequently spend as much time as I can rewriting. (Rewriting the whole book, not only the last few pages, important as they are.)
Update, 3:45 pm: I finished! The total word count of the first draft was 85,293. That's an average of 2031 words per session, with the book finished in 42 work sessions from July 28 to today.
Previous first-draft-finishing milestones:
Make Nice on January 1, 2003. That one took about five years.
Bangalored (which used to be called "Dear Prudence") on December 28, 2006. That one took a little more than two years.
technorati: writing, novel writing Labels: novel writing
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Coppola enters his sage period
From an interview with filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola in the December-January Bookforum:One of the most wonderful things about being a filmmaker is doing the research. When I made The Godfather I got a number of books about the Five Families and how they came about and about the families before that. Knowledge is a string that keeps going back and back. ... I've always felt that when you're making a movie, you're essentially asking a question. And when you're done, the film you have is the answer. technorati: narrative, Francis Ford Coppola, filmmaking Labels: film criticism, films, narrative, novel writing
Sunday, December 02, 2007
Getting closer
Aside from a long scene I still need to rewrite, I came a lot closer today to being finished with the first draft of my current novel project. I basically wrote the scenes that provide the climax of the plot. I need one more chapter, and then I need to go back and basically write chapter 10 again. Maybe next weekend.Labels: novel writing
Thursday, November 22, 2007
Click over there
I don't have a huge amount to say for myself, but look at the Metblogs over there on the right, where I'm posting up a storm, and at the Scratchpad beneath it, where I'm posting stories of interest without comment.
I did manage about a thousand words today. I don't mind it not being more; I set myself up for a big day next time.Labels: novel writing
Sunday, November 11, 2007
End of the weekend
Finishing up another weekend of writing, having redeemed the slow day yesterday with a good 3000 word day today. I'm nearing my 75,000 word count goal for the novel, and now I have another challenge: ending it. Yesterday at the start of work I mapped out several scenes that remain to be written purely from a plotting perspective; even after this weekend, there are at least seven more plot movements to hit.
That will take some doing, but it's pleasurable work; writing the end of a book and hitting plot points that have been prepared for all along is like kissing somebody you've had a crush on for a long time and having it turn out just as much fun as you always imagined. technorati: writing, novel writing Labels: novel writing
Sunday, November 04, 2007
Another fucking beautiful day
I'm not sure how many more of these gorgeous fall days I can take. I took a break from writing in the middle of the day and went home and sat in the garden with Cris for a few minutes. Milagrito the cat was out there with us, enjoying the family feeling. A bumblebee circled about.
Then I walked back to my office and did another 3000 words. This was a good weekend, over 5600.Labels: Milagrito, novel writing
Thursday, November 01, 2007
Experiments
I am experimenting with a new internety thing called Tumblr, using it to manually clip interesting news stories: markpritchard.tumblr.com -- courtesy Alexis. Apparently you can use it to "clip" all sorts of things, but I can't figure out how to make the RSS feed from this blog -- which may well be broken -- appear in it.
I can also train its contents to appear here on this page -- but first I have to figure out a way to keep it from taking over half the page.
Meanwhile, a colleague at work -- I work as a technical writer at a giant software company large enough to have seven tech writers just in our division -- keeps asking me if I plan to do National Novel Writing Month. I said I'm not only already writing another novel as fast as I can, but the NaNo I started in November 2004 took me more than two years to finish and still needs a rewrite. In my opinion, National Novel Writing Month exists primarily to give people permission to start a novel -- and I'm past that point. I may not be past many points in my career as a novelist but I'm past that one. technorati: writing, National Novel Writing Month, NaNoWriMo Labels: blogging, novel writing, tools
Sunday, October 28, 2007
Another sunny day
Here's another sunny day I'm spending indoors working on my book. In years past I used to hike all day long on Mount Tam on days like this. Especially in the fall, it's beautiful out there. Oh well, I also used to wonder why I wasn't writing. Now I am.Labels: novel writing
Saturday, October 27, 2007
Deep autumn
End of another day of writing. I got a very late start, but once I got going it went well, and I wrote the scene I wanted to, about 2600 words. Now I think I'm going to do some thinking about what needs to be in the next chapter, so I can sleep on it and then get started tomorrow with a little more alacrity.
