David Patneaude's Blog: Different Worlds - Posts Tagged "fiction"

I think we've all heard the metaphor people use to describe a too-busy life: having too many balls in the air. Although I never could juggle--balls, swords, pitchforks--I know the feeling. Right now I'm working on two novels--a middle grade story that would probably be called urban fantasy if you had to put it in a category, and a YA mystery--and a collection of short stories, some of which were published in 1995 in the book DARK STARRY MORNING. And I'm hovering over (from a distance) no less than a half dozen manuscripts (various genres and age groups) my agent is trying to place. Of course also in the mix that I'm trying to keep elevated and undamaged is my delicate writer's ego. So I spend some time giving myself pep talks: those stories are all winners; some intuitive editor is going to snap them up; keep at it; you may not be able to juggle, but you can write.

Some of us remember the original movie (you know--John Wayne as Rooster Cogburn), and more of us are probably familiar with the Coen Brothers'2010 remake with Jeff Bridges in the starring role and Hailee Steinfeld as Mattie Ross, a girl of singular convictions and courage. But if you haven't read the book, do it. When Charles Portis's most famous novel was published, the Boston Globe called it "An American Masterpiece." I can't argue with that. It truly is. If you like stories with complex characters, adventure, suspense, bravery, loyalty, eccentricity, humor, lyrical writing, delightfully unexpected dialogue, and yes, true grit, you'll love this book. Rarely, if ever, do I read a book and find myself unable to NOT laugh out loud. But I read parts of TRUE GRIT on the train in Europe, laughing at the dialogue, marveling at the writing, prompting people around me (including my wife) to wonder, prompting me to read passages out loud to prove that I had reason to laugh. Check it out. The five stars are earned.

Most authors use writing as the vehicle for telling a story; Fewer use story as the vehicle for showcasing their writing. The former is usually thought of as commercial, the latter as literary. What I prefer reading is neither of those (although if I had to choose between the two, I'd go for the pretty words every time). I prefer a story in which the author hits the sweet spot, somewhere in the in-between. In other words, I like literary stories in which something happens. Or stories with a plot that are well-written and thoughtful.

So when I review and rate a book, I consider how well a story meets those two criteria--does it engage me with scenes happening on the page, and is it well-written? And if both of those factors are present, what's the ratio? Too much scenic stuff? Then I don't have time to take a breath and get to know the characters and think about what's happening to them and what it all means. Too much prequel and sequel? Then boredom sets in and I find myself skimming and skipping, at least mentally, to hurry on to the next page on which something is actually happening. And I start to resent being told what the characters are thinking/feeling/deciding. I'd rather experience what's going on and decide that stuff for myself.

I love books that manage to balance scene and sequel, action and narration, plot and character, dialogue and interior monologue, calm and conflict. AND are intelligently written.

Given that Goodreads reviews are on a one-star to five-star continuum, I try to assign stars to both story and style, five for each, and then average them to get my final evaluation. For instance, recently I reviewed a book by David Baldacci called Wish You Well. I thought the story merited a four, the writing a two. Then, using my advanced math skills, I averaged the two and came up with a three. Highly scientific, right?

But enough of my wonkiness. Where this is leading is an explanation for a review of my most recent read, Richard Ford's Canada. Richard Ford is a wonderful writer--he's won a Pulitzer, for cripe's sakes. And I gave him five stars for the literary merits of this book. On the other hand, not much happens, and what does happen takes place, for the most part, off the page. It's revealed retrospectively by a passive narrator who observes everything (even the stuff that happens to him) from a distance, either actual or determined by disinterest or the passage of time.

So like the protagonist (Dell) I found myself observing, waiting for the other shoe to fall, waiting for something to happen. Which in one way works. The tension builds. Doom is on the horizon. But it's so slo-o-o-w in coming. Page after page of telling and introspection eventually lead to a real scene (a short one), but then we're on to another batch of sequel followed by prequel to whatever might be coming way down the road.

I admired the writing greatly. If you're a writer who wants to know more about how to put a sentence together, read this book. It's worth it. But I thought the writing excelled to the detriment of the story. So I gave the story a one. One plus five equals six. Divided by two is three. So there you go. My review: three stars.

