Writing techniques

how to write

The Creative Benefits of Keeping a Diary

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There is an article by Maria Popova on her BrainPickings.org site about the creative benefits to writers of keeping a diary.  Since I have not kept a diary except briefly in my early teens, and that has long since disappeared, I was curious about the benefits.  Maria Popova is  a Bulgarian writer, blogger, and critic living in Brooklyn, New York.  Her Brain Pickings blog features her writing on culture, books, and eclectic subjects.

Maria Popova founder of Brain Pickings

Maria Popova

Ms Popova says: Journaling, I believe, is a practice that teaches us better than any other the elusive art of solitude — how to be present with our own selves, bear witness to our experience, and fully inhabit our inner lives.  She goes on to quote famous writers who have kept journals to discover their perceived benefits.

Anais Nim, from a lecture at Dartmouth college: Of these the most important (benefits) is naturalness and spontaneity. These elements sprung, I observed, from my freedom of selection: in the Diary I only wrote of what interested me genuinely, what I felt most strongly at the moment, and I found this fervour, this enthusiasm produced a vividness which often withered in the formal work.

Virginia Wolff says:  Still if (my diary) were not written rather faster than the fastest type-writing, if I stopped and took thought, it would never be written at all; and the advantage of the method is that it sweeps up accidentally several stray matters which I should exclude if I hesitated, but which are the diamonds of the dust heap.

André Gide’s view: A diary is useful during conscious, intentional, and painful spiritual evolutions. Then you want to know where you stand… An intimate diary is interesting especially when it records the awakening of ideas; or the awakening of the senses at puberty; or else when you feel yourself to be dying.

Susan Sontag says: Of course, a writer’s journal must not be judged by the standards of a diary. The notebooks of a writer have a very special function: in them he builds up, piece by piece, the identity of a writer to himself. Typically, writers’ notebooks are crammed with statements about the will: the will to write, the will to love, the will to renounce love, the will to go on living. The journal is where a writer is heroic to himself. In it he exists solely as a perceiving, suffering, struggling being.

Eugéne Delacroix muses: Even one task fulfilled at regular intervals in a man’s life can bring order into his life as a whole; everything else hinges upon it. By keeping a record of my experiences I live my life twice over. The past returns to me. The future is always with me.

Virginia Wolff again: How far, we must ask ourselves, is a book influenced by its writer’s life — how far is it safe to let the man interpret the writer? How far shall we resist or give way to the sympathies and antipathies that the man himself rouses in us — so sensitive are words, so receptive of the character of the author? These are questions that press upon us when we read lives and letters, and we must answer them for ourselves, for nothing can be more fatal than to be guided by the preferences of others in a matter so personal.

And, in conclusion, Ms Popova writes: This, perhaps, is the greatest gift of the diary — its capacity to stand as a living monument to our own fluidity, a reminder that our present selves are chronically unreliable predictors of our future values and that we change unrecognizably over the course of our lives.

I must say that I’m un-persuaded.  I don’t feel the need for a ‘living monument’ to my fluidity of self.  I seem to have enough difficulty managing the fluidity of my feelings, my values, my priorities, my relationships, my identity from moment to moment and from day to day!  But it does seem to me that the idea of capturing a ‘diamond in the dust’ is a good one; perhaps I should establish just such a file!  One activity that I find myself engaged in more and more as I grow older and I observe what are actually ordinary things and events is to ask Why? The answers are quite astonishing sometimes, ranging from the whimsical to the unlikely to the enlightening.  Also, I’m beginning to make a habit, when I observe an unusual facial expression or event, of asking, How would you describe that?  It’s an exercise in creativity, of avoiding ordinary language.

 

The Secret of Great Writing

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In the autumn of 1938, a sophomore at Radcliffe College, Francis Turnbull, sent her latest short story to family friend, F Scott Fitzgerald.  His response is recorded in F Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters.

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F Scott Fitzgerald

Dear Frances:

I’ve read the story carefully and, Frances, I’m afraid the price for doing professional work is a good deal higher than you are prepared to pay at present. You’ve got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner. This is especially true when you begin to write, when you have not yet developed the tricks of interesting people on paper, when you have none of the technique which it takes time to learn. When, in short, you have only your emotions to sell.

