Clause and Effect: Part 2

Fiction is not a freshman essay. When building voice, sometimes grammar rules need bending, even obliterating. For example, when writing first person, crafting neat grammatically correct sentences at all times would negate the immediacy that this voice needs for it to come off as real.

But it’s a balancing act; too many fragments and run-ons might make it sound exactly like someone’s thought patterns, but it’ll be impossible for a reader to stay with it for more than a few paragraphs.

A fragment (an incomplete thought masquerading as an independent clause) is a good example of a mistake (in a college essay) that can be used to good literary effect.

Kept saying I was crazy. (fragment)
They kept on saying that I was crazy. (full sentence)

Tone, voice, and context will guide the writer as to which choice is best, but consistency is key. Mix them up without thinking and you’ve got a mess.

Run-ons (two or more independent clauses joined together without a coordinating conjunction or a semicolon) can also be used as an effect. Here is a comma splice (a type of run-on) used in dialogue to render a more natural feel:

“I hate their fans, I hate their team, I hate their stadium,” he said. (run-on + dialogue tag)
“I hate their fans; I hate their team, and I hate their stadium,” he said. (compound + dialogue tag)

Nowadays, the first example seems to be the default in newspapers when reporting speech, so whether it’s even considered a run-on anymore when used in that way I’m not sure, although technically it should be. Of course, in the second example, the writer also had the choice of using two semicolons or could’ve repeated the coordinating conjunction ‘and’.

As for which example works best, it’s subjective and would depend on the voice and tone of the narrative that had already been established. Using a run-on in a narrative passage is also possible (after all, everything’s possible) but is a much more obvious middle digit up at convention and should be handled with extreme caution.

It’s away from clauses, but it’s worth looking at phonetic writing (or phonetic dialect as it’s sometimes called). This is dialogue (or even narration) written as it sounds and not how it should be spelt.

It’s generally considered that writing characters in the style of Twain’s Big Jim is to be avoided (technically as well as politically) and that writing phonetic dialect should be blended to be more readable. In the nineties, Irvine Welsh headbutted that theory to the floor, but voices like his are the exception to the rule (it’s worth noting that even with Welsh, the thick Edinburgh vernacular of Trainspotting was rendered more with slang than phonetic dialect).

In short, it’s all in the blending: writing phonetic dialogue is a risk, yet writing characters with no linguistic quirks is just bad writing.

Some of the richest writing has come from writers who are prepared to take technical risks, yet good writers always think about how readers will experience their prose. So, by way of summing up, I’ll fall back on a cliché: know the rules before ya break ‘em.

Next week, Andrew Oberg returns from an unsuccessful quest to make electronic ink by hotwiring his dot matrix printer to a squid aquarium.

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This year’s ABNA Contest

It’s that time of year again. Time for CreateSpace and Penguin USA’s annual Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Contest. Here’s the nitty-gritty:

This is the fifth time around this contest has been run, and although some of the progression details have changed over the years the bulk of the contest hasn’t. What’s on offer is a US$15,000 advance and a publishing contract with Penguin USA to each of two winners. What the details of the contract are is anyone’s guess, but my hunch is probably a limited initial run with not much editing or publicity help from Penguin (more on why I think this below). If anyone knows better though, please leave a comment.

The two categories are the catch-all General Fiction and the pukey Young Adult Fiction. I say ‘pukey’ because to me most of the titles you can find categorized as YA are the kinds of stories that make you nauseated. Anyway, what you need to have on hand to enter is a single-authored novel between 50,000-150,000 words. You would then plug into the contest site the first 3,000-5,000 words and a pitch of up to 300 words. Incidentally, it doesn’t matter if you’ve already self-published your title, those are eligible for the contest too.

Here are the tricky parts. The contest is officially open from 23 January to 05 February US Eastern Standard Time, but will stop taking manuscripts after the first 5,000 have been received. And if you do want to participate I suggest getting your entry in as soon as possible because if past years are any indication they’ll get their first 5,000 within just a few days. But the main obstacle to overcome here, and this has actually changed significantly since the contest’s first run, is the pitch.

