Riding the Revision Trail

After many days or weeks of writerly slovenliness, Puntitas has done some revision. Last night, she worked on one of the poems she’s been revising lately, the one she discovered to be absolutely incoherent ten years after it was finished. The changes are still more than surface-level editing, but they’re no longer about changing the whole direction of the piece. After last night’s session, Puntitas thinks the poem will change very little from now on.

Today she also worked on a nonfiction prose piece she considered done. Its “done”-ness was determined ten years ago, so Puntitas believed it prudent to read it before launching it into the world.

As far as revisions go, most of what Puntitas did was surface-level, cutting wordiness, getting details to match up, clarifying vagueness, and removing repetition. While she’s happy with that work, she’s not willing to say the piece is done. Her plan had been to read the piece from beginning to end without tinkering, but she started to notice the sort of little glitches that are easy to forget, so she tinkered as she went along, losing all sense of the voice and tension of the piece. She’ll need to read it again in a day or two because she isn’t sure that the narrator’s central problem is clearly set up, explained, or resolved. The sections that are supposed to do that may not do enough and may commit the additional sin of interfering with pacing.

On a personal level, the piece made Puntitas cry, not that her writing is particularly moving, rather that the problem is still unresolved for her, a state of things which she knows, but was not expecting to react to so strongly. The piece may require an objective reader after some revision.

Puntitas reads _The Link_ by C. Tudge.

Real Adventures Versus Sham Ones

Thanks to bad seasonal allergies, which some health insurance companies that Puntitas has applied to consider an incurable disease and reason for charging higher premiums (incidentally, , one of Puntitas’ friends says the same of that dreaded preexisting condition menopause), and insomnia (hello, Insomnia, my old friend), Puntitas has read an entire book by Victoria Alexander. The book didn’t actually grab Puntitas very much from the beginning, but she read it all the way through because she read an article last year citing Amanda Quick and Victoria Alexander as queen’s of what she thinks of as “the sparkling period romance,” the more-or-less Regency era love story with repartee, intrigue, and a handful of scenes involving extraordinary impropriety.

Puntitas likes Amanda Quick for her smart, spunky heroines and for her tension, both sexual and suspenseful, though the plots themselves, especially the mystery component are flawed and underdeveloped, even as subplots: pivotal events just sort of happen without an abundance of preparation or explanation, and one event doesn’t necessarily follow clearly from another.

So Puntitas decided to try Victoria Alexander, and the conclusions she has come to are (1) that there’s no pressing need to read more by the same author right away and (2) that Puntitas’ problem with the adventure genre is the concept of adventure for its own sake.

The book Puntitas just read is about a foreign princess who seeks out her estranged English husband, claiming to need his help to research the life of a self-exiled great aunt. The princess’ story, which fails to convince either her husband or the reader, covers a more sinister plot—restoring her country’s crown jewels to their rightful place despite the efforts of a distant cousin, also hoping to recover them in order to gain the throne, a chain of events as probable, intrinsically compelling, and realistic as the ones on General Hospital, the soap Puntitas follows while getting her nails done.

But she digresses.

Being a person of depth and numerous emotional demons, Alexander’s heroine distrusts, omits, and lies every chance she gets, inadvertently and advertently bringing more adventure and sexual tension upon herself and Hubby, neither of which does much for Puntitas, who has been wondering from Page One why the princess doesn’t just take the more direct route of laying the matter out before her great aunt’s English descendents, who have proven themselves loyal to her father but who figure no where in her scheme until ….

Yes, as luck would have it, the climactic scene takes place in the home of the great aunt’s descendents, where the jewels have been waiting for the heroine simply to come and get ‘em. Well, it would have been that simple if she’d done that in the first place. What happens instead is that all her intrigue has led the rival distant cousin to the jewels, so the princess must confront a pistol toting virago in a private sitting room and choose between duty and love in a ballroom filled with gala clad Nobility.

Of course, the princess’ motives are as layered and complex as her lies are convincing. She wants to restore the jewels to her country both to serve her royal house and people and to gain personal autonomy. She wants to involve her estranged husband (this is a sequel to another book in which the princess escapes her minders, falls in love, gets married, and goes back home a la Roman Holiday, the 1953 film starring Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn) in order to regain his love, and she repeatedly justifies both courses of action by saying she wants to have an adventure.