This is the experience of all writers. It was necessary for Dickens to put into Oliver Twist the child’s passionate resentment at being abused and starved that had haunted his whole childhood. Ernest Hemingway’s first stories ‘In Our Time’ went right down to the bottom of all that he had ever felt and known. In ‘This Side of Paradise’ I wrote about a love affair that was still bleeding as fresh as the skin wound on a haemophile.

The amateur, seeing how the professional having learned all that he’ll ever learn about writing can take a trivial thing such as the most superficial reactions of three uncharacterized girls and make it witty and charming — the amateur thinks he or she can do the same. But the amateur can only realize his ability to transfer his emotions to another person by some such desperate and radical expedient as tearing your first tragic love story out of your heart and putting it on pages for people to see.

That, anyhow, is the price of admission. Whether you are prepared to pay it or, whether it coincides or conflicts with your attitude on what is ‘nice’ is something for you to decide. But literature, even light literature, will accept nothing less from the neophyte. It is one of those professions that wants the ‘works.’ You wouldn’t be interested in a soldier who was only a little brave.

In the light of this, it doesn’t seem worth while to analyze why this story isn’t saleable but I am too fond of you to kid you along about it, as one tends to do at my age. If you ever decide to tell your stories, no one would be more interested than,

Your old friend,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

P.S. I might say that the writing is smooth and agreeable and some of the pages very apt and charming. You have talent — which is the equivalent of a soldier having the right physical qualifications for entering West Point.

 

F Scott Fitzgerald makes a very good point: that the most important skill of a writer (of fiction) is to be able to convey the feelings of his/her characters to the reader in a unique and compelling way.  It is not enough to tell the story clearly and neatly, gaining the reader’s attention. As he puts it, we have little interest in a ‘soldier who is a only little brave’.

How does one convey feelings in this compelling way?  First of all, as a writer, one must feel the feeling; it is not enough to imagine how it would feel.  Then, one must place oneself into the character so that the expression of the feeling is consistent with the character’s personality: different people express anger (for example) in different ways.  Finally, one has to ‘paint the picture’ carefully selecting from all the many available devices:  How does the character look?  What does she say?  What does he feel?  How do others react?  What does it sound like?  What’s a good analogy?

Easy to say.  Not so easy to do!

The Character: David Dawson

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General David Dawson is a character who appears in two of my novels: The Iranian Scorpion and Hidden Battlefields.  He is the father of Robert Dawson, the principal character, a US Drug  Enforcement Agent in both books.

Why is he there?  Several reasons.  He is a different character than Robert; he is impulsive, hot-tempered, impatient, and something of a womaniser; traits which Robert does not share with his father.  But David is also brave (a decorated military commander), intelligent and ambitious; attributes which are visible in Robert, too.  The general’s relationship with his son is complex.  On the one hand, he is disappointed that Robert did not follow him into a military career.  He wonders, sometimes, whether his son is worthy of his heritage.  But at the same time, he feels genuine affection for his only son and admires his accomplishments as a DEA agent.  There is also a love rivalry between the two men for a very attractive woman.  This rivalry begins in The Iranian Scorpion and reaches crescendo pitch in Hidden Battlefields.  In this situation, David’s wild impulsiveness, and Robert’s cool-headedness come into play.

Most readers will admire the general when he strays off his assignment as a nuclear weapons inspector in Iran, but one cannot be astonished when his impetuousness gets him into serious trouble.  Similarly, in Hidden Battlefields, he places himself in situations where his military skills are called for, but are not always used to the best advantage.

Robert’s mother is mentioned in The Iranian Scorpion as an embittered ex-wife, but she re-appears in Hidden Battlefields as a happily re-married woman who successfully takes some control over her ex-husband in a situation where Robert has no levers to pull.