Before I get to that though, a bit of background on how the contest used to be judged. Initially they had a team of editors and reviewers that would read your first 5,000 words and then either advance your book or drop it. Following that, books would be voted on so it kind of became a popularity contest as you could get anyone to sign in and vote for your book. Then they’d bring the pros back in to whittle down the list again, and (I’m a little hazy on this part) the final winners would be voted on. Last year, and again this year, your pitch is far more important. Now in the first round Amazon editors will only look at the 300 word pitches and choose 1,000 in each category to advance. Next, Amazon top customer reviewers (from Amazon’s internal reviewer rating system) will read the 5,000 word excerpts and reduce the number to 250/category. Round three has Publishers Weekly reviewers reading the excerpts, and their scores lowering the count to 50/category, followed by Penguin USA editors choosing 3/category. The final 6 will then be voted on by Amazon customers (presumably anyone with an Amazon account would be able to vote) and the 2 winners decided.

All in all, aside from the first round I think your entry would get a fair treatment by professionals whose focus is on the commercial side of things. Why I object to the first round pitch-is-everything stance is that it seems to assume that if you can write a commercially viable book then you can automatically write a sales pitch for it, something that may or may not be the case. Of course, the logic of the contest that will appeal to us writers is that it costs nothing to participate and you stand to gain a large amount in both money and exposure.

Very briefly, here’s why I think Penguin won’t put much into the winners’ books. Just as writers stand to gain a lot from the contest, Penguin stands to gain more. Here they have a chance to have many helping hands pick a book that they will have to invest very little time and money into getting ready and could potentially make them a great deal of profit. While the Amazon top reviewers and customers will probably be looking for an interesting read, the Penguin and Amazon editors (and maybe the Publishers Weekly reviewers too) are far more likely to be looking for what will sell well. And these people know what they’re doing.

Still, all in all, I’d say it’s worth taking a chance on this, especially if your book is mainstream. I know that Paul j Rogers and I both have YA decalogies on an ogre-troll romance in a hidden magic kingdom accessible through a trapdoor in a McDonald’s toilet where an evil but very charismatic witch has duped people into voting in the Social Democrats that we’ll be submitting. And that’s just the teaser!

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Clause and Effect: Part 1

In the opening chapter of How To Write A Sentence, Stanley Fish identifies that a writer must love crafting sentences (rather than merely loving words). He then makes the juxtaposition that a painter must love the smell of paint before he or she can begin the journey towards a masterpiece. This, in my opinion, is pretty much on the money.

The way in which we use (or don’t use) the four sentence structures (simple, compound, complex and compound-complex) gives our writing its cadence. In addition, the patterns that develop between structural interplay go a long way to building that elusive beast we call ‘voice’. All grammatically correct sentences can be categorised as belonging to one of those four structures. (*I’ll examine a few ungrammatical literary effects next time I post.)

Short simple sentences portray action and immediacy very powerfully. In fast-paced, genre stories where action is at the forefront, they can become a primary structure, something that Raymond Chandler realised early on in his career. Writing at around the same time, Hemmingway used them to explore more literary themes to Nobel Prize winning effect.

Amongst other things, compound sentences offer enlargement or contrast and a way of linking simple sentences when the rhythm needs to change. Vonnegut once stated that forming a compound sentence with a semicolon is a mortal sin, a writer showing off that they’ve been to college. As much as I like Vonnegut, I’d have to disagree because a compound with a semicolon as the fulcrum is too clean a structure to punish just because it holds a bachelor’s. It’s worth noting that very short compounds — especially using the conjunction ‘and’ — don’t need a comma. In fact, they look ridiculous if they’re given one, compare:

It was hot, and I was sweating. (that a mosquito?)
It was hot and I was sweating. (nope, it’s gone.)