Last night we went to the symphony and I actually got an idea for the book's ending. It was generally not a fantastic night at the symphony but I was able to jot down a note and that felt really worth it.Labels: novel 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
Friday, October 12, 2007
What novels are about these days
I have a certain fascination with plot summaries and what they show about the presumed subjects that people want to read about -- presumed by publishers, that is. Here is a list of plot summaries from the New York Times bestseller list, with titles, authors and publishers removed. A Colombian poet's love for a woman is tested. A young man -- and an elephant -- save a Depression-era circus. An Afghan-American returns to Kabul to learn how a childhood friend has fared under the Taliban. An epic story about three generations of Greek-Americans, told by a hermaphrodite. A doctor's decision to secretly send his newborn daughter, who has Down syndrome, to an institution haunts everyone involved. Privileged 30-somethings try to make their way in literary New York just before 9/11. A rift in an Amish community threatens to keep a courting couple apart. A Spanish shepherd boy travels to Egypt in search of treasure. A father and son travel in post-apocalypse America. Politics and treachery in the court of Henry VIII. The lives of two women in 19th-century China. An unlikely romance between a soldier and an idealistic young woman is tested in the aftermath of 9/11. A girl sues her parents after learning they want her to donate a kidney to her sibling. An Amish teenager goes on trial, accused of having a baby, then smothering it to death. A team is dispatched to investigate the wreckage of a Soviet bomber that crashed 50 years ago, loaded with weaponized anthrax. Romance blooms between a widower and a woman who's been teaching his brother, who has Down syndrome, to live independently. The story, set mainly in northern India, of characters united by the legacy of colonialism. A cafe manager falls for a Cary Grant-like charmer, then learns he has an 11-year-old daughter. An American third-string quarterback joins the Italian National Football League's Parma Panthers. How the choices made by a North Carolina man and the neighbor with whom he falls in love play out in their lives Virgil Flowers investigates three murders in a small Minnesota town. A friendship between two women in Afghanistan against the backdrop of 30 years of war. An aspiring photographer working as a nanny has terrible visions. The entangled lives of an upstate New York couple and their best friend. Two young black men, adopted in childhood by the former mayor of Boston, encounter their birth mother and sister Stone Barrington, the New York cop turned lawyer, tracks a rogue C.I.A. agent on a Caribbean island. The dark elf Drizzt Do'Urden seeks vengeance against the orcs. Someone is out to destroy a young chef's New market restaurant, poisoning food and setting off a bomb. A woman finds a skull in her garden, while in the 1830s, a medical student tracks a killer. Nathan Zuckerman grapples with aging and desire. In Lake Wobegon, a daughter learns about her mother's secret life. Two sisters overcome their differences and claim their heritage when one returns to their North Carolina home. Another Christmas story featuring the angels Shirley, Goodness and Mercy.
Note several themes: - A large dose of wonderfulness, some of it seen in magical realism, some of it in mere exoticism.
- A fascination with Asia.
- Two different stories about Amish characters; I can tell you they're by different authors.
- Several stories emphasizing the vulnerability of babies.
technorati: books, novels, plots Labels: books, novel writing
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
Sunday, September 23, 2007
Keepin' on
According to my little chart over there on the right, I'm halfway through the first draft of my new novel after 8 weeks (really 8 weekends). My goal is really more like 90K words, not 75K, because it will allow me to cut, so I'm not celebrating yet. But it's good to make constant progress.
One of the little jokes I'm playing on myself is taking a character and situation from my recently completed (yet still to be rewritten one more time) novel about an American girl in India and using them in the new book, which has a completely different focus and setting. One of the minor characters in the India book appears in the new one. This would be a sort of shared joke with readers, except that the India novel has no readers yet.
Speaking of the India novel, it was called Dear Prudence. But my agent -- who has asked for a rewrite with a certain focus -- said the title didn't do anything for her, and she got the reference, too. So the title of that book, which I will rewrite next spring after I finish the current project, shall henceforth be Bangalored.Labels: Bangalore novel project, novel writing, Sundays
Friday, September 07, 2007
Live the life of a writer!
