Balls and Walnuts
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Category Archives: Writer’s Life
Review of Brutarian Quarterly #44
My review of Brutarian Quarterly #44 is up at Tangent Online. There’s one great story (Megan Crewe’s “Horns”) and two good ones.
See, despite what you might think from yesterday’s post, I don’t like to give unfavorable reviews.
More later. I’m busy taking tonsils out today.
D.
An Open Letter to My Victims
Updated August 13.
I’ve decided this post was too snarky to live. Consider it a humor-misfire.
As for authors who take issue with my reviews:
- I do my best to critique the story that was written, not the story I wanted to read.
- I approach every story with an open mind.
- If I gave you a negative review, I’m sorry, but your story must have irked me deeply. You can’t please every reader.
- And if you feel like I missed the point, by all means TELL ME. If you can make me appreciate your story, I’m not above changing my mind.
D.
The Shatter Manifesto
Note added 8/13/05.
Lots of folks read this post without knowing me or being familiar with my blog. Guess what: they get the wrong idea about me. A great deal of this seems to hinge on the word ‘Manifesto’.
I’m a humorist. I liked the word ‘Manifesto’ precisely because it is so fatuous, overblown, and arrogant. The word tickles me.
Unfortunately, some folks come over here and assume I am fatuous, overblown, and arrogant. Well, maybe I am. On the other hand, perhaps you don’t understand my sense of humor, or perhaps I’m a crappy humorist. All I ask is that you consider these competing hypotheses.
Back to the, erm, Manifesto.
Now that I’m writing occasional reviews for Tangent, I have a decision to make. When faced with a story I don’t like, I can (A) write an honest review, or (B) write one of these:
In summary, if you’re the kind of reader who enjoys impenetrable plots, artificially amped drama, liberal use of italics (and exclamation points!!!), unbelievable characters, and inconclusive endings, then you’ll absolutely love Farley Turgid’s “Overdrawn at the Sperm Bank”.
Rereading this, I realize I may have strained the point with my hyperbole. The more common manifestation of this syndrome goes like this:
So if you crave axe-wielding Nordic demigods who speak in Ye Olde English whilst bedding fair naiads in between time travel jaunts to Edwardian England and Imperial Rome, you’ll absolutely love Farley Turgid’s “Not Without My Loki”.
In both examples, the reviewer is trying to put a positive spin on things. But, I’m sorry. I can’t do it. I know what I like, and I’m opinionated enough to tell people about it.
I promise I’ll try to find something good in every story, but sometimes it’s damned difficult. Does that mean it’s a bad story? No. (Well, maybe. Eventually, a consensus opinion may emerge.) It only means I didn’t like it. Does anyone think a reviewer’s opinion is anyone’s but his own?
In An Open Letter to My Victims, I have responded to those present and future authors whose babes I have spat upon. Here, I intend to discuss what I consider a good short story*.
A good short story
- entertains
- puts the story first
- makes me think
- makes me feel
Let’s take ’em one at a time. I’m talking to you, the author.
A good short story entertains. I can forgive a lot, and I mean a LOT, if I have fun while reading the story. Is the story interesting? Amusing? Exciting? If you hold my interest, make me want more, and don’t disappoint me in the ending, I don’t really care if your writing doesn’t sparkle. The editor in me may nitpick, but the reader (and reviewer) will cheer.
A good short story puts the story first. That means it’s about the story — not about you, the author. I’m not interested in your feats of writerly legerdemain. Because it’s about the story, remember? We’re storytellers. Let me put it another way: anything that pulls me out of the story and makes me think about you is a bad thing.
A good short story makes me think. . . . About my values, my life, my loved ones, my world. Not, by the way, about the mechanics of the story (‘Now, who is that character? What just happened? Why did he say that? Who said that?’). I don’t mind putting some thought into the bones of a story, but I shouldn’t have to study it to get the point.
A good short story makes me feel. Mind you, this is an open-ended requirement. The feeling might be awe, amusement, sadness, regret — you name it. But your story should make me feel something.
Do you have to satisfy all four criteria? No, only one; but in my experience, if you’ve nailed one, you’ve nailed them all.
By the way. I had originally intended to have a fifth criteria: “A good short story should make sense.” But I read a story today in Brutarian (“Horns”, by Megan Crewe) which didn’t quite make sense to me. I can guess what the story means, but I wouldn’t swear I have the right take on it. And yet I enjoyed it — it fulfilled each and every one of the above criteria.
Perhaps that’s how it is with poetic fiction. (Good poetic fiction.) It works at a sub-rational level; it doesn’t have to make sense.
