Are Women Writers Disadvantaged?

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There’s an article in today’s The Daily Telegraph headed “It’s the same old story of women writers, claims novelist“.  The article, written by Rosa Silverman, is as follows:

Women writers remain disadvantaged by a male dominated literary world in which men do not want them to succeed, a female novelist has claimed.  Elizabeth Jane Howard, who wrote the Cazalet tetralogy, said that female authors suffered “a hard time politically and sexually”, suggesting little had changed since the 19th century.  Jane Austin was “respectfully received” but others such as George Eliot had to disguise their names for “a better chance of being taken seriously,” she noted.  Almost two centuries on, writers such as JK Rowling and AS Byatt did the same, possibly for similar reasons, she said.  Howard, 90, who was married to the author Kingsley Amis, said that instead of allowing women to succeed on their merits, the world of male critics and editors “scratch each other’s backs.  I think men are more sympathetic to the work of men,” she said.  “They find domestic, emotional matters more difficult.”  The writer VS Naipaul was among those who have expressed the views to which she  was referring, Howard said.  In a 2011 interview, he dismissed women writers as “unequal” to him and criticised their sentimentality.  Howard, whose fans include Hilary Mantel, who has won the Man Booker Prize twice, added: “I think at higher levels, a talented male writer would have an easier journey than a talented female writer, who might very well get bad reviews.”  Although there are signs that men’s perceptions are changing for the better, the general position of women around the world “is showing no signs of improving”, she added.  Howard, who won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for her first novel, The Beautiful Visit in 1951, said: “Women are not starting from an equal position.  People say that because they have got the vote, the problem is over.”

I would be very interested in what my readers think of Ms. Howard’s views.

I think that she almost certainly has a point, but that she overstated her case.  I think it is wrong to imply that women writers are as ill-received now as they were two hundred years ago.  It’s also not clear to me that Rowling and Byatt used their initials rather than their first names to prevent discrimination.  After all, it is very difficult to hide one’s gender in today’s world (behind initials, or almost anything else).  As I may have said elsewhere, I think that women are definitely better at expressing emotion than men (part of the DNA?).  If one accepts that this is true, would it be fair to say that women tend to choose themes which allow them the liberty to display their superiority?  And would it also be fair to say that men find this superiority uncomfortable?  If so, this may account for Ms. Howard’s perception that male critics and editors discriminate against women.

I don’t think it’s accurate to say that women writers suffer “a hard time politically and sexually”.  They don’t seem to be suffering sexually.  What male author can match the success of E L James Fifty Shades of Grey?  And what do politics have to do with writing?  I would have said that “women writers may suffer discrimination professionally and socially.”

It seems to me it is an exaggeration to say that the general position of women around the world “is showing no signs of improving”.  I would argue that women writers are winning more recognition in the West, where there is a greater appreciation of the expressive skills of women.  In the Middle East and in Asia, progress may be slower, but I have the impression that women are finding greater professional recognition in many fields.

What do you think?

Fiction Writing Tips

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Melissa Donovan has 42 Fiction Writing Tips for Novelists on the website “Writing Forward”.  You can view her entire list here: http://www.writingforward.com/writing-tips/42-fiction-writing-tips-for-novelists.

I have picked out my top ten of her tips, and give my reasons for the selections below:

  • Don’t lock yourself into one genre (in reading or writing). Even if you have a favorite genre, step outside of it once in awhile so you don’t get too weighed down by trying to fit your work into a particular category.  (This particular piece of advice appeals to me because I haven’t selected ‘my genre’.  [See the post on Genre.]  I think this advice is especially appropriate for reading.  Reading different genres can definitely open the mind.)
  • Don’t write for the market. Tell the story that’s in your heart.  (This advice is related to the item above.  It seems to me that some writers have a genre which the market – and readers – recognise.  Sticking to that genre and their market can make them financially successful.  Think J K Rowling.  But even she has branched out with an adult story she wanted to tell.)
  • Make your characters real through details. A girl who bites her nails or a guy with a limp will be far more memorable than characters who are presented in lengthy head-to-toe physical descriptions.  (This is a very good point.  I think that what the writer should try to do is to stimulate the reader’s imagination, and a small, but telling detail is probably the best way to do that.)
  • The most realistic and relatable characters are flawed. Find something good about your villain and something dark in your hero’s past.  (In Efraim’s Eye, the villain has a  past which distorts his view of women, and one tends to feel sorry for him.)
  • Avoid telling readers too much about the characters. Instead, show the characters’ personalities through their actions and interactions.  (To this I would add, what the characters say.  The words a character chooses and the way they phrase their opinions can say a lot about their values.)
  • Every great story includes transformation. The characters change, the world changes, and hopefully, the reader will change too.  (I think that we’re all interested in important change – as long as it doesn’t hurt us.  We like to see how and why others change, and the effects on them.  In Efraim’s Eye, Naomi goes through a major change: from being an unfulfilled nomad to setting down nourishing roots.)
  • Aim for a story that is both surprising and satisfying. The only thing worse than reading a novel and feeling like you know exactly what’s going to happen is reading a novel and feeling unfulfilled at the end — like what happened wasn’t what was supposed to happen. Your readers invest themselves in your story. They deserve an emotional and intellectual payoff.  (Very true!)
  • Let the readers use their imaginations. Provide a few choice details and let the readers fill in the rest of the canvas with their own colors.  (I think this advice is particularly appropriate for sex scenes.  I used to think I had to paint a complete picture; now, I believe that a few brush strokes are sufficient to engage the reader’s imagination.)
  • Appeal to readers’ senses. Use descriptive words that engage the readers’ senses of taste, touch, and smell.  (To this I would add the reader’s sense of hearing.  Sometimes it’s appropriate for the reader to hear what’s going on.)
  • Apply poetry techniques to breathe life into your prose. Use alliteration, onomatopoeia, metaphor, and other literary devices to make your sentences sing and dance.  (This is about engaging the reader’s brain at another level.  Ms. Donovan has another point about ‘crafting compelling language’.  When we surprise the reader, we get him/her thinking.)

There are plenty of other excellent suggestions on the website!

 

Literary Award!

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My third novel, Efraim’s Eye, has been awarded second prize in the category General Fiction by Reader Views Literary Awards – 2012.  The complete list of winners can be found at http://www.readerviews.com/Awards2012Winners.html.  I notice that three books from Strategic Book Publishing (my publisher) won awards.  Although it is the author, not the publisher that has to submit the entry to the competition.

This is the first time I have submitted one of my novels into an awards competition.  A full description of the awards and the submission process can be found at http://www.readerviews.com/Awards.html.

Reader Views is a company based in Austin, Texas that provides a wide range of services to self-published authors, and authors who use small publishers.  (The latter is my category.)  Reviewers who judge the awards are independent, professional readers and critics.

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Editing by the Author

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When I first started writing, I would write a couple of pages, then review and edit what I had written.  When I had completed a chapter, I would go back to review and edit that chapter.  When I finished the book, I would review and re-edit the entire book.  At each of these three stages, I found mistakes or text that I wasn’t happy with, and I made changes.  A professional editor would then take over, and finally, I would check what the editor had done.  (In most cases, the editor had done an excellent job correcting typos and syntax errors.)

My first four novels were what one might call ‘four dimensional’.  That is, they told a story about characters, events, places and times.  Most novels are four dimensional.

My fifth novel has two additional dimensions: a spiritual dimension and a philosophical dimension, and as I was writing the last few chapters, I began to realise that my editing of the entire novel would have to be far more rigorous.  I became concerned that some of the material in the earlier chapters would not fully support the spiritual and philosophical dimensions that I wanted the reader to understand.

