A week in the writing life of Brian

I didn't write much this week, about an hour each morning. I spent the weekend at my parents' house and it's impossible to write there. I'm not sure why. I could have stolen away an hour or two, locked myself in a room. Maybe it's the sense that there's someone just outside the door, even if there isn't. A muscle memory from growing up, when one of my brothers could burst in at any moment. Even though we are now (nearly) old enough to be past that point, old memories die hard.

I've been tormented by a book called The Anatomy of Story, by John Truby. It's primarily about screenwriting, but it translates perfectly to novels. It's made me re-think everything about my book, and has left me marginally paralyzed. Truby argues that every good story goes through a series of basic steps, and if your story doesn't have these steps, it will fail. I'd like to dismiss this as a bunch of overthinking gobbledygook, but I can't. Because he's right.

I've been writing a lot with my sweatshirt hood on. Not because it's cold but because it blocks out Jersey, who always sits just at the corner of my vision field, pretending not to stare at me. She's distracting, that cat. Chester's technique is more simple and earnest; he just comes up and nudges his nose into my thigh.

I read two novellas by Jim Harrison -- Legends of the Fall and Revenge. Both of these 100-page stories were made into decent movies. Now blast those images of Brad Pitt and Kevin Costner out of your head: these stories are like Hemingway concentrate. So stripped down and far-reaching is Harrison's prose, the novellas read almost like synopses, but beautiful synopses. Writers are supposed to show and not tell but Harrison tells, with very little in dialogue or scene. It works because everything fits together in a way that propels the reader forward. And it works because nothing is extraneous; every line is a poem.

Stephen King published a story in this week's New Yorker. I read the story and it was okay. It's biggest attribute was that it wasn't too long like everything else in the magazine. Sometimes I wish I could be stranded on a deserted island with nothing but a subscription to The New Yorker. Only then could I ply the depths of all the articles, stories and poems before the next week's edition came out. I thought it was strange that Stephen King would publish there considering his aversion to literary snobbery but I Googled the situation and realized he's published a bunch of stories in The New Yorker, including some of the ones in his recent collection, Just After Sunset. If you pick up that collection, read the story about the guy who gets trapped in a porta-potty. Who hasn't thought of that happening? And why didn't I think to write a story about it? It's also worth noting that The New Yorker only publishes stories by authors who have a book coming out that month, and SK's 1,000-word tome Under the Dome comes out today.

And finally, I was stuck while trying to write yesterday and I picked up You Shall Know Our Velocity! and turned the page to the exact passage --finally -- I'd been looking for for the past two years, idly now and then, whenever I came across the book on the shelf. The part I was thinking of only turned out to be a paragraph instead of a dozen pages as I'd pictured it in my head; so largely does an image loom when we long to return to it. I don't know why this particular page resonated with me so much that I'd remember to look for it years later. It's hard to know why certain sentences, after all the words we've read, stick with us, sometimes forever. I think it's because we've experienced an event or a feeling just the way the author describes it. It might be a small moment (the scene I mention is just a guy hopping from rock to rock for no reason at all), but you've been there, somewhere, as a kid perhaps, and when a stranger explains something you experienced, or at least the way you'd like to remember it, it feels like magic.

Where to begin...

It’s happened to us all. You settle into bed, crack the spine on a new book, flip to the beginning and -- what’s this? -- the author wants you to read a few pages before the story even starts. Enter the prologue. A prologue is designed to give the reader information that is, at least least in the author’s opinion, essential for understanding the main story. It could be a scene that illustrates a powerful backstory, but happens long before the rest of the book starts; or a part of the story told in a different point of view from the rest of the book. Or, the prologue can just be a teaser to hook the reader with the promise of more exciting things to come.

So, is the prologue another tool in the writer’s chest that, if used properly, can add new dimension to your novel? Or is it just another item on the Long List of Things Writers Should Avoid at All Costs Even Though a Lot of Popular Writers Do It And No One Seems to Mind?

The experts, of course, are mixed. According to this Writer’s Digest article, agents hate prologues because they see it as a lazy way to insert backstory; a more skilled writer would find a way to weave it into the rest of the narrative. But if that’s the case, why do so many wildly successful books have prologues? Peruse the NYT bestseller list and I’d bet you’d find that over half the novels have prologues.

There are times when prologues work well. Say you have a story about a rogue virus that takes over the world. Before you get to your protagonist’s little story, you want to show firsthand what it’s like for someone to get the virus and suffer horribly. And since the entire story is told in the hero’s point of view (and he doesn’t get the virus), you tell it in first person, in a prologue.

As a reader, I’m not a fan of prologues. It’s a big commitment to start a book, and it takes some time to get into the story. A prologue essentially forces you to start the book twice, and often it feels like just one more barrier to getting lost in a story. But as I’m re-writing my own manuscript, lately I’ve found myself leaning toward including a prologue. I have a backstory scene that makes for a dramatic start to my novel, but it happens out of sequence with the rest of the narrative, and it wouldn’t be as powerful if I weaved it in through flashback. But I need to be honest with myself. Am I putting the scene into prologue because it’s the only way it makes sense, or am I doing it because my real first chapter isn’t exciting enough?

The problem is, these days, not even established writers can get away with Dickensian introductions and long chunks of backstory. Today’s readers want to get in media res right away, or they’re gonna drop you as fast as they can type in their Facebook password. Agents know this, so they look for a first chapter (or prologue) that snares you like a treble hook. As a consequence, the first chapter – or more likely the first page or the first sentence – is all the agent’s going to read before making his decision. So I need to make it count. Which brings me back to my dilemma: do I include a prologue that starts with a bang, but risks turning off the agent and readers for the sole reason it exists, or do I start slower but weave everything into the main story?