One of the complex sentence’s most useful functions is for showing temporal arrangements; in fact, they’re so useful for dealing with time sequencing that it’s easy to get lazy and overuse them, sending your reader cross-eyed in the process.

The compound-complex sentence (sometimes called complex-compound) can go so fast as to mimic stream of consciousness; however, it can just as easily do the opposite and slow the reader down while they backtrack for meaning over precisely fashioned clauses. As a literary device, it can have the effect of blurring the lines between narrator, character and the world of the story and has therefore long been a favourite of many writers.

In addition to the four different sentence structures, the four basic functions (declarative, interrogative, imperative and exclamatory) can produce different effects. With declarative set as your default, why not adjust to interrogative once in a while, for example a string of rhetorical questions, or you could try an imperative, perhaps a barked command? If those functions don’t cut it, maybe an exclamatory sentence is what’s needed if, for example, you have an emotion to underscore. In this manner, the function of a sentence can also be manipulated to shape voice and cadence.

With a very small set of tools, an infinite number of shapes and patterns can be created. Vocabulary, structure and function can be lathed into a unique voice that best tells the story to the audience it is intended to reach. Clauses give meaning and rhythm to writing and electrify the reader, like an unusual guitar riff catches the ear, or a rich impasto captures the eye on canvas.

More on this topic next time I post in Clause & Effect: Part 2. Tune in next week to catch Andrew Oberg who’ll be returning from his winter solstice.

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Happy Holidays!

Although our Saturnalia festivities are just winding down, we here at Drugstore Books want to wish all of you the happiest of holiday seasons this year. We’ll be back on January 13th with a new post from Paul j Rogers.

Till then! :)

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On Characters: Two Takes in One Round

This week, guest contributor Nick Cody takes us blow-by-blow through some big opinions about character. 

 

Here are two views on literary characters that could not be more different. Since the literary world can often be a clash of strong opinions, let us imagine the conflicting interpretations of character as a bout of heavyweights. The following is my best attempt to give a ring-side seat.

In one corner we have the master prose stylist and perhaps the only person in human history to write masterpieces in more than one language (Russian and English), Vladimir Nabokov.

In the opposite corner, a premiere critic and man of letters, is the ever-original Harold Bloom. His early work Anxiety of Influence (1973) presented a startling new way of reading literature. And his later works, including The Western Canon and Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, are filled with dazzling displays of wit and insight.

Light on his feet, Nabokov lands the first punch. In a 1967 interview in the Paris Review, the interviewer and novelist have this interesting exchange:

INTERVIEWER
E. M. Forster speaks of his major characters sometimes taking over and dictating the course of his novels. Has this ever been a problem for you, or are you in complete command?

NABOKOV
My knowledge of Mr. Forster’s works is limited to one novel, which I dislike; and anyway, it was not he who fathered that trite little whimsy about characters getting out of hand; it is as old as the quills, although of course one sympathizes with his people if they try to wriggle out of that trip to India or wherever he takes them. My characters are galley slaves.

Any casual reader of Nabokov might have been curious about the answer to the above question. After all, Humbert Humbert of Lolita and Kinbote of Pale Fire seem to possess such vitality that they slip beyond the control of the hand that guides them.

Seems is the keyword, because as always with Nabokov’s novels a second or third reading will reveal to the curious reader the guiding hand of the puppet master. Jarring statements like his concluding sentence in that quote are meant to send the casual reader back to the novels. Humbert Humbert, a galley slave? Seriously?

The “trite little whimsy” is indeed as old as the quills. One only has to recall Blake’s bit on Satan to traverse 200 years: “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true poet, and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.”

In much the same way, Harold Bloom is of the “Devil’s party.” And proudly so since he agrees with Blake’s reading of Paradise Lost. On character, his most striking iterations can be found in his writings about Shakespeare. Hamlet and Falstaff, not Satan, are his gods. This is from his Shakespeare book, “Hamlet appears too immense a consciousness for Hamlet; a revenge tragedy does not afford the scope for the leading Western representation of an intellectual.”

