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As promised, I’ve been working on my next book.  I hit a bit of a rough patch where I wasn’t sure how much exposition to give.  It’s a new thing for me because previously I’ve only known two different scenarios in my writing:

  1. Writing a section that is just really fun to write.
  2. Writing a section that I need to have, but am not enjoying and am just slogging through.

Needless to say, the things in category 1 are much better done than those in category 2.  The latter inevitably end up needing to be revised.

But I reached a point in my new book that was really neither.  I felt like I could go either way on this section; I could linger a bit and give some more atmospheric exposition, or I could just say what I needed to say and move along to the next part.  I’m torn about how to go–part of me wants to move on, and I have read advice for writers that says not to put in unnecessary stuff.

On the other hand, I think (and have been told by multiple readers) that my earlier stories fell into the trap of moving too quickly and not lingering enough on certain things to set the scene.  So I am inclined to spend more time on stage-setting than I ordinarily would, to try to correct for this tendency.

One thing this forces me to do is really picture the scene in my mind.  This is harder than you would think.  In the past when I have written stuff, I have had a general sketch in mind, but nothing too detailed.  This caused me to try and get away with saying some pretty vague stuff.  This way, I’ll now have a more firm idea in mind, and can communicate it better to the readers.

The scene I’m currently writing is also important because (not to give too much away) it is setting up a location that the protagonist will return to later, where the majority of the action in the story will take place.  So it’s a good opportunity for some foreshadowing, and I don’t want to miss out on that.

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So, I am currently in the early stages of writing a new book.  It’s going to be much longer than the last one–probably will end up being a novella, but maybe a novel if I’m lucky.  It’s already about as long as the longest story in my first book, and I’m still introducing the main characters and conflicts.

I’ve tried to incorporate the helpful suggestions and critiques I’ve received from my first attempt–many of which came from Blogger friend P.M. Prescott, to whom I’m very grateful. The book so far is much more like the last story in the collection,  ‘The Quarry”, in that there is more dialogue, and the dialogue is used to convey information about the characters and setting, rather than just using the description.

One of the hardest things about writing fiction is that I’ll get stuck with a certain”voice” in my head, and it gets translated to the page it permeates the whole story.  In the last collection, the “voice” was very much like H.P. Lovecraft’s, and Lovecraft rarely did dialogue.  And regardless, when you have a single authorial voice, it can make it hard to write dialogue that seems like it’s really multiple people–you have to be careful to differentiate how they speak, so it’s clear who’s who.

That is not to say there is not any description.  The other thing that I’m working on is putting a little more thought into the descriptions, to try to do a better job of painting a picture for the reader.  In previous work, I’ve consciously shied away from doing too much in the way of description, because I think that too much can bog the story down, and that sometimes the most effective way of scaring somebody is to leave some things unsaid or just hinted, so their mind fills in the blanks with the scariest things they can imagine.  But it’s a delicate balance, and I may have gone too far in the direction of vagueness before; making the scenes seem too clinical and detached.

The other thing I’m doing differently this time is what I’m doing right now: occasional blog updates on my progress.  I’ll maybe even post an excerpt or two, depending how it goes.

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What’s with these long lost stories turning up lately?  First they unearth a Harper Lee novel from somewhere, and now a Sherlock Holmes story has been found in an attic. This Gilbert and Sullivan fan hopes the Thespis score will be next, but that may be too much to hope for.

I’m expecting the next thing will be that we start uncovering works by famous classic authors that mimic modern-day ones.  Someone will find a Jane Austen manuscript about a lady being courted by a vampire, or that Edward Bulwer-Lytton wrote something about a school for wizards.

Kidding aside, what lost books/stories/other media would you hope to see discovered?

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As I promised when I reviewed the movie, I finally read Stephen King’s  novel. Interestingly, I’d say I have about the same overall opinion of it as I had of the movie: it was interesting, but very flawed.