D.
*Look at the words: What I consider a good short story. As in, MY opinion. And even if I don’t explicitly say so, it’s still just my opinion.
I can see the finish line, and is it ever depressing
I don’t often indulge in one of those writers-writing-about-their-writing posts, and I promise I’ll try not to overdo it, but I have to kvetch.
If you had asked me a few moments ago how long I’d been working on my novel, I’d have told you, “Three years.” But I just checked. I wrote the first version of the outline on 4/27/03, and I finished the earliest version of Chapter One in June, 2003. I’ve only been at this two years! It just seems like three.
Here’s the first paragraph from that very first outline:
Suffer the children
In her July 6 post, Demented Michelle* told the story of a dickwad psychiatrist who told her she didn’t have sufficient life experience to be a writer (she was a teenager at the time). This jogged my memory the way a swift kick will turn over a Suzuki Samurai. Here’s my tale.
Summer after 6th grade, I decided to write a novel.
Gauging emotional impact.
Here are a few related questions for the writers in the crowd:
How do you know if your story works at an emotional level?
Rephrased: how do you know they’ll laugh when you want ’em to laugh, cry when you want ’em to cry?
And how do you know you’re not traipsing off into the land of literary autism? Maybe you know that place: you look at what you’ve written; your inner voice says “YES!”, but your readers all say, “Uhhhh . . . ”
I’ve been thinking about this for a while now — ever since I got into the latter third of my novel, and more frequently as I close in on the ending. Thinking my way through the epilogue today, I made myself cry. Since this happened while driving, you might argue it wasn’t a good thing. But I was tickled.
It’s not the first time I made myself cry. Trouble is, I get into moods where it doesn’t take much to set me off. An old Barney Miller episode might do it for me. Since the stuff I write ultimately comes from my innards, it stands to reason it should have some emotional impact for me.
I suppose that at a bare minimum, my writing should make me feel the ‘correct’ way. If it doesn’t work for me, why should it work for anyone else? After that, I would hope it works for my handful of readers. The fact that my writing made a certain someone cry recently does, I admit, cheer my heart.
It would be nice to have a few dozen readers vet the manuscript before farming it to the publishers, but I know that’s not going to happen. So I guess I’ll have to cross my fingers, knock on wood, and send it out, hoping that at least one publisher will see this book the same way I do. What else can I do?
D.
Here’s a bit of good news.
Tangent Online‘s Eugie Foster has accepted me as one of their reviewers. Here’s the first paragraph from the website’s “About Tangent” page:
Dave Truesdale created Tangent in 1993 with the objective of reviewing all the professional short fiction in the speculative fiction field. Since its inception, Tangent has published thousands of reviews, garnered four Hugo award nominations, and has been praised by the likes of Gardner Dozois, James Patrick Kelly, and Ellen Datlow.
. . . and it gets even better.
I’m really tickled by this, folks. I’ve already reviewed two stories, including an ASIM story that Eugie Foster herself wrote. Since Tangent has a conflict of interest policy, she needed someone to review her story who didn’t know her. Fortunately for me, I liked it. (As I’ve mentioned, I’m compulsively honest, even if it means my public humiliation.)
I found Tangent blog-hopping via The Dark Cabal . . . and now I can’t remember how I found The Dark Cabal! Oh, well. The brain is the first thing to go.
D.
Chandler: Not a snowflake* kinda guy
Sorry to harp about Chandler, but Karen and I went to see Land of the Dead this afternoon, and I’m still trying to get the taste out of my mouth. This flick was not Dead goodness.
Here’s proof (I think) that Chandler didn’t write from an outline, at least not circa 1947. This is an excerpt from a letter written “To Mrs. Robert Hogan”, March 8, 1947, reprinted in Library of America’s second Chandler collection:
“One of my peculiarities and difficulties as a writer is that I won’t discard anything. I have heard this is unprofessional and that it is a weakness of the amateur not to be able to tell when his stuff is not coming off. I can tell that all right, as to the matter in hand, but I can’t overlook the fact that I had a reason, a feeling, for starting to write it, and I’ll be damned if I won’t lick it. I have lost months of time because of this stubbornness. However, after working in Hollywood, where the analysis of plot and motivation is carried on daily with an utter ruthlessness, I realize that it was always a plot difficulty that held me up. I simply would not plot far enough ahead. I’d write something I liked and then I would have a hell of a time making it fit in to the structure. This resulted in some rather startling oddities of construction, about which I care nothing, being fundamentally rather uninterested in plot.”
