Non-Nutritional Novels

Posted on by July 28, 2015
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CheetosI just read and reviewed Green Girl, by Kate Zambreno. See it here.

A green girl is a young, naïve, unformed girl, as Ophelia was described in Hamlet.  Zambreno’s book describes such an unformed person in novel-length detail. But why? I use this book as an example of a novel that tells no story.

If I described a spotted river rock in great detail over 250 pages, would that be a novel? Let’s say I mixed detailed observations with my impressions and descriptions of the rock’s behavior as it tumbled with the current. Is that a novel? To describe something is not to tell a story about it.

I believe a novel is, or should be, a kind of storytelling, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and there must be some point to it. The “point” can be to educate or entertain, but ultimately, a novel is supposed to comment on the human condition in some way, as all good stories do. Storytelling is an art form we use to talk about ourselves.

A river rock that moves from Point A to Point B along the riverbed has taken a journey, but not one that illuminates anything about human life, unless a storyteller comes along and helps us imagine a connection between that rock’s activity and some human experience. That would make it a story. Without the storyteller, you have only a report.

Likewise, a long, meandering description of a vapid, unformed girl, no matter how detailed, does not tell a story, any more than a description of a rock does.

I recognize that I’m old school. Aristotelian, actually. These days, a novel is anything that gets published as a novel. Nobody needs approval from me.

Nevertheless, I would like novels to tell stories. If they don’t, I feel hungry.

Zambreno – Green Girl

Posted on by July 24, 2015
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Green GirlThere is a vaguely Faulknerian mood to this strange novel. In Faulkner’s work, dim-witted, almost subhuman characters passively bump their ways around Yoknapatawpha County. As a traditionalist, I’m not a fan of passive, aimless characters behaving pointlessly, but at least in Faulkner, you have those beautiful sentences to keep you going.

In Green Girl, the main character, Ruth, is a vapid and emotionally chaotic 20-year-old American working at a department store in London. She has no interests, no values, no motivation, no reasoning power, barely language, and ironically, no clear desire (the name of the perfume she sprays on guests entering the store). She is utterly unlikeable, which would be fine if we could learn something from her. She stumbles, half-blind, through a fog of sensory and emotional confusion. Nothing happens; there is no plot. She never changes; there is no character development.

Is there redeeming lyrical prose? I think the author reached for it, but missed. The style of writing could be construed as prose poetry, but if that was the intent, it leaves me less than satisfied.

Example: Ruth is conflicted about her desire for social admiration versus her contempt for the superficiality of lookism, so she has this thought balloon:

“Look at me
(don’t look at me)
Look at me
(don’t look at me)
Look at me don’t look at me look at me look at me don’t look at me don’t look
(Look)
(Don’t look)
I can’t stand it if you don’t look
Look
Look
Please
Stop”

I guess that’s kind of poetic. At least the typography is. But does it convey anything beyond itself? Is it insightful? Some readers might find it Joycean. I found it so banal and clichéd that I cringed at the author’s attempt. The book is full of such painful examples. Perhaps others will read them more generously than I could.

If I wanted to write a portrait of an unformed person, one who had not yet come to self-awareness, I think I would reach deeper than this. Ruth’s thoroughgoing superficiality is an insult to adolescents. If she were 12 years old, rather than 20, her inner seething might be more convincing (though no more interesting). It just wasn’t believable to me that a 20-year-old, not obviously brain-damaged, developmentally impaired, or mentally ill person could be so hollow. In Yoknapatawpha County, you make allowances because it’s Mississippi hill country in the 1920’s. But here in contemporary, working-class London?

Some female reviewers have gushed that Zambreno absolutely captured their adolescent experience. I am shocked if that is not hyperbole. But maybe I’ve lived a sheltered life. What do I know?

There are moments of keen observational writing in here, but they are more than offset by mind-numbing repetition and banality.

Zambreno, Kate (2011/2014).Green Girl.  New York: Harper Perennial (275 pp).

Is Fiction Autobiography?

Posted on by July 23, 2015
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Death of the Author QuoteI just posted a book review, of Two Serious Ladies, by Jane Bowles. See it here.