So, now that I have finished writing the last chapter, I am going back to the beginning, and reviewing each chapter.  This review is much more rigorous than before.  I spot whole sections (one of more paragraphs) which were either not interesting enough to the reader, or did not support the spiritual or philosophical dimensions.  I delete or completely re-write those sections.  (I think it is easy for a writer to become ‘mesmerised by his/her own writing’ and get carried away in prose.)  I found, also, that I had to add small pieces of text to help clarify the spiritual and philosophical messages.

It is necessary in this fifth novel that the central character changes his identity and his values, but I noticed that what I had written before did not support the vulnerability of this character to the changes that come later.  So, I had to make subtle changes to his character.

In the second, more rigorous, review of each chapter, I was also sensitive to accuracy of time, place and characters.  (See my post on Accuracy.)

During this review, I tend to be merciless about what I would call ‘ordinary writing’.  That is, writing which lacks uniqueness and character.  For example, rather than write that a character ‘fell to the floor, sobbing’, I’ll write ‘she collapsed onto the floor, hiccoughing with sobs’.  Doesn’t the latter version better convey her desperation?

And of course, each time I review something I have written, I’ll find typos, awkward syntax and punctuation errors.  (That’s a never-ending battle!)

So I no longer trust my self to ‘Get It Right First Time’, as the quality gurus like to say.  For me ‘Getting It Right’ is the result of at least six re-reads and improvements, and some of the improvements can be pretty extensive!

Lady Chatterley and Sex in Writing

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The Daily Telegraph carried an article last Tuesday in which the author Julian Barnes suggested that the failure of the Lady Chatterley’s Lover obscenity prosecution in 1960 opened a whole new world for writers. Barnes won the 2011 Man Booker Prize in for The Sense of an Ending.  He said that upon hearing the outcome of the prosecution when he was 14, “At last, I remember thinking, British literature would be able to catch up with foreign, especially French, literature, which for a century had been far more truth-telling – and far more titillating than its British equivalent.  But having a new freedom and knowing what to do with it were two quite different things.  Instead of a blanket prohibition, there was almost the reverse: not a writerly desire, but a commercial obligation to write in a detailed way about sex.  And sometimes all that happened was that the misleading old euphemisms were replaced by new misleading cliches.

“It’s easy to mock, and each generation will mock the previos one because each generation needs to imagine that its attitude to sex strikes just about the right balance; that by comparison its predecessors were prim and embarrassed, its successors sex-obsessed and pornified.  And so writing about sex contains an additional anxiety on top of all the usual ones: that the writer might be giving him or herself away, that readers may conclude, when you describe a sex act, that it must have already happened to you in pretty much the manner described.”

This is an interesting point of view.  Some I agree with; some I don’t.  While the Lady Chatterley prosecution may have been a watershed at the time, in my opinion, it has little effect on literature today, 50+ years later.  What affects literature today is what the public wants to read and what critics think they should read.  Critics don’t speak with one voice on the subject of sex: some criticise authors for attempting to write about it, and others point out the blank space left by its omission.  Some readers today may be ‘prim and embarrassed’, but others, as the success of Fifty Shades of Grey shows, are quite happy to be immersed.

For myself, I don’t feel any ‘commercial pressure’ to include sex in my novels.  I include it because it helps to define the personality and values of the characters involved.  Here, for example, is a passage from Efraim’s Eye:

Paul was suddenly awake.  There was someone in the room.  A slight, pale figure had slipped almost soundlessly past the door.  The figure made no threatening movements.  He tried to see through the gloom.  Like a butterfly shedding its chrysalis, the figure dropped its robe.  It was Naomi.  She lifted the bed covers and climbed in beside him.  She was trembling.

“What’s the matter, Naomi?”

“He tried to attack me.”

“You’ve been dreaming.”
”It was horrible.”

Still trembling, she clung to him.  Gently, he stroked her hair, which cascaded across her face and shoulders.  There was peaceful, utter silence in the room.  She lay on her side, against him, her head on his shoulder.  He kissed her forehead, and stroked her back.  Gradually, he felt the tension seep out of her.  There was the faint scent of her perfume.  He felt one of her breasts against his chest.