So for me, the secondary characters in a novel help to define the values and the personality of the main characters.  Secondary characters also add depth and interest to a novel; without them, at best, a book becomes two dimensional.  In addition, they are usually essential to the progress of the plot, and, as in both of the above novels, they help the author express a theme.  The Iranian Scorpion, is about what it takes to succeed in a challenging situation: more than a intelligence, a plan and courage: it takes attention to detail and luck, as well.   In the case of Hidden Battlefields the theme is that while we as individuals have major, un-resolved conflicts going on in our heads, we cannot reach our full potential as human beings.

Review: H is for Hawk

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Having read Henry Marsh’s Do No Harm, which was shortlisted for the Costa Book of the Year Award, I have now read H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald which won the top prize.

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H is for Hawk tells the experiences of Helen Macdonald, a writer, illustrator, historian and lecturer at Cambridge University in training a wild hawk. Macdonald had some advantages in this task: she was fascinated by falconry and hawks as a child, and she had experience of hunting with hawks, but she had never trained a wild hawk to hunt. There was a major disadvantage: her much-loved father, a renowned photographer, had just died suddenly when she acquired the hawk for £800 from a breeder in Northern Ireland. Much of the book deals with the intense commitment and frustrations which the falconer must endure over the lengthy process of winning the trust of a wild predatory animal so that it works together with the falconer in killing wild game. The goshawk in the book has personality: feral, proud and beautiful, unpredictable, iconic. One learns, incidentally, that Macdonald is a scholar, an intelligent and sensitive person, but the author also exposes her vulnerabilities: in particular, her crippling grief over the loss of her father. In parallel with the story of Macdonald’s goshawk, she tells the story of T H White, now deceased, a dedicated, but somewhat eccentric falconer and the author of The Goshawk. We learn of his mistakes and his anguish as he tries to train a goshawk. So this book operates at several levels: a present, objective account of the training of a wild hawk; there is a past, reported account of the training of a different hawk; there are psychological explorations of both the author and her role model, T H White. This may sound rather complex, and, in a way, it is, but Macdonald weaves it all together beautifully so that it is quite natural.

The writing, in style and language is exquisite. In particular, the descriptions of natural settings and the behaviour of the hawk are breath-taking. For example: “. . . she (the hawk) sees something through the trees, out there on the other side of the hedge. Her pupils grow wide. She snakes her neck and flattens her crown, and the tiny grey hair-feathers around her beak and eyes crinkle into a frown that I’ve learned means there’s something there.” And: “The fields are shorn, yellowed into stalky, rabbit-grazed sward spotted with foraging rooks.”

H is for Hawk is clearly a major labour of love. This love and its result: a durable classic about nature, surely merited the Costa Award.

As a child, I was very interested in falconry; I read everything I could lay my hands on the subject – even flirting with the idea of obtaining a hawk. For me, H is for Hawk has a special resonance, but I suspect that some potential readers may be put off by a book on falconry. For those potential readers, I would say, “This isn’t just a book about falconry. It’s a book about nature, the human condition, grief, joy, life and death.”

Inside the Writing Life

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In the Winter 2015 edition of The Exeter Bulletin, the alumni magazine of Phillips Exeter Academy (the boarding school from which I graduated) there is an article Inside the Writing Life.  It is an interview of Roland Merullo (class of ’71, and quite a bit after my time).  Merullo has written 13 novels and four works of non-fiction.  He has been recognised for a Booklist Editors’ Choice, a Maria Thomas Award and was a finalist for the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Prize.  The interviewer is David Weber, who is Emeritus English Instructor at the Academy.

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Roland Merullo

Q: Does the act of writing allow you to enter a space where it’s only yourself you need to please?  Or do thoughts of agents, publishers, other writers, or readers enter in?

Merullo: I think you really have to work to keep agents, publishers and especially critics out of the room where you write.  At the same time, in order to improve, especially in the early going, you have to be open to criticism and suggestion, so it can be a tightrope sometimes.  I support my family only from my writing, so I can’t indulge myself and write a 2,000 page essay on the meaning of life, or golf, or learning to swim, or my love for my daughters.  But I’ve gotten pretty good at going into my interior room and mining my own truth, even if its eventually packaged in a way that will please publishers and bookstore owners.  Before I started on In Revere, In Those Days, I was well into another book, hundreds of pages, and it just felt false to me, as if I were writing to please  some outside critic and not from my center.  One night, I just said, “Screw this” out loud, put all that work aside and wrote 30 pages of In Revere in a couple of hours.  That felt right.