Via Publisher's Lunch: I was speaking to a friend recently and telling him I was going to Italy this summer with my family to work on a book there and he said, "Tell me, sometime, how one gets a lifestyle like that." I wanted to tell him that what you have to do is write for ten or twelve years not knowing if anyone else in the world will ever want to read it, and then be fortunate enough to get a book published, and have a good wife who understands your need to do that, and then be able to deal with the fact that you have about five thousand dollars' worth of bills in the in-basket, and about three thousand dollars in the bank, and you have no idea when the next dollar is coming, or where it's coming from, and you go upstairs with that worry swirling in your mind, and you sit down at a desk that has pictures of your kids on it, and you make up stories that you think will move other people ... but it didn't sound right somehow, so I just shrugged and made a joke.
For other people it's not going to a party on Saturday night and staying home and writing. For others it's looking your mom or dad in the eyes and saying you know they put you through college, and you appreciate it, but instead of going on to pharmacy school, which was their dream for you, you've decided to live in a crappy apartment someplace with your girlfriend and write a book. For others it's facing all the little madhouses inside themselves and writing about that, all the self-doubt and negative voices, all your other failures and half-successes, all the comments of the practical-minded folks you love. Or all of the above. technorati: writing, writers, lifestyle Labels: novel writing, novelists, writers
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
Sunday, August 19, 2007
The weather was beautiful, I hear
I'm not taking much advantage of the weather, but it's been extraordinary in SF just about all week long, and this weekend really took the prize -- sunny, warm, not too breezy, not too hot.
Of course, every chance I get, I'm in my underwater-green office, where the window won't even open, working on my book. You can see the progress at right, but for the sake of posterity:
- 9 work sessions over 3 weeks
- 17,011 word total to date
- I'm about 2/3 of the way through chapter 3
I'm particularly pleased that I have been able to average more than two work sessions per week. That'll really help in the long run.
In unrelated news, I ran across a family group photo from 1955, the year before I was born. Readers who have no reason to enjoy my family photos might still enjoy the period costumes, the details of which you can enjoy by clicking "All sizes."Labels: novel writing
Friday, August 17, 2007
Happily trundling onward
As you can see from the "New Novel Progress Meter" on the top right side of this blog, I am making progress. I worked for a short while today and pushed into chapter 3, with the word count over 14,000. This is not the same thing as being 15% done. As I know from my previous novel-writing projects, the first 20 or 22 thousand words are the easiest. After that I have to stop and look around and figure out where I am and where to go next.
Still -- progress.Labels: novel writing
Sunday, July 29, 2007
Good weekend
I had a good weekend working on my new book, starting off with a 6100 word first chapter. If every weekend is that productive, I wouldn't have much of a problem finishing by the end of the year, the deadline. Of course, everything will get a lot more complicated as I go along -- and it better, or the book won't be worth much. I hope the planning I've done will save time and worry.Labels: novel writing
Saturday, July 28, 2007
Started writing my new novel today
That's 2048 words down, another 85,000 or so to go. The writing seems a little flat to me, but I can correct that later -- if my deadline gives me time to do any rewriting, that is.Labels: novel writing
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
Hooked on a feeling
I don't know what the topic of the email was, but on the advertising bar of Gmail today I saw this: 
I couldn't resist clicking on it, and wound up at a site with a big advertisement for, not software, but a "course" that promised to teach how to write any book in less than a month. I was particularly tickled by the description of the "Master Writer" behind the course: Living in his luxurious English home, Nick Daws has been a full-time writer for over 12 years. He enjoys a life of holidaying with his beautiful wife, playing his part as a regional celebrity, and occasionally putting finger to keyboard to write another book. Oh, la. Eet ees almost too much to touch ze keyboard and write yet anozzer book.
Then there are some of the "WRITING SECRETS no-one has yet told you about": How to only ever write in FIVE MINUTE segments, so you never lose interest! Hey, that's just how I do my technical writing. I work for five minutes, then walk around for another five minutes, then force myself back to my desk. I'm starting to get the idea here. You can also learn:...an ingenious method of injecting instant scene setting into your books, using just two extra words. Hmm... could they be adjectives? Turning the sentence "He walked across the street" into "He walked across the windy busy street" certainly does inject instant scene-setting. Why characters are KEY to any book -- fiction and non-fiction! The course is "your key to a superior lifestyle, 'celebrity' status and industry kudos," an enlightened state further described like this: Perhaps you're doing it for fame, or the money. It could be you just want to become an industry guru and boost your career. Or it's possible you simply want to become the talking point of a party by introducing yourself as a writer. Emphasis theirs. I can just see someone reading this and imagining attending a cocktail party where people are whispering to each other "Look -- there's the writer! How I envy him!"