Chandler began writing The Big Sleep, his first novel, at age 50 (1938). He wasn’t a fast writer, nor a prolific one by today’s standards. By the time of his death in 1959, he’d written seven novels, all featuring Philip Marlowe.
As for Marlowe, I think the second paragraph in The Big Sleep sums him up best:
The main hallway of the Sternwood place was two stories high. Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a group of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a night in dark armor rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn’t have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the vizor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn’t seem to be really trying.
That’s Marlowe: a would-be stand-in for a tarnished knight.
D.
*Snowflake: this is not a reference to Chandler’s machismo or lack thereof. I keep forgetting you’re not all writers. The ‘Snowflake Method’ refers to a particular technique of novel outlining. See link.
Lethem on Chandler
Gun, with Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem
During internship, I gave all my Chandler paperbacks to an old black man dying of laryngeal cancer. He spent his time in an eight-bed ward, nothing to do but watch TV (one TV for the whole ward, forever tuned to the Spanish language channel), and when I found out he liked to read mysteries, I thought I’d do something nice.
Parting with those paperbacks was like loaning out a stack of letters written to me by my best friend. I’m not usually the type to get sappy about my books, but — The Big Sleep! Farewell, My Lovely! Take my left nut while you’re at it.
There’s something almost painfully endearing about Chandler’s protagonist, Philip Marlowe. I can’t think of a more sympathetic fictional character. There’s more to Marlowe than just smart-ass wisecracks (that’s about all you get from most movie Marlowes — even Bogie, God bless him). More than just his self-effacing humor, or his White Knight ethos. For me, it’s the fact that Marlowe has a vision of how things should be, and he’s inevitably dissapointed. He’s a chivalrous character in a world that relegates its Knights to wax museums.
The few SF-noir-hardboiled hybrids I’ve read usually don’t get it. You can’t do this on snarky smart-alecky patter alone. It’s not enough that your protag, at least once in the novel, drinks hard, is sapped on the head, gets slipped a mickey, runs afoul of the police, and falls for the dangerous dame. You can’t turn Chandler into a formula like that. The only way you can do Chandler is to do Marlowe.
Halfway through Gun, with Occasional Music, I told Karen that Lethem got all the elements right, but didn’t truly get Chandler. By two-thirds of the way through, I’d changed my mind. And if I had any remaining doubt that Lethem understands Chandler, it vanished after I read an interview he did with Trudy Wyss, for Borders. Here’s a relevant excerpt:
The Chandler detective is one who’s self-aware to just a degree where he can see the absurdity of his own actions, and particularly of the urge to rescue other people. That’s something Chandler was very tormented about: What does it mean to try to be a hero? To be a white knight in a kind of crumbling world?
And he’s just also such a beautiful writer. The secret of Chandler is that he’s really very romantic. Behind all that ennui there’s this enormous yearning that causes him to reach, in this very precarious way, for all sorts of beautiful phrases and unlikely poetic comparisons. And then he’s always making fun of himself for doing it at the same time. That’s why writers obsess over Chandler–because he’s found a way to have his lyricism and make fun of it at the same time.
So, yeah, he gets it, and in Gun, with Occasional Music, he’s proven that he gets it.*
Conrad Metcalf is a private inquisitor in a world where questions have all the political correctness of the N-word. Here, Celeste Stanhunt, wife of the murder victim, is talking to Metcalf:
“I’ve answered enough questions today to last a lifetime. Let’s see some identification, or I’m calling in the heat.”
“The heat?” I smiled. “That’s ugly talk.”
“You’re using a lot of ugly punctuation.” She stuck out a hand. “Let’s see it, tough boy.”
It’s an interesting world, not immediately recognizable as a dystopia. One of the beauties of the novel is the way it sneaks up on you like a revelation, exactly how dystopian this place is. The written word is all but extinct, and the spoken word is endangered. Morning news on the radio consists of mood music: the listener must intuit local and world events by the flavor of orchestration. Television news consists of clipped images — politicians smiling, shaking hands, kissing babies. Nearly everyone uses drugs (with names like Forgettol, Regrettol, Addictol) and, guess what, this junk is free courtesy of the government. As time passes, what at first seemed quirky becomes, by turns, ominous, and then outright nightmarish.
That’s why I had my doubts about Gun early on. At first it seemed that Lethem’s approach to Chandler was a sort of novel-sized Mad Lib. For cops, substitute Public Inquisitors; for rye whiskey, substitute make (the individual’s personal blend of drugs; Metcalf’s is “skewed heavily towards Acceptol, with just a touch of Regrettol to provide that bittersweet edge, and enough addictol to keep me craving it even in my darkest moments.”) For the lower class — ubiquitous in Chandler’s work — substitute evolved animals. There’s a kangaroo here you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley.