I didn’t mention in the review that Jane and Paul Bowles (author of The Sheltering Sky) were married for decades while they lived in Tunisia. Their marriage was unconventional, both of them having relationships with other people (often homosexual), even while they remained married, for convenience, at least. I thought that autobiographical fact might help to understand the restless, hollow characters that appear in both Jane’s and Paul’s books. I decided I didn’t know enough about them to make that claim in my review.

And that got me thinking about whether it is legitimate to invoke an author’s biography in evaluating a work of fiction. I imagine some future reviewer of my android novel saying, “Oh, yeah, that Bill Adams was like an android himself – emotionally unexpressive.” I wouldn’t like that. “Just read the book,” I want to say, “and leave me out of it.” I admit I have always been amygdala-challenged. But is that a fair interpretation for a book I wrote?

To some extent, all fiction is autobiographical. How could it not be? But should that matter? These days, we’re not supposed to care about the author’s intention because once you publish a book, it doesn’t belong to you anymore. It becomes fodder for reviewers, who do with it what they will. The author is silent (or worse, “dead.”) So sayeth the postmodernists (e.g., Roland Barthes).

I don’t think an author’s biography explains a novel but I confess I still think in terms of the classical rhetorical triangle, in which a work of art is one part of an ongoing cultural conversation. The other two corners of the triangle are the author and the audience (from Aristotle, and per Art Danto’s The Madonna of the Future). In this view, it is an error to view a novel as a stand-alone object. An author’s life and times are always germane to the conversation involving it.

So while I like a novel to speak to me on its own, and I rarely am interested in the author’s biography, I admit that bringing facts about the author’s life and times to a review, while perilous, is a legitimate approach to analysis.

 

Bowles – Two Serious Ladies

Posted on by July 22, 2015
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Two Serious Ladies_Seriously Aimless

In this sometimes amusing novel, two well-off American women cast aside their comfortable lives and pursue separate journeys of self-discovery. In both cases, they end up hanging out with prostitutes, con-men, and other shady characters, living in dirty places, drinking a lot, and having unconventional sexual experiences. It looks like degeneracy writ large. Yet each woman seems to find part of herself that was missing. They are not unsatisfied in the end.

It’s not a bad setup for a novel, but it didn’t work for me, for two reasons.  First, the women never seemed properly motivated. They bump around from one banal experience to the next, for no reason. They seem numb and hollow. Whatever emotions they express are arbitrary rather than organic.

In this, the characters are not unlike those in The Sheltering Sky, by Paul Bowles, Jane’s husband. In that novel, the characters’ numb aimlessness seemed to be a picture of post-WWII anomie that infected much existential literature of the time, and that novel (1946, I think it was) made numerous references to the horrors of war, forming a context for understanding the characters. In Jane’s novel, the women don’t seem to stand for anything. They are just empty shells passing the time. There is no plot (which would be okay if the characters were strong).

Jane’s characters move from food and drink to sleep and sex, then back to food and drink, repeating the cycle endlessly. They are bored and unmotivated, like Hemingway’s characters in The Sun Also Rises (which was contextualized by Spanish Civil War). I wanted some explanation for why these women are so restless. There is a dim suggestion that they chafe at paternalistic society, but if that’s really the theme, it is not well-drawn.

Another drawback for me was the writing style, which struck me as vague and over-narrated. A random example:

Mr. Copperfield chuckled. “You’re so crazy,” he said to her with indulgence. He was delighted to be in the tropics at last and he was more than pleased with himself that he had managed to dissuade his wife from stopping at a ridiculously expensive hotel where they would have been surrounded by tourists. He realized that his hotel was sinister, but that was what he loved. (p.41)

That is not writing that draws me in. For example, how do you say something “with indulgence?” I haven’t a clue. How did Mr. C feel? “More than pleased with himself.”  Hmm. He loves sinister hotels. Why? No reason is given in the text, and there is no description of what constitutes its sinister nature anyway.  And he did not “dissuade” his wife from the other hotel. He simply decreed they’d stay at the allegedly sinister one. These may seem like nit-picky points, but the whole book is like that, and no matter how carefully I read, I rarely knew what was going on or what the narrator intended. As a result, I never felt engaged by this novel.

However, it is readable, once in a while satirical of manners and practices, and the women often have a kind of arch, Austen-like voice that’s interesting. So, not all bad by any means, but it left me unenthusiastic.

