10 posts from 2007

I stole this from Cori -- thanks :)

Hardback or trade paperback or mass market paperback?
I prefer trade paperbacks, but since I buy most of my books secondhand, I'll take what I can get. My biggest gripe is the lack of margins in books -- I'm a note jotter, and I LOVE big wide margins for writing. I'd like to publish a line of books printed in just this manner.

Amazon or brick and mortar?
Brick & mortar.

Barnes & Noble or Borders?
I like Barnes & Noble. However, I have a couple of used bookstores that I much prefer to either. Burwood Books (Beatrice, NE) is housed in the historic Burwood Hotel downtown, a beautiful turn of the century place with three stories of used books. The Antiquarian in Omaha's Old Market District is much the same. Stacks of books everywhere, really reasonable prices. My only gripe is The Antiquarian's regular clientele smoke. A lot.

Bookmark or dogear?
Bookmark, usually of a haphazard variety: a kleenex, a gum wrapper, a leaf, or a grocery list will do. I've made beautiful bookmarks for friends & family for Christmas, but I usually don't have one.

Alphabetize by author or alphebetize by title or random? 
Maybe this is part of my problem. They're all grouped by subject: Great Plains literature, Native American literature, horror, short story collections, anthologies, 18th century British, 19th century American, etc...  

Keep, throw away, or sell? 
Keep. Unless I really really hate a book, it'll be mine forever. 

Keep dustjacket or toss it? 
I always keep them, but I flatten them and keep them on the top shelf. Just in case I end up with an accidental collectible :) 

Read with dustjacket or remove it?
I can't read with a dust jacket. 

Short story or novel? 
I love them all. I Iove the short story form -- so compact, so forceful. It's just beautiful how tiny details can paint a complete picture. But... when you find a novel that is fantastic, it's so lovely to get lost in that world and be able to stay there for days and weeks. 

Collection (short stories by same author) or anthology (short stories by different authors)?
Again, I love them all! Collections are great when you're trying to get a feel for a particular author, pick up his idiosynchrasies and figure out "what's it all mean?!" Anthologies, though... of course you can never completely trust that you won't get an editor with an agenda, but the quality of literature in an anthology gives a really high bang for your buck. If you can only have one book, make it a Norton Anthology that's 4 inches thick!

Harry Potter or Lemony Snicket?  
 I've never read Lemony Snicket. I did love the Harry Potter series, but I'm glad to see it wound up.  

Stop reading when tired or at chapter breaks?
I just stop whenever. I carry my books around with me, so I may read a half page while waiting in line, or 43 pages while eating my lunch.

"It was a dark and stormy night" or "Once upon a time"?

"Dark and stormy!"

Buy or Borrow?
Depends on the book. I buy fiction and non-fiction related to things I'm especially interested in. I borrow non-fiction for research and school.

New or used? 
I love to sniff new books, but I love a used book too. I never buy one that stinks of basement though. 

Buying choice: book reviews, recommendation or browse? 
I'll take any kind of recommendation, even if it's only a pretty cover.

Tidy ending or cliffhanger?
Tidy endings.

Morning reading, afternoon reading or nighttime reading? 
I read during carpooling, read at lunch, read while I'm eating, read in the bathtub, read before bed. 

Favorite series? 
Harry Potter, probably. I don't do many series. I remember liking the Green Mile series by Stephen King. 

Favorite book of which nobody else has heard?
Ada the Ayrshire. :) This was a cartoon that ran in my farmer father's favorite magazine, "The Grass & Grain." We had an Ada comic book, and over the years, I never knew what happened to it. But at Burwell Books one afternoon, you could have knocked me over with a feather when I looked down and saw a copy of Ada. It cost 10 cents and is a priceless memento of my childhood. My kids think I'm odd. Who else would get so attached to a cow-comic?

Favorite books read last year? 
The Road, by Cormac McCarthy; The Shawl, by Cynthia Ozick; Rachel Calof's Story, Rachel Calof; Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman. 

Favorite books of all time? 
On Writing, and Misery, Stephen King; Walden, Henry David Thoreau; The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck; My Antonia, Willa Cather;  

When you have one of those days when nothing wants to go on the paper, this is a good way to loosen things up. It only take a few  minutes and works surprisingly well.

To start: You need two characters and a basic setting. Do this fast, without giving yourself too much time to overthink it. The point is to try to get the rhythm of it. When I first set this down, I don't even attribute the lines, just basic dialogue & a few bits of setting. Have fun!

