books
Getting to know a new book
When you begin reading a book, what do you need in the first few pages (or paragraphs, or sentences) to get you to keep reading?
I finished reading Gillian Flynn‘s Gone Girl the other day. It’s a highly acclaimed, very popular book and was recommended to me by several people whose opinions I trust. I found the opening intriguing, right from the first sentence: “When I think of my wife, I always think of her head.” (And, of course, those opening three paragraphs take on a totally different tone after having read the book.)
Yet I had a hard time getting into it at first.
For me, this is not unusual. Looking over the list of books I’ve read recently, I see my pattern is the same:
1) I start out with a book that has been recommended to me in one way or another.
2) I read the first few pages one night just before bed.
3) I may read a few more pages the next night.
4) Maybe a few more pages the next night.
5) I stop reading for, like, a week.
6) I pick up the book again, trying to remember what was happening when I left off.
7) I finally get into the book and read like crazy to the end in a day or two.
Starting a new book, for me, is a ton of work. Just like it’s work to get to know a new friend or colleague, it’s work to get to know a new character. It’s work to get to know a new world, especially if the world is different from this one (and I often read fantasy/science fiction). I have to find something very valuable in the beginning of a book to make me want to do that work.
For me, that something is usually the quality of the prose itself. I felt right from the start of Gone Girl that Gillian Flynn is skilled with words, and that gave me faith that she would also be skilled with story. It helps to have had the book recommended because that tells me others have found the story worth reading to the end.
The other thing that will keep me reading is if I feel I’m about to read something truly original. Even if I’m reading a story with a “traditional” or “genre formula” plot, if something in the beginning makes me feel I’ve never read something quite like this before, I’ll keep going.
In how-to books and classes on writing, writers can find so many “rules” for writing a good opening: posing a question, a strong character’s voice, an in medias res action sequence, etc. For me, these things can be important, not so much to get me to the end of the book, but to get me more quickly over that hump of work in the beginning. But I won’t bother with the hump unless I am already hooked by the prose and the originality.
For the record, I loved (despite being disturbed by) Gone Girl. I bought it at the bookstore because it was recommended to me, and I can whole-heartedly recommend it to you. :)
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Gillian Flyyn, Gone Girl, novel beginnings, strong prose“Up” ending or “down” ending?
Sometimes predicting an ending isn’t hard. When you’re reading a book (or watching a movie) within a certain genre, for example, you know the romantic male lead and romantic female lead will get together, or that the evil sorcerer will be defeated by the reluctant hero, or that the detective will solve the murder case. What you often don’t know is how that ending will come about. One oft-quoted piece of advice I received in graduate school is “Give the audience what they want, but not in the way they expect.”
There is a difference between knowing that the hero of a story will triumph and knowing how that triumph will come about. There is usually a crisis moment close to the end when the outcome is supposedly in doubteven though you know things will eventually be okay (or not okay, though “up” endings are way more common than “down” endings). I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE when a book can deliver an “up” ending or a “down” ending that I know is coming, but in a way that truly surprises me, and that doesn’t happen very often.
However, I VERY RARELY near the end of a story truly not knowing whether the ending will be “up” or “down.” Last night I finished reading another book from one my agent’s clients. (The Wet Nurse’s Tale by Erica Eisdorfer, and there are some plot-point spoilers below, though I’ve tried to be vague enough not to really spoil anything) The main character mentions somewhat early on that she might have just given up at the start if she’d known the horror of what the future would bring. This is pretty obvious foreshadowing, but left me wondering if she meant the horror leading up to an eventual “up” ending or the horror of a “down” ending. At stake was the life of a child.
As the pages turned and fewer and fewer chapters remained, the story turned quite dark, as stories often do when they approach the climax. All kinds of clues got dropped that the antagonist in the house would bring about the death of the child. There were precedents. There was an “accident” and a disastrous outing. There was violence done to another character. The main character speculated on how the antagonist would kill the child. The main character devised a plan to save the child in which the child would be alone with the antagonist for a short time. On top of it all, the main character several times stated how beautiful the child was and how happy the child made her (and I think we all know a super-loved/needed character often dies at the moment they are loved/needed the most). At the same time, though, the tone of the book and the voice of the main character indicated that things would turn out okay. Although I suspected tone and voice would win out, I really wasn’t certain. I mean REALLY wasn’t certain. I can’t remember a book I’ve read where the outcome was that much in doubt for me, and I worried. Ever since my son was born I’ve had a really hard time reading about the death of a child. I didn’t want the ending to turn out badly. Then I wouldn’t be able to sleep for days and days.