Bowles, Jane (1943). Two Serious Ladies. New York: Harper-Collins. (231 pp).

 

The Shitbird

Posted on by July 20, 2015
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BikersThere are few things more unnerving for a writer than that familiar doubt that erupts in the middle of a project, “Is this total bullshit?” I know you’re supposed to ignore the “shitbird,” as I’ve heard it called, the bird who sits on a writer’s shoulder and whispers in his or her ear: “This IS bullshit, and you have no talent and you will never write anything good.”

I thought I’d left the old shitbird behind. Not because I discovered  I  write deathless art, but because I realized that he, the shitbird, is the bullshit. There is no standard for “good” writing. Writing is writing and there are a million ways to do it. There is no such thing as talent, only competence and hard work. And finally, I write the best I can write. I can’t write better than myself.

But, my doubt arose after finishing the first draft of Chapter 9 of my new novel today. Each time I start a new chapter, I think, “What in the world am I going to do? I got nothing!” Each time I finish a chapter, I think, “That’s the end of it, for sure. My brain is absolutely dry.” In between, somehow, the magic happens, I really don’t know how. Reliable though that magic has been so far, I can’t count on it. You can’t bet on magic. You just follow the procedures and hope it kicks in.

Disturbingly however, what I’m writing lately are plot-driven, action-oriented scenes, like I used to do when I wrote mysteries in the old days. I like action; I love a strong plot. But what I want to write are great characters who just happen to confront plotty obstacles. Rabbit Angstrom was a great character, and he faced some difficult situations in the world and more inside himself. Olive Kitteridge was a great character. Humbert Humbert was unforgettable. That’s what I want, really good characters.

I’ve got some pretty good characters in my two androids (technically, an android and a gyndroid), and their creators, two engineers in Honolulu. But my chapters seem to be either interminable talking heads, or knock-down fistfights, shotgun-toting posses, and narrow escapes from burning buildings. I worry about that. Whither my Olive Kitteridge with her single arched eyebrow?

It was in that moment of worry the shitbird got me. I’ll probably be all right tomorrow, back in the groove. Nothing a couple of shots of tequila won’t fix.  I have a writing conference coming up in two weeks and that will cut my productivity to almost zero for a while and erase my dynamic RAM. The re-entry will be tough. So I’ve been tacking hard while the sailing has been good.

I’m at twenty thousand words, and I thank the muse for that, because I truly do not know where they came from. That puts me at about 28%, well past time to move on to Part II. Except I first have to wrap up a ridiculous action-plot predicament I’ve put the characters into, involving an arsonist motorcycle club. Seriously. Who let that bird in here?

Listening to the Characters

Posted on by July 17, 2015
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Langen&Co.OHG-D1Seven chapters have miraculously appeared as the start of my new novel (although Chapter 7 has to be significantly rewritten to accommodate my plan for #8 – I hate when that happens). Regardless, I’m starting to enjoy my characters.

I started writing this book somewhat reluctantly as a necessary sequel to a previous novel. Sitting down at the writing desk each morning had that deep-sigh-and-grit-your-teeth feel, as every morning used to when I worked in the corporate world.

But now, after 15,000 words, the characters have transformed from puppets I move around, to real characters. They speak to me, which means that when I plan a scene for one of them that’s not consistent with who that character is, it immediately feels awkward and wrong. It’s as if the character is saying to me, “No, I don’t want to do that.” Conversely, characters are now coming up with fragments of dialog and bits of action I didn’t expect.

Oddly, three central characters in this project are recycles from the previous book (75K words), so you’d think I would know them quite well already. I thought I did. For two of them, this is actually their third time out. They debuted in an earlier novel that simmers in a drawer, so they’ve been around several years.

I think what happens is that because of the previous book(s), I have a sense of the characters’ deep backstory, and I respond to that intuitively. That’s what allows them to speak to me. I also don’t spend much time laying out their histories, because I already showed it all in the previous adventures, and consequently, the current project even flows better, because readers don’t like backstory anyway.

So I’m coming to the surprising conclusion that it’s actually a bit easier to write a sequel than it is to create new characters from whole cloth. In the sequel, you already know who you’re dealing with and what to expect from them.

By contrast, I’m struggling with my new character, the nominal MC. I do have a biography and personality profile on her, but she has yet to surprise me. She’s still in puppet mode.

