Write a book

Earlier this month, Nathan Bransford asked: “Can anyone with enough practice be a good writer? What about a great writer? Is there a part of writing that is innate or can it be learned by anyone?”

As a teacher, I have to believe that with enough work, any reasonably intelligent person can become a good writer. It’s what I tell my students, and it’s what I believe. Give me a hard working, dedicated student and enough time and I can help that kid become a good writer.

Writing is hard work, but it’s not rocket science.

I am fond of telling people that I am not a very impressive person, and in many ways, this is true. I once thought of authors as brilliant, talented, almost other-worldly beings. Now that I have joined the club, their stature has diminished considerably. I can’t help but think that if I can do it, anyone can do it.

It turns out that authors are ordinary people like me.

In fact, I always tell the people who attend my readings and appearances that they should be writing, regardless of what they perceive their ability level to be. I firmly believe that everyone has a story to tell, whether it is fiction, memoir or something else entirely. In fact, based upon the success that I’ve had in the publishing world, I can’t understand why more people are not working on a book.

You never know when you might strike gold.

I like to say that publish or not, finishing a book is a major accomplishment.  It’s a goal that many, many people have but very few ever achieve. People spend their lives thinking about writing a book, envisioning their story, imagining the finished product, but never getting around to putting words to paper.

Finishing a book places you well ahead of this enormous majority.

And with the self-publishing outlets that exist for authors today, finishing a book doesn’t mean that it has to remain on your hard drive or in a stack of printed pages, even if you can’t find a publisher who is interested. Design a cover and a layout and print as many books as you’d like. Sell them from the trunk of your car, give them out as gifts or pass it onto your children as a timeless piece of you.

Either way, you will have written a book. That is quite an accomplishment.

Waiting is the worst

My favorite literary agent in the whole world (and one of my favorite people in the world) is Taryn Fagerness. I am proud to call her my agent and my friend. She is a brilliant professional and my hero.

Hero? Heroine? I dunno. I think hero sounds better, but if she likes heroine, that would be fine, too.

Either way, despite my supreme adoration for Taryn and my assumption that all other literary agents pale in comparison, I recently discovered that there might be one or two other agents in the world who pass muster, including Nathan Bransford of Curtis Brown, LTD. Though I don’t know him personally, I’ve begun to read his blog and have become an instant fan, not necessarily for his literary agent super powers (of which I have no knowledge), but for the way in which he consistently brings interesting stories from the publishing world to my attention.

It’s become a blog that I read every day.

Recently, Bransford wrote a post about the excruciating pain that comes with waiting.

I understand his pain.

As a writer, waiting can be the worst. Whether it’s waiting for your book to sell or your agent to read your manuscript or your wife to read the latest chapter, waiting is absolute torture. Unlike the athlete or the musician, whose performance is instantly recognized and appreciated by fans, an author’s efforts remain unseen by most readers for more than a year after the words have hit the page.

This is bad enough. But waiting for an editor, an agent, or even your loving spouse can be brutal.  Yes, I know that reading takes time and people are not available at the drop of the hat, but I often wish they were. 

Bransford says it best when he writes:

“The frustrating thing about submitting to agents and editors is that there's nothing. you. can. do. about. it. Once you hit send you're at their mercy. The stress of always wondering if today is the day you're going to receive good or bad news, of always sneaking peeks at your e-mail, and trying to be cool and composed in front of the people who are invested in your work, and hearing all those nos before you get your yeses.... it's a steady stress that wears you down.”

Amen, brother.

Last summer, I was waiting for my publisher to make an offer on UNEXPECTEDLY, MILO. The interminable wait to hear if I was to be more than a one-hit-wonder was bad enough, but tied into this delay was my wife’s decision to teach during the subsequent school year. A good offer on the book meant that she could stay at home with our newborn daughter for another year. Otherwise, we would be forced to navigate the difficult and potential heart-wrenching waters of daycare.

A change in staffing and a restructuring of departments within the publishing house delayed the offer, making our wait even more excruciating. Eventually my wife and I were forced to hope for the best and submit her request for extended maternity leave, unable to wait any longer lest her teaching position ended up unfilled.

A stressful time indeed.

In the end, everything worked out just find, but Brandford is correct when he asserts that waiting is the worst part.

I’d take a bad day at the keyboard over a single day of waiting any day.

Uniformity be damned!

I find the degree to which authors differ in their approaches to writing utterly amazing. 