Well, I’m tired today. But, dear Reader, I’ll leave you guessing whether it’s because of the book’s ending or because of the recent change to daylight savings time . . .
Disclosure: I am in the process of reading books by other authors onmy agent’sclient list. This is how I came to readThe Wet Nurse’s Tale. To be clear, I have not been asked to promote, nor is it my purpose to promote this book other than to say I found in it a great example of an important writing principle. :)
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Alexandra Machinist, Erica Eisdorfer, novel endings, The Wet Nurse's TaleA beautiful pay-off: Nicole R. Dickson’s Casting Off
I just finished reading a book that had a remarkably powerful pay-off for me: Nicole R. Dickson’s Casting Off. The story is about a single mom who is six years past being in an abusive relationship. She’s still struggling to find herself, to find security, to find “home.” She thinks she’s spending a summer on a tiny Irish island to study sweaters using a research grant, but of course it ends up she’s really there to change her life.
The pay-off in any novel is only as powerful as the layering of promises and expectations that go into the making of it. In the case of Casting Off, Dickson layers in chapters showing the protagonist’s anxiety and chapters showing the secondary protagonist’s misery. She also takes pains to show how each sweater knitted on the island is done in special patterns that reflect the life of the person who will wear it. Likewise, the sweaters are shown in several cases to be instrumental to the wearer’s well-being. All of this crafting, and more, had to be done to produce the pay-off.
I wish all of you had read this novel so I could just blurt out the details of the scene I found so touching, but since I don’t know who of you has read the book, I won’t give spoilers. I will say that the truth revealed in the scene was expected and unexpected and so beautiful it made me cry for the rest of the book.
If you have a completed manuscript and want to see if your pay-off has been layered properly, there are many ways to go about it. One pretty basic suggestion I can give is to exchange manuscripts with another writer, but make sure each of you leaves out the pay-off part. The pay-off is the scene that your novel builds to. It is usually the climax of the book. (I will confess that in the case of Casting Off, others might identify the climax as coming in a scene after the scene I adore.) The pay-off is the delivery of the promise you made to the reader at the beginning of your book and then built upon in the middle.
So you take your manuscript with the pay-off missing and have your writer-friend read it while you read your writer-friend’s manuscript that’s missing its own pay-off. Each of you should write down what you think is in the missing pay-off and give examples from the manuscript that have created this expectation. Then, share your thoughts. It will be interesting for you to hear whether your writer-friend’s guesses are accurate, but it will be just as helpful for you to see if your own guesses are accurate about your writer-friend’s story. Once you have exchanged guesses, share the real endings and discuss how they met or didn’t meet your expectations and what each could do to strengthen the pay-off. Armed with new insight, you then go back through your manuscript and develop the parts that need developing for a great pay-off.
And you could read Nicole R. Dickson’s Casting Off, if you want an example of a novel that does pay-off well.
Disclosure: I am in the process of reading books by other authors on my agent’s client list. This is how I came to read Casting Off. To be clear, I have not been asked to promote, nor is it my purpose to promote this book other than to say I found in it a great example of an important writing principle. :)
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agents, Alexandra Machinist, Casting Off, Nicole R. Dickson, pay-offReading John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars
In the past 24 hours I have been a-flurry with thoughts about YA literature, mostly because I had two significant reading experiences. The first is the YA novel by John Green, The Fault in Our Stars, which I finished last night. The second is an article in NCTE’s Council Chronicle (Volume 22, No. 2) titled “YA LiteratureWhere Teens Find Themselves” by Lorna Collier, which I read this morning.
Originally I wanted to write this post about Green’s novel, about how wonderful it is and what ideas I have for reading it together with a classroom of high school students. But while I considered my topic over breakfast, I read the NCTE article and found these quotes particularly relevant:
From Don Gallo, ALAN (Assembly on Literature for Adolescents of NCTE) co-founder:
“There are some schools where no teacher even knows about YA lit . . . You ask, ‘What do you think about young adult literature?’ and they say, ‘Oh, we don’t teach that crap here.’ That’s been an attitude of some English teachers since forever. There are school districts where YA is used in middle school but not high school because ‘in high school we do the REAL literature.'”
From Robert C. Small, past ALAN president, quoted from a 1986 article published in NCTE’s English Journal:
“These are works of literature [from a list including Judy Blume, Robert Cormier, etc.] even in the narrowest and most conservative sense. They have serious intent, careful craftsmanship, effective expression, and other qualities that make literature literature.”