How about you, LB readers? Think about the books you’ve enjoyed... prologue or no prologue?

Double-blind Word Cloud

I created a "word cloud" of my novel, Double-blind, at wordle.net. I discovered this site a few weeks ago and it's already provided me with hours of entertainment. The way it works is the cloud gives more prominence to the words that appear most frequently in the text. I pasted my entire manuscript into the word-cloud generator. And, for reasons I'm not sure I can articulate, I substituted my hero's and villain's names with "Harry" and "Voldemort."

You can generate an endless array of random clouds, but I like this one because it shows all of the main character's problems hovering above him like a literal rain cloud.

Published! (?)

It's a monumental event in my writing career: I had a story accepted for publication! Don't get too excited (though I certainly did); the story is only twenty-one words long. As I mentioned in this post, I submitted to Robert Swartwood's Hint Fiction Anthology, which will be published next year by W.W. Norton & Company. Out of over 2500 submissions, my story was selected to be among 125 in the book. The coolest part is I will share the pages with some big-name authors, from Joyce Carol Oates to Peter Straub. I mean, you could read JCO's story and turn the page and see Brian Crawford (perhaps the editor will go in chronological order but for some reason use JCO's middle name, and Crawford will be next; or maybe he'll group all the dark stories together, and since my story is dark and JCO's is bound to be -- she wrote Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? for God's sake -- we will be forever linked. 

What's more, I get paid for it. Twenty-five bucks. Not bad, more than a dollar a word. Now, if I could just get that rate for Double-blind, I'd have seventy grand.

Also, check out this MSNBC video about the anthology... Robert comes on toward the end. 

WWDDD?

I've officially started rewriting my manuscript (based on the editor's feedback). I have a ton of work to do, so I'm trying to focus on one piece at a time and not get overwhelmed.

My most weighty task is to reinvent my main character. Beginning writers often try too hard to make their hero likable. Newbies think they need to make the protagonist morally above everyone around him. This doesn't make the hero likable; it makes him boring. I am guilty of this with the lead character of Double-blind. There are interesting -- and often horrifying -- things going on all around him, but my protagonist often slips into the role of a decent, even-keeled, passive observer. Who wants to read about some passive goody two-shoes?

Take Don Draper from the TV show Mad Men. He repeatedly cheats on his wife. He neglects his kids. He lies to everyone. He's mean to his employees. He drinks and smokes too much. But we all root for him. We all love him. I mean, my wife really loves him.

So, as I'm revamping my character, I shouldn't be asking myself what I would do. What would Don Draper do?

A web log entry has been posted for perusal by the intended readers

I wasn't sure what to blog about this morning -- until my beloved Wall St. Journal came to the rescue. There it was, right on the front page: an article about the Plain English Campaign, a 30-year-old group whose goal is to stem "the ever-growing tide of confusing and pompous language" that "takes away our democratic rights."

Sign me up. SIGN ME UP. I still remember the patronizing sting I felt in college while watching an infomercial featuring a "live" audience. Halfway through the product demonstration, a message flashed across the bottom of the screen: "observers have been remunerated."  Now that's just pretentious and uncalled for. Were the producers hoping that anyone watching an infomercial at 2:00 a.m. wouldn't know that they meant "we paid a fake audience to act impressed"? 

And I won't even go into how often I see something like this at work: "this strategic initiative was chartered in order to design, develop and implement key functional processes in a collaborative effort to obtain operational excellence" (I didn't make that up).

According to the WSJ article, the Plain English Campaign's latest foe is the financial industry, where, founder Chrissie Maher argues, there can be real consequences from the use of bloated and ambiguous language -- such as "families losing their homes because of jargon-filled credit agreements."

Learn more at the Campaign's website, and be sure to check out the Golden Bull awards and the hilarious before and after examples, such as:

Before
Your enquiry about the use of the entrance area at the library for the purpose of displaying posters and leaflets about Welfare and Supplementary Benefit rights, gives rise to the question of the provenance and authoritativeness of the material to be displayed. Posters and leaflets issued by the Central Office of Information, the Department of Health and Social Security and other authoritative bodies are usually displayed in libraries, but items of a disputatious or polemic kind, whilst not necessarily excluded, are considered individually.

After

Thank you for your letter asking for permission to put up posters in the library. Before we can give you an answer we will need to see a copy of the posters to make sure they won't offend anyone.

Speaking of offending people... while some gobbledygook is clearly deliberate and malevolent obfuscation (sorry), more often, people write this way to make sure their message won't offend anyone. One of my favorite examples is posted on every SF Muni bus (the pantheon of non-offensiveness).  A metal sign, tacked behind each driver, reads:

"Information gladly given but safety requires avoiding unnecessary conversation."  

What? Come on, it's a tough world out there. We can handle "Don't chat with the driver."

Top 20 of the last 10

Over at the literary blog, The Millions, they've counted down a list of the best fiction of the millennium (so far). Out of the 20 books listed, I've only finished Middlesex, Atonement and The Road, all of which were awesome. The top two books on the list, The Known World and The Corrections, I quit reading after about 50 pages. As for the rest of the list, I suppose at some point I'll read The Brief, Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao -- even though I can't stand footnotes -- and I've been dying to read Gilead. But beyond that, nothing jumps out at me.

Leaf Blowerers, have you read any of the books on the list? Any recommendations?