This last is the reason Puntitas hasn’t been able to make much headway in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The plot of that work is simple too: take the ring and leave it where it belongs. The characters so charged don’t know where that is, so they must ask around to find out where that place may be or who may know more about how to find it. Puntitas understands all that and is willing to play along as difficulties arise on the way to the next clue or informant, but she loses all sympathy for everyone as characters are asked, “Do you want to take the shortcut, or would you rather go the long way and have adventures?” and reply, “Oh, I want adventures.”

Life offers complications aplenty without needlessly manufacturing drama and adventures that put people and relationships at risk. Puntitas supposes that for those who enjoy adventure for its own sake (and drama too—The Tempest is an utter mystery to Puntitas), there’s probably a high in activity even when the activity is purposeless in general (as in The Tempest) or purposeless to achieving a goal (for Alexander’s princess, lying to her estranged husband doesn’t actually win him back, one reported goal, and not-visiting the great aunt’s descendents prevents her from going to the most likely source of information about the jewels, another reported goal). But for Puntitas, the high lies in knowing what is to be accomplished and in doing what needs to be done, two things that are difficult and adventurous enough on their own.

To be genuinely exciting, adventures need to be meaningful for the characters and for the world they live in. Having characters create them simply to test their metal is like attempting suicide to understand how important life is or doing drugs or booze to get a sense of happiness or relief. The events are almost always meaningless, and the insights they produce are unsatisfying counterfeits of real thought. An adventure story is particularly meaningless if, as in this case, there would be no story (in its present form) had the character taken the most obvious course of action, given her realistic options, in the first place.

Puntitas reads _Her Highness, My Wife_ by V. Alexander, which is less exciting than Puntitas made it sound.

Books and Plots

I spent a little time on the computer yesterday, prowling the Library of Congress website. I went to the Book Festival page and listened to one of this year’s podcasts, an interview with Peter Robinson, of Inspector Banks fame.

The first point of interest is that our good friend Robinson, whose mysteries I like, started life as a poet. Food for thought, to be sure. That it comes as I’m about to launch my manuscripts into the world is … well … not satisfying.

The next is that one piece of advice he gives to fledgling crime writers (or any other kind of writer) is that the back story doesn’t all need to be at the beginning. That’s one of those things I know, but hearing it came as a revelation, probably because it’s easy to forget. Knowing the back story often helps the writer plan and organize, but dropping it all on the reader’s lap, especially at the beginning, is rarely necessary. My favorite example of this is an Anne Rivers Siddons novel I read years ago. The first fourth was all back story introducing a character. I remember thinking that the point had been made and that, if she didn’t actually start going somewhere, I would stop reading at the end of the next chapter. Fortunately, the next chapter included plot, and when I finished the novel, I reflected that most of the first fourth of the book could have been condensed to an early chapter or two plus one really telling scene that appears near the end of that introductory fourth. I think I also noticed the comment because two of my prose pieces suffer from the curse of too much back story at the beginning.

Another piece of advice is that writers don’t need to know the whole story when they start writing. This I know for a fact. Generally, I know key moments in the story, certain aspects of the character, and the central question (conflict) addressed by the narrative. The rest emerges as I go. I was surprised to find out that the same happens in a crime novel because I assumed the crime had to be well understood for a story to be built around it, but that kind of writing involves the same process of discovery and revision as any other, so … Why not?

On the subject of books and their impact on my writing, I just finished the Navarro book. It’s a sci-fi version of James Patterson: lots of action, suspense, archetypes, and cliché, which combine well to keep the reader going. The book does a couple of things that are unusual and worked well for me.

One is that it holds off on physical descriptions of the characters until two thirds of the way through the novel. When the characters are introduced, they’re described in terms of their personalities, habits, and the things in their work areas. Later they’re all described in terms of height, weight, dress, and hair color when characters from a different plot line review dossiers compiled about them. It was interesting both to compare my conception of them with the writer’s and to meet them yet again through the filter of other characters. I also noticed the writer tends to notice people’s hands, which I think are very telling.

Another is that the writer handles distrust realistically. In one of the plot lines, two characters, who don’t know each other, are put in a situation of having to work together. Over time, they learn that they have reason to mistrust the people they work for. What happens in most genre fiction is one of two outcomes: (1) they reveal their mutual mistrust and snipe at each other, each trying to save his own skin, or (2) they form a precarious bond that turns into collaboration as their mistrust of external forces compels them to rely on each other for survival. More often, both scenarios take place, 1 followed by 2. In this novel, however, characters act as they would outside of fiction: each man harbors his own mistrust, conceals it, and acts for his own best interest. That self-containment creates interesting tension and great plot turns.