“Thank you, Paul.”

Desire swept over him.  “I want you Naomi.”

She said nothing.

She stroked his chest, and her hand strayed down across his belly.  “Oh!”  For some time she continued to hold him.  “Do you have a condom, Paul?”

“No, but I’ve had a vasectomy, and . . . and I have no . . . “

“no STD’s,” she finished the sentence for him.

She continued to caress him.  Then deliberately and languorously, she slid on top of him.  Reaching down for him, she guided him.  She gave a little groan of pleasure and began to move.  He was almost passive, knowing that his time was later.  He caressed her face, her breasts, her back, her arms.  “God, you feel lovely!”

She gave soft mewling sounds as her passion flamed higher, and the pace of her movements increased.

Then, suddenly she convulsed, buried her face at his throat and gave a long sighing groan.  He could hold out no longer, wrapped his arms around her, and succumbed to the surge of ecstasy.

They floated down; lay on their sides, her back against his chest, pressed tight against him, his arms still around her.  She felt blissfully safe.

They fell asleep.

This passage is intended to reinforce several points about the characters.  Naomi can be child-like and she is very frightened by the terrorist; she views Paul almost as a father figure; she did not come to him for sex, but for security.  Paul admires Naomi, and would not normally have tried to seduce her, but her naked presence is too much for him.

I don’t agree with Barnes that the ‘old euphemisms’ and the ‘new cliches’ are necessarily ‘misleading’.  It is not a word I would have chosen.  I think what he probably means is ‘ill-conceived’.  For me, this is the challenge: how does one choose the right words and construction to have the reader feel what the characters are feeling – no more, no less?

I think that Barnes has a point when he says that ‘readers may conclude, when you describe a sex act, that it must have already happened to you in pretty much the manner described.’  I had a friend who emailed me after reading Efraim’s Eye to the effect that he felt he now knew me better, “including your sexual experiences ha ha!”  My reaction on reading the joking email was to shrug.  He doesn’t know as much as he thinks he knows.

 

Accuracy

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It seems to me it is frequently the case in movie thrillers, particularly the complex variety, that inconsistencies and errors creep in.  For example, I noted several errors/ inconsistencies in Arbitrage, the news film starring Richard Gere.  Gere plays a billionaire hedge fund manager who is leading the good life.  (He has Laetitia Casta, no less, as a mistress.)  An investment in a Russian mining venture turns sour because the Russians will not permit the metal to be exported.  This is rather unlikely, though it is possible that the Russians have decided to use all of the mine’s output domestically.  But, in that case it would still be making money.  Could the hedge fund get the money out of Russia?  Even oligarchs fleeing Russia are able to get their money out of the country.  Not a credible scenario.  It would have been more credible to have the venture fail for environmental reasons, but no savvy billionaire investor is going to make a mistake like that.  Then to cover up the $400 million hole in his fund, he borrows $400 million from another investor.  (Gere wants his fund to look like a winner so he can sell it.)  Whoever wrote this into the script doesn’t understand accounting.  A four hundred million dollar loss can’t be offset by borrowing the same amount.

Gere has an automobile accident while driving with Casta.  She is killed, while he has superficial injuries (?).  To protect his good name, he flees the scene of the accident, and, at a gas station, he makes a collect call to a young black man whom he has befriended in the past.  The young man picks up Gere and takes him home at 4:30 am.

A police detective suspects that Gere was driving the car and has left the scene of the accident.  He says that Gere’s cell phone records show that he went to a gas station.  (I doubt that this is possible: the location of a cell phone can be traced at the time, but not historically; to do so would require the service providers to store enormous quantities of data.)

To put pressure on the young man, the detective produces a photo, taken at a toll booth, of a car with which has his license plate.  This is intended to prove that the young man was in his car, when he says he was home.  The story line is that the police altered the ‘tapes’ from the toll booth.  How this was done is not clear.  Wouldn’t it have been more sensible for the police to have doctored a photo with software?

