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.

Less Is More

On the recommendations of friends, I’ve been reading more formula fiction than usual. The realization I think I’m coming to is that less is definitely more as far as plot twists and social issues go. The last two books I’ve read serve nicely as case in point.

Both are mystery series, revolving around unconventional women. The Spencer-Fleming (written currently) is about a female Episcopal priest who serves in a small Midwestern town, has a relationship with the police chief, and manages to get herself mixed up in high profile crimes. The Forrest (written 20 years ago) is about a lesbian police officer who works homicide in the city of Los Angeles and keeps her sexual orientation to herself (more don’t-ask-don’t-tell than actually closeted).

The latter is about half the length of the former. It’s plotline is relatively simple, focusing on one crime, dispensing with secundary crimes and red herrings relatively quickly, and organizing the personal subplot around a clear central idea, how one gets over a past relationship. For me, this simplicity makes both the story and the characters more compelling and the plot twists and red herrings more surprising and effective.

In the former, so much is happening that I find myself spending as much energy trying to figure out how characters and subplots go together (not because the writing isn’t clear) as I do on following the action, and I notice myself thinking, “How clever” and “of course,” rather than “Oh, wow” or “Oh, no.” I also find myself making evaluative comments about how the social issues are dealt with: illegal aliens, age differences in romantic relationships, old guard vs. new guard, intercultural/interfaith relationships, public vs. private. While the story was well crafted, more of the characters were flat, relying on the series, not the individual story, to give them depth.

Now that I’m starting to think more about writing and revising prose, I realize that I felt insecure about keeping plotlines simple, but lately, I’ve been thinking I shouldn’t worry.

Puntitas reads _The Diary of a Nobody_ by G. and W. Grossmith, _I Shall Not Want_ by J. Spencer-Fleming, and _Murder at the Nightwood Bar_ by K. V. Forrest.

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.

Discussing Someone Else’s Writing

Saturday I workshopped with another friend. We didn’t discuss a draft. We discussed a general writing project.

She’s planning to write a murder mystery, has an excellent idea for an opening scene and a good general sense of what she wants to do, but was having trouble working out some of the basics of her plot and characters. Our conversation hovered around these questions:

• Which real people can lend life to the main characters?
• Where may her characters live, and where may the story take place?
• How can other people’s plots be used to guide her through the story line and help her find a motive?
• How can predictable elements be turned into red herrings and plot complications?
• What secondary characters can people the story and stand in as suspects?

We didn’t get very far with this last because she needed time to think through some of the other things, and it struck me that my own writing process is characterized by fits and starts, periods of thinking and reading alternated by periods of taking notes, focused free writing, and actual drafting. For me personally, knowing when to interrupt the writing to reflect is a vital part of the process though I do admit that sometimes I spend too much time mulling and not enough time writing.

Another thing I noticed was that, for my friend, as for me, plots seem to grow around a basic number of characters–the two, three, or four people essential to making something happen or someone discover. Other characters are added as props or simple plot agents, what one of my professors calls window dressing, and sometimes one of those props becomes real, occasionally jockeying an essential character out of the way.

As my friend and I talked, she said something about how helpful it was to talk to people about the story, and I agree. Part of the benefit is the workshop aspect: it helps to bounce ideas off of and get suggestions from other writers, but another equally important aspect is that talking about the craft makes it more real, easier to hang on to through work, bills, and tax preparation (yes, it is that time of year).

As of our conversation, I’ve decided to work on my extraterrestrial story a little everyday, without waiting for the muse or preparing elaborately in any way. So far, I’ve managed to work on it only once this week. I do have the excuses of taxes to prepare and my circadian rhythm to get under control, so I may not get much done this week, but I’m hoping that next week will go better.

Puntitas reads _The Haunting of Hill House_ by S. Jackson.

Police Academy

As a professional interpreter and potential mystery writer (yes, when avoiding other projects, I consider the field of mystery writing), I engaged in research last night. The local police department is offering a course on law enforcement in the community. I went to the one geared toward the city’s gente, which means it was held in Spanish, because a coworker thought it might help us improve our legal vocabulary.