Finally, the writer brings two plots together in ways that complicate the action. She develops two plot lines, each with its own protagonist. The expectation is that the point of convergence is a meeting of the two protagonists, but it isn’t. The story lines converge when each protagonist encounters a supporting character from the other plot. In fact, the story teeters on the edge of farce at this juncture as the action hinges on sexual union between a man who thinks of sex as something one does when necessary and a frigid woman. The effect of coupling a protagonist with a supporting character is that, instead of one point of convergence, there are two, complicating the action unpredictably for characters in both story lines.

Over all, the novel was an enjoyable read without much lasting value, but I did learn a lot from it, and I did recognize seeds of something that could have been great.

Puntitas reads _Virgins of Paradise_ by B. Wood.

Plotting Like a Script Writer

While waiting for my latest audio books to download, I googled Eva Navarro, the writer I’m currently reading. The book is the sort of science fiction I can tolerate: heavy on the character and plot, easy on the sci-fi. I’m actually enjoying it much more than I expected, but I will be happy to move on to something else.

Anyway, I found a book review and (an interview, the latter being on a Mac page, which profiles prominent Mac users. (Who knew?) One of her responses struck me because my own writing is exactly opposite of what she describes. Once I finish revising the stories I’ve already written, I think I’m going to try this method.

As background, I’ll say that one of the plot lines follows a script writer and her team at a television studio. That part of the novel smacks so much of taken-from-real-life that its readers don’t need to check the back of the book to know its author works in the business.

The interviewer observes that the book is structured like a film script and asks whether that was accidental or intentional.

Answer: I come from the world of advertising, where we’re all about the target audience, so I tried to use short sentences, small amounts of description, a scenic narrative style, and short chapters. I thought my readers would tend to be teenagers, used to reading scripts. I was wrong because the book has been equally well received by adults, who have enjoyed the multiple story lines and the large numbers of characters. …

http://www.faq-mac.com/noticias/6282/mujeres-mac-eva-navarro-guionista-productora-escritora#

Of course, when I think of this sort of writing, I think of James Patterson, whose books are written to be read once. (I’m not knocking them. I’ve read eight or ten, and I’ll probably read more.) They contain the right combination of action, stock characters, and classic conflicts to keep the reader hooked, but they don’t spend enough time developing character and theme to make his work linger long after the book is closed.

My mistake has been to associate the style of writing Navarro describes with the product Patterson delivers. The protagonists of Navarro’s two story lines have enough demons and complexity for me to wonder about them while I’m not reading, and as I reflect on other books I’ve read, it occurs to me that the same formula has been used to produce more resonant novels, Pillars of the Earth being a good example.

Now Puntitas really will go away.

Puntitas reads _El llanto de la comadreja_ by E. Navarro.

Retolling the Bell

I’m reading Hemingway after ten or fifteen years of being away, and it’s like reading a writer who is new to me.

I read a lot of his short stories in my teens and early twenties and a couple of his novels in my mid twenties. I remember enjoying his work very much, acknowledging that I was reading a master, but what I remember of his style is that it was austere and of his content is that it was too masculine for me to fully understand. For those reasons, I’ve ignored For Whom the Bell Tolls for two or three years. Now I’m reading it, and I can’t put it down.

The first thing that struck me is that the writing is lush and lyrical. It would have been called poetic if people had had today’s sensitivity about what a poem is. Parts, especially the stories characters tell, cry out for line breaks, and I hear elements of my own writing in so many places.

The next surprise is the stark contemporariness of the story. The protagonist is an American dynamiter sent by the Communists to a guerrilla band in the mountains. It’s set in Spain in the 1930’s, but may as well be set in Iraq or Afghanistan at the turn of the twenty-first century. The environment; the psychology of tension, fear, loyalty to causes, and disloyalty to the past; the bad language; the sex; the fierceness and tenuousness of the link between the native and the outsider—all of these are probably as true of current military incursions as of that one.

The final and most amazing discovery about reading the novel is that I don’t feel the same disconnect from Hemingway’s characters I once did. He does write about what it is to be a man (or a woman) and what a man (or a woman) wants, but I don’t feel cut off from the protagonist because mostly he’s struggling with the problem of how to continue to be who he has been taught to be while being something different. The hunter and the soldier are two well respected models of manhood, but both hide the aberration of a taker of life; likewise, the woman is a comforter and supporter, but during war, her comfort and support lead to the same aberration of life taking. It’s a problem of pushing a virtue to its extreme only to discover that it is really a weakness or an evil.