Apart from problems like these, I took an immediate dislike of Gere’s character.  He pretends to be a loyal family man, but this is clearly not the case: he is late for important family gatherings.  So, at the end, when Gere’s future hangs in the balance, I have no sympathy for him.  For me, when writing about a villain, I think the reader should have a trace of sympathy for the villain, or at least understand him.

I think it is fair to say that it is not to easy, in a book, to ‘pull the wool over the reader’s eyes’.  It’s all there in black and white.  If one were to write in chapter 9 that a character wore a pink dress, but in chapter 3 it says ‘she hated pink’, what would the reader think?  He would think that the writer was either sloppy or didn’t remember.  Technical (or accounting) details can be important to some readers.  If these details are inaccurate, some readers may not notice, but those who do will question the author’s credibility.

I frequently find my self going back to check something I had written earlier.  If I find an inconsistency, something has to be put right.  Sometimes I write about something on which I’m not an expert.  In The Iranian Scorpion, for example, opium is harvested and converted to heroin.  Since I knew this was possible, I could have just said: “The opium was harvested and converted to heroin.”  But to take this shortcut would have taken a great deal of significance out of the story.  So, I did the research, and in The Iranian Scorpion, it tells exactly how opium is harvested and converted to heroin.  Harder work for the author, but it makes it more interesting for the reader.

Empathy

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In my post ‘Emotion’, I have touched already on the importance of a writer of fiction feeling the emotions of his characters.   This is a kind of follow-up on that post.

The other evening at about 6:30, my wife came home from her work.  I was in my office upstairs working away on my latest novel.  She came upstairs and put her head in the door.  “Why are you crying?” she asked.

“Henry’s son was just killed,” I said.  (Henry is the key character in my fifth novel.)

“Oh,” she said, “I thought something was wrong.”

In fact, something was very wrong: William, Henry’s son, for whom he had great admiration and fondness, had been killed.  For me, this felt like a tragedy.  One might ask, ‘Is it really necessary for a novelist to get so emotionally involved with his characters?’  Perhaps it is possible for a writer to maintain a level of detachment, but for me, that wouldn’t work.  One might also ask, ‘You knew that William was going to get killed – in fact, you plotted his killing – how can you be so sad when you kill him?’  First of all, I didn’t kill him.  I wrote about how he was killed fighting Somali pirates.  And secondly, fore knowledge of an event doesn’t necessarily protect us from an emotional response to the event itself.  For example, when you know that your daughter is going to get married, you may also know that you’ll be feeling a little weepy (as I did), but that slight anticipation doesn’t stifle the watery eyes when you start down the aisle.  At least it didn’t stifle the tears for me.

Emotion is one of the features of humanity which makes us so interesting, and separates us pretty definitively from the rest of the animal kingdom.  (As a dog lover, I knows that animals have feelings, but not the grand passions of their human masters.)  Emotion, or the lack of it, can go a long way to define our character and our values.

For me, Van Gogh was an artist who understood the power of emotion, and his canvasses reflect this understanding with their powerful brush strokes, brilliant colours and fluidity.  Just look at ‘Starry Night’:

Starry NightFor me, Van Gogh has captured the wonder we feel looking up at the night sky.  In a similar way, I believe that the novelist must try to capture the feelings of his or her characters.  And what better way to capture them than to feel them yourself.  Emotions are only real if you can feel them; if they are not felt, they are only synthetic.  To feel the emotions of a character, one must know him or her, and to know her, the writer must define her.  Then, one can begin the process of empathising: I am him, in this situation, how do I feel?  Angry?  How angry?  What’s unique about my anger?  If my anger is only a stereotype, it doesn’t define me as a person.  The writer not only has to empathise with his characters, he has to capture the feelings of the character in distinctive language.