And one could find many more on Falstaff. Here are two emblematic quotes from the chapter on Henry IV: “But Falstaff, Rosalind, Hamlet, and Cleopatra are something apart in world literature: through them Shakespeare essentially invented human personality as we continue to know and value it.” And then further down the page: “Falstaff would hardly matter if he did not greatly exceed all of us in vitality, exuberance, and wit.”

According to Bloom, great characters like these not only transcend their literary works, they transcend us. And that is why we keep reading them and returning to them. For someone holding a Nabokovian view on character, it is a resounding right jab to the jowls. We don’t read Henry IV for the play as a whole, we seek out Falstaff and feel the loss when he is not on stage.

A ringing bell closes Round One.  Judges, readers, writers.  How do you score this one?

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A publisher’s digital cold-call

Although it used to be unheard-of for a publisher to approach a writer, the chances of that happening are now better than ever. A great many writers are forgoing the traditional route and making their works available either through self-publishing or free ebook distribution services like SmashWords or Kindle Direct Publishing. With profits dwindling rapidly and technology moving to make them obsolete, it would make sense for a publisher to search for new talent. One would think, anyway.

So although I was very surprised to get an email recently from a publisher with, “Re: Your manuscript Randolph’s One Bedroom” in the subject line, I didn’t immediately think it was a spam mail. As it turns out, it was just that, and here are the details of my experience and some personal opinions about the situation.

The company that mailed me was called “Just Fiction! Edition”, and the name did actually make me a bit suspicious. What they were offering was basically what I’ve already done on my own, setting the book up on a print-on-demand basis and releasing it through various echannels. They were, however, also offering to list it with various bookseller organizations both within Germany (where the company is based) and the U.K. This hinted at marketing, and since I’m very busy with my regular work (and now studies too), and to boot a terrible salesperson with little to no business savvy, I was intrigued by this aspect of it. I actually wrote them back, asking for more details, and there read that I would get 10% royalty (not great but certainly not bad for print, pretty poor for ebooks), professional editing of my work, and the aforementioned listings.

Well, maybe this wasn’t such a bad deal? I still wasn’t convinced though, and so did some research about the company. I went back to their site (which I had initially glanced over) and confirmed that it didn’t look all that appealing, and the rough summations posted on their catalog page certainly didn’t do much for the titles listed—you have to click on an individual title to get the full blurb—that was a clear sign that something was up. A quick Google search also revealed quite a few bloggers warning about the company, with this site being particularly helpful. The Authonomy discussion boards were alight with tales from others who had received the identical email I had, only their names and book titles had been inserted. Yes, this was a case of being cold-called. Other writers told how this company would allegedly keep the rights to your book, actually offer no editorial, or more importantly (in my opinion) marketing help, and how their payment system involves using vouchers instead of money to make royalty payments on books with low sales. I don’t know to what extent these accusations are true, but the sheer number of people posting and blogging about these issues inclines me to think there’s something to them.

I don’t disagree with this company’s general approach to publishing. Print-on-demand is a great and eco-friendly system, and helping authors get published is also what we here at Drugstore are all about. But we also help edit books and get them set up for authors to self-publish and keep all of their royalties for themselves in whatever payment system they choose with the company who will produce or distribute their books/ebooks. If you do want to self-publish—which is really what “Just Fiction! Edition” is doing—then in my opinion there are better ways to go about it. And if like me you’d like a little help with one aspect of selling your book(s), keep your eyes open but tread with caution. It’s a cactus patch out there. We’ve got some links on our Side Effects page that may help you find a path, and I recently added a site that reviews publishers and agents.

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Off the Highway

“Read this,” my friend said to me. It was the winter of ’87, and he was around a decade older than the seventeen-year-old, fresh-faced me.  Kerouac’s On the Road was the book he’d pulled from his bookshelf. “After that, you’ll be ready for this,” he said after finally locating a well thumbed copy of Hunter Thompson’s Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas.