Alexander Alter of the Wall Street Journal has collected remarks from a variety of leading authors pertaining to the way in which they approach the process of writing, and they could not be more diverse from one another. 

For example:

“Orhan Pamuk writes by hand, in graph-paper notebooks, filling a page with prose and leaving the adjacent page blank for revisions, which he inserts with dialogue-like balloons. He sends his notebooks to a speed typist who returns them as typed manuscripts; then he marks the pages up and sends them back to be retyped. The cycle continues three or four times.”

“Kazuo Ishiguro, author of six novels, including the Booker-prize winning "Remains of the Day,"typically spends two years researching a novel and a year writing it. Since his novels are written in the first person, the voice is crucial, so he "auditions" narrators by writing a few chapters from different characters' points of view. Before he begins a draft, he compiles folders of notes and flow charts that lay out not just the plot but also more subtle aspects of the narrative, such as a character's emotions or memories.”

“Dan Chaon writes a first draft on color-coded note cards he buys at Office Max. Ideas for his books come to him as images and phrases rather than plots, characters or settings, he says. He begins by jotting down imagery, with no back story in mind. He keeps turning the images over in his mind until characters and themes emerge.”

I sit down wherever I am, open the laptop, and begin writing.

In comparison, I feel so… uninteresting.   Lame.

A veritable imposter.   

Strange things afoot at the Circle K

Photographer and artist Paho Mann has photographed almost two dozen re-inhabited Circle K convenience stores in the Phoenix, New Mexico area.  As the company began moving its stores to more profitable locations in the 1990s, “the shells left by this migration were filled by small businesses, each inhabiting an architecturally identical structure. The new occupants painted, put up a new signs, and modified windows and doors.”

The result is a fascinating look at the creativity and individuality of local business people and provides an intriguing look at the history of the region. 

It’s also flat-out kooky, a sensibility that often appeals to me.

I can’t explain it, but ideas and images like this inspire me like few others.  I look at one of these re-imagined Circle K’s and think that I could probably write a novel about each one.  I can’t help but imagine the people working inside, and just like that, characters begin to take shape in my mind. 

Also, for connoisseurs of the film classic Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, the Circle K brings back some rather fond memories as well. 

Editor at all hours

I know I’ve said it before, but after working on copy edits and report cards until after midnight and then writing a quick post for this blog, it’s remarkably reassuring knowing that there is someone in Europe, still awake, ready to read, and willing to send me an email in the middle of the night highlighting the two typos in the post. 

I’ve made some very good friends since publishing my book.

Admitting my failure

I’ve been reviewing the copy edits to UNEXPECTEDLY, MILO this week, and as I reach the halfway point in the manuscript, allow me to share some of my more frequent mistakes have been brought to light thanks to this process. The list so far includes:

1. A failure to realize that there are two different spellings for the words vice and vise, depending on the meaning. I always thought that vice was the only correct spelling for both definitions. I didn’t even know that vise existed as a possibility.

2. A chronic overuse of the word upon. I have so far encountered nearly two dozen instances in which I used the word upon when the word on was sufficient and grammatically correct.

3. An under-utilization of hyphens to an extraordinary degree. My copy editor has inserted dozens, and perhaps hundreds, of hyphens into my manuscript where there were originally none.

None I tell you!  Not one!  I conducted a search for them in the original manuscript and found not a single, solitary hyphen.  Not even a dash.  Lots of commas and ellipsis, but not a hyphen to be found.

4. Thanks to The Grateful Dead and their only chart topping hit, “Touch of Grey,” I am never able to remember the American spelling of the word gray/grey. Even after correcting the error this evening, I still cannot remember at this moment which is correct.

5. A persistent confusion of the words All right and alright, with a strong and apparently mistaken leaning toward alright. Is alright even a word?

6. An ongoing, nearly lifelong use of the British spelling of theatre, a mistake I have been making since high school. I have no idea why.

My copy editor, whose name I am currently seeking, was also kind enough to point out that a Jeep Cherokee does not have a convertible top, so the top-down Jeep in my book needs to be a Jeep Wrangler instead.

This is why my copy editor will be getting a mention in the acknowledgements of the book.

He or she (I’m guessing a woman based upon the occasional comment in the margin) is damn good.

AwkwardFamilyPhotos.com

Two things:

1.  I can picture any number of the characters from my books appearing on this blog someday.

2.  If I am ever in need of a writing prompt, an idea for a story, or just the impetus for a new character, could there be anything more inspiring than photographs like these?