Death

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My wife and I went to the States this past week to attend the funeral of a niece.  She was not someone with whom I have had much contact, but as the daughter of my brother-in-law, who was absolutely devastated, I felt we should go.  She was about the age of my children (40’s), and she died in a tragic skiing accident.  She was an avid and very good skier, skiing with the man she hoped to marry.  She had stopped on the slope to clean her goggles, and was struck from behind by an out-of-control skier.  She was wearing a helmet, but the impact was so great that it broke her neck and she died instantly.  The out-of-control skier was not injured.

Many of us have had our parents, friends and relatives die, but I feel that the death of one’s child, particularly so un-necessarily, is the ultimate tragedy.  Our children are the ones who are carrying into the future not only our genes, but our values, beliefs and aspirations.  The death of a child not only leaves us in deep mourning, it constricts us: heart, mind and soul.  And in this case, one cannot help but wonder what if.  What if her goggles didn’t get fogged?  What if she had been three feet to the right or the left?  What if the other skiier hadn’t been so stupidly careless?  What if her man had been standing directly behind her?  (He was standing beside her.)

Death features prominently in the writing of many novelists.  A death is often used to make a point, and often the point is that death is senseless, un-justifiable, un-reasonable.  Often, in real life, that is exactly the case.  And some writers go on to make the point that if death is senseless, there cannot be a loving God, because a loving God would never allow a senseless tragedy to happen to His people.  But, in my opinion, this argument overlooks an important point: it may look and feel senseless to us.  However, in an unknowable, cosmic context it may make sense.  Why is it unknowable?  Because if it were knowable, we would also know God, and if we really knew God we would not have free will.  Why no free will?  Can you imagine that anyone who really knew God, and therefore knew his plan for us, would actually do something that God didn’t like?  In other words, I believe that God’s gift of free will carries a price: we can’t know everything.

Looking back on my writing, death and its messages have been present in all my novels.  In Fishing in Foreign Seas, Jamie’s father develops incurable cancer.  He is terrified, but, gradually, he comes to terms with his life and the blessings of his sons and wife.  In Sin and Contrition, Gary, the ego-centric politician from a poor background, is approached by his long-absent father for money for a vital heart operation.  There is an argument, the two fail to agree, and the father dies.  Gary’s mother has dementia, but Gary leaves her care entirely to his sister.  Gary later regrets his behaviour.  Efraim’s Eye portrays the mind of a pathological terrorist: so committed to revenge that killing on the way to his grand attack is incidental.  In The Iranian Scorpion, the Iranian gallows casts its shadow over Robert and his father.  And in my fifth novel, Henry slides into deep depression after his exceptional son is killed in combat.  But in each case, there is some redemption, as, I think, there usually is in life.

 

Lost City Radio

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My wife and I recently returned from a trip to Peru.  More on this later.

Knowing that we were going to Peru, one of my sons-in-law gave me a novel, Lost City Radio, to read.  It is the first novel by Daniel Alarcon, who was born in Peru and raised in Birmingham, Alabama.  The novel is set in a country which is not identified, but from some geographic and political clues is probably Peru.

It takes place during a time of violent political revolution that sounds like the Shining Path revolution which gripped Peru.  Many people are missing.  Its central character, Norma, hosts a talk show, ‘Lost City Radio’, which takes calls from listeners who describe their lost loved ones in hopes that another listener will provide information on the lost one’s whereabouts. Norma is married to Rey, who is a biologist with a keen interest in the medicinal properties of jungle plants.  He has been drawn into the revolutionary camp and is an enemy of the government.  For ten years, Rey disappears from Norma’s life, but she doesn’t dare to describe him on the air for fear that this will compromise him.  Instead, she continues a lonely life in the city and at the radio station, until an eleven-year-old boy and a strange man arrive at the radio station from the jungle.  Norma makes the connection between the boy and Rey, and this gives her the courage to talk about Rey on air.

Most of the reviews of this novel are very complementary.  They say that it depicts war and human reactions to it movingly and well.  War is senseless, yet people struggle to make sense of their lives in the wake of it.  This is all correct.  The novel has a mysterious vagueness about its setting, the passage of time, the characters, their relationships and motivations which tend to make the novel a universal rather than a specific statement.