I read much of this out loud today at work to the other technical writers, most of whom are also in writing groups and are working on novels in their spare time. We had a pretty good chuckle. Because the fact is, we are making good money as writers -- minus the scene-setting and the characters, unless the "Transaction Tracer" or the "Report Template Creation Wizard" can be thought of as characters.
Want to really make good money as a writer? There are courses, all right -- like this. But never mind being a celebrity.Labels: novel writing, technical writing
Sunday, July 22, 2007
Bliss in my office
I've been spending the last two days in my office over at my friend Bob's house, where he rented me an entire bedroom as an office so he wouldn't have to find another roommate. There's the new chaise I got delivered yesterday so I can take naps -- very important part of my creative process. 
For much of yesterday, I worked on character backstories, creating this big timeline: 
Labels: novel writing, spaces
Saturday, July 14, 2007
Progress at the beginning
Been working on my new book -- not the India one -- still getting the characters squared away. There was one character whom I was having the hardest time getting a handle on. Every time I tried to imagine one of the other characters -- about whom I have a fairly good mental image -- interacting with this problematic character, I couldn't picture it. He was slippery like teflon.
At that point I realized that one of my characters was like a housemate I'd once had many years ago, and another was like this VP at a company I once worked at, and that I was able to call up mental images of most of the characters based on people I'd known, if only slightly. But I had the hardest time thinking of who this slippery guy might be. Then it hit me, I know exactly whom to model him on. I have a very clear image of this one guy I know and this will make working on his character so much easier.
Along the way of working on the characters, I've been inventing a lot of backstory for them: how'd they meet each other, and so forth. One of the boundaries of the book is that one character who is a software millionaire knows them all, and has invited them all up to his vacation cabin in Washington state. So I have been thinking of plausible ways all these people actually know one another.
And I've been making big-ass colorful charts with post-it notes and colored markers. That's the right-brain part of the exercise -- if I have that right. I always forget which is the right brain and which is the left. The non-practical one.Labels: characterization, novel writing
Monday, July 09, 2007
I'll take Ants in Your Pants, please
... [There is] a truth that novelists shy away from: their trade embarrasses them. When you first start making things up, you expect that someone is going to tell you to stop. Perhaps you want them to, so that you can get back to behaving like an adult, and make a living in the real world. You have to invent a character, a main character too -- readers expect it, though the notion of setting up this giant "as if" device and lugging it around with you is inherently shaming. You know your main character barely emerges from layers of solopsism, and for the longest time it -- it is an "it" before becoming a he or a she -- dangles from some part of yourself, an ugly parasite, an unviable cojoined twin.
Eventually you give it a name, in a squeamish separation ceremony, a combined amputation and baptism. Somehow this rite of passage convinces readers to accept your squirming offcut as a real person, although one who lives in an alternate universe. But you, the writer, remain ashamed of your ploy. You can hide the same, or bypass it altogether, by doing what Mischa Berlinski does -- give the main character your own name, and pretend you or your alter ego are in the business of jotting down a few facts. You fit out your book with the apparatus of nonfiction -- footnotes and a reading list. Then your publisher writes "A Novel" on the cover, and the complicity comes full circle; writer and reader sit winking at each other, and the story begins. Initially I found myself agreeing with almost none of that description of writing a novel. The strange birth metaphors, the business about shame and embarrassment as if writing a novel were a particularly unglamorous sexual fetish, the general air of revulsion -- for me, that is not what novel writing is about.
But then, in a reaction typical for me, I thought, Uh oh -- maybe that means I'm not doing it right. (Woman in Woody Allen film: "I finally had an orgasm, but my doctor said it was the wrong kind.") Should writing a novel be a wrenching process of dissociation, of revealing the worst parts of myself under the pretense of art? Would achieving that level of discomfort mean I was finally a real artist and not just a hack or dilletante writing surface-level comedy?