My comments: I agree that one needs to exclude external influences when one is writing, but that one has to be open to critiques at other times.  I, too, have scrapped whole sections of a novel that didn’t ‘feel right’.  I started over with what I felt was good and genuine.

Q: Do you think of writing as existing above all in its own realm, called art?  Or do you want your books to act in some way on the worlds of culture, politics, society – or even on the inner lives of readers?

Merullo: There is art to it, and art is essential to any healthy society, but I take a workmanlike approach to writing books.  It bothers me a great deal to hear writers talk about their work as if they have a special line to God or something, or as if it’s “torture” to face a blank page. People who value words should use that one more carefully.  Writing reminds me very much of carpentry, in both its methodical aspects and in the need to think ahead . . . though my body hurts less after writing a novel than it did after building a deck or a garage.  I’m all about the inner lives of readers, and the interior life in general – an area we tend to ignore as a society.  But I feel that for it to matter, the interior dimension should be linked to our outer lives, to things like politics, for example. . . .

My comments: I like the comparison of writing with carpentry, and I agree that both require methodology and planning.  I’m surprised by his comment, below, that he doesn’t outline.  To me an outline is essential to avoid the unnecessary and to include the essential, just as a carpenter’s drawing assures that the project will be completed as envisioned.  I sometimes feel that I have a muse – some external influence – because, occasionally, I will suddenly think, after I’ve written something: “Where did that come from?  That was brilliant!  I could never have thought of that!” I doubt that it was God, but maybe The Presence spoke up.

Q: By this time do you write intuitively, having internalised the skills you needed?  Or does technique remain a conscious focus?

Merullo: I write almost completely intuitively.  Early on, I’d study the work of other writers, but I’m not particularly analytical or scholarly.  I don’t outline, try not to over analyse.  When I taught in college – 10 years at Bennington and Amherst – it wasn’t especially enjoyable for me to analyse the great works of literary art, to break them down into pieces, and try to explain why they were so good.  Some of that is a teacher’s job, of course, necessary and good, but to me it was too often like eating a delicious piece of pie and having to sit there and talk about the ingredients in elaborate detail.  I just wanted to eat the pie.  And now I just want to bake the pie.  My feeling is that if you go down deep into yourself – beyond the purely intellectual level – you can maybe write something that reaches down deep inside the reader; you can connect with them in the most profound way.  I think about technique very little now.

My comments: I write pretty intuitively, but as I review what I’ve written, I think about details: technique.  I think his comment about reaching down deep inside yourself and thereby being able to reach something deep inside the reader is tremendously important.  I just wish I could do it more often!

Plot vs Theme

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I think we all understand what is meant by the plot of a novel.  It is the story line; the summary of what happens.  The theme is the message that the author is trying to get the reader to think about.  It is the philosophical/theological/social/psychological message of the novel.  The theme may not be very clear; it may be quite subtle or implied, because the author wants to present the reader with a puzzle: something important to consider.

It is probably fair to say that every novel has a plot, but not every novel has a theme.  For example, my novel, The Iranian Scorpion, is a thriller, and as such, it has a plot, but I didn’t intend it to have a theme.  I suppose, considering the novel retrospectively, one might say that its theme is the near impossibility of banning addictive drugs such as heroin, but I didn’t intend to write the novel to make that point.

Consider To Kill a Mockingbird, one of the great novels of the 2oth century.  The plot is quite complex.  It involves two young children, Scout and Jem, who live with their widowed father, a lawyer, in a small Alabama town in the 1930’s.  The father, Atticus, is appointed by a judge to defend a black man who is accused of raping a white woman.  In the course of the trial, Atticus establishes that the white woman and her father are lying.  Nonetheless, the black man, Tom Robinson, is convicted by the jury.  Tom is killed in escaping from jail.  What follows is an attack by Bob Ewell, the accused’s father, on the children at night.  Boo, an elusive and mysterious neighbour, intervenes.  Bob Ewell is thought to have fallen on his own knife and died.  The plot itself has elements of uncertainty: the evidence presented at trial, the attack on the children, the motivation of Boo.