Are We Alone?

Posted on by July 16, 2015
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dung beetleEnthusiasts keen on the search for extraterrestrial life always present this justification for their interest: we must find out: Are We Alone?

This topic comes to mind again today (7/14/15) after reading a New York Times article (http://nyti.ms/1dWlI2y) on the proposed High Definition Space Telescope, 100 times more sensitive than the Hubble. It would be big enough to study nearby Earthlike planets that might support life.

According to Matt Mountain, a former director of the Hubble, “Only once in the arc of our species…will we turn a corner and be able to determine … whether we are alone. We can be that generation.”

If that’s the main motivation for the new telescope, I can save everyone a tremendous amount of time and money by providing the correct answer right now: We are not alone.

There are at least two million other species on our planet right now (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-we-any-closer-to-knowing-how-many-species-there-are-on-earth/). If you’re feeling extremely lonesome, you can dig up some beetles.

The problem with that perennial question, “Are we alone?” is the referent for the pronoun.  Who is “we?” Matt Mountain was clear that he meant “we” were the human species. That’s why I can answer his question definitively. Homo sapiens is not alone, Matt.

But perhaps the “we” is supposed to refer to something like “all of us living things on the planet,” as if we were all suddenly pals, homo sapiens drinking beers with phosphorescent algae and gazelles on Friday nights. If the ill-articulated question is really, “Is there life anywhere beyond Earth?” then the answer is still “yes,” with about 95% certainty. There’s plenty of scientific data to suggest that we might soon find bacteria on other worlds.

And if we did? If life we can recognize is found, dead or alive, on Mars, Enceladus, Europa, or elsewhere, then all of us drinking buddies here on Earth would finally be “no longer alone.” Why would that be important?

Such a finding would disconfirm some unspoken assumption that God created life exclusively on Earth,  though not even the Bible says that. It’s hard to believe that scientists who wonder publicly if “we are alone” are worried about interpreting the Bible.

Could the question arise from some atavistic urge to be “special?” If there is life on other planets, then we’re not special here on Earth. But in what way does your habitat make you special? You can live in Miami or Chicago. Is one place more special than the other? Everybody’s located somewhere, so in that sense, everybody’s special. Earth is one particular place to be, special for those of us who live here.

So are we, the earthbound lifeforms, unique in the universe? Statistically, it is not reasonable to think we are. I do admit, until extraterrestrial life is positively confirmed, life is, as far as we know, isolated here on Earth. However, speaking to  dung beetles everywhere, that’s inconsequential, so carry on as you were.

Lem – His Master’s Voice

Posted on by July 13, 2015
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Lem-HMVWhat To Assume About Aliens

Lem, Stanislaw (1968). His Master’s Voice. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (199 pp.)

It barely counts as a novel, this story presented as a single scientist’s memoir of a project he worked on long ago. There is virtually no dialog, no action, no character development, and almost no plot. Furthermore, the memoir is written at a high level of diction, with a rich vocabulary, including phrases in untranslated Latin. That’s the warning: it’s probably not for the average sci-fi/space opera fan.

The story is somewhat similar to Carl Sagan’s Contact, of the mid-1980s. Lem writes in Polish. HMV appeared in English in 1983; Contact came out in 1985. In both cases, a signal is received on earth, from space, that looks like a communication, and the challenge is to decode the message. In both stories, mathematical transforms are applied to the data and various assumptions are made. In Sagan’s story, the signal turns out to be the plans for a spaceship.

Lem’s story is not so obvious. First, there is the question of whether a recording of neutrino radiation is a signal at all. Maybe it was just an anomaly in ordinary neutron activity. This raises a crucial question: What is a “signal” and how would you recognize one in a SETI project? Is a signal strictly in the mind of the beholder, or would there be something identifiable about a phenomenon that would tell you it was intended as a signal? How do you discriminate signal from noise in the absence of intentionality?

Once you believe you do have a signal, how do you interpret it?  It’s not strictly a matter of cryptography because you have no reference criteria. Supposedly, the key to cracking the German Enigma code in WWII was that each message ended with “Heil Hitler!” That constant was enough to develop the solution. You need something to go on.