Then I remember the lesson of Sullivan's Travels: Sometimes people need "Ants in Your Pants of 1938" much more than they need "O Brother, Where Art Thou." Labels: novel writing
Sunday, July 08, 2007
Third draft done
I finished the third and, I hope, final draft of my novel Dear Prudence, which I started in November 2004. It's off to my agent with it, and it's on to the next project.
Update: To celebrate finishing the book, I'm doing something a little counter-intuitive -- I'm posting some chapters that I cut from the first part of the book. I think they're kind of funny. If you're a fan of my writing, maybe you'll enjoy them, even out of context.Labels: Bangalore novel project, novel writing
Saturday, July 07, 2007
Character making
Did some work on the characters for my new book today. While taking a break I talked to my friend Bob, who owns the house I rented my office in. He's a composer and non-fiction writer. "I don't know how you fiction guys do it," he said, while applying some sort of sealant to the bathroom floor tiles.
"I'm just making it up as I go along," I replied, meaning the technique, not the book. I've done each book differently, and I am trying some new stuff with this one. I'm thinking of doing my notes as a wiki this time.
But I might have answered: You just play God with the characters. Not too much, though. At a certain point, they take on a life of their own and you have to stop interfering.
I'm definitely at the starting-from-scratch God part now, though.Labels: characterization, novel writing
Friday, July 06, 2007
The medium is the mass age
Asks this provocative essay in the British Guardian: Has the masterful narrative sweep and sheer brilliance of "The Sopranos" killed the American novel?(The success of "The Sopranos") wouldn't be troubling were Americans reading other, actual novels. But they're not - at least not in the numbers they once did. An alarming study released in 2004 by the National Endowment for the Arts noted that in the last two decades the US has experienced a 10% drop-off in the reading of literature -- which they define as just one novel, story or play per year -- and a 28% drop in the key 18-24 age group.
In truth, the novel has been whacked by a number of things, starting with the decline of public education, where standardised tests stand in for cultural (and actual) literacy. Emphasis mine. Regardless of the merits of the comparison between the best television series ever made and the entire corpus of the American novel, I was struck by the writer mentioning the decline of public education. Isn't that also at the base of the decline in shared American democratic values? technorati: The Sopranos Labels: democracy, novel writing
Friday, June 29, 2007
Everybody's a critic
I found this little "blog rating" tool on Badger's site. Clearly I have not been doing my job.
What's new? Still plinking at my India novel, preparing to send it to my agent, for whom it will, I hope, be a welcome surprise. I've been mentioning it to her every few months for the last year and she may have permanently put it on the back burner of her expectations, so I hope she'll enjoy getting it.
Then I'm going to start a new project pronto-tonto. The publisher of my books of sex stories asked me earlier this year to submit a proposal for a novel, and I'm just about to sign a contract (one reason my agent has not completely forgotten me). I'll be talking more about this book in the next few months, but the operative thing is that the deadline is the first of the year. Yes, I have to write a whole novel of at least 200 pages in six months.
That shouldn't be too horribly challenging, because genre writers do it all the time. In fact, many writers of romance or crime books, both fiction and non-fiction, polish off three or four books a year. They would not be impressed with the deadline of 200 pages in 6 months. So I'm not going to complain.
Still, it should be interesting. My India novel (I'm still shilly-shallying about the title, but for now it is Dear Prudence), started as a NaNo -- a project for National Novel Writing Month. That's where you're supposed to churn out 50,000 words in the month of November. And I did get a good start -- in November, 2004. I managed to do about 20,000 words that month, but then it took me two years to work out the rest of the book, the first draft of which I finished on 28 December 2006.
I did, however, keep almost all of those first 20,000 words, which makes me think that it's not a bad idea to give people an excuse to start a novel with an artificial deadline, just to see what they turn out. But it really should be called National Novel Starting Month, because only Georges Simenon could write a novel in less than a month.