The overriding theme of the novel is the racial prejudice which existed in the American South in the ’30’s.  But there is also the idealistic courage of Atticus and his children in the face of prejudice.  In addition, there are issues around social class and gender which are touched on.

I think it is fair to say that the plot, while it reflects some of the author, Harper Lee’s, childhood experiences, is constructed so as to develop the themes for the reader.  Harper Lee took two and a half years to complete the novel, and during that time, she became so frustrated that at one point she threw the manuscript out a window into the snow.  (Her agent made her retrieve it.)  In my view, To Kill a Mockingbird is the best example of compelling plot and themes beautifully integrated.

A lesser example would be my novel, Sable Shadow and The Presence, which has as its themes the overriding importance of identity for us as human beings.  Identity is who, why and what we are.  It is critical in determining how happy we are in the life we lead, and our identity can be changed under certain circumstances.  The plot is the life of a bright, but introverted male character who grows and develops into a ‘great success’, only to see his success evaporate, and having to build a new identity.

Living the characters

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How does one, as an author, decide what a given character says or does?

For me, the answer is: I try to get inside the character’s skin.  What this means in practice is that I try to feel what the character is feeling at that particular moment, and I ask myself, ‘what is s/he thinking?’  While I don’t explicitly bring it to mind, I’m aware of the character’s background, his/her values, personality and ambitions.  This process is particularly necessary when a character is suddenly put in an unexpected or difficult position.

Fir example, in Efraim’s Eye, the principal character, Paul, is suddenly asked by Naomi, “Do you love me, Paul?”  By way of background, Paul and Naomi had become lovers two days previously.  She is a very pretty and sweet charity worker, a rootless, lonely, thirty-something.  Paul is a London-based widower in his fifties, a financial consultant who has a girlfriend his own age.  Naomi and Paul are not an obvious match, but Paul finds Naomi enchanting and Naomi sees Paul as a secure, reliable father figure, who, nonetheless, wakens her dormant sensuality.

The story continues:

 

Unprepared as he was for that question, Paul knew that there could be only one answer. “Yes, yes, of course I love you.”

Naomi’s head tilted, and her gaze fell to the table cloth. Uncertainly, she asked, “Why do you love me?”

Instinctively, Paul knew that his answer must not include the word ‘beautiful’ or one of its synonyms. He said, “You’re a very sweet idealist, Naomi. You are a woman with great talents as a linguist, as a musician, and in dealing with people. But for me, best of all, is your joie de vie. Life is a great, pleasing adventure for you, and it’s delightful to be with you.”

For some moments, Naomi gazed at him, apparently repeating his words in her mind. She asked, “So you think I’m a sweet, talented, adventurous woman?” She pronounced the word ‘woman’ awkwardly, as if it were a term unfamiliar to her.

He smiled. “For a four word summary, that will do.”

Paul knew the answer to the reciprocal question. She loved him as a daughter loves, and he had awakened her latent brilliance as a lover. But, for her part, she had wanted to know whether she, herself, was a person who could be loved.

 

Paul’s response, ‘Of course I love you’ leaves room for doubt about the depth of the feeling behind it, and in the days ahead, he begins to doubt the durability of the relationship.  His response to the question, ‘why do you love me, Paul?’ manages to avoid the artificiality of a ‘because you’re beautiful’ response.  He recognises that she has a hunger to be valued for more than her looks.  His answer, from his point of view, is both truthful and recognizes as strengths what she may have seen as weaknesses.

So this exchange between Paul and Naomi, while unexpected by the reader, helps to define these two characters, and begins to open a path to the future for each of them.

Topics for Novels

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How do writers choose a topic to write about?  What factors influence the setting, the characters, the time frame, the key events?