In Lem’s story, the scientists extract what seems to be a pattern, even though it constitutes only 4% of what they think is the total signal, and they make some earthbound assumptions about what it could mean, and construct a quasi-biological structure from the possible “instructions.” The structure’s purpose is another mystery (It’s not a spaceship).

Lem’s narrator goes on at great length (and tediously, some would say) to question whether or not they were on the right track, knowing absolutely nothing of the alien culture. He gives this example: If you inserted a random computer punch card into a player piano, it could cause sounds to be played, but would it be meaningful to interpret that output, even if you detected a musical phrase?

As the narrator considers one hypothesis after another about what assumptions should and should not be made about the signal, the reader’s mind is whiplashed from side to side and front-to-back. What can you guess about alien epistemology that’s not merely a pathetic projection of unexamined human assumptions? Anything?

And that’s the fun of reading this difficult, wordy, sometimes tedious sci-fi non-novel.

Screenwriting: How Hard Can it be?

Posted on by July 10, 2015
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Celtx40I’m going to a meeting of local screenwriters and wannabe screenwriters (like me) tonight, to see if 1. I can learn anything, 2. If I can survive without being totally intimidated, and 3. If I might meet some interesting people.

My goal is not to write the next Hollywood blockbuster. Judging from the quality of most, I would be ashamed to do that. But I am concerned that fewer and fewer people read novels anymore, and into that diminishing crowd, fewer books are being sold.

The death of the novel has been pronounced many times, but always wrongly, and for good reason. It’s a vibrant, expressive art form that serves a real human need. Novels will live on. However, that doesn’t mean writing and selling novels will continue to be a viable economic enterprise.

Some people enjoy watercolor painting and some like singing 19th century music, and those art forms aren’t going to die out either, because they serve a need. But how large an audience can you hope to reach with those forms? The world is changing and the written word is not the great form of entertainment it once was.

But people do watch movies – any kind of video. People will watch cute cat videos until you’d think their heads would explode. But they don’t. There seems to be no limit to public interest in video story-telling.  If I want to be a storyteller who has an audience, I should be looking to the screen – some screen, any screen.  Thus my interest in tonight’s meeting.

I took a class years ago on how to format a script and how to feel some of the beats. I wrote two 10-minute plays, which were “performed” (read aloud) in class, one on death, one on sex. But compared to other students’ submissions, mine were obviously one-dimensional. So I learned I was no good at it and never tried again.

But I still have the interest.  Maybe I can learn.

My current novel is halfway through the third chapter. I have 6500 actual words, with which I am unnaturally and unjustifiably pleased.  And I was thinking, how hard would it be to write a screenplay, more or less in parallel with the novel? Is that impossible?

Usually, one novelizes a screenplay or screen-writes a novel. But if you’re writing from an outline, why couldn’t you draft a series of small screenplays, based on groups of chapters and the major beats of the novel, as it progressed?

I think it wouldn’t work. But, I think trying it would be a great way for me to learn screenwriting, and I think it might improve the quality of dialog in my novel. I’m going to assess that opportunity.

Overcoming Blank Screen Syndrome

Posted on by July 8, 2015
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laptop-310098_640A milestone for any project is first words written. Page one, Chapter one: actual words. They are probably not the right words, but you have to start with words in sentences.

The sequel I’m working on now will be my sixth novel. My experience has always been that the first words I write are not the right words. I already know the first chapter is completely wrong and will have to be deleted or rewritten and relocated. So I’m under no illusion that I have really written the first words of the new novel, but I don’t care at this point. Staring at a blank screen is such torture that I bless the 700 words I wrote today and I will build a castle on them.

The method I’ve developed over the years to overcome the sheer pain of blank screen syndrome is somewhat elaborate and time-consuming, but I’d rather do it than stare helplessly at the screen.

I start with a cast of characters, as described in another post, and develop a biography and a personality for each main character. That takes a couple of days for the characters I will need in Chapter One. I do other characters as they come up.

Then I turn to a template for the sketch of a new chapter. It asks for the title (always TBD) and the start date, because I feel very satisfied when I put the “finished” date on it later.  Then the template requires me to write the goals for the chapter. What do I hope to accomplish with it?

For Chapter One of anything, the goals are to introduce the MC and the status quo, but that’s too general. Those outcomes will be accomplished as side-effects of what the characters say and do.  So really, what I’m looking for is HOW do I expect to accomplish those goals.