Borders Books in Farmington, CT

On Sunday I made an appearance at Borders Books and Music right down the road from my school. As always, I spoke for a while, read a little bit from SOMETHING MISSING, took some questions from the audience, recommended a few books, and finished off with a brief signing.

This was my most local appearance so far, just ten minutes from my home, so my wife and daughter were able to attend as well.  I can’t tell you how fun it is to see my daughter sitting in the audience, listening to me share stories about the book, even if she spends much of the time babbling and fidgeting in her mother’s arms. 

As a result of the bookstore’s proximity to home, there were many recognizable faces in the audience that day.  Friends, colleagues, and students (current and former) were mixed in with a few nonpartisans, and it made for a much more informal and casual atmosphere.  Adults and kids asked lots of questions, and many of them were quite insightful.

In my last few appearances (including this one), budding writers have been asking me about my writing process, specifically inquiring about my preference of the keyboard versus the pen. While this question seems innocent enough, I’ve gotten a sense that these people are searching for the right answer, longing for the means by which their work might instantly improve.

I’m a keyboard man.  Unless I’m writing short poetry, which I will do from time to time (I’m currently working on a poem about a boy named Gilly who tastes his cremated grandfather’s ashes out of curiosity), I am always composing on a laptop.  But I don’t think this is necessarily the correct way to write.  While I cannot imagine writing fiction longhand, am I expected to believe that Shakespeare’s work would have been any better had he been writing on a MacBook Pro?

I doubt it.  

Unfortunately, I don’t think it works that way, and these writers, hoping for a quick and easy solution to their writing struggles, are out of luck. 

Unless, of course, you believe Charles Bukowski, who discovered word processing at the age of seventy.

Death is not a deterrent

Whenever I speak about my book at a bookstore or library, I always encourage the members of my audience to begin writing.  I tell them that anyone is capable of writing if they apply themselves, and I mean it.  I think everyone should be working on a book.  Regardless of a person’s level of skill or experience, everyone has a story, whether it be fiction or otherwise. 

Too few people take the time to commit these stories to paper.  

Following my appearance at the retirement community on Monday, I found myself engaged in a conversation with an 86-year old woman, a former chaplain who once wrote sermons and the occasional Op-Ed piece in her youth.  She told me that she was thinking about writing a memoir and hoped to get around to it “someday.”

“But dear,” I said, calculating a means by which I might not offend.  “You’re 86-years old.  Do you really think you should be waiting?”

“What are you trying to say?” she asked.  “Do you think I’m going to die tomorrow?”

“Well, you have a better chance of dying tomorrow than most people, so yeah.  Maybe. I hope not, but you never know.  For someone your age, shouldn’t you be thinking that there’s no time like the present?”

“I got plenty of years left on these bones, young man.”

“If you say so,” I said, conceding the fight but not at all happy about it.    

I have at least two friends who I have been trying to convince to get writing without much success.  Both are talented writers with stories to share, but so far, they haven’t scrawled even a single sentence that they are willing to share with me.

But if I can’t get an 86-year old woman to feel a sense of urgency, what chance do I have with a stubborn procrastinator and an under-confident slacker, both still in their thirties?

Not much, I’m afraid.

Short story conundrum

In college, I wrote many short stories.  Most are not well written, but I have a couple that are good and one that I like very much.  I’ve been thinking about showing my favorite to my agent in hopes that she can help me get it placed in a magazine somewhere.

But I worry.  It was written more than ten years ago and is nothing like the work I do today.  I’m afraid that it might simply be dreadful. 

As I debate the future of my short story and attempt to rouse the courage to send it to Taryn, I’d like to share Kurt Vonnegut’s eight rules for writing a short story, which I think are rather good, and some of which can be applied to novelists as well, though I reject numbers 4, 5, and 8 with all my soul.

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Busy!

I’m in the process of debating over the multiple careers of protagonist Wyatt Mason in THE CHICKEN SHACK. Wyatt is the owner of The Chicken Shack, but he is also a part-time English teacher at a local community college, an occasional freelance magazine writer, a member of the Town Council and the local vigilante. I’ve worried that this might seem like too much, and that Wyatt’s life will come across as convoluted and unrealistic.

At the same time, I find myself justifying Wyatt’s multitude of career paths by citing my own.