I suspect that every author will have a slightly different answer to these questions.  In my case, there was a different set of criteria which influenced the topic for each of my six (so far) novels.  I often think it would be easier if I had a consistent topic and some repeat characters, as the late P D James had with her detective stories.  The problem for me is that I get restless with repetitive tasks.  I would make a very poor assembly line worker.  I changed my major in college twice – from architecture, to mathematics – before settling on physics.  As a naval officer, every day was different.  As a salesman of heavy electrical equipment, every sale was unique.  As a manager and as a management consultant, every situation one faces is different.

Starting with Fishing in Foreign Seas, I tried to stay within my experience: romance, Sicily, the north-eastern US, raising a family and the sale of heavy electrical equipment.  I added some sex and some intrigue for seasoning.  For me, this worked, but I wanted something grander, more important.

What could be more important than sin?  What could be grander than six life stories entwined?  That was the premise of Sin and Contrition.  With a chapter devoted to each sin, I found that each character developed uniquely, and that my imagination could add interesting – but credible – surprises.

Efraim’s Eye came about because of a charity assignment I had in Mexico, where we suspected the chief executive of the charity of being corrupt.  I felt that a corrupt charity was interesting, but probably not gripping.  But, what if the purpose of the charity’s corruption was the financing of a terrorist attack?  And what if there was an intense love story?

The feedback from readers of Efraim’s Eye was very good: it was an exciting thriller with believable characters.  I decided that I wanted to write another thriller; this time about the drugs trade, and I decided that Afghanistan, with its huge output of opium for heroin, and being in the public eye, was the setting.  But, I also needed an immediate destination for the heroin, as very little of it is consumed in Afghanistan.  Some research convinced me to make Iran the home of the bad guy and the immediate destination of the heroin in The Iranian Scorpion. 

Before I finished Scorpion, I started on a novel in the first person about a bright, self-conscious boy who hears unfamiliar voices, which, over time, he attributes to representatives of God and the devil.  I wanted to write a serious novel which, through the life of Henry, explored psychological, theological, and sociological issues around the choices we make in our lives – for better or worse.  I wrote three chapters of Sable Shadow and The Presence before setting it aside: I had lost my way and needed to take a break.  But with the completion of The Iranian Scorpion, I came back to Sable Shadow with new enthusiasm, and I completed it.

In the back of my mind was another novel, slightly similar to Sable Shadow, but an allegory, told in the first person, set largely in the Middle East, with Middle Eastern characters, and dealing with the search for meaning in life.  I’m working full tilt on it now, but before getting really started, I wrote Hidden Battlefields, another thriller, this one about a huge shipment of cocaine from Peru to the ‘Ndrangheta mafia in southern Italy. Four of the main characters from Scorpion are in Hidden Battlefields.  The theme of Battlefields is how major conflicts in our values and priorities can affect who we really are.

As I look back on the progression of novels, two trends stand out, both of which amount to increasing levels of challenge for me as a writer:

First, my craft as a writer is being challenged on all fronts: character development, thematic subtlety, language, credibility and interest.

Second, I have to do more and more research, to the point now where I spend more time on research than I do on writing.

 

Review: Orfeo

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I decided to read Richard Powers’ Orfeo (published in January, this year) when it was on the long list of ten novels for the Booker Prize. It has since been omitted from the short list for this year’s prize.

Richard Powers is an American novelist, born in 1957, in Evanston, Illinois. At the age of eleven, he moved with his family to Thailand where he became an avid musician. He began his studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) with a major in physics, but he graduated with a BA in English literature, followed by an MA. He worked as a computer programmer in Boston, but he quit that job to devote time to writing. His first novel was published in 1985. In 1992, he returned to the University of Illinois as writer-in-residence. In 2010 and 2013, Powers was a Stein Visiting Writer at Stanford University, during which time he partly assisted in the lab of biochemist Aaron Straight. He was named the Phil and Penny Knight Professor of Creative Writing in the Department of English at Stanford in 2013. He currently teaches a graduate course in multimedia authoring, as well as an undergraduate course on the mechanics of narrative, at UIUC, where he is the Swanlund Professor of English. He has written ten novels and has won a number of literary awards.