1. Character A speaks. Must be less than 6 words.
2. Character B does not speak; instead, describe an action that he/she performs.
3. Character A speaks one line.
4. Character B responds less than 3 sentences.
5. Character A answers one line.
6. Character B responds less than 3 sentences.
7. Character A gesture.
8. Character B speaks less than 3 sentences while performing some action.
9. Character A speaks a line beginning with "I remember . . . "
10. Character B responds with less than 2 lines.
11. Character A asks a question.
12. Character B speaks a line beginning with "I used to believe . . . "
13. Describe character A and some object from the setting, either A is doing something, or the object relates to A somehow.
14. Character A speaks one line.
15. Describe Character B's actions when he/she doesn't respond.
16. Character A speaks a line beginning with "I never" or "I always."
17. Character B speaks one line.
18. Character A speaks one line; describe the action while he says it.

There you have it. Easy-peasy. As Anne Lamott tells us, all first drafts are shitty, so here's my shitty first draft. Later I'll post revisions, and we'll see how we progressed from this to that.

So, here's the exercise:

A: "I thought you weren't coming."
    Jane dropped her bags in a heap on the floor and flopped into the chair, covering her face with her hands.
A: "Looks like you had a fantastic day."
B" "My God, Neil. My life is turning to shit and I can't seem to get myself out. I've been fighting with Bill all day over the phone."
A: "Do tell."
B: "Oh, it's really the usual. His inability to commit, his lack of attentiveness, his aversion to family and convention. Really, you must be tired of hearing this?"
    Neil cleared his throat.
B: "I'm sorry to bore you." Jane leaned forward in her chair, taking Nail's hand in hers. "You're perfect. Tell me the secret of finding a perfect, normal man."
A:   "I remember you before you met him. You weren't so keen on convention then, remember?"
B: "But I love him, Neil. That's the difference. Now I want to be utterly conventional."
A: "Don't you think you need a c onventional man for that?"
B: "I used to believe that eventually I'd find someone who was perfect for me, you know? Now I'm beginning to doubt it."
    Neil picked up his pen from the table between them, holding the tortoise-shell barrel between his pale fingers. "Want me to write you a happy ending?"
    Jane gave him a wan smile and sighed. She slid her ring over the knuckle and then back, over and over as the silence stretched out.
A: "You'll never guess who I saw at the farmer's market this week. I went to get some arugula and tomatoes,and I happened to see your sister. She was buying goat cheese."
B: "You never met my sister . . . did you?"

Anyway, that's my shitty first draft :)

The Road (Oprah's Book Club)

Cormac McCarthy

Wow. Just wow. I  stumbled across a copy of Cormac McCarthy's latest book in a used bookstore the other day. $1. I didn't even hesitate; how can you go wrong for a buck? Did I ever get my dollar's worth! I went in to take a bath, took the bath, and came out 3 hours later, prune-fingered and goosebumped and wrapped in my flannel robe, and sat down to start The Road over again.

Assignment: Write a quick sketch of a character using only the voice of your main character to relate a situation. This should, of course be in the first person point of view, and it should lend deeper insight into the character, perhaps deeper than even the character realizes.

You show me yours, and I'll show you mine! :D

Here's mine, and I hope you'll forgive me for reading Dashiell Hammett, because my character seems like he wants to be one of his characters:

    About seven o’clock, I told Harry to pour me one more for the ditch. He snickered at that – Harry always says I’m one hell of a wit – and poured me another Scotch. “Gonna be late for dinner again,” he says to me. What a cut-up, that Harry.
    “If you think my wife tells me where to shoulder the wheel and when to push, Harry, you better think again,” I says. “You just better think again.” It was an inside joke, see? All us regulars down at the Harbor Lights – Howard, Stewie, Frank, Ray, and me, Jack – worked hard, and by God, if a man wants a belt at the end of another day, then he'll have one, and who in hell is his wife to tell him  any different? “My wife,” I snorted.
    Now I didn’t say this to Harry, because this was before his time at the Harbor Lights, but my wife used to think just that way, just the way he said. Of course I never stood for it, never changed my ways, but she kicked up a fuss for a while, always with her nagging, always on about my drinking. “I earn that drink, Irene,” I says to her then. “You want to run this household? Want to take a turn working every day? Let's just see how you like waiting tables at the Rise ‘n Shine, wetting your panties if someone leaves you a quarter tip. Maybe you can even sell Avon if people ain’t too scared of your ugly phizz. Or,” I says, “maybe you can learn to shut your effing pie hole for one lousy second, put the goddamned dinner on the goddamned table, and act the way a wife is supposed to act.”
    Of course, she saw it my way. Deep down, see, she knew I was right. I may not be a saint, but I gave her a good house, a good life, and she never had to dirty her hands with no job neither. “Hell,” I told her, “I should be so lucky!” Plenty of times I wished I could tell that idiot boss of mine, Louie Carmichael, that I was quitting his lousy job. There’s plenty of work for a guy like me, twenty years in city maintenance. But did I do that? No. And why? Because I had an obligation to her and the kid. Everything I did was for her and the kid, and all I asked was dinner on the table and a quiet evening in a clean house. Is that too much to ask? Is that too fucking much to ask? I didn’t think so.
    When my drink was gone, I got my coat and left. The damn car would be cold now that it was dark, but the house wasn’t far, and Thursday night meant chili – proper chili with no beans in. Backing out, I saw a note she’d left on the seat of the car that morning. It said to pick up hamburger. “Ha!” I says to myself, “What?! I’m your fucking errand boy, now? I’ve gotta take time outta my busy day for this?” Well, Irene, my sweet, I wasn’t stopping anywhere, and woe is you if my supper wasn’t ready because of no hamburger. Woe is you.
    But usually we got on fine, just fine. There was that time with the busy body neighbor of ours though, the one who couldn’t help sticking her nose in our business. She was one of those women’s libbers, see? She took a mind to get my Irene to join up, always inviting Irene to women’s libber meetings or trying to drag her to classes at the junior college or asking her out to lunch. Well, of course, I had to put my foot down, didn’t I? My dad's day, women knew their place. Nothing but trouble, all these stirred-up women nowadays. “Absolutely not,” I tells her. “No wife of mine is going to a women’s lib meeting. You don't know how good you got it, Irene. I give you everything you need, and you still want to run around all day playing liberated woman. Well, Irene, play just a little bit more and you’re gonna be so goddamned liberated that you won’t know which end is up! Now, get my dinner.” And who could argue with that? Really, who could argue with that, now?
    I parked in the driveway and saw that Irene had forgotten the damn porch light again. “Monkeys is easier to train,” I says to her, time and time again. “Can’t you just remember the light? How’s it look when a wife can’t even be bothered to leave a light on for her loving husband when he works late?” She always swore she'd do better. “Irene!” I hollered. “What? I can see in the dark? Turn on the light now, Irene!” Nothing. Christ. I'd never raised a hand to her, but God knows she tests me. I dug around in my pocket until I had my keys, but as I grabbed the door handle to unlock it, the door pushed right in. “What the fuck?” I whispered. This wasn’t right, not right at all. “Irene? Answer me, Irene!” My God, what if we’d been robbed? Irene wasn’t bright enough to call Emergency, not strong enough to fight anybody off.
    And, ah God, I was right! Robbed! Everything was gone, everything. I stood in the middle of the family room, turning around and around, speechless for once. The place looked like the day Irene and I moved in, all white walls and green shag, before we had a life here. Or anywhere. I yelled again, but she wasn’t answering. Maybe she was hurt! Maybe tied up! But I walked from room to room, and all the rooms were the same – empty. There was one thing left though. In the kitchen, I saw a bottle standing up on the counter, and I knew right away what it was – Dewar’s Scotch – and that it shouldn’t be there. No thief would leave Scotch behind, but there it was. Underneath the Scotch was a note, in Irene’s handwriting. After all I’d done for her, it had come to this. “I don’t believe it,” I said. “I just don’t fucking believe it.”
    Up in the cupboard, I saw she was kind enough to leave one highball glass, thank you so much! So I pour myself a double. Why not? No need to stand on formality now, was there? Who was going to complain about my drinking now? Just who was going to complain? I sat at the kitchen table, surrounded by that God-forsaken Cathy® wallpaper that Irene loved so much, scotch in one hand and crumpled note in the other. And this is where I’m going to stay, too. When Irene comes back, and she will be back, I’ll be sitting here at the table, waiting for my dinner. And woe is her when she gets home. Woe is her.

Diary - Chuck Palahniuk
The Collected Short Stories of Weldon Kees
Red Harvest - Dashiell Hammett
One Thousand Acres - Jane Smiley

I'm taking a fiction-writing workshop this fall. Two friends of mine and I enrolled in the same section and swore that we wouldn't ridicule each other. We're all terrified creative writing majors who have a deep-seated fear that we are not, in fact, creative. We are convinced of this because we read so much; we are convinced that all the good ideas have been used before, used better, or used up. We enrolled to prove ourselves wrong.

Class opened today with a reading by Anne Lamott, with the subtle title of "Shitty First Drafts," a portion of which says, "For me and  most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really, shitty first drafts." Jesus, what a brilliant piece of writing! Talk about soothing our fears and reassuring us that, yes, in fact, we are shitty writers, but everyone is shitty in the first draft. Ah, what a relief!