At the moment, I am a fifth grade school teacher, the owner and operator of a mobile DJ service, a secular minister who performs marriages and baby naming ceremonies, an author who has published one book, sold another and is at work on a third, and a fledgling life coach.

In addition to these careers, I am a blogger, the writer of the occasional Op-Ed piece, and I am attempting to write the libretto of a rock opera. I have also been publicizing my book through speaking appearances at libraries and book stores throughout New England and am an avid golfer and poker player.

I am also pondering the possibility of hosting some writing clinics in the area for writers who are looking to improve their skills and get their work published. I met a photographer at a recent wedding who conducts about three seminars a year on wedding photography and seems to make a solid profit from her efforts.

I figured that I might be able to do the same.

Oh yeah, and I’m married with a daughter who is eight months old.

Does Wyatt’s life really seem so complicated in comparison?

Of course, I must also be careful not to justify the legitimacy of a character or an event based upon my own life or the life of one person somewhere in the world. “But I once knew a guy who did the same thing!” is a familiar refrain in writing workshops as writers attempt to explain away the improbable or fantastic, and even I have been guilty of this kind of justification in the past.

But just because one man once survived a fall from 10,000 feet when his parachute failed to open doesn’t mean that it will be plausible in your book.

So what to do with Wyatt? So far I’ve switched him to an ex-Town Councilman, but his job at the college, his ownership of The Chicken Shack, and his sputtering writing career will probably remain intact.

It’s who he is, like it or not.

Cursive writing: Expendable?

I haven’t used cursive in years.  Even my signature can hardly be called cursive.  It’s more of an indecipherable scrawl.  Other than the years I spent instructing my students in cursive when I taught third grade, I have not found any use for this form of writing in my own life. 

Perhaps it has something to do with being left-handed.  Dragging my hand across a written page leaves my hand stained with ink. 

I mention this because there’s been some concern as of late that cursive is a fading skill, a dying art. 

Should we be concerned?

Is the use of cursive necessary for the future of our society?

As a teacher, one of my greatest challenges is finding room for all of the new material and additional curricular responsibilities in an already full school day.  While it seem as if we are more than willing to add to the curriculum each year, we never actually remove anything in order to compensate for the additional time requirements, nor do we make an effort to extend the school day. 

So perhaps cursive should go.  Perhaps it’s expendable.

Thoughts?    

Credit to the copyeditor

UNEXPECTEDLY, MILO has entered the copyediting stage of production, in which some clever editor with a keen understanding for the English language, an outstanding eye for detail and an unbiased red pen will read through my manuscript line by line, proposing changes here and there to eliminate redundancy, clarify ideas, streamline sentences and make me sound a hell of a lot better than I really am.

It’s a reassuring process that allows me to sit back and wait for smart people to clean up any mess that I left behind.  And it’s one of those aspects of publishing that I once feared but now adore.

For the most part, the red pen of the copyeditor represents suggestions, and most often good ones, but I am free to reject any edit that I do not like. When going through this process for SOMETHING MISSING, I rejected few of my copyeditor’s suggestions, and when I did, it was usually in an attempt to maintain the rigidity and precision of Martin’s life by adhering to unnecessarily formal and obtuse language.

I recently read an interview with Mary Norris, copyeditor at The New Yorker, and what struck me most about her job was the lack of recognition that she receives for her work. She helps to polish dozens of stories each week, and yet her name never appears on a single one.

I wonder how this feels. Reading through her interview and getting a sense of her personality, I would guess that she is not in the publishing business for the glory or the recognition. She likes good writing and enjoys making it a little better.

But still, a little public acknowledgement might be nice.

And this led to me to realize that the same thing has happened with my book. Someone whose name I have forgotten copyedited SOMETHING MISSING, making it a better story in the process, and yet that person’s name never appears anywhere in the book. In fact, had I not acknowledged my editor, Melissa, my agent, Taryn, and my friends, all of whom helped to shape the book, their names would have never appeared in the book either.

Perhaps this should change. Maybe there is space on the page containing the book’s copyright information for the names of my editor, my copyeditor, and anyone else instrumental in the crafting of the book. Regardless of whether or not these selfless individuals desire acknowledgment of their work, shouldn’t there be some kind of recognition of their efforts?

I shall look into this.

When death interrupts the writing process

I passed the manuscript for UNEXPECTEDLY, MILO onto a friend who has yet to read it. When I asked him what was taking so long to finish, he admitted that he no longer was in possession of the book. “I gave it to my aunt, who was afraid that she might die before the book was published. She loved SOMETHING MISSING and wanted to read your next one now, just in case.”