On the one hand, I can appreciate the reason for this vagueness, but, for me, it had its drawbacks.  I found it difficult to connect with any of the shadowy characters at an emotional level – or even intellectually.  When I finished it, I thought: “Interesting book, but kind of frustrating.”

About Peru: it’s a beautiful, fascinating country.  We spent a week above 10,000 feet, which was difficult.  I wasn’t really sick, but I had very little energy or positive spirits.  Much of the landscape is beautiful: the Cola and Urubamba Valleys, Lake Titicaca.  Manchu Picchu is awesome in its beauty and its sense of mysterious community.  The Incas were incredible stone masons.  Working without iron tools, they cut huge blocks of granite with extraordinary precision.  One thing thing that was off-putting was the decorations in the (Catholic) churches.   Nearly every church had elaborately dressed figures of various saints.  I thought, “Is this a monotheistic religion?”  And in the cities, particularly Cuzco, the use of real gold (an 8 pound solid gold crown of thorns) and silver (life sized statue of the Virgin Mary made of silver) was obscene.  Wouldn’t it have been better to give that money to the poor, of which there are plenty?

But I recommend a trip to Peru, and a read of Lost City Radio.

Doubt

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My wife and I watched the film Doubt last night.  We wanted to watch it for several reasons: it stars Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman, both of whom we think are excellent actors.  It also involves a dilemma in the Catholic church; we are Catholic.

The film was made in 2008 and is based on the Pulitzer prize-winning stage play, Doubt: a Parable.  In the film, Hoffman plays kindly a parish priest, and Streep plays the ultra strict and conservative principal of the school which is attached to the church.  Hoffman befriends the only black boy in the school, who is lonely, insecure and abused by his father.  Streep, a very un-trusting nun, suspects that Hoffman has formed an improper relationship with the boy, though she has no real evidence of this.  She confronts Hoffman, who denies any wrong doing; she tells Hoffman that she has spoken to a nun in his previous parish who told her that Hoffman had behaved improperly there.  Hoffman resigns from his current parish and he is immediately appointed by the Bishop to a larger, more important parish.  It turns out that Streep had not actually called his previous parish, and made up the story of improper behaviour.  She takes the position, however, that since he resigned, her allegation must be true.  At the end of the film, Streep confesses to a young nun that, “I have doubts . . . I have such doubts”.

The acting in the film by both Hoffman and Streep is excellent.  In fact, Streep is so cynical and so certain of her position that it is hard to believe that she has any of the doubts she finally expresses.  And Hoffman is so sincere in his denials that it is hard to understand his resignation except as a means to get away from Streep, but there is no hint of this.

Through much of the film, my wife and I were shaking our heads: we had doubts about the credibility of the story line.  We weren’t convinced that this could be a real situation: it seemed too forced.  I realise that it is difficult to create a situation where the audience (or the reader) has doubts about what actually happened, and what it might (or might not) mean.  But this is the essence of the film, and I think that rather than focus on the unique characters of the principal and the priest, it would have been more useful to present more ambiguous evidence of guilt or innocence that the characters can argue over.  As they argue over the evidence, their characters will be revealed, and the dilemma comes alive.  As it is, the only evidence we have is the priest’s friendliness to the boy, the fact that the boy was disciplined for drinking communion wine, and the fact that the priest placed a white shirt in his locker.

As a writer, I consider it absolutely necessary to pause and check the credibility of any twists in the plot, particularly twists which are essential to the central outcomes or messages.   For example, I am working on a novel which includes a sudden, catastrophic disaster which has terrible consequences for the main character.  To make that disaster more plausible and real, earlier in the book, I have the characters talk about minor versions of the disaster.  And, later, before the big disaster, I have the characters actually experience a real, but limited disaster.

One of my concerns in writing Efraim’s Eye was whether the reader would believe that the London Eye is actually vulnerable to attack.  Early in the novel, Efraim plans his attack in detail; there is no room for doubt.