I just posted a review of WORLD WAR Z (below), and did it as a straight critique of the story and the storytelling, but I think it's also fun and more meaningful perhaps to look at this zombie story on another level, kind of like INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS was about more than aliens taking over or replicating human bodies and THE INVISIBLE MAN was about more than a fictional man becoming invisible. Those stories about real-life humans losing themselves to convention, to sameness, to ordinariness, to numbness, to uncaring sociopathy, to being relegated to a less-than-human state. So maybe WORLD WAR Z is about more than zombies. Maybe it's about the spread of other, real-life kinds of deadly epidemics--willful ignorance, superstition, intolerance, hate, blind allegiance to buffoonery, denial of facts and reason (past, present, and future), the perpetuation of dumb-ass conspiracy theories, and a general failure to evolve, to be what a human is capable of being. Maybe it's metaphor/allegory/symbolism. And in that case it's not just fictional face-value scary. It's real-life frightening.

Review: In need of a book for a flight home from Los Angeles, I picked this one up at the Burbank Airport bookstore. Not usually a reliable source of promising reading, but in this case I managed to pick something worthwhile. Zombies? you say. Worthwhile? you say. Well, yes. When the zombies come packaged in a high-concept, well-researched, well-written novel that anchors the fantastic and speculative in human realities, a good read is born. At the time I bought the book I didn't pay any attention to the fact that it was soon to be a movie (starring Brad Pitt, no less). So now that I do know about the movie, I'm interested in seeing how the film will overcome what I felt was the book's shortcoming--the lack of a main character. The story is told as a series of interviews (dozens of them) with survivors of the zombie war. They're consistently interesting, sometimes gripping, and often creepy, and all together comprise a comprehensive picture of the world war between humans and the rise of the reanimated. But other than the interviewer, who takes a personality-deprived backseat to each interviewee, there's no protagonist. There's no one to identify with. There's no continuity in character. So I'm curious about one thing: What role will Brad Pitt have? A reanimated interviewer?

All in all, a good book, an accomplished method of storytelling, such as it is. I just missed getting inside a main dude's head.

When you're working on a new novel you almost have to call it something, even if the name is simply a placeholder. "That New Thing I'm Working On" is just a little too clumsy and vague in your head or when you mention the project to someone, and it doesn't look all that good in your computer files. So somewhere in the rough draft stage (if not before), I come up with something to call the story. But it's definitely not guaranteed to survive until submission time, and after that it's still in jeopardy. I'm working on a YA mystery now that's still in the draft stage and is already on its third working title. It's kind of like King of the Hill: Someone rules until someone stronger comes along to push him off. Sometimes you like a title and you mention it to a writer friend or critique group member and the reaction is "What???!!!" and you have to adjust your thinking.

A number of my titles that made it all the way to the point of submission ended up on the cutting room floor, the victims of editors and marketing people and better ideas. That King of the Hill thing, again. I submitted my first novel as THICKER THAN WATER. It was published as SOMEONE WAS WATCHING. THE WILD BLUE became FRAMED IN FIRE. THE GHOST OF PHANTOM LIMB PARK morphed into HAUNTING AT HOME PLATE. TWENTY-THREE DEGREES AND FALLING became COLDER THAN ICE. Did the new titles make a difference? Better sales? Worse? We'll never know, but it's fun to speculate. Some of my titles--THE LAST MAN'S REWARD, THIN WOOD WALLS, EPITAPH ROAD--did survive the editorial process, and they've been among my most successful, so every once in a while I must come up with a good idea. Still, I can't help but wonder if different titles would have proven more (or less) successful.

Some titles hit you as inspired and untouchable: TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, THE CATCHER IN THE RYE, THE PRINCE OF TIDES, CATCH 22, EVEN COWGIRLS GET THE BLUES, SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE, FAHRENHEIT 451. THE POISONWOOD BIBLE, THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST, THE OUTSIDERS, THE BRIDGE TO TERABITHIA, HOLES. But you know some of those weren't the author's first choice. Would they have been the same books with different titles?

I've said it before and I've probably written it before, but the "buzz" thing is an ongoing puzzle to me. In other words, how does one book, maybe good, maybe not so good, maybe awful, get tons of attention, and another, maybe very good, go largely unnoticed?

I don't know exactly how much notice Conrad Wesselhoeft's Adios, Nirvana received when it was published in 2010, but I don't recall seeing it featured on bookstore shelves or lauded in reviews or given awards. Those things should have happened, though. The book has flawed and wounded but likable and memorable characters who change and grow, a believable narrative, credible language, conflict, humor, and a strong voice. What else do you need?