But things change. The mystery unfolds as it deepens, time passes, caprice becomes meaning. The author has a plan, but I won’t spoil it by telling you. Trust me, trust Lethem.
Gun was Lethem’s first novel, so in fairness we should compare it to The Big Sleep. Like The Big Sleep, the mystery in Gun is, ultimately, a secondary concern. You could quibble over it, but you should bear in mind a much-repeated (and possibly apocryphal) story about Chandler. Humphrey Bogart (Marlowe in the first film version of The Big Sleep) and director Howard Hawks got into an argument over who killed the chauffeur — or was it suicide? Chandler replied that he didn’t know, either. (In another version of the story, it was Jack Warner who telegrammed Chandler with the question. When Chandler couldn’t answer it, Warner billed him 75 cents for the telegram.) Point being, if you’re here for the mystery, then you’re no fun at all.
Post script: My patient didn’t do well. Laryngectomy, fistula, recurrence, sepsis. “Piss-poor protoplasm” is how docs put it when we’re around each other and have to wear our stony faces. He had no family, no friends. When he died in the 10th Floor step-down ICU, I was Intern On-Call, and I had to come to his bedside to pronounce him dead, and I was probably the only one in the hospital who gave a damn about him. Some of you might say, “He would have liked it that way,” but I think he would have preferred not being dead. That would have been my choice.
D.
*Those of you who read this blog regularly may be wondering if I’m incapable of giving a bad review. That I leave all the snarkiness to my wife — the classic good cop, bad cop. Maybe you’re even wondering if I love everything I read, and that I would wax poetic over the ingredients list of Safeway’s Very Maple cookies.
But I don’t.
What’s the point in trash-talking a book, no matter how elegant, logical, and/or humorous that trash-talk may be? Do you really need to know that I sped-read Chris Roberson’s Here, There & Everywhere last night, and now I want my money back? Or that I gave up on Brin’s Kiln People in less than one hundred pages because he can’t control his damned exclamation points? No. You don’t need to know that. And you won’t find snark like that on these electronic pages.
It’s the story, stupid!
Wherein I discover the world of Mundane SF
Futzing around with Technorati tags this AM, I found a link to writer Ian McDonald’s lengthy discussion of Mundane SF. As I mentioned recently, I always seem to be months if not years behind the times, and this is not exception. So if I betray my ignorance of the issues in this brief position piece, remember: you cannot embarrass me with my lack of knowledge because I have no shame. But you knew that.
Mundane SF comes to us from writer Geoff Ryman. (The linked page will lead you to the Mundane Manifesto as well as Ryman’s blog.) In essence, Ryman espouses a theory of SF which sticks strictly (think Madame Madge Dominatrix ‘strictly’) to the realm of the possible. No more faster-than-light travel, no wormhole travel, no interstellar trade with aliens, no time travel — nothing fun. It’s diamond-Hard SF.
If you write SF, Ian McDonald’s thoughtful discussion (linked above) is well worth your time. Here’s the line that had me applauding:
“It’s not just the Mundane Manifesto is totally unnecessary to produce the type of science-fiction it celebrates (one very very much worth celebrating, and that is due it’s time in the sun) , it’s that the genre has a much richer palate of colours. It’s a poor manifesto that would venerate Verne (tech-speculation) but consigns much of H.G. Wells’ core texts to the ‘bonfire of stupidities’ (interplanetary war, aliens, time-travel…). To me, one of the strengths of SF is that it is an allegorical literature: parables and myths of our age.” (emphasis mine)
A few of you out there have read my stuff; you folks will recognize why something like a “Mundane Manifesto” gets my blood pressure up. I could sally forth against Mundane SF, but as an unpublished author my words don’t carry much clout. YET. (Muwahahaha.) So, here’s one small voice making a pitch for reason.
The object of writing is entertainment.
There. I’ve said it. We’re not politicians and we’re not social planners. You can’t blame us for fostering an irresponsible attitude towards the environment. (So goes the claim of the Mundaners — by willy-nilly planet-hopping, we encourage the idea that we can rape this planet and move on to the next.) We’re performance artists, nothing more.
I’m not saying there’s anything bad about Mundane SF. I’m sure it has a healthy audience of readers — all those hard SF wonks who jeered when Han Solo used ‘parsec’ as a unit of time.
Just leave us allegorists alone, will you?
D.