That’s quite a compliment.

The Wall Street Journal recently ran an article about the new wave of novels being published posthumously from writers like Vladimir Nabokov, David Foster Wallace and Ralph Ellison. Having experienced my own legitimate brushes with death in the past, I think quite a bit about the prospect that I might be hit by a bus in the middle of a book and never have the opportunity to finish.

It’s an unsettling thought, leaving characters frozen in time, their stories untimely cut off. And perhaps it’s a sentiment that Stephen King also battled with when writing his Dark Tower series. In that series of novels, King inserts himself into the story, becoming both the writer as well as a character who must be saved by the very characters about whom he is writing. When King was nearly killed after being hit by a van (an incident that occurs both in real life as well as the book), the protagonist, Roland, warns his maker to finish his tale and to stop dawdling. One cannot help but wonder if King is exorcising his own fear of death and the unsettling prospect of an unfinished novel when issuing Roland’s warning to the fictional version of himself.

But unless an author retires, I guess that he or she will always have an unfinished piece of work. Right?

And even when an author does retire, this is not always the case.

After publishing TIMEQUAKE in 1997, Vonnegut announced his retirement, causing me to begin a purposely slow and methodical reading of his final novel that has taken me into my eighth year. Knowing that no other books were coming from one of my favorite writers, I decided to read about a page a week, re-reading constantly but stopping myself from ever finishing the book, fearful of what life might be like without a new Vonnegut sentence in my future.

Since he died, however, one collection of stories and essays (ARMEGGEDON IN RETROSPECT) has been published and another (LOOK AT THE BIRDIE) is due out later this year. Though I’m not sure how I would feel about someone purging my computer for all my unpublished stories and essays, I’m certainly pleased that someone has taken the liberty in the case of Vonnegut.

And so I am honored that someone has requested my manuscript in fear of her eminent demise. In fact, the same thing happened to Stephen King in the midst of writing his Dark Tower series. A woman in Vermont who was facing terminal cancer wrote to King after the publication of the fourth or fifth book of the series, asking if he would share the fate of Roland, Eddie, Jake and Susannah with her before she died. Unfortunately, King writes in much the same way I do, waiting for the story to flow from his fingers, absent of planning and arduous forethought, so he had no idea how his series would end and therefore could not grant the dying woman her request.

As long as my friend’s aunt does not request my current manuscript, I can keep at least keep her happy.

Luke and Luc

Have you ever noticed the difference between the names Luke and Luc? 

Luke, pronounced as it appears, is the name of a guy who could be my friend.  Strong, independent, and manly, it is a name that bespeaks of confidence and vigor.    

Luke Duke from the Dukes of Hazzard, a man’s man even with his unfortunate choice of automobile decoration. 

Luke Perry, former teenage heartthrob and often-forgotten (and rightfully so) star of Joss Whedon’s film version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. 

Luke Skywalker.  The greatest Luke of all time, and probably named in honor of his creator, George Lucas. 

Then there’s Luc, pronounced by puckering your lips, extending your jaw, tilting your head slightly upward, raising your eyebrows, and sounding utterly ridiculous.  It’s the way that Jean-Luc Picard, the laughable and tragically absurd captain from Star Trek: Next Generation, pronounced his inexplicably hyphenated first name.

Luc. It is not a good name.  

It does not bespeak of confidence or vigor

It does not connote strength or independence. 

One would never want to be photographed while saying this name.  Doubt my assertion?  Go find a mirror. 

It is impossible to shout in an emergency.  Don’t believe me?  Try shouting this:

“Luc!  I’m over here! To your left, Luc!”

or….

“Luc!  I’m open!  Pass me the ball, Luc!”

It can’t be done.

It is a ridiculous name. 

These are the things that I think about when choosing a character’s name.

The half-finished book

Suzanne Munshower of The Guardian writes in praise of the half-finished book, celebrating her willingness to put a book down prior to finishing it if the story no longer captivates her.

I’m not sure how I feel about this.

Being a somewhat compulsive person, I often feel the need to finish a book even if I am no longer enjoying it, and many times I do just this. Sometimes it works out. There was a moment in Wally Lamb’s I KNOW THIS MUCH IS TRUE when I was ready to close the book and move on, bored with the storyline and the pacing of the novel, but I persisted despite every inclination to do otherwise and was rewarded with a game-changing fall from a ladder that propelled the book forward to the end and made my willingness to persevere pay off.