The cover of his Penguin Classic edition of On the Road hijacked my imagination. Sold by the power of an image, I said I’d pick up that bright orange other book another time, and we headed out for a beer. I read the book from start to finish in about a quarter of the time it took Jack to type it.

In late spring, I accompanied a friend to France in pursuit of a foreign exchange student he’d met the previous summer with the princely sum of five pounds in my pocket. Kerouac came with me.

The mademoiselle’s Parisian father was unimpressed with the white kid in holey 501’s and the Vietnamese kid in cowboy boots who kept on ringing his doorbell, and wooden shutters were soon latched and bolted. I got the feeling that the Vietnamese beat bum was the one he despised the most.

We staked her out for three days without success from a café in the square across from her house, glimpsing her only once in the back of a Range Rover. While my friend smoked and brooded in a corner, Casady kept my spirits up, and I began to recast this boredom as something holy.

The proprietor was only a few years older than us and, over time, I befriended him. We’d taken to shooting the odd game of pool before I’d return to savour a few more pages about Mississippi Gene and Montana Slim. I probably gave this French guy an interesting road name although I can’t remember it now.

One afternoon, two angry blokes showed up at the café, and our Gallic host translated that we had to get the hell out of there, now. Resurfacing from a pond of silent scowls, my mate suggested we zip down to Bordeaux to visit another mademoiselle who was listed in his Filofax, jumping the night train as his money was now running low. My fiver had been burned before we’d even got on the ferry.

We jumped the train, got caught, and now we were both broke. Without money in his pocket, my mate’s confidence left him, and he flipped between moods that were all just different flavours of hopelessness. I knew what we’d do next. In fact, I’d been looking forward to it.

I’d hitched a few times before that spring but just twenty miles up a B road. This, however, was looking epic. It took five hours before we got a ride. Eventually a woman in a Renault Espace stopped. She was a professor and spoke English. She said she’d lectured in London last month and had been thinking of England when she’d turned the corner. She’d never picked up hitchers before, she said.

She took us to her home in Poitier and put up us for the night, instructing her two sons, who had long hair and played flamenco guitar, to take us out on the town. Fed and watered, the next day she drove us to Paris and gave us the equivalent of fifty pounds in francs, enough to take the train and ferry back to England.

Back then, for a while at least, it seemed that Kerouac was right: the road is holy.

Next week, Andrew Oberg takes a look at digital pests.

 

 

 

 

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“Crime and Punishment” and the rules of writing

I probably should have read “Crime and Punishment” by Fyodor Dostoyevsky years ago, but based on how much I’m enjoying it now perhaps it was better to wait. After all, where we’re currently at intellectually and as a reader will greatly influence how much we can take from any given work.

The book is of course a masterpiece of literature, exploring deep psychological issues and making a great deal of commentary on Dostoyevsky’s contemporary society that still has a lot of relevance today. What has really struck me so far though, nine-tenths of the way through the book, is how little it has in common with the formulas that we’re told every writer should follow. I have my doubts that Dostoyevsky would get picked up by a modern mainstream publishing house, or even by a minor publisher more inclined to take risks, if he were trying to publish today. Were Dostoyevsky a struggling writer now, my gut tells me that he’d be hit by rejection mail after rejection mail, denying the world not only his great work but also Woody Allen’s very enjoyable “Match Point”, which clearly owes a heavy debt to it. Thank goodness for self-publishing!

There are a number of points on which I think the modern cookie-cutter presses would find fault with “Crime and Punishment”. For one, it has almost no action, with the twin murders of the pawnbroker and her sister happening very early in the book and the remainder focusing mostly on how Raskolnikov reacts psychologically to what he has done. There are very long dialogues between characters—some of whom that don’t even re-appear—that have little to nothing to do with the main plot of the book, very detailed descriptions of what people look like, their clothes, and the places they happen to be in, whole pages that lack any kind of paragraph division, and a shifting narrator’s voice that bounces between character’s heads and even at times appears to address the reader. In fact, aside from the long descriptions of what is happening mentally with certain characters, almost the entirety of the book is dialogue. There are no thrilling chase scenes, no puzzles for the reader to untangle, no voyeuristic sexual escapades, no slapstick side characters providing comic relief, and no luxurious/exotic settings. And to boot, the book is a massive 208, 144 words long. What “Crime and Punishment” does have, and has in bundles, is an analytic exploration of social ideas through the raw human emotion of those involved.