Overall, Conrad's writing is excellent, and he does a fine job of balancing the various elements he has going on in the story. And then there's the feeling that this could be real, that these are real people, kids and adults, that you want to get to know better. This is the kind of fiction that involves you enough that you want to know what's going on with the characters now, now that the ending has been written. Jonathan, Conrad's main character, is a smart kid, but he's believably smart. He's a kid, not an adult in kid's clothing. He behaves like a kid, feels like a kid, hurts like a kid, takes risks like a kid.

This kind of verisimilitude is what is missing in some of the stories I've read (yes, even those that get "buzz") that are written about and for young adults. But this story gets it right, and the author should take a deep bow, even though his show may not have attracted a full house.

There at least a couple different kinds of mysteries. There's the obvious one--the body on the floor and everybody including the reader wondering for the entire length of the story whodunit. Then there's the kind where there's a mystery but nobody including the protagonist and the reader knows there's a mystery until the solution appears. There's stuff going on, some of which may be puzzling or even mysterious, but there's also other stuff going on that seems to be more significant, so everybody gets distracted with what apparently is the main question/conflict/story.

Louis Sachar did this brilliantly a few decades ago with HOLES. Rebecca Stead did it just as brilliantly a few years ago with WHEN YOU REACH ME. And in LIAR AND SPY, she takes that route, albeit less dramatically, once more. So if you've read WHEN YOU REACH ME, or even her earlier FIRST LIGHT, and you start reading LIAR AND SPY, you begin looking for pieces of a puzzle early on, even before, under ordinary circumstances, you'd suspect there was one. Which doesn't detract much from the story, really. In fact, even when you're sure something is going on under the surface stuff, you don't know exactly what it is, and you don't know how many "its" there are.

The author's writing is economical and engaging. The characters are likeable or not, but consistently believable. The adults aren't fools, and they don't get in the way of the young protagonist and his buddies working things out for themselves. The book has gotten a lot of praise, and I can certainly see why. I would definitely recommend it, especially to someone who hasn't read Rebecca Stead's earlier books. It would be fun to jump into this story unencumbered by experience and without being nagged by that little feeling of deja vu.

Unless I'm on vacation or taking some other major break from the day-to-day, I read almost exclusively on the Stairmaster at the Y. Reading does a lot of things for me, but one of the benefits of reading while exercising is the diversion, the anesthetic effect of having something else to think about besides the heart-pumping, breath-stealing, sweat-producing annoyance of climbing 165 flights of stairs in 35 minutes or so. Anyway, that's where I read now and where I've read in the recent and not so recent past--until I picked up GONE GIRL and discovered that 35 minutes and waiting until the next day to get back at the book just wasn't doing it, that is. Gillian Flynn definitely knows how to get a reader hooked, and she does it the right way, with fine writing, complex characters, and a strong plot. I found that I simply couldn't NOT read it, and I was prepared to love it.

But in the end I found it fell a little short for me--not as a writer, necessarily, because she definitely knows how to write--characters, scenes, dialogue, conflict, suspense, narrative format--and not really as a reader, although there were a few places where the suspension of disbelief was stretched thin and close to the breaking point, and I could see through the sheerness of it to the devices holding the whole thing up. What it came down to was my viewpoint as a human--after getting to know the characters and having a lot invested in them and having hopes and expectations for how things should turn out--and having that viewpoint soured.

In a way, that's a testament to the author's skills. If we didn't think of the characters as fellow human beings, if we didn't care about them, we wouldn't care what happened to them, good or bad. We wouldn't be thinking about it days or weeks later. But still...

This isn't another CORRECTIONS, or HOUSE OF SAND AND FOG, where it's hard to care about any of the characters and in the end all you're left with is admiration for the writing and an empty feeling about the story itself and questions about the point of it all. But it's not far removed from those books. The characters in GONE GIRL are flawed, but for a while we're allowed to pull for them, and then we're not. Maybe that's consistent with the overall narrative, but I don't have to like it. Not everything provocative is booth engaging and enjoyable. Just ask anyone who's had to endure Miley Cyrus or that guy with the foot-long fingernails or two dogs humping. Distaste and disappointment aren't feelings you can turn off or on; they just are.

I'm fielding questions about writing (a couple a week or so to start with) on Goodreads, so feel free to ask. It'll give me an opportunity to make stuff up.

I'm fielding questions about writing (a couple a week or so to start with) on Goodreads, so feel free to ask. It'll give me an opportunity to make stuff up.