For those who may not have read the essay before, here is the link here. A wonderful piece for the blocked artist :)

Also, a quick note about the text. Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft is a great book! It's full of useful ideas, interesting exercises, examples, and inspiration; however, unlike The Artist's Way, it doesn't have a proscribed method it asks you to follow, and it is much less pretentiously artsy. If you're a writer who just wants to write without being caught up in an endless cycle of affirmations and quasi-spiritual explorations, this is the book you want to guide you.

One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd: A Novel

Jim Fergus

One Thousand White Women is a 1998 novel by Jim Fergus, known most for his writing world for Sports Afield magazine and other sporting life. In his preface, Fergus explains the how his novel was born:

In 1854 at a peace conference at Fort Laramie, a prominent Northern Cheyenne chief requested of the U.S. Army authorities the gift of one thousand white women as brides for his young warriors. Because theirs is a matrilineal society in which all children born belong to their mother's tribe, this seemed to the Cheyennes to be the perfect means of assimilation into the white man's world -- a terrifying new world that even as early as 1854, the Native American clearly recognized held no place for them. Needless to say, the Cheyenne's request was not well received by the white authorities -- the peace conference collapsed, the Cheyennes went home, and, of course, the white women did not come. In this novel they do.

The book is written as a collection of journals and letters written by a woman named May Dodd, the daughter of a well-to-do industrialist in Chicago, who is unlucky enough to find the love of her life in a common laborer named Harry Ames. Since her wealthy family will never hear of a mismatched marriage of this type, she simply moves in with Harry, taking factory work herself and giving birth to two children. For this very public disobedience, May's father has her committed to an asylum. Her disease: promiscuity.

When given a chance at earning her freedom through the "Brides for Indians" program, May leaps to sign up, and on the journey to Laramie the reader is introduced to a group of "brides" that includes fallen Confederate debutantes, common criminals, immigrants, artists, religious zealots, orphans, a runaway slave, and genuinely ill mental inmates. Throughout, Fergus uses a plain-spoken, yet rarely crude, conversational tone, perfectly adapted to the letters and journal entries of an educated but irreverent and independent woman with nothing to lose. Characters are sketched subtly but vividly over the course of the book, especially through the use of phonetic renderings of language, leaving the reader, near the end, with the desire not only to know, "What happened to May?" but really to know, "What happened to all of them?"

While this book, because of the nature of the plot and the well-known outcome of Indian/Cavalry relations, certainly will have no sequel, I can still remain hopeful that Jim Fergus has or will publish more. His knowledge of and obvious affection for the Great Plains and all her species, both four- and two-legged, makes his prose a joy to read.

A link to an interesting Authorlink interview here.

Patricia Marx is a longtime writer -- Harvard Lampoon, Saturday Night Live, New Yorker -- but only recently did she write her first novel, a romantic comedy entitled Him Her Him Again The End of Him. She says that she was urged by her friend, photographer Richard Avedon (you mean you aren't friends with a world-renowned photog? What's the matter with  you?) to write the novel as an expression of her own personal voice, something she says she has never before allowed.

This brings up a good question for everyone who wants to write. Do you write the voice in your head, or is the voice a construct? I'm sure it depends a lot on the situation. Whoever read an English Lit final written in the author's natural voice? However, writers of fiction take note: Marx thinks that her natural voice allows readers to identify better with the character, makes it feel less staged. Hell, she didn't even give this main character a name. Why? Because, as a fellow writer, Marx is bothered by the "contrivance."

Which leads to another question: isn't the entire thing a contrivance, even if your characters have no names, even if you write in a natural voice? The answer is, of course, that it is a contrivance. But the less obvious the staging is, the gauzier the veil between the reader and the character, the better the book. Stream of consciousness was intended to remove the veil completely. Of course, any reader of Ulysses can tell you that the endeavor is not completely successful. In my opinion there is no way to seamlessly interject a characters thoughts and actions into a reader's head. For example, Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway was one of the first to use the technique, but although I might sympathize with her thoughts on postwar England, I cannot completely immerse myself in the time or the place. A modern reader may simply be too far removed from the setting.

Although I agree with Marx that finding your own voice is not only important, but possibly vital to success, I think there are limits on the positive effects to be achieved. Improved writing, better characters, and verisimilitude will all result, but I think is unrealistic to hope to completely absorb the reader. Entertain, distract, engage, or even enthrall a reader -- yes. But completely transport -- no. Sadly, no.