Of course our Western literary tradition would be much worse off without “Crime and Punishment”, as would many branches of philosophy and psychology. That Dostoyevsky wrote the book as he did is a tremendous credit to him. We’ve discussed the so-called rules of fiction writing quite a bit here at Drugstore, and what I keep coming back to is this: Write your own way, have the courage to believe in your work, listen to others’ ideas and take the offered suggestions (always with a grain of salt), but remember that the final decision is always solely yours. Only that way will your work truly reflect you, and only that way will it have its best chance of becoming something of real value.

Next week, Paul j Rogers remembers Jack Kerouac.

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Nabokov In My Knapsack

This week, guest contributor Nick Cody looks back to a time when a literary heavyweight seldom left his thoughts. 

I was told shortly after I had arrived, and believed it to be true, that the country I was living in had the highest population density in the world. And that the city with the greatest density in Taiwan was my city, Taichung. Furthermore, in Taichung, nowhere were people packed, stacked, and living more closely together than in downtown. And that is exactly where my apartment was.

Into this thick-as-molasses, swirling, buzzing, intoxicating sea of humanity dropped, as if one day from an eyedropper, two more interlopers: me and the ghost of Vladimir Nabokov. But maybe I should explain the use of the word intoxicating. Cities in general, and Asian cities in particular, always sparked in me a kind of natural high. I identify the same invigorating stimulant praised in the poems of Walt Whitman. I felt the same way about Taichung that Whitman felt about Manhattan. A look through the online archives of his Leaves of Grass will reveal many poems like this:

CITY OF ORGIES.

CITY of orgies, walks and joys,
City whom that I have lived and sung in your midst will one day
make you illustrious,
Not the pageants of you, not your shifting tableaus, your specta-
cles, repay me,
Not the interminable rows of your houses, nor the ships at the
wharves,
Nor the processions in the streets, nor the bright windows with
goods in them,
Nor to converse with learn’d persons, or bear my share in the soiree
or feast;
Not those, but as I pass O Manhattan, your frequent and swift
flash of eyes offering me love,
Offering response to my own—these repay me,
Lovers, continual lovers, only repay me.

But it was not Whitman who I carried with me daily on the “walks and joys” of my new life in Taiwan. After having read and reread Nabokov continuously for the previous two years, I lived, for lack of a better phrase, under his spell. More precisely yet, it was my understanding of this great writer gained from the superb two-volume biography by Brian Boyd, that kept me alert, quick, and sensitive to any ironic event or fluttering detail of daily life that could portend some significance. Without Boyd, I doubt I would have understood Nabokov at all. For Lolita, I had already read and found amusing, and almost immediately dismissed as frivolous word play. And the same goes for his greatest work, Pale Fire. I had simply missed most of it– meaning the significance of many details– and remained unaware of the ingenious intricacies of both novels until I read the Boyd biography.

It was through Boyd that I learned about one of the major themes and obsessions in Nabokov’s life and work: details, especially camouflaged or innocuous ones, are not only significant. They might be winks from beyond. If one is alert to them, and can connect the dots so to speak to figure out what ironies they might offer, life can be a thrilling bit of detective work. Ultimately, I had hoped to capture some of the magic I felt playing peek-a-boo with me throughout my days and weeks in Taichung so that I could pin them to some future storyboard or pen them in a novel.