Essentially, the point I took away from this article is that many teachers don’t teach YA literature because they think it isn’t valuable in a classroom.
Do teachers really think this? The article didn’t cite any specific research, and I didn’t do a search for such research before writing this. What I do know for certain is that I didn’t include young adult literature in my classroom for many years.
Why didn’t I? First and foremost, I was completely unfamiliar with it. By the time I started teaching, my last encounter with young adult literature had been junior high school, when I was primarily concerned with questions of love and popularity. As I moved into high school I became a strictly adult book reader.
I went to high school in the late 80s, in a time when YA literature was not the same as it is now. That’s not to say YA lit of the 80s wasn’t valuable or important, there just wasn’t the huge volume and variety there is now. I wonder if I were an adolescent today if I would have a greater or lesser interest in YA books, and I wonder if young teachers today who were raised in a world of such books are more likely to teach them.
When I started teaching, I did not look down my nose at YA literature. As I said, I just didn’t know a thing about it. My teacher preparation program hadn’t exposed me to the latest and greatest works of YA lit, and no one in my new English department was teaching it. Although I don’t know this for sure, I don’t think a single English teacher in my department in the mid-90s had a classroom library with numerous new releases. I don’t say this to be critical. I don’t think they had any better idea what was new in the YA publishing world than I did, and I was fresh out of college.
The truth is that I didn’t really get interested in YA literature until I attended a BER workshop titled “What’s New in Young Adult Literature.” I was looking for professional development points in order to renew my teaching license, and it seemed about time for me to really learn about what my students were reading when I wasn’t assigning Frankenstein or Romeo and Juliet. This coupled with my growing interest in a writing career put me on the path to developing a classroom library that sought to keep up with YA lit as it was being published.
It might seem obvious to you, if you are not an English teacher, that it’s important to keep up with the real world of books, but it’s not always so obvious to an English teacher. We are trained to teach the canon. We are trained to teach literary analysis, the five-paragraph essay, and (sometimes) grammar.
My own experience was that the more familiar I became with the actual real world of book publishing, and the more I understood and read the books my students were reading, and the more I could share about the professional world of writing (in other words the more I stopped being insulated from my field by classroom walls), the more I felt I could offer my students a glimmer of understanding as to how what-you-do-in-school is relevant-to-life.
There’s something about literature that always feels abstract when you’re a student. Something that makes the big ideas float around in a great mist you can wade through and even glimpse through, but never hold in your hand. The ideas encountered in English classes are universal, but contextual. I feel YA literature is a valid way to provide context for the audience it’s meant to address.
The story of a cancer patient and her romance with another cancer patient, John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars is one book I would use with students at any high school level. It is the kind of literature I wish all high school teachers were using in their classrooms. Although many more teachers are using contemporary YA works today than back in the 90s when I started teaching, I like to think even more would use it if they just read a book like The Fault in Our Stars.
And since this post has become longer than I intended, I’ll leave off with two blurbs from the back of my hardcover edition. I think they pretty succinctly state why I would love to read Green’s book with a group of high schoolers:
“[Green] shows us true lovetwo teenagers helping and accepting each other through the most humiliating and emotional ordealsand it is far more romantic than any sunset on the beach.” -New York Times Book Review
“The Fault in Our Stars takes a spin on universal themesWill I be loved? Will I be remembered? Will I leave a mark on this world?by dramatically raising the stakes for the characters who are asking.” -Jodi Picoult
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ALAN, Council Chronicle, John Green, Lorna Collier, NCTE, The Fault in Our StarsThe Drift
Both of my long-term critique partners have had special news this October. Rhonda Masoncompleted the draft of a new manuscript (I’ll label it space opera romance for now), and I am SUPER EXCITED to announce thatDiana Botsford‘s second novel set in the Stargate universe is releasing today as an ebook! (releasing November 20th in print!) The Drift is the sequel to her first Stargate novel, Four Dragons. If you are a Stargate fan, or even if you’re not, I invite you to check out her work. Diana is a thoughtful writer who understands character motivation, and I really responded to her portrayal of Jack and his inner crisis in this story.
Diana is largely responsible for my return to writing after my own inner crisis. Her example during the writing of Four Dragons really gave me the push I needed to recover my rhythm and confidence as a writer, and for that I will be eternally grateful.
A little while back I posted aboutthe importance of good critique partners. I have been inspired, encouraged and improved in so many ways for having had the blessing of a few good writing buddies, Diana and Rhonda especially.
Congrats, Diana, on the release of The Drift!