Echoes in a Hollow Space

It’s taken me a long time to realize there are people who love to read but who don’t give a damn about how a thing is written. Yeah, I know, should have been obvious with one browse of bestseller books—but, somehow, the concrete realization of this fact  managed to elude me. Of course, not all bestsellers are badly written. Many are quite well written, in fact. But now and then someone comes along like Stieg Larsson or Dan Brown or Stephanie Meyer or E. L. James who are really atrocious at narrative but still manage to concoct a compelling story and capture that certain something in the zeitgeist that has people flocking to them.

Full disclosure: I am again attempting to read Stieg Larsson’s Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and this time it seems to be sticking, but I have bounced off Larsson and these other writers. I probably won’t try the others again as there seem to be diminishing returns and too many other things I’d rather read. The thing is, as I have been struggling with my own writing, I have also been struggling with my ability to read fiction. I keep bouncing off of books, even well-written ones, even those by old favorites, and I’ve been longing to become immersed in something. I’m far enough past Larsson’s tell-not-show and long infodump opening that the mystery of Tattoo has had a chance to hook me, so I may actually finish this book. No guarantees, though. It’s been the first part of December since I finished anything, even rereads of old favorites. (The last was Deborah Harkness’s Times Convert, the follow-on book to her All Souls Trilogy. It was meh, but I’d loved the other books and wanted to catch up on the characters.)

My writing and my fiction reading have always been connected. One feeds the other, even if what I’m reading has nothing to do with what I’m writing. Being immersed in someone else’s world for a time helps stimulate the mystic place in my brain where my own singing starts. I can’t help thinking that if I cure one symptom it might help cure the other.

I’m still writing almost every day, and it’s still mostly like pulling teeth, but I do plant butt in chair. Most days it isn’t much more than 500 or so words. Some days I’m blessed by 1000 or so. Today, all I managed was 250. But the important part is sitting my butt in the chair, opening the file, and doing something.

So, readers who don’t care how a thing is written. It’s all good. People should like what they like regardless of nerds like me who care about those things. I once had a friend who absolutely refused to read when he was younger, even though it caused him problems in school. He was a bright, imaginative, funny fellow but he just hated reading. Then one day when he was in high school a perceptive teacher shoved a science fiction book into his hands. He was intrigued by the premise and started to read. From that moment on, he became a voracious reader of science fiction and fantasy. He always had a book in his hands. He did confess to me, though, that he often skipped the descriptive parts and dialogue tags and read just the dialogue so he could get through the story faster.

And therein hangs a tale: there are many people like him. Not only do they not care how a thing is written, they want to get through the story as fast as possible to find out what happens. No savoring. They don’t really care about “the art of story,” that immersive feel of a book. It’s a mystery to me why they read at all—but again, that’s not for me to decide. People should be allowed to like what they like and how they like it, and no one—well-meaning nerd, politicizing authors, crusading literati, anyone—has the right to tell them otherwise.

There are no shoulds in reading. Only what gets you through the night. And the book.

Random quote of the day:

“In writing, punctuation plays the role of body language. It helps readers hear you the way you want to be heard.”

—Russell Baker, “How to Punctuate,” Ebony, November 1985

 

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Lucy and Ethel, Justin Bieber, or the Kardashian Klan. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Random quote of the day:

“The words of the writer act as a catalyst in the mind of the reader, inspiring new insights, associations, and perceptions, sometimes even epiphanies.”

—Nicholas Carr, The Shallows

 

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

Random quote of the day:

“Poetry, the arts, require feeling—on the part of the reader and observer, as well as the writer. Poetry is participatory, it requires, after feeling, response; and after response it demands movement, action.”

—Jan Freeman, “Breathe-in Experience, Breath-out Poetry”

 

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

Random quote of the day:

“When a thing has been said and well said, have no scruple: take it and copy it. Give references? Why should you? Either your readers know where you have taken the passage and the precaution is needless, or they do not know and you humiliate them.”

—Anatole France, Anatole France Himself: A Boswellian Record by His Secretary, Jean-Jacques Brousson, tr. John Pollock

 

Disclaimer:  The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

Random quote of the day:

“Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.”

—W. Fusselman, “Slogans for a Library,” The Library, April 1926
(often misattributed to Margaret Fuller)

 

Disclaimer:  The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

Here’s what I was concerned about on March 23, 2011. I never posted this, don’t remember why now, but came across it while cleaning up my hard drive. This is still something that concerns me, still a valid question to ask myself, but my life is so much more complicated now—and my creative life so much on hold—that it has slipped down the list of worries.

I have no idea when the Dos Lunas saga will see the light of day, although a member of my “fan base” was inquiring about it last week. I use “fan base” ironically for those who don’t get the quotation marks. When I was generating a lot of these DL stories I had a dedicated band of local readers who really liked them and always asked for more. One of them contacted me Friday to find out why I hadn’t e-pubbed them. I explained that time is not my friend these days and why.

Yet I still hope to do just that one of these days.

And so, last year’s concerns:

So. I’ve got this contemporary fantasy novel that I wrote about a mythical Southern California county by the name of Dos Lunas. I’ve been writing about this place for years, a bunch of short stories, and this is the first completed novel (though I’ve started and hope to finish others). Some of the vast cast of characters who inhabit Dos Lunas are Indians from a tribe called the Kintache, a tribe as mythical as the county they inhabit. I have for some time felt rather sensitive on the subject of cultural appropriation, as in this post, for instance. That’s why, with notable exceptions, I’ve tried to write from the outside in, rather than in the POV of my Indian characters. Being a middle-class white girl, I knew I couldn’t do justice to an Indian POV.