That’s not to say, though, that they are similar–there are huge differences between the book and the movie.  Let me start with the ways I though the book was better than the movie:

  • Wendy seems like less of a shrieking idiot, and more of a fully-realized three dimensional character.
  • Mr. Halloran has more of a role to play than just “show up and die” so that Wendy and Danny can escape at the end.  The scariest part of the book was the moment when the malign influence of the Overlook briefly tries to take hold of his mind, just as they are about to escape. (However, there are also problems with Halloran’s survival–I’ll get to that.)
  • The suspense of whether or not Halloran will reach the hotel in time is very, very well done.

But then are the things the movie gets right:

  • Getting rid of the stupid attacking hedge animals–that would have been even worse on screen than on the page.
  • Also, getting rid of the wasps.  Actually, most of the hotel’s early attempts at harming the characters are pretty laughable in the book.
  • In my review of the movie, I complained that Jack Torrance seemed “like a blundering, angry buffoon”.  This is lessened in the book, but there is an even bigger problem–a problem so big I’m going to drop the bullet point format to discuss it.

The problem is that instead of Jack seeming like a buffoon, the hotel itself seems like a buffoon.  At the end, when the Overlook has almost fully possessed Jack, it forgets about its own boiler, causing it to explode.

If you accept the strong suggestion that the Overlook is a conscious entity, then this is equivalent to someone forgetting to make his heart beat. This makes the hotel seem less scary and more of an obnoxious idiot.  Which is even worse than Torrance seeming like an obnoxious idiot.

Then there was the problem of Mr. Halloran’s survival.  I was sort of conflicted about this, because I really liked the character; but in the movie the fact that he is killed by the possessed Jack makes the supernatural forces seem like a more credible threat. In the book his survival cheapens the haunted hotel’s powers even more.

Finally, the other thing that annoyed me were the repeated references to Poe’s Masque of the Red Death. I felt like it was suffering the same problem I noted in the movie Prometheus and its references to Lawrence of Arabia: “this story isn’t so great–maybe inserting a few bits from something better will spruce it up.”

Both the book and the movie had interesting concepts in them, but neither one quite works. I read that King apparently disliked the Kubrick movie so much he backed a miniseries that was more faithful to the book.  I’ve yet to see it–I’d be curious to see how it handles the hedge animals.

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There are two books I consider to be “Great American Novels”, and one of them is To Kill a Mockingbird. (The other, by the way, is A Confederacy of Dunces.)

So you might think I’d be excited that a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird is being released. But I’m not.  It strikes me as bizarre, more than anything else.  Supposedly, Harper Lee wrote this book–entitled Go Set a Watchman–prior to Mockingbird.  According to Wikipedia: “It was set aside when her editor suggested that she write another novel from the young Scout Finch’s perspective. The manuscript was then lost for many years, until being rediscovered by her lawyer in the fall of 2014.”

Now, how could they possibly misplace the sequel to one of the most famous books written in the last half-century for this long? If that’s actually true, it suggests that somebody screwed up royally. This article says “Lee’s lawyer found it affixed to an original typescript of To Kill a Mockingbird.” Huh. An original typescript of To Kill a Mockingbird. Where was this typescript? Something like that would very valuable, even if it had no other forgotten sequel attached to it.  So I would presume it would have been kept somewhere safe in the years since Mockingbird became one of the most famous books in the world.  And I would think whoever was keeping it would have been careful to keep it in good condition, and thus noticed the other book attached to it long before now.

But it seems crazy to me that, even after it became one of the most widely-read books in American history, even after it was made into an award-winning movie, Lee’s editor never thought to say “hey, what about that other book you were working on? Since evidence suggests people like your writing, maybe you ought to give that one a go.”

It strikes me as very, very hard to imagine that people in the book business are that sloppy.

So, what else might have happened?  Did Harper Lee get conned into agreeing to release something she didn’t want to release, as this article suggests? Did they have somebody else write it and have Lee agree to put her name on it?  I have no idea, but the whole thing looks weird.

That being said, I’ll probably buy the book.

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For Christmas I received a book called “How to Read Literature Like a Professor”, by Thomas Foster. The title is self-explanatory I suppose, but it serves as an introduction to literary analysis.  The main point he makes is that it’s all about pattern recognition–an analysis of a given “text” (“text” being used in the academic sense of “anything”) is done by recognizing that this character is like this myth, or legend, or that this weather symbolizes that state of mind.