I don’t know how to explain it except in how it relates to myself. As someone educated in the late twentieth century, I prize objectivity and impartiality. One who commands both has a clear head to think with. Problems can be worked through and good decisions can be made. In my work as a community interpreter, a small amount of empathy is necessary toward rendering the subtext of what is being said, but objectivity and impartiality are essential toward precision and fairness. The problem is that a high level of objectivity and impartiality also makes the interpreter unresponsive and largely indifferent to the pain of so many of the people s/he works with, an it is uncomfortable to realize that one can routinely suppress one’s feelings to a degree that is considered aberrant and inhuman, so uncomfortable that Puntitas could not use the word I in that statement.

On a less serious note, the hammer-and-nails part of my brain has been fascinated by Hemingway’s handling of profanity, Spanish, and sex.

I’ve heard myself say things like, “Obscenity thyself,” “Muck you,” “Unprintable son of an unprintable whore,” “Fornicator,” and perhaps my favorite “What a chicken-crut hormonal cycle” (yes, Puntitas is premenstrual). Interesting that very strong words like “joder,” “cabrón,” and “carajo” are included either in full or as recognizable shadows. I guess too few Spanish speakers worked at American publishing houses of the day to realize they were unprintable.

I find myself reading the transliterations of Spanish as if they were Spanish. “He has suffered much” becomes “He’s had lots of painful experiences” or “he carries around a lot of pain,” and “milk” becomes “cum.” Often I find myself disagreeing with Hemingway’s translations of things, but I’m not sure whether the discrepancies are due to time and dialect or his misunderstanding of the language. One example is in what he renders as “why not?” At one point he puts it beside “Como no,” which I would render as “of course” or “sure.” There’s a difference. The commitment of a “why not?” is half hearted while a “sure” is firm.

The sex goes farther than I expected for a book of the era, even given that it was written during one of the more liberal periods of the early twentieth century. The sex scenes contain a lot about what people are thinking and feeling while they’re coupling, but they include a few concrete details that leave no doubt and a few good mental Polaroids about what is going on.

All of this is very instructive.

Puntitas reads _Bonk_ by M. Roach, _Sailing from Byzantium_ by C. Wells, and _For Whom the Bell Tolls_ by E. Hemingway.

The Accomplice’s Witness

I spent my day reading a book about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Though I enjoyed it, the book didn’t compel me as much as one of its secondary characters did.

The book focuses on Mary Surratt, the first woman to be executed by the U.S. government for her role in the plot to kill President Lincoln and other government officials. One of the sources heavily drawn from is the memoir of Louis Weichmann, a civil servant for the Union, friend to Surratt’s son (also a key conspirator), resident of Surratt’s boardinghouse, suspected conspirator himself, and witness for the prosecution.

Weichmann’s story was definitely where my interest drifted as I read, and now that I’ve finished the book, he is what I think about. His detractors say that he was part of the conspiracy or very much informed and that he wasn’t tried along with the others only because the prosecution needed his testimony. From the snippets in the book, I can very much believe that. His proponents say that he was a naive but observant outsider who may have been brought into the fringes of the group for use as a possible scapegoat, and I can believe that too.

My own guess is that he was a little of both. I’m imagining him as a straight-laced geeky guy who likes, but doesn’t always “get,” his wilder “cool friend.” A lot of the things he sees and hears probably rub him the wrong way, but since the people involved are his friends, he’s probably not understanding what has no context for him: not quite making sense of stray bits and pieces, jumping to conclusions, or blowing things out of proportion. There’s probably a point at which he does know, but denial, the loyalty of long association, the fear of unemployment or possible prosecution, the excitement of being involved in something so clandestine, the overwhelmed wishfulness that it’ll all just go away—all keep that knowing at arms length, far enough from the surface of his awareness to convince himself he doesn’t know. And then that knowing reaches out and grabs him hard, forcing its reality into the center of his brain, whether that be in the ah-hah moment he describes, in which the pieces fall mysteriously and obviously into place, or a panicked instant of confrontation, in which a truth he’s put off examining suddenly becomes a set of consequences he must live through. This is the classic conflict of a character in a novel.

What makes this person additionally compelling is that he spent the rest of his life justifying his actions. I’m going to try to read his account of the events. I’m wondering if I’ll find him as compelling as Clifford Larson’s portrayal.