Now, I do have one character, JK Montmorency, who is three-quarters Irish and one quarter Indian. He’s been raised mostly as a middle-class white boy, privileged, taking his life for granted, so I’ve felt comfortable writing from his POV. And I’ve written in this special protection for the Kintache, a mother goddess who walled their valley off from the rest of the world through most of their history in order to protect them from the negative currents of history. They missed out on the Holocaust that visited most of the California Indians when the white men invaded their land in the late 18th century. They observe it happening to the other tribes, and they mourn for it, but they have stood somewhat outside the sweep of history. It’s been my hedge, you see, because most of the Dos Lunas stories are semi-comedic. With serious undertones, sure, but comedy-dramas, and the Holocaust isn’t really a suitable subject for comedy (Roberto Benigni and a different Holocaust notwithstanding).

I thought I was writing something I knew, this serio-comic place called Southern California with its goofy and eccentric ways. But like many things that are silly, there’s a vast reservoir of serious, tragic things just below the surface. I thought I was doing a decent job of reflecting that, too, but I’ve never been without doubt about it.

These days doubts are blossoming and growing, like the wildflowers in Dos Lunas, where it’s springtime at this writing. Reading Sherman Alexie, whom I love, has me feeling desperately inauthentic—and even disrespectful. Above all, I want to be respectful to the real suffering of the real native people of California. But I worry about it constantly. I think I’m being respectful, but what if I’m deluded?

I can only keep on, I suppose, and hope others let me know if I’ve stepped in a big pile of dog shit. Hopefully, with the same care and consideration I’ve tried to have in these stories.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

I sometimes find myself fretting about my characters and disappointing my readers. Will they be disappointed, I ask myself, in a story where the freak protagonist remains a freak at the end, not magically transformed into someone more attuned to mainstream standards of beauty and social standing? Not young and strong and thin and accepted. A glorious transformation definitely takes place for this particular character I’m thinking about, but it’s all internal—with maybe a glimmer of hope at the end.

For me, as a reader, that’s all I ask: the potential for a better tomorrow. I’m not a fan of unrelieved realism and tragedy and probably would never write that kind of a story. When I was young, I thought it the only way to achieve High Art, but I don’t think that so much anymore. And I’m not so much interested in High Art, either. Just good writing.

This protagonist I’m thinking about is being punished for her sins. Not in the narrowly defined Judeo-Christian sense—as often marketed by fundamentalists and evangelicals. I don’t consider things like who is twanging who in whatever manner to be a sin, so long as everyone is a consenting adult. Sin is a word I reserve for things like murdering, cheating, manipulating, driving companies into bankruptcy, costing thousands of jobs, and the losing/looting of pension funds and properties. Fortunately, my protagonist is not a hedge fund manager or a corporate raider, so the reader may be able to find some sympathy for her.

I have a penchant for complex and not completely sympathetic characters, though. Sometimes that works out, sometimes not. They don’t always act with shining heroism and at times are a bit unstable. Or shitheads. Readers don’t always like them. That’s my fault some of the time (all the time?), because I haven’t written them with sufficient courage. I haven’t had the nerve or the foresight to take an unattractive character (or character trait) to its logical extension. I’ve tried to hedge my bets, gambling that I can charm my way past the unlikeable bits with no diminishment of heroism. I’m afraid to let the reader actively dislike the character even for a short time. You can’t really do that, I don’t think. When someone is being a shithead, you have to let them be one. You do run the risk of alienating some readers, of them putting the story down and never going back, but if you’ve set the story up right, they may stick with you for the rest of the ride to see how things work out.

Or maybe it’s a question of doing the best writing you can, the most interesting characters, and letting them find their audience. A risky stratagem, given the vagaries of the market, but the only honest way I know of approaching this. In real life human beings are often contradictory, selfish, stupid, and yet they’re not bad people. They have the potential for redemption. Those are the people I’m interested in seeing in fiction, too. Oh yeah, a good shiny-smiled hero or heroine is fun to read sometimes, but most of the time I like yellow-toothed protagonists better.

And maybe this, too, is a question of skill. Perhaps the reader can accept their contradictions, their mean streaks, their lashing out if the skill of execution is right. I know I’ve read characters like that and not thrown the book across the room. Take, for example, Chess Putnam in Stacia Kane’s wonderful Downside Ghosts series. Chess is a complete mess, makes stupid and self-destructive decisions, is her own worst enemy—and yet I love her and love reading about her even when I’m cringing hard at what she does. I keep pulling for her to snatch her backside out of the fires she throws it into time and again. She isn’t every reader’s cup of tea, but she’s mine, and wonderfully flawed and makes for compelling reading. So, the point is not to make characters that will be acceptable to every reader, but to make the writing compelling enough that readers can still find something to hold onto. Have I learned that lesson yet? I don’t know—or I know that I haven’t pulled it off all the time. I’m still working on it.

You can’t please all readers all the time. That I know for true. Some will accept the well-written shithead, some never will. That’s a matter of taste. As for the writer writing these complex people, it’s a matter of writing and revising and revising and revising and finding the balance.

Yes, that’s the truth, and the answer to my question, I suppose.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

Random quote of the day:

“I don’t think there is a casual reader of Nancy Drew.  There may be casual readers of Proust, but not of Nancy Drew.”

—Fran Lebowitz, quoted in “Nancy Drew: Curious, Independent and Usually Right,” National Public Radio, June 23, 2008

Disclaimer:  The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.