But the first of the year is now a real, not arbitrary deadline for me. I'll let you know how it goes.Labels: Bangalore novel project, novel writing
Saturday, June 23, 2007
Done - er and done - er
Still polishing up my Bangalore book, with helpful comments from friends, and itching to get on my next project. What's that next project? A novel I have a contract to write in six months. Still trying to figure out what to do with it on the web. I was talking last night with A. about trying to do character blogs for each of the seven characters in the book, somewhat similar to what Chasing Windmills does.
They are a vlog dramatic series (now on hiatus), and if you go to that link and click on each of those pictures, you'll see a character blog. Each is written by the actor who appears as a character in the series. So that's like 11 different people each doing a character blog.
I'm not so sure I could or should do seven different character blogs myself and actually write the novel. On the other hand, it might be a good exercise to get into voice and character. Perhaps if I had more than six months it would be a good idea.Labels: blogging, novel writing
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
Sunday, March 18, 2007
Novel idea
Yesterday I wrote about the queue of ideas for novels that I and other writers have, some of which we can never hope to have the time or knowledge to actually write. Here's a news story that provides a perfect inspiration for a novel. I'll even give you a title: "The Extra Man." The calamity of Asia's lost women
The killing of baby girls has led to a surplus of disaffected men who are a threat to stability
Will Hutton
Sunday March 18, 2007
The Observer
In the middle of the 19th century, an area the size of Germany located between Beijing and Shanghai in central China was run for more than 15 years by the Nian rebels, a 50,000-strong network of bandit groups who lived by pillage and rape. The inability of the Imperial armies to quell the rebellion for so long was a sign of the system's vulnerability that would eventually lead to its collapse.
Importantly, the Nian bandits were men without women, long understood in China as the principal stimulus to their rebellion and cause of their violence. They originated in a district in northern China -- Huai-pei -- where the killing of infant girls to conserve food for more economically valuable boys in response to famine had been particularly terrible.
By 1850, the official records show that there were 129 men to every 100 women, an astonishing imbalance in the ratio between the sexes. Lower-class Huai-pei peasants could not find wives; hungry, economically displaced and, in Chinese terms, 'bare branches' -- not proper men because they could not marry and father children -- they turned to banditry as providing meaning and sustenance alike.
Those womanless bandits cast a long shadow over not just today's China, but the whole of Asia. Asia is estimated to suffer from up to 100 million missing women -- aborted as fetuses or murdered in infancy because of their sex. Pakistan, erupting in protests last week against President Musharraf's anti-democratic high-handedness in suspending a senior judge, is a volatile tinderbox where the capacity for such insurrection to spread is everpresent.
Fanning the flames of injustice and Islamic fundamentalism is the country's sex imbalance. Dispossessed, displaced men with no prospect of ever finding a partner more readily take to the streets like Nian rebels; violence demonstrates masculine meaning.
In today's China, there are now 119 men for every 100 women. In some areas, the imbalance is greater than it was in Huai-pei in 1850. Earlier this year, an official Chinese report projected that by 2020, one in 10 men between 20 and 45 would be unable to find a wife. Professor Valerie Hudson of Brigham Young University in the US estimates that by 2020, there will be 28 million surplus Chinese men and 31 million surplus Indian men. More here. So, if I were going to write that novel, it would be about one guy, and his friends, in such a society. I might even put a gloss on whether it was China, India or some fictional place that mixed aspects of each. The novel would have certain comic aspects in the first half and become more and more bleak as it went along, ending with the protagonist deciding to join a terrorist group out of sheer desperation; he is quickly killed.
Free idea. Take it and run. technorati: China, surplus men, unintended consequences, India Labels: India, novel writing, writers ideas
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
|
|
Hey, look, it's my new book! Click this:
Make Nice
How They Scored
I Saw You, Ed. by Julia Wertz
(contributor)
 
Best Sex Writing 2006 (contributor)
Lesbian Camp Girls
Too Beautiful and Other Stories
How I Adore You
Sara Miles's
Jesus Freak
Bob Ostertag's
Creative Life
Liz Henry, Ed.
Wiscon Chronicles vol. 3
Andrew Zornoza's
Where I Stay
Sara Miles'
Take This Bread
A Radical Conversion
Friends
Best blogs ever
Other favorite links
My lovely publisher,
Cleis Press
News
Bloggers
Online magazines
Religion
Reference
The best webcam
|
|
wishlist