Puntitas reads _The Garden of Last Days_ by A. Dubus III and _The Assassin’s Accomplice_ by K. Clifford Larson.

Missing Ingredient

My two latest reads were recommended by a friend. She’s a fan of the formula romance. For her, the ending must be happy, and the final chapter must be followed by an epilog, which tells readers that the couple has two children, great sex, and a thriving ranch. That sense of resolution is so important that she doesn’t buy a book without first reading the last few pages to make sure it delivers.

For me, the ending is not a problem, but what I learned over this last long week and a half is that something must happen in addition to two people falling in saccharin love, having the occasional tiff, and settling it quickly to return to an idyll of precious moments and specialness. I need a dose of intrigue, inner conflict, self-awareness, a struggle against society to keep me going, and no, the clichéd soul searching of lovers wondering if they’re moving too fast or stressing because they suspect their beloveds of being unfaithful don’t keep me interested because that kind of turmoil isn’t described in a way that makes it even a little reminiscent of the real.

Yes, yes, I know the real is not always the goal. Some people read to escape, hence the happy ending and the thriving ranch. But the assumption seems to be that a more realistic love isn’t as sweet, fumbling, and fanciful as these tales of attraction, doubt, and commitment suggest. My own observation is that ordinary love stories are fabulous, profound, and lasting. The ones that end in nothing are the ones that sound more like the books. So why not celebrate the ordinary, teach readers to find joy in flaws and minor miracles?

My own formula romance is about an unattractive woman who has feelings for a family friend. Most of the energy of the narrative is spent on her coming to terms with being plain, an important step for a young woman (yes, Puntitas is plain enough to have been mistaken for the campus tranny at an early teaching job) and on making the shift from friend to something other. The typical romance novel misunderstandings do happen, but they’re secondary to this other storyline.

Okay, I hear the alarm bells too: I’ve set out to write a love story, and I’m having trouble focusing on … uh … the love story. This is not good.

Puntitas reads _Smitten_ by J. Evanovich and _At First Sight_ by N. Sparks.

_The Woman in White_ and Other Controversies

I’m reading Wilkie Collins’ the Woman in White. Wikipedia classifies the genre as sensational. The term rings a bell, but a faint one, so I’ll find out more about it.

I chose this book because it sounded like a ghost story, and though I’m only a few chapters in, it reminds me of Dracula in the same quiet way that running into a person we know superficially brings to mind the cousin or roommate we know better: the layers of narrative, a night walk and the appearance of a mysterious woman wearing ordinary but completely white clothes, the arrival to a seemingly empty house, eccentric characters who smack of the morally corrupt (a perfectly proportioned dwarf [we know Victorians and their thoughts on deformity and disability], a mannish woman, and a womanish male invalid).

I’m reading it because it’s Halloween, a holiday I like for lots of reasons from children and candy to the acknowledgement of the metaphysical, the embodiment of forbidden impulses, and the fearless and even joyous confrontation with inevitable death and with the drives we can’t or won’t suppress.

I’ve always wanted to write a ghost story of my own, the kind Henry James and F. Marion Crawford wrote, silent, under-the-skin tales that get down deep because they’re based on an assumption that there is a soul and that day-to-day choices feed or dampen that soul. Some, the best of them, read like theology, and I think an otherwise resistant reader can be persuaded to consider God inside a ghost story.

For me, this is vital. So much of my work involves God—sometimes frightening, sometimes petty, sometimes indifferent, sometimes intense and protective, sometimes sexual. I don’t think “faith based” fiction has room for this kind of God. I’m not sure that a lot of other readers do.

Last night, I was having dinner with a friend. She’s in the final stages of her dissertation, which is on the sermons of a tenth-century monk. She was summarizing part of a chapter to me and said that, to her monk’s way of thinking, the male should close the gates of his senses and remove himself from women in order to enter into what she terms a dull Heaven that is devoid of sensory experience and burdened by continuous prayer.

My own thought was that concentrated sensory experience leads to small moments of magnified gratification, like the tension and release of orgasm, but the sustained sensory deprivation and focus of my friend’s monk is the instant prior to or immediately following climax. A body knows the anchor of the senses and does everything it can to find out what else is possible; a soul knows there is more and flounders against the lack of limits.

My fiction is about that struggle, and that eternal state of orgasm is what a lot of my characters strive for or work against. I don’t know how much value someone like my friend can find in my writing. I’m not sure how much of a market there is for this either.