But in the last year, I can also name at least three books that I stopped reading somewhere in the middle, deciding that my time could no longer be wasted on a story that did not interest me. While I was happy to recapture the time that I might have invested in reading those books, they will always loom over me, making me wonder if things might have changed if I had read just three more pages.

I utilize the notion of the half-read book into my writing process. One of the things that I have learned to keep in mind when writing a book is pacing. Today’s reader is simply too impatient to allow a book to slowly develop, which unfortunately seems to be my tendency. Gone are the days of the idyllic plot development of Jane Austen and Henry James. Plots must now take off immediately, and the pace in which the story is told must be brisk and unwavering. Today’s reader is a fickle, impatient individual who demands instant gratification.

How annoying.

At readings and book signings, I often address this topic by blaming my audience’s lack of patience for making my life more difficult than it need be. “If you would all just chill out and give my book a chance, I could write it the way I want to write it,” I often say. “Give it fifty pages, for God’s sake!”

Smart move. Huh? Chastise the very people who have chosen to come out and support you as an author.

But I’m curious where other people stand on the half-finished book. Is this something that you do frequently, or like me, does the idea of not completing a book weigh on your mind and leave you always wondering if you’ve made the right decision?

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, I assume that you didn’t put SOMETHING MISSING down halfway through. Right?

A float has to float

Attempting to improve on my ability to craft dialogue, I find myself listening to people more and more, eavesdropping on conversations and taking careful note of a person’s choice of words.  Today I was in Carvel, waiting to order, when the woman in front of me was handed her root beer float.  She looked at it, paused a moment and then asked, “Don’t you mix these up?”

Obviously, the woman was a lunatic to assume that a root beer float should be mixed like a shake.  The word float implies that the ice cream should be floating in the root beer, and not spun in like some mutated Dairy Queen Blizzard.

But what I noticed even more was her use of the word don’t instead of the word do.  Note the difference in tone between the two questions:

Don’t you mix these up?

Do you mix these up?

The use of the word don’t implies accusation.  It makes the speaker sound rude, condescending, and annoyed.  It’s not a nice way to solicit the desired bit of information from the counterperson.      

The use of the word do essentially turns the same question into an honest search for information, with no tone of accusation or annoyance whatsoever.

Just think: One simple word change could have made this woman’s ridiculous question at least sound sincere and polite, but instead, she came across as a complete jerk.  

Which undoubtedly she is. 

Good to keep in mind when writing dialogue. 

I was tempted to instruct this woman on her poor choice of words but chose instead to remain silent.  Though I don’t do it often, I am capable of restraint from time to time.  

The woman behind the counter then asked for my order.

“A root beer float, please,” I said, speaking louder than necessary.  “But you don’t have to mix mine up.  Just make it like a root beer float is supposed to be made. With ice cream that floats. No special orders for me.”

The woman with the float-turned-shake harrumphed in my general direction, attempted to argue that "”lots of people have their floats mixed up” and exited the store in a blustering huff, dragging her bedraggled son behind her.  She was not happy with me.   

So much for restraint.

Difficult to defend Dan

Dan Brown seems to be taking a lot of abuse lately.  I guess when you sell almost 100 million books, you make yourself a target. 

After all, success breeds envy, jealousy, stupidity and downright cruelty.  I have my own experience in such matters and can assure you that this sad fact of life is true.

With these thoughts in mind, I was prepared to come out in defense of Dan Brown, author extraordinaire and bestselling novelist, whose first two books I found to be entertaining, albeit farfetched, stories. 

What do these critics know?

So what if his prose doesn’t crackle like that of Philip Roth or Toni Morrison? 

How can millions of devoted readers be wrong?

Then I stumbled upon Tom Chiver’s list of Brown’s worst twenty sentences and Brian Davis’s proposed edits of Brown’s work (a fascinating read). While I might shudder over the prospect of a similar examination of every sentence in SOMETHING MISSING, these two critics advance a formidable position on the weakness of Brown's writing, and they base their opinions on irrefutable evidence.  

I’m not great with physical description, but this example is probably one of Brown’s worst:

Captain Bezu Fache carried himself like an angry ox, with his wide shoulders thrown back and his chin tucked hard into his chest. His dark hair was slicked back with oil, accentuating an arrow-like widow's peak that divided his jutting brow and preceded him like the prow of a battleship. As he advanced, his dark eyes seemed to scorch the earth before him, radiating a fiery clarity that forecast his reputation for unblinking severity in all matters.