I carried with me, among other things essential to an English teacher, a notepad for copying the details of these surprising coincidences. One night I misplaced my pen and only a few minutes after thinking, “I lost my pen. I have to find another.” There, at the top of the subway station steps, was a pen waiting for me. When I met a cute Taiwanese girl at the language academy, and found that her English nickname was Alice, I smiled. Nabokov had translated Alice In Wonderland, and might have been the first to do so, into Russian during his early years when he still lived in Russia. And when Alice told me she was studying Russian, it went straight into my notepad, with a double underline for emphasis!

One key event convinced me that these were charmed days. Another instructor at the language academy, an American whom I had had some good discussions with in the past, asked me about books. What was I reading? I told him as much as I could in the time allowed about Nabokov and specifically mentioned the Boyd biography. He must have been infected with some of my enthusiasm because a few days later he approached me with a book and a wry smile. “Remember you were telling me about Nabokov and that biography?” And then he opened the English conversation textbook he was holding and plopped it on the staff room table. “Check out that photo.”

On the page, framed with text of the dialogue, were two people standing in a bookstore. In the background of the photo, on a table, sat the two-volume biography of Nabokov by Brian Boyd. My jaw dropped. My hands slapped my knees. And then I jumped straight into the air as if electrocuted via cattle prod. That was my first entry in the notepad.

Where is that notepad now? And where is the magic? The scrawled notes were grubs and caterpillars that never became the butterflies of poetic insight. Even a quick glance at online resources finds that I had been living a delusion about at least one fact: Taiwan does not have the highest population density in the world. Looking back, I wonder how much my days were clouded with delusion: I am a writer; I am in the Land of Plenty; things have significance.

Next week, Andrew Oberg takes a look at Crime & Punishment.

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“The Hoax” and identifying with one’s characters

Returning to “The Hoax”, and the issues about writing that it raises, I’d like to consider how Gere’s character in the movie relates to the character that he is writing about.

Although he pretends to be co-writing the autobiography of Howard Hughes, he is of course acting completely on his own, as the title of the movie suggests. Howard Hughes, though, was a real person, and still living at the time that the events in the movie are meant to depict. Due to Hughes’ very public persona, Gere’s character was therefore able to construct and write about an imagined Hughes based on his knowledge of the real Hughes—a kind of blend of fact with fiction. He engrossed himself in this to such an extent that he began to dress as Hughes and record elaborate fake radio interviews in which he acted as Hughes and impersonated his voice, while Gere’s character’s friend conducted the interviews. Over time, Gere’s character eventually becomes so obsessed with Hughes that he half-hallucinates half-dreams whole scenarios involving the two of them with Hughes’ underlings.

Few writers likely approach this level of character inhabitation, this linking of one’s mind with the created mind of one’s character(s)—and the case here is rather special as Hughes was of course a living human being—but there is something to this tendency writers have, in my opinion. I recall Mark Porter once telling me that he heard Rueben’s voice (a character from his Dogs Chase Cars) inside his head, and that he was “hard to hide from”. (You can find the interview here.) That struck me at the time and it still does today. J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis famously had heated debates about whether or not it was right for a writer to link the real world we inhabit with one of fantasy, which indicates the level of their involvement not just with their characters but with the worlds those characters inhabited as well.

In my own experience I haven’t had the level of character identification that Mark seemed to have, and certainly not that Gere’s character in “The Hoax” had, but I do think that to some degree, however large or slight, it is unavoidable, even if it’s only for the time that one is actually writing. It is then, especially, that this tendency takes on a very positive hue and allows a writer to mold and shape the actions of a character in a way that suits the character’s personality. This naturally grants a high degree of believability to a story—would Mr. X really do that to Mr. Y? If the answer is yes, then the reader will accept nearly anything. But if the answer is no, then the reader will react negatively, possibly even putting the book down for good. The challenge for fiction writers then, is to create characters with enough depth and with enough nuances that their interactions with each other and their environments will make for a compelling story. And then also of course to make sure that one’s characters always act “in character”.

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Posted in Nuts & Bolts | Tagged , , | 2 Comments