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Orfeo follows much of the fictional life of Peter Els, a composer, music professor, and amateur bio-scientist. He dabbles in genetic experiments on bacteria and viruses in parallel with music composition, seeing similarities between the infinite variety of music and basic organisms. Els is driven not by fame or fortune, but by a compulsion to compose a piece of music which will have a lasting, ethereal effect on the listener. When he composes a piece which, for the first time, elicits critical acclaim, he refuses offers to stage it again.

The focus of the novel is on the sinister net of terror-prevention which tries to capture him when he becomes a bio-terror suspect, and which he tries to elude.

One has to admire Powers’ multiple competencies as a musician, as a poet and as a technologist. Nonetheless, this is not an easy novel to read. There are no chapters, and the shifts in scene and timeframe are sometimes difficult to follow. I say Powers is a poet because there are frequent passages of music description similar to:

“Then the damning glockenspiel, mute for three songs, silent for so long that the ear forgets the forecast from song one. Child’s toy, funeral chime, light in the night. A bell from out of the pitch-black; a shock but no surprise. A sound that makes hope sound primitive.”

If one is musically literate, and if one is familiar with the piece about which Powers is writing, I’m sure this would be lovely. (I was a singer, and I enjoy classical music, but never learned to read music.) Powers also uses unexpected nouns and adjectives in his descriptions. Sometimes, these seem very clever; at other times they are confusing.

The character of Peter Els is, for me, difficult to relate to: not because he is a musician or a bio-chemist, but because he seems, until near the end, to be a self-proclaimed, born loser. There are not sufficient likeable features with which to empathise. One shakes one’s head each time he makes a stupid mistake (mistakes which Els himself confesses), but there isn’t enough redeeming motivation for the mistake for us to understand and respect him, nonetheless.

Perhaps Powers was not aiming at any particular market when he wrote Orfeo. If you are an amateur composer or a competent musician and someone who is concerned about the encroachment of authority on our freedom of expression, Orfeo is a must read.

 

Creating Reader-Friendly Books

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In the October 2014 issue of Independent, the monthly journal of the Independent Book Publishers Association, has an article “On Creating Reader-Friendly Books for Today’s Busy Readers”.

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The article is aimed at non-fiction books, but much of the author’s (Jodie Renner) advice is applicable to fiction, as well, except for the first item which recommends the “use of casual language and everyday words for immediate comprehension and inclusion.”  If it was ever fashionable to write fiction in casual language and everyday words, it has certainly gone out of style today.  One has only to look at the first page of almost any novel on the Booker Prize Long List (I know it has been reduced to a Short List, now) to see the use of unusual words, phrases and construction.  It seems to me that this is intended to announce, “I am an innovative and creative writer!” and is not intended to make things easier for the reader.  I think that the first page of a novel should be about capturing the readers interest (see my December 3, 2011 blog https://williampeaceblog.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=34&action=edit).  The use of unusual words, phrases and construction should be confined to intriguing the reader and clarifying the scene better than ordinary text.

Ms Renner goes on to say that one should “write lean; don’t waste the reader’s time”.  I think this is good advice: I find myself deleting extra words that contribute nothing when I review what I’ve written.

She recommends “cut down on the use of -ly adverbs. (adjectives converted to an adverb)  Instead of propping up a weak, overused verb with an adverb, use a strong, specific verb.  Instead of ‘walked slowly’ use strolled, sauntered, ambled, wandered, roamed, or meandered.”  In fact, some critics recommend the banishment of all adverbs.  I think this is a little harsh, but I confess to using my thesaurus to find a verb that’s more suitable than what first sprang to mind.

She says, “Avoid generic words such as things, objects, stuff, items, persons, places, food, plants , animals, pets, kids, which don’t give the reader an instant visual.  “They had lunch in a restaurant” doesn’t evoke a picture for your readers.  Be specific and create sensory imagery so readers know the mood of the gathering, visualise the kind of restaurant, and can almost smell the food and hear the sounds.”  Sometimes when I’m describing a new scene, I find myself going through a sensory checklist: if I were there, what would I hear, smell, see, and feel (both emotionally and tactilily.)

There are other bits of advice in her article, but for my audience their repetition would be boring.