I drop down to the next section, “Plot Points.” There, I describe at a high level what action will take place, and where, and who will be involved. “Robin comes home early from work and finds Sid with another woman.”

To flesh out that action (so to speak), involves several days of research because for Chapter One, I don’t even have complete names for the characters yet and locations are only vague geographical references.  So I go into a long, tedious search of my “character names” files, developed over the years to collect interesting first and last names in scores of ethnicities and time periods. I also use online references like http://names.mongabay.com/most_common_surnames.htm to find good names. I like names to be suggestive of the characters’ personalities, and I like first and last names to be easily pronounceable, sonorous, and highly distinct from each other. If there’s a Robin, there will be no Rachel, not even a Robert. I’m fond of alliterative names but that can get cute so I have to check myself.  Finally when I have character names, I write several choices into the chapter outline, because the one I prefer today, I’ll probably hate tomorrow.

For locations, I use City-Data (e.g., http://www.city-data.com/city/San-Francisco-California.html to make sure my characters are living and working in the kind of neighborhoods I want them to be in. Then it’s a long session with Google Maps, Google Earth, and Google Street View to find a house and a job for each one and  work out transportation logistics. I hate it when I change my mind about a location because that involves at least another hour of research but sometimes it has to be done because I’m not getting satisfaction.

Once I have geography I have to do buildings and cars. I have a list of reminders to ask myself about colors, textures, smells, lighting, sounds, temperature, meanings (to the characters) furniture and visual space – it’s a long list. I don’t always fill out every detail, but I specify enough so I have a feel for the locations, exterior and interior, where my scenes will take place.

Once I have space, I need time. I have to decide the season of the year, the time of day, the weather, temperature and lighting conditions.

Next, I need a list of scenes that will fulfill the main plot points listed above. In this example, I might decide to start with Robin on the drive home from work so  she can ruminate on things by herself for a few minutes. That introduces some of her attitudes. Then I need a short scene where she arrives home and notices things out of place, then an awkward scene where Sid is busted, then a tense scene where the other woman appears and is kicked out by Sid, then a very excruciating scene where Robin and Sid “discuss” what has happened, then a quick exit scene that gets Robin out the door.

I make that list, and make sure the order is what I want. It may turn out that I have too much. I like chapters to be short, between 2K and 3K words, rarely over 12 pages or so, but scenes tend to take on their own life and I just have to go with that. The number and length of scenes is ultimately empirical.

Finally, I need or want some narrative foot-in-the-door opener. I like to start a chapter with the 3P narrator’s voice (or alternatively, a 1P character pontificating a bit), along the lines of “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” That helps me establish my narrator’s voice and gives the momentum to get rolling. It doesn’t always work out, and it always risks running too long but I like to do it.

I deliberately avoid starting with the weather, the scenery, and waking from a dream or even a sleep. I also don’t like starting with a direct quotation because it will necessarily be out of context. I don’t start with manufactured drama by using unresolved pronouns. Faulkner did that a lot and I disliked it. It seems manipulative, even hostile. I like to start with a snappy generalization that I can parse subsequently in the MC’s mind, using free indirect discourse if necessary, but I can also start with description of high action, if appropriate.

I confess that today’s precious 700 words of Chapter One are entirely narrative description mixed in with the MC’s thinking. It’s probably too much, but you can’t edit nothing, so I’m leaving it for now. When I finally got Robin into the kitchen and ready for the first focused-camera scene, I stopped, and started writing this post instead.

I started writing this because I was so relieved to have, once again, overcome blank screen syndrome, which I really, really hate, and I stopped also because to write an actual scene with action, characters, and dialog – I don’t just flow into that. Each scene takes further preparation and my cortex was blown for the day.

But at least I beat the blank screen syndrome! Yay. I’ll start tomorrow by going over that narrative introduction, cutting it back and adding more physical description for my MC, which I always tend to overlook.  Then I’ll sketch my first scene before I write it.

This method, chopping the wood before lighting the fire, works for me. It’s mentally exhausting, but it gets words on screen. The tragic part is that every single chapter starts with the same blank screen and the whole process must begin again. It’s July now. Can I get a draft done by Christmas?