In the words of Chivers:

Do angry oxen throw their shoulders back and tuck their chins into their chest? What precisely is a fiery clarity and how does it forecast anything? Once again, it is not clear whether Brown knows what ‘forecast’ means.

And I might add that the whole damn paragraph is overdone, with one too many simile and metaphor. 

Like I said, a sentence-by-sentence examination of SOMETHING MISSING might also yield a few clunkers, but the list of problems that Chivers and Davis assemble is daunting. 

Of course, I must ask:

Can any of the blame be laid at the feet of his editor?  I’d like to think that my editor would be wise enough to save me from a sentence like:

Although not overly handsome in a classical sense, the forty-year-old Langdon had what his female colleagues referred to as an ‘erudite’ appeal — wisp of gray in his thick brown hair, probing blue eyes, an arrestingly deep voice, and the strong, carefree smile of a collegiate athlete.

Stupid, annoying plot

I often bemoan the importance placed upon plot in the current literary environment.  Being a writer who does not have a plot in mind when he begins a book, I tend to focus upon character first, and as a result, my work can sometimes be rambling and unfocused, especially in its first draft.  In revising UNEXPECTEDLY, MILO, several characters and scenes were ultimately cut from the novel because they simply did not propel the plot forward. A conversation with my agent or editor might go something like this:

Not me:  What’s the purpose of this character?

Me:  I dunno. Isn’t she interesting and kind of amusing?

Not me:  Yes, but how does she fit into the story?

Me:  I dunno. A minor yet clever diversion?

Both my agent and editor are kind enough to let me down as easily as possible by saying things like, “She’s a great character, but maybe she wasn’t meant for this book” or “Perhaps you can post this chapter online after publication, as supplementary material?”

They are nice and maybe even right, but I am left wondering why all things must serve the plot.  Why can’t a book have a more meandering, character-driven approach to it?  Why does everything in a story need to propel the action forward?  Why does conflict need to be introduced so early? 

This topic comes up quite often when I’m speaking to people about my book, and when it does, I usually put the blame right where it belongs: upon the shoulders of my audience.

Not nice to blame your audience and fans, I know, but it just might be true. 

The modern reader, I am told, does not have the patience for a slowly develop, slightly meandering plotline.  If a book doesn’t grab the reader’s attention in the first twenty pages, it is often abandoned.  In today’s climate, the conflict must be introduced early and the plot must be advanced at all times. 

How annoying that an army of impatient readers impact the way in which I write. 

The along comes this article on the state of the novel from The Wall Street Journal, written by Lev Grossman, which contains this dreadful line:

If there's a key to what the 21st-century novel is going to look like, this is it: the ongoing exoneration and rehabilitation of plot.

Damn.

Golf and writing bear the same fruits

Golf is like writing. You only need to be told to think about the game differently in order to improve dramatically.

Imagine the backswing differently. Envision yourself throwing a Frisbee as you rotate. Think wet noodle. Swing through the ball. Forget the ball entirely.

No strength training. No demonstration. No specifics on technique or grip. You don’t even need to practice the new approach in order to improve. Just listen, absorb, swing, and presto! You hit the ball farther than you ever have before, and more importantly, you feel good doing it. You find a groove in your swing that never existed before. It’s almost as if one minute you’re playing one game, and the next minute, you’re playing a new, entirely different game.

Writing is like this as well. I find myself reading a short story by John Updike or listening to dialogue written by Stephen King or laughing to the humor of Kurt Vonnegut or David Sedaris, and just like that, I am struck by an unexpected revelation.

Wow. Setting can become character.

Hey. Silence… the absence of a response in dialogue… can be just as meaningful as the use of actual words.

Ah-ha… Using italics to reinforce the right moment of inflection can really change the humor of a sentence.

No practice is required. No lesson or tutorial. No series of explicit directions. Just like golf, I only need to be told to think about the craft in a different way, and instantly, my skills are improved.

One moment setting is setting. The next, the possibility of making setting as pervasive and unique as character has popped into existence.

One moment I am pondering an appropriate response for a character in the midst of an argument, and the next, I realize that no response might be the better choice

One moment I am struggling to bring humor to a section of text, and the next, I find the italics sitting in my author’s toolbox.

This is why I despised cross country running so much. Nothing changes. No immediate gratification. Just running and running and more running.