Reflective pause here.

It was scheduled for six p.m., so everyone arrived between five and twenty after. Myself not a follower of Strict Punctuality in any of its manifestations, I felt a certain amount of comradeship with those who arrived within the first ten minutes, but those who maundered in at a quarter past only to start a thorough catch-up session with the neighbors gave rise to a long meditation on the virtues of a well regulated clock.

More generous of spirit than I, the lieutenant, formerly a professional interpreter, greeted people as they came in, making sure the attendance sheet was signed and registration forms were filled out. Coffee and pastries were set up on a back table. More gossiping took place over the stack of name cards from the previous session. Then at six twenty-five, the evening’s instructors took the floor.

My notes for the first hour’s lecture read as follows:

3 types of crime

Infractions—mostly traffic related
Misdemeanor—not serious (e.g., theft, tagging, disturbing the peace)
Felony—serious (e.g., murder, burglary, rape); avoid where possible

The lecture took all of five minutes—if that. What dragged it out were questions like this:

– What if you’re driving to work and everyone is going ninety miles an hour and the speed limit is eighty-five but everyone else is going a hundred and you can’t slow down because you’d be holding up traffic in this area where the speed limit is eighty-five and all cars are going a hundred and you don’t want to pose a traffic hazard by going seventy-five when the speed limit is eighty-five, is that speeding? Would you ticket us for that, even though we’re only going ninety, five miles over the speed limit, for the safety of all?

– This happened to a friend of mine, not to me. He was driving to work, running late with a sick child in the backseat, and ran a stop sign, not really ran it because I looked both ways and slowed as I went through it even though another car was honking at him, my friend. Is that running a stop sign—with the sick child in the backseat?

– Can the police tow your car if it’s parked in the driveway and then accuse you of DUI and resisting arrest if they followed you home while you were minding your own business on a Friday or Saturday night?

A few episodes of Cops reared their ugly heads, as did stories of life en mi tierra, where one person or other mixed it up a little with an agente who swung a good macana.

We had a ten-minute break after that.

A second lecture on the use of force followed. That one ran for thirty minutes or so, but again, we paused to revisit the various nuances of high speed traffic, stop sign regulations, and degrees of shading while driving under the influence. We also discussed a curious incident involving a near dognapping and rescue (something about using a baseball bat to nudge a twelve-year-old’s backpack open in order to free Pulgoso), the widely held belief that a gun is easily mistaken for a can of pepper spray in the dark, a brainstorm of reasonable explanations for why innocent people may run from a police officer (a bout of spontaneous anxiety squirts being the most probable), and philosophical musings about how much one can steal without doing serious jail or prison time.

I do give the instructors credit for turning each of the questions into real learning experiences, even when the actual point of inquiry was nonexistent, but I will point the finger of BAH! at my coworker for suggesting that our Spanish would be improved.

The lectures were so heavily peppered with English that half of it was delivered by the lieutenant sitting in the back or by the native speakers scattered throughout the room. Not surprisingly, only about half of the suggested renderings were understood, so the lecture continued on in a language that shifted between Spanglish and Pocho, depending on whether English or Spanish prevailed. At one point, the course morphed into a hardy round of charades, with the instructors pantomiming the business of unloading a firearm and securing it in a locked box, which they then stored on the upper shelf of a closet as people called out the words for each step in the process.

I can’t say the evening was a total waste. In and of itself, the material was interesting, as was much of the information gleaned from the answers to the questions. Even the painfully detailed traffic stuff was useful because I don’t drive and sometimes have to interpret auto insurance claims. But the thought of spending the next ten weeks of my life over hours of hypothetical questions squelches any and all desire to continue attending. If I feel brave and patient–very patient—I will try again, but I’m not reading that in the coffee grounds.

Puntitas readss _The Things They Carried_ by T. O’Brien.