It is not a bad book, although I think I might already be doing what Foster describes.  Feel free to read through any of my posts critiquing books, movies or video games and see if you agree–I tend to remark when a given story or character reminds me of another one.

It’s probably true of any field, not just literature, that pattern recognition is they key to being good at it.  That’s why I love studying history; you start to see recurring behavior patterns and possibly even can learn something from them.  Being able to notice when thing x is like thing y is a highly important skill.  It’s also a relatively easy one to develop–all you need to do is see a lot of stuff and remember it.

One claim Foster makes is that “there is only one story” in the world, and it’s about “everything”.  This is the sort of statement that’s so generic and unfalsifiable it seems useless.  And yes, I know about Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, and the “monomyth”.  I don’t doubt that the vast majority of stories share the same fundamental theme (I’ve even blogged about it), but I think saying there is only one oversimplifies, and saying it’s about “everything” is just a cop-out.  The Masque of the Red Death and Watership Down are totally not the same story.

That’s not to say it’s a bad book; Foster’s writing is light and witty, and he seems like he would be a fun guy with whom to chat about books. As you can doubtless tell, I enjoy that sort of thing.

One thing I’ve been thinking about lately is how much better the world might be if armchair analysts of literature–myself included–would redirect their powers of analysis towards things like politics or current affairs.  Imagine what could happen if people could only look at society with the same detached, logical and rigorous search for patterns that they apply to fictional narratives and characters.

I know people–heck, I think I’m one of them–who love morally interesting and complex stories, who is fascinated by exploring possible motivations of the characters in a story–and then turns around and makes simplistic judgments or assertions about real world events and people.  I sometimes think if I were as good at applying my critical faculties to real-life as at literature, I’d be better off.

Anyway, rant over–it’s still an enjoyable book, and despite what I’ve said here, I’m sure I won’t be giving up my fondness for the parlor game that is literary analysis anytime soon.

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I don’t know about you, but I find stupid protagonists in stories to be annoying.  And there’s nothing more irritating than seeing an obvious plot twist coming down the pike, and having the hero not realize it. This happens in several of Lovecraft’s stories, and I find it to be a real mood-killer.

I assumed for a long time that everyone was like this.  But then it occurred to me that maybe some readers enjoy that.  There is a certain satisfaction, I guess, in seeing what is going to happen before the characters do.  You can feel like you are smarter than somebody else, even if they are only a fictional character.  (Having never experienced that first-hand, I wouldn’t know if it’s much fun.)

Personally, I like to be surprised by a story. Which do you prefer: the comfort and satisfaction of knowing what’s coming, or the fun of being surprised by plot twists?

 

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I received an absolutely wonderful book as a gift from a friend today.  It is called The Empire Striketh Back, a re-telling of the story of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back as if it were written by William Shakespeare.  It is actually written by Ian Doescher, and I must say he did a marvelous job translating the film’s script into the language of the Bard.

There are so many things to love about this–it had me hooked from the “Dramatis Personae” page, done perfectly in the style of the plays.  And then the language–well! Let me quote a little bit of the first scene, just to give you an idea:

LUKE:  If flurries be the food of quests, snow on,

Belike upon this Hoth, this barren rock,

My next adventure waits.

It is really quite splendid.  Probably would have made the movies better if Lucas’s rather awkward dialogue had been re-written this way. I highly recommend it to anyone who has seen the movie (and who hasn’t?) I haven’t enjoyed a parody of Great Literature this much since reading The Classics Reclassified. I highly recommend it.

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There was a good show on PBS last night about George Plimpton, of which the above video is an excerpt.  As I have said before, I love his most famous book, Paper Lion, about his time as the “last-string” quarterback for the Detroit Lions. I also enjoyed his book Open Net about playing goalie for the Boston Bruins.

That’s really only the tip of the Plimpton iceberg, though. It would probably be faster to list all the things he didn’t do in life, but just read the Wikipedia synopsis of his career. I don’t think he could ever be accused of not living life to the fullest.

The thing that gets forgotten in the talk of the guts Plimpton had to try (and fail) all these difficult activities, is the fact that he was also a truly great writer.  I recommend Paper Lion even to people who don’t care about football in the